grass. The coming of that ninth day of July found Sibley’s shabby, bloodied patrol setting out again. Up each new slope they crawled, more dead than alive, expecting, hoping, praying each in his own way to find on the far side that inviting fringe of cottonwood that would mark their arrival at Little Goose Creek. But disappointment was all they found for the next hour and a half. More and more hills. More valleys. More rugged, rocky ground.
“Look!” Sibley said, loudly.
The party stumbled to a halt, those behind coming along at a clumsy lurch, finally stopping among the rest as they pointed ahead. Two horses grazed near the crest of the next hill.
Seamus warned, “We better wait here, Lieutenant.”
“Yes,” Sibley agreed, motioning for his anxious men to be patient. “We’ll see about things.”
As they watched, the horses eventually turned, and even from that distance the men could see that the animals were saddled. The shimmer of reflected metal flashed beneath the sun’s new light. The glimmer of carbines in saddle boots.
“Mary, our Mother of God!” Finerty exclaimed, lunging forward.
He was the first of the massed wave that hurried out of hiding from the brushy willow, making for the hillside.
“Careful!” Donegan bellowed, struggling to hurry along himself, afraid of what might be a trap.
On the slope of the far hill a pair of men suddenly rose from the tall grass, lumbering toward their animals and yanking their carbines out of saddle pockets.
“Don’t fire!” hollered someone near the front.
Others pleaded weakly, “Please! Don’t shoot!”
“Stand and identify yourselves!”
“Lieu … Lieutenant Frederick … Frederick Sibley. U.S. S-second Cavalry.”
“Shit!” one of the two cried, the butt of his carbine sinking to the grass. “We thought you was dead, sir!”
“We were,” Finerty spoke for them all as he came forward, a dozen of the soldiers right behind him. “Believe me—we were surely good as dead.”
Sibley himself came forward. The two soldiers snapped salutes as the lieutenant asked, “Are you on picket duty?”
“No, sir,” one answered. “We got permission to go hunting this morning. Break up the monotony at camp.”
“M-monotony?” Finerty repeated. Then he broke out in a crazy, hysterical laugh.
“Told you while back, newsman,” Bat chided. “Said you’d have lots of good stories to tell your readers, you decide to come with us.”
“Damn you, Bat!” Finerty roared, whirling on the scout. “Leave me be about it!”
Sibley said to one of the pair, “Private, I want you to ride back to camp. Get some horses from your troop, any troop. And ask Captain Dewees or Rawolle for that matter—” The lieutenant caught himself and remembered his academy courtesy. “With my compliments, of course—ask them to supply an escort to return with those horses.”
“Yes, sir,” the soldier said, and trotted up the slope to his mount.
Sibley hollered as loud as he could, “Tell them we’ve left three men behind who can’t come in on foot.”
The private reached his horse, turning to reply, “I will, Lieutenant.”
Seamus came forward to stand beside Sibley. “And, Private?”
“Yeah?” the soldier answered as he rose to his saddle.
“Before you go, empty your saddlebags of everything you have to eat.”
He seemed confused. “Everything I have to—”
“You heard the man,” Sibley instructed. “These men … my men—they haven’t had anything to eat … to eat in—”
“A long goddamned time!” Finerty roared for them all.
Chapter 16
8-13 July 1876
THE INDIANS
Another Indian Agent Heard From—
A Piteous Appeal
WASHINGTON, July 14—Indian Inspector Van Derveree reports that at a council with the Indians of Red Cloud and Spotted Tail Agencies, June 30, the chiefs and others expressed a willingness to relinquish the Black Hills country on the terms offered by Van Derveree. The chiefs promised to keep their people at home, and to remain about the agencies. They declare, and the evidence here sustains their declaration, that the only Sioux who are absent are the Cheyennes who have committed depredations in the neighborhood and who have gone north to join the hostiles …
Appended to the report is the following statement of Bear Stands Up, an Indian of the Spotted Tail agency, who arrived from Sitting Bull’s camp June 25th … Sitting Bull sends word that he does not intend to molest any one south of the Black Hills, but will fight the whites in that country as long as the question is unsettled and if not settled as long as he lives … He does not want to fight the whites—only steal from them. White men steal, and Indians won’t come to the settlements. Whites kill themselves and make the Black Hills stink with so many dead men … Sitting Bull says if troops come out to him he must fight them, but if they don’t come out he intends to visit this agency and he will counsel his people for peace.
Colonel Wesley Merritt did not choose to march east to the troubled agencies that eighth day of July.
Nor south to Laramie.
Instead he decided on a third option: to stay put right there on Sage Creek, where he felt more mobile, closer to the agencies, and unquestionably closer to the northbound trail used by any hostiles fleeing the reservations. From that stockade he could respond quickly to trouble in either direction—Fort Laramie or Red Cloud.
Through the next four days the regiment sat, fighting the thumb-sized horseflies that tormented man and beast alike. Scouting parties were sent out, but none returned having sighted any war parties or any fresh trails. Then on the evening of 11 July, the night the Fifth drew its first beef ration of the campaign, more orders arrived.
“We’re marching back to Laramie,” King explained to Cody.
On the lieutenant’s face it was plain to see the ardent fervor to get in his licks against the enemy. Ever since learning of the Little Bighorn disaster, that feeling was something tangible and contagious: Bill was himself every bit as eager to get a crack at those who had wiped George Armstrong Custer and half his regiment from the face of the earth.
“From there we’re going north to Fetterman,” King went on to explain Sheridan’s new orders. “Then we can finally be on our way to reinforce Crook camped somewhere near the Big Horns.”
At dawn the next morning, Wednesday, the command marched away from Sage Creek, heading back to the Cardinal’s Chair on the headwaters of the Niobrara River, sixteen miles closer to Fort Laramie. That evening brought exactly the sort of furious thunderstorm that midsummer had made famous on the western plains, complete with deafening thunder and a great display of celestial fireworks, accompanied by a generous, wind-driven mix of rain and hail that painfully pelted the regiment, soaking every soldier to the skin.
Beneath overcast skies on the morning of the thirteenth, the Fifth plodded eighteen more miles and went into camp by another prominent landmark in Wyoming Territory, Rawhide Butte. Sundown brought with it another drenching thundershower.
That very night it was whispered that Merritt had relieved Captain Robert A. Wilson from command of his A
