“Son of a bitch is licking his wounds, by God!” Miles grumbled. “And I bet that’s where he’ll sit until Sheridan sends him enough troops to surround the Black Hills!”
Shit, he thought, curling up the end of his long mustache. Sherman and Sheridan had better give him a chance at Sitting Bull and all those savages that went and chewed up Terry’s finest cavalry. At long last they better give Nelson Miles and the Fifth Infantry a chance at closing that bloody chapter on the northern plains.
That is, if Sherman and Sheridan were really serious about ending the Indian problem once and for all.
If the army brass thought they were going to keep Nelson Miles sitting on his thumbs here at Leavenworth while sending Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Whistler to lead Miles’s own Fifth Infantry north to whip the Sioux—those fat-bottoms in Washington City had another thing to think over!
In a flurry he whirled from the window and plopped himself back into his chair, taking up a lead pencil. On a single sheet of long paper he began composing the telegram he would send to Sherman. Starting here and now he would badger the brass in the War Department until he secured his field command. By damn, he sure as hell wouldn’t let Whistler go marching off with Nelson Miles’s Fifth Infantry! Not when there were glories to be won whipping Sitting Bull out there on the Yellowstone and the Tongue and the Powder!
Once they gave Colonel Nelson A. Miles his orders for field command—they’d have this Sioux War all but ended!
Nelson knew there wasn’t a thing he could not do: from defeating the hostile Sioux and Cheyenne, to getting himself elected President of the Republic. He had been careful, damned careful, charting every move, every step along the way throughout his career. His education at the Academy, even his marriage to just the right niece—it all laid the foundation for what should have made Nelson Miles the greatest commander in the history of the Army of the West. Right up there in the military texts with Washington, Taylor, and Grant.
“But now you’ve gone and done this to me, Armstrong,” he groaned softly as he flung down the pencil, then rose to stare out the window. Gently laying his forehead against the mullioned windowpane, Miles stared out at the sun-splashed parade where the buzz of tragedy continued unabated.
“Dammit—how am I ever going to compete with the memory of a dead man? How can I, a mere mortal, Armstrong—ever hope to compete with you again—now that you’ve become a legend on that bloody hillside somewhere in Montana? Now that you’ve become a symbol of our national honor that must be avenged? Now that you’ve become a myth? Bigger than you ever were until that day you fell, bigger than you’d ever been in life?”
Chapter 10
6 July 1876
THE LITTLE HORN MASSACRE
Confirmation of the Disaster.
CHICAGO, July 6—At the headquarters of Lieut. Gen. Sheridan this morning all was bustle and confusion over the reported massacre of Custer’s command. Telegrams were being constantly received, but most of them were of a confidential nature and were withheld from publication.
DETAILS OF THE BATTLE
Graphic description of the fighting—
Major Reno’s command under fire
for two days—every man of Custer’s
detachment killed except one
scout—affecting scenes when
relief arrived.
Special
CHICAGO, July 6—A special to the
“All? All of them?” Samantha asked, her voice barely audible.
Nettie Meinhold gripped the newspaper, her elbows outflung to keep from getting herself crushed by the press of female bodies all wanting to read the story for themselves. The stocky, German workhorse of a woman bellowed above the clamor, “Quiet!”
Some of the women backed away somewhat, and Third Cavalry Captain Charles Meinhold’s wife shook the paper indignantly. “This is my newspaper, and I’ll read the stories to you again if you’ll be kind enough to listen. I’m just as worried as any of you.”
“Custer’s really dead,” murmured a full-bodied woman beside Sam who reminded Samantha of her mother. “Hard to believe.”
Nettie Meinhold reminded, “It says so right here.”
“But n-not all of them?” Samantha asked again.
“No,” one of the other women growled with that aggression born of great fear, her eyes brimming with worry, glistening with tears. Her lower lip trembled as she turned away.
That was just the way Sam felt. Trying to control herself, to keep from crying like all those who had hid their faces at the first reading of the newspaper’s banner headlines. Some just weren’t able to bear up under the bloody truth.
“Those are savages!” one of them cried out in anguish, sobbing in her hands.
Another groaned, “They say you won’t find a better unit in this army than Custer’s Seventh!”
“Listen to you!” Emma Van Vliet snapped angrily, her arms flying like a big bird’s wings. “Here we are—wives of the Second and the Third—every last one of us … and you’re knuckling under saying Custer and his Seventh were the best?”
“To fall … all of them—”
Someone whined, “It wasn’t all of them!”
“Only half the regiment!”
Mrs. Van Vliet growled at them, “They weren’t the best. Not to be crushed like they were—”
“Still, dear God! Half a regiment!”
Nettie Meinhold tried calming them a moment. “Listen, Custer and his Seventh couldn’t be the best. Look what happened to them. Why, to be defeated by a bunch of godless savages?”
Mrs. Dorothea Andrews inched forward, saying, “Don’t you all realize they’re the same Indians our men are marching against?”
Somewhere in that knot of fearful wives one of the women went weak-kneed, crying out, “Dear Father in heaven!”
Two others caught the woman as she began to crumple there on the porch to Old Bedlam, and struggled through the crowd with their burden, heading for the door.
Over and over Sam hypnotically rubbed her hand across her belly, feeling faint, hearing the women moaning,
