Sure enough, Finerty thought as he halted his loaded horses near John Bourke, William B. Royall, and the rest who would accompany Crook into the mountains—he might just welcome another good fight of it.
Even that, simply to fend off the boredom.
*The Plainsmen Series, Vol. 1,
•The Plainsmen Series, Vol. 3,
†The Plainsmen Series, Vol. 5,
‡The Plainsmen Series, Vol. 7,
**The Plainsmen Series, Vol. 8,
††The Plainsmen Series, Vol. 9,
Chapter 9
First Days of July 1876
There was no way John Bourke would have stayed in camp and not gone to the mountains with the general. Only a team of Tom Moore’s most ornery, stubborn mules could have held him back.
Besides the four reporters, Crook had invited Lieutenant Colonel William B. Royall, commanding officer of the Third Cavalry; Royall’s adjutant, Lieutenant Henry R. Lemly; Captain Andrew S. Burt of the Ninth Infantry; Captain Anson Mills of the Third Cavalry; Lieutenant William L. Carpenter of the Ninth Infantry; and Lieutenant Walter S. Schuyler, on detached service from the Fifth Cavalry and serving as one of Crook’s aides. To handle the packing chores, Tom Moore had selected a man named Young, one of his assistant packers, to ramrod a half-dozen civilians who accompanied the general’s party out of camp that Saturday, the first of July. Mounted entirely on mules, each man in the group carried provisions for four days.
After a two-hour ride that morning through forests bristling with pine and fir, following the trail the Shoshone Indians had taken upon departing for their Wind River Reservation back on the nineteenth of June, the hunting party reached a grassy plateau watered by several icy streams that ran right out of the glaciers poised above them, a meadow delightfully carpeted with countless species of mountain wildflowers. After a short stop to rest the mules, the group pushed on, finding the narrow trail growing increasingly difficult.
“I thought an Indian always picked the easiest route,” complained Joe Wasson as they lumbered ever upward in single file.
“Not when those Indians figure the Sioux might follow them,” instructed Captain Mills. “The Snakes took the hardest trail they could because they know the enemy might soon be in these hills to cut lodgepoles and run across their trail.”
“Will you look at that, gentlemen?” Crook said a few minutes later, stopping his mule and turning in the saddle to take in the entire panorama that lay before them.
“Utterly beautiful,” John Finerty offered.
Bourke himself was struck speechless for the moment, looking down upon the view fanned out below their feet. From the headwaters of the Little Bighorn River far to their left, all the way to the ocher mounds of Pumpkin Buttes out on the broken plains, on south to the land of the Crazy Woman and Clear creeks, the lieutenant could not remember seeing anything more beautiful than what he beheld at that moment.
Crook took his time surveying the country to the north of their base camp with his field glasses before he sighed disgustedly and snapped them shut in the leather case he had strapped over his shoulder.
Royall inquired, “You see anything at all of the enemy, General?”
“Not a damned thing.”
“No smoke, not even some telltale dust, sir?” asked Mills.
Shaking his head, Crook replied, “I must admit I’m more than disappointed. I’m damn well depressed. Here I was hoping that by coming up here on this hunt, I’d discover more than just a few days of relaxation. By damned— I was figuring on seeing some clue as to Terry’s whereabouts.”
“Maybe he’s got the hostiles cornered on the Yellowstone, General,” suggested Burt.
Finerty chuckled, saying, “Better that we don’t see a damned thing, General Crook, than find that huge village headed our way.”
“Always the optimist you are, Mr. Finerty,” Crook said with a wry grin. “Damn, but aren’t you Irishmen always the optimists!”
With every mile’s climb growing tougher on the mules, by midafternoon Crook called it quits in a beautiful meadow on the headwaters of a branch of Goose Creek itself. All about them lay trees long ago uprooted by the force of winter gales, and in every direction ran spiderythin game trails, although not one man among them had seen anything to shoot for their supper kettle. With trout breaking the surface of a nearby stream, a few attempted some fishing but could not lure a single cutthroat or brown to what they used for bait. Not until the shadows had lengthened did Crook return to camp with a black-tailed deer.
“From up on top,” the general said, pointing upslope with his rifle after he had pulled the carcass from his mule’s back, “the whole range is dotted with tiny lakes just like those we passed in the last hour or so of our climb.”
Against appetites whetted by the strenuous work, the fresh meat from that one deer, along with strips of bacon and fresh-baked pan bread, all quickly disappeared before the men leaned back onto their beds of pine boughs cut for fragrant mattresses and lit their pipes. As the sun went down on the far side of the snowy granite peaks just above them, the men began to huddle ever closer to the fires, pulling their blankets more snugly about their shoulders. It startled Bourke just how cold it could get in the mountains here in the heart of summer.
Setting off the next morning, the hunters climbed ever upward on a trail of their own making, every few yards crossing tiny rivulets of freezing runoff that spilled from snowbanks still found here and there back in the deepest shadows of thick timber. Wild flax grew in abundance, as well as a profusion of harebells, forget-me-nots, sunflowers, and the wild rose they already discovered on the plains below, along the creek that bore its name. It would be a case of their finding the beauty before the unbearable.
By midmorning their climb had become a torturous exercise in endurance. The stands of fir and pine thinned as they neared timberline, making for a growing number of alpine meadows crisscrossed by so many icy streams that they were forced to slog through virtual bogs. Man and mule struggled onward with the greatest exertion, stumbling across what first looked like solid ground but was quickly discovered as being nothing more than a thick layer of decaying pine needles crusted over an icy pond. Time and again they all fell, climbing back out of the cold, muddy bogs to shiver as they planted another sucking foot or hoof in front of the last still buried up to the ankle, or deeper yet, in the pasty ooze. Everywhere deadfall and huge outcrops of smooth-faced granite the size of railroad cars impeded their path. Above their struggles loomed the immensity of Cloud Peak itself, dwarfing everything below it, especially a dozen puny men and their pack-train.
At long last they struggled out of the final vestiges of dwarf pine and juniper to stand above timberline itself, struggling those last few hundred years in the thin air to reach the shore of a narrow, crystalline mountain lake that fed both the Tongue River on the east, as well as the Big Horn and Grey Bull to the west. Huge bobbing cakes of thick ice marred its wind-furred surface. At the edges of the slowly retreating banks of crusty snow along the lake’s shore raised the tiny blue heads of the dainty forget-me-nots. Off to the west and northwest they could make out still higher ranges likewise covered with a mantle of white even at this late season.
“I must admit,” Mills said, huffing slightly with the rest, “I have traveled some in Europe and have seen many a gorgeous landscape in my years—but I will tell you here and now that I have never laid my eyes on anything quite as beautiful as this.”
His heart pounding with its cry as his lungs drank deep with every breath, Bourke could not believe he had actually made it there, where it seemed they stood on top of the world. Below lay the last great hunting ground the hostiles were mightily set upon defending to the death. Far to the east came that rush of civilization ever westward, with the army as their spear point. But for these ageless forests and these huge granite spires towering against this
