At four A.M. on Thursday, 22 June, buglers raised the shrill notes of reveille up and down that camp the Fifth Cavalry had pitched about a mile from Fort Laramie near the confluence of the North Platte and Laramie rivers.
By first light Lieutenant Charles King heard the throaty sergeants bawl, “Prepare to mount!” Then came that long-anticipated order, “Mount!” and seven companies crossed the river on a new iron bridge and were setting off on the chase. They were ordered due north toward Custer City in Dakota to intercept the trail being used by hundreds of warriors riding north to join the summer roamers known to be in the unceded hunting grounds of the Powder River-Rosebud country. For the time being Captain Robert H. Montgomery’s B Company would remain behind in post, with orders to catch up with the main column in four days.
After only two miles the column passed the charred ruins of Rawhide Station, telegraph link between Fort Fetterman and Fort Laramie, burned by hostiles as little as ten days before. The Fifth pushed on with that vivid reminder seared into their consciousness, marching into an austere land carved with majestic buttes and dry coulees, covered by only sage and cactus.
Before he had left Laramie on an inspection trip to Captain William H. Jordan’s Camp Robinson and its nearby agency at Red Cloud, District Commander Philip Sheridan had ordered Lieutenant Colonel Carr to take his Fifth and close down that trail. But at the same time, Sheridan had drafted Bill Cody to ride along eastward as guide for his own escort, which included a Beecher Island veteran, now a member of Sheridan’s personal staff, Lieutenant Colonel James W. “Sandy” Forsyth. Left behind to guide temporarily for Carr’s Fifth Cavalry were Cody’s friend, Charles “Buffalo Chips” White, and Baptiste “Little Bat” Garnier, the half-breed interpreter Crook had assigned to Fort Laramie after Colonel Joseph Reynolds’s disastrous Powder River campaign.
After a march of something on the order of thirty miles that Thursday, the regiment went into camp on the South Fork of Rawhide Creek, where water and grass could be found in abundance, but firewood was in short supply.
With another day’s march behind them, the third morning the regiment pulled away from its camp at the Cardinal’s Chair,* a well-known geographical rock formation situated on the headwaters of the Niobrara River, at daylight on the twenty-fourth. By noon Lieutenant King, riding with Carr’s staff at the head of the column, entered the valley of what frontiersmen lovingly called the “Old Woman’s Fork” of the South Cheyenne River. There were shouts, voices leapfrogging from behind them, farther back along the column until the call reached the front.
“Rider approaching!”
Squinting his eyes into the bright summer’s light, King turned to watch the lone courier, still better than a quarter mile back along the dusty column, sprinting up on his lathered horse, his mount raising rooster tails of golden spray that shimmered with the waves of heat rising off the land.
“Colonel Carr?”
“You found him,” the lieutenant colonel answered.
The young courier saluted, licking his dry lips. Alkali dust caked his face, and foam at the horse’s bit, tail-root and at the edges of the blanket. “Dispatches from Fort Laramie, sir. General Sheridan.”
“Give ’em over.”
King watched the man’s impassive face as he read over the three pages of handwritten documents.
Carr asked, “Sheridan’s returned to Laramie?”
“No, sir. He telegraphed these from Camp Robinson.”
The lieutenant colonel nodded, saying nothing more, then read over the dispatches one more time. When he looked up, he blinked, pursed his lips a long moment, then asked the courier, “You’ve been ordered to return, Private?”
“Yes, sir. As soon as I’ve delivered those to you, General.”
Carr saluted. “Back there a couple of miles, you passed a spring. Get that mount watered, then rest him an hour before you ride back. Is that understood, soldier?”
“Yes, General.”
“And—one other thing, Private. By God, keep your eyes moving all the time.”
The youngster grinned, cracking the sweat-plastered powder caking his face, swiping his hand across the sweat and grime on his chin. With a salute he turned and was pushing his mount back down the column.
“Gentlemen, we’ve had a small change in our plans.”
King asked, “We’re not going to unite with Crook, General Carr?”
“No. At least not for the time being, Lieutenant.”
King felt disappointment, curiosity mixed. “Where to?”
“We’re to continue on north along the Custer City Road, but once we hit the Powder River trail the war bands are reported using, instead of following it into their hunting grounds—we’re supposed to halt there and await further orders.”
“Further orders?” squealed Major Julius W. Mason nearby. “Are we ever going to get into this war or not?”
“I don’t know about you fellas,” Carr told them as he reined his mount around so its nose once more pointed north, “but something tells this old horse soldier that we might just bump into some action before we even join up with Crook.”
Then he pointed into the distance. “How far to that line of trees would you gauge, Mr. King?”
“Less than a mile, General.”
“Very good,” Carr replied. “Inform the company commanders we’re going to take a short rest there, and tell the officers I expect to have a conference with them in some of that shade up there.”
King raised his face into the heat of the noonday sun. The tender flesh along the inner sides of his thighs chafed with sweat, rubbed against the rough wool and unforgiving saddle tree of his McClellan until they felt as if they were on fire. “Yes, sir.”
“Damn right, King. If I know what you’re thinking. But trust me—it’s even hotter to an old soldier like me. Now, you ride on ahead and bring those two scouts in. I want their latest report on the ground ahead at the officers’ meeting.”
Minutes later Little Bat and Buffalo Chips were back in what shade the stubby, rustling cottonwoods offered, joining that ring of officers. Carr listened to what the halfbreed scout had to tell them about the country to the north, and what Indian sign the two of them had crossed since daybreak. The regiment’s commander didn’t take long in deciding his course of action.
“Major Stanton,” Carr said, addressing the department’s paymaster, “I’ve decided to send you ahead on our trail with a company in reconnaissance.”
“Which one, sir?” asked Captain Thaddeus Stanton, Sheridan’s own emissary riding with the Fifth.
“C. That’d be yours, Lieutenant Keyes.”
Edward L. Keyes straightened. “Yes, General.”
Stanton turned to Carr. “General, I’d like to request that you send King with me.”
Carr looked at his young adjutant. “Lieutenant? How’s that sound to a veteran Apache fighter like you?”
King grinned, glancing at Stanton. “By all means, sir!”
Stanton stood, dusting the back of his wool britches. “When do you want us to detach, General?”
Carr turned to Keyes. “When can you have C Troop ready, Lieutenant?”
“Half an hour, sir.”
“Make it fifteen minutes, Lieutenant.”
Keyes saluted and was gone, trotting off toward the horses tethered nearby.
Carr turned back to Stanton, but for a moment his eyes connected with King’s meaningfully. “I’m giving you Little Bat as guide. White will stay with me. Gentlemen, it is crucial that you reach the Cheyenne River as quickly as possible. Sheridan wired down from Red Cloud that the warrior bands are abandoning the agency en masse. I need you on the Cheyenne, and I need you there as fast as you can cover that ground.”
“Understood, General,” Stanton said, tapping the sawed-off blunderbuss of a rifle he carried on a sling looped over his left shoulder.
Minutes later, as King stood in a narrow patch of noonday shade tightening his cinch, Carr strode over. The lieutenant colonel spoke softly, almost fatherly.
“Lieutenant—I feel I must warn you: these Indians of the plains aren’t like those Apache we fought down in Arizona.”
