their weighty burdens during the Fifth Cavalry’s first pursuit of the enemy that season.
Those two horses would not be the last animals to drop in their tracks before the summer’s Sioux campaign was out.
On the following cloudy, dismal morning, that of the Centennial Fourth, Merritt ordered the regiment to strike camp, begin a countermarch, and scout back to the south, in the direction of Fort Laramie. The colonel realized that the Indians now knew of the presence of his troops and that further patrolling along the Mini Pusa would prove fruitless. Two companies with worn-out horses accompanied Merritt and the supply wagons due south along the valley of the Old Woman’s Fork, with the colonel’s intentions to rendezvous all battalions forty-eight hours later at the army’s stockade erected at the head of Sage Creek. Meanwhile the regiment’s commander dispatched Major John J. Upham with three companies to march to the northwest, up the Mini Pusa for one last scout of the Cheyennes’ possible crossing. At the same time, Carr was sent off east to the Black Hills with another three companies, again to look for recent signs of activity.
By the sixth of July, the Fifth Cavalry had reassembled, establishing their camp no more than seventy-five miles north of Fort Laramie on Sage Creek at the stockade guarded by a single company of infantry who were assigned to watch over a section of the Cheyenne-Black Hills stage road. Merritt promptly sent a courier south with reports for Sheridan. The rider was back by ten o’clock the next morning while most were having a leisurely breakfast and some officers were enjoying a cool bath in one of the creek’s shallow pools.
Cody himself escorted Major Townsend’s courier to Merritt’s tent, then watched the colonel open the flap on the thin leather dispatch envelope as the scout poured himself another cup of coffee … about the time he heard the colonel quietly exclaim, “Good Lord!”
He looked at Merritt’s hands shaking, how the officer’s youthful face suddenly went gray with age and utter shock, carved with deep concern. It frightened Bill. “Colonel?”
“They … the Seventh … Custer too …”
“What about Custer and the Seventh?”
Merritt wagged his head, choking as if on something sour, unable to speak. All he could manage to do was hand the dispatches over to Cody.
We have partial confirmation of
Custer’s disaster, which, from
the papers, appears to have been
complete. Custer and five
companies entirely wiped out.
Once he had read them, and reread them a second time, Bill gave the pages back and turned away, pushing himself through a cadre of officers all hurrying like ants atop an anthill to hear for themselves the unbelievable news.
Bill had known Custer. Why, he had even ridden stirrup to stirrup with the golden-haired cavalry officer, hunting buffalo together on the plains of Kansas. Custer was the sort so vital, so alive! Hero in war. Conqueror of Black Kettle’s Cheyenne. Custer the Invincible!
Charles King came bounding up, his hair still wet from his morning swim. He stopped Cody. “Bill! Bill—is what I hear true? Dear God—say it isn’t true!”
Cody could only nod as more anxious men gathered around them in a knot of fierce disbelief.
Silence fell over that camp beside Sage Creek like a suffocating blanket of doom. This was a gallant, romantic era when the officers of one cavalry unit had friends among other regiments. Most of those men serving with the Fifth lost comrades or classmates, soldiers who fell with the Seventh at the Little Bighorn.
So in the awful stillness of that summer morning, Bill quietly confirmed the worst for those who pressed in close, “Custer and five companies of the Seventh are wiped out of existence. It’s no rumor—General Merritt’s got the official dispatch.”
“Where?”
“North of here—Little Bighorn.”
“Official?”
“Sheridan himself.”
“Custer? Dead?”
“Confirmed. Twelve days ago. On the twenty-fifth of June.”
King grabbed Cody by the arm. “You’ll be all right, Bill?”
“Yes,” the scout eventually answered, throwing his shoulders back somewhat, his long hair brushing his collar. “There can be no doubt now, Lieutenant, that before a fortnight has passed, we’ll march north to reinforce Crook.”
“This is going to be bigger than any of us could have imagined,” King said. “Sheridan will throw everything he has at them after losing Custer.”
“But, you know, Lieutenant—if we are just now finding out about the battle, one thing’s for damn sure: the Indians down at Red Cloud and Spotted Tail already know.”
King snapped his fingers, saying grimly, “Which means if they weren’t preparing to jump the reservation and head north—they’ll be doing it damned soon.”
With a nod Cody replied, “Hotter’n ever to join up with the war camps that wiped out Custer and half the Seventh Cavalry.”
Sheridan himself would have even hotter plans for the Fighting Fifth.
Later that evening Lieutenant William Hall, acting regimental quartermaster for the Fifth Cavalry, rode in from Laramie with fresh dispatches. A gravely disappointed Merritt learned that he was not to take his eight troops of cavalry and push toward the Powder River country to unite with Crook. Instead Sheridan told him he should either march on to the Red Cloud Agency to bolster the army’s force at Camp Robinson, or march back to Fort Laramie to await further orders.
Whichever the colonel should decide was best.
* * *
That hour’s halt for coffee and hardtack proved itself a deadly delay for Sibley’s patrol.
As the soldiers relaxed around their tiny fires there in that grassy glade, Seamus heard more and more of them boast that the Indians would not dare follow them into the mountains. Despite how the scouts appealed, there was simply no convincing the lieutenant’s men that danger lay ahead.
Grouard had long ago given up in disgust and joined the soldiers on the ground, dropping on the grass painfully to curl an arm under his head and close his eyes.
“You gonna be all right, Frank?” Seamus asked.
The half-breed whispered low, his eyes flicking down to his belly, “Just this damned woman’s weeping sickness.”
“It’s gotta hurt.”
He lay on his side, breathing shallow as he made himself more comfortable, knees drawn up. “Worse’n anything I ever had.”
It was early afternoon when Pourier and Donegan decided the soldiers had enjoyed a long enough halt.
Bat went over and nudged Grouard. “Time to go,” he told the other half-breed.
Clearly in pain, Grouard moved stiffly to rise, struggling to climb back onto his horse as the soldiers resaddled. He walked his horse over by Sibley to say, “You just keep your men close together behind me,” as he rose in the stirrups to rub his groin with a grimace. “Tell ’em to ride fast and keep up with me. They gotta keep up and—be ready to fight.”
The patrol moved out behind their scouts in single file, following Pourier, Donegan, and an ailing Grouard, pushing up through the forests thick with lodgepole, dotted with open parks carpeted in tall grass and wildflowers, winding their way through a tumble of boulders as big as railroad cars.
They hadn’t gone all that far when Pourier signaled a halt and slid from his horse. In the middle of the trail lay a pair of crossed coup-sticks.
