“Colonel Jones.”
“Proprietor of the Jones House?” Cody asked.
Crawford nodded. “None other.”
“You mean to tell me you brought this all the way up from Cheyenne for me?”
“He give it to me a while back, weeks as a matter of fact. Said to run you down when I had a chance.”
Donegan wagged his head in amazement and asked, “And you haven’t thought once in all those weeks, all those long, thirsty days and cold nights riding north to Sioux country, not once did you consider pulling that cork and having yourself a taste of that beautiful whiskey?”
Cody turned to Seamus with a look of amused consternation on his face and pointed the neck of the bottle at Crawford, saying, “You’re a dense one, Irishman. This here Captain Crawford is about the only scout who could pull off that journey without draining the bottle Colonel Jones sent for me.”
“Hard to believe, it is, it is,” Seamus said wistfully, staring at the lovely hue of that whiskey.
“Not hard to believe at all, Irishman,” Cody replied. “You see, Crawford’s just the man for such a job—he’s got to be the only teetotaling scout I ever met!”
Late that afternoon the Shoshone returned with news of more Sioux trails coming in from the west to join the main route. Crook had the command remount at six and during that night’s march many of the cavalrymen sang Negro melodies learned during the recent war, as well as some popular Irish songs. They did not camp at the bend of the Rosebud until long after the moon had set at 2 A.M. and the wind had quartered around, heaving right out of the north.
On the following day’s cold march into the teeth of a wind-driven drizzle that steadily became a slashing, galedriven rain by midmorning, the column passed several old camps littered with the bones of dogs and ponies: more ample evidence that the warrior bands clearly were no longer living off the fat of the land as they moseyed toward the northeast. Throughout the twenty miles made that morning and into the afternoon, the age of the trail freshened. What had at first been a trail some two weeks old became ten days old, then shortened to a week, and by the time the column made bivouac on the Rosebud below Lame Deer Creek, it was believed they had compressed the enemy’s lead to no more than four days.
“The goddamned heat and dust and breathing all that ash was bad enough,” Donegan grumbled at the smoky little fire he and some of the other scouts somehow kept burning in the fury of the storm that visited itself upon them that night. “But rain and mud and wet wool blankets can take the starch right out of a strong man.”
With only one thin gray army blanket in addition to his saddle blanket, Seamus shuddered with the cold that pierced a man to his marrow. He was not alone, for that August night in the valley of the Rosebud, Surgeon Bennett’s thermometer fell far below freezing by dawn on the tenth.
Captain Emil Adams strode through the bivouac of his C Troop, Fifth Cavalry, rousting his men from the hard, cold ground by telling them exactly what they did not want to hear in that thick Prussian accent of his.
“Vake up, boys! Surgeon tol’t me his termometer says it was
“What thermometer?” asked Second Lieutenant Edward L. Keyes.
For no more than a moment that question confounded the old German. Then he smiled wryly and replied in that colicky bullfrog accent of his, “Veil—any tammed termometer t’at vas tammed fool to get here! Und’stan’t?”
The laughter that greeted Adams’s declaration served to warm many of the men as they rolled from their frost-covered blankets and stomped about on frozen limbs to greet the sunrise and to water their horses at the banks of the Rosebud, where they discovered a thick rime of ice crusted along the creek.
After marching a few miles north that Thursday morning beneath a most welcome sun, with all those hooves and boots kicking up great columns of dust and stifling ash, Washakie’s scouts discovered a recent campsite, its sun-dance lodge as well as some buffalo-hide lodges still standing. Naw at last they were getting close enough that the scent of their prey was strong in their nostrils.
At noon Crook ordered a brief halt at the mouth of Greenleaf Creek, right where Grouard’s detail of scouts found the hostiles’ trail turning due east—headed for the Tongue. The half-breed stood with Donegan, Cody, and many of the others while Crook, Merritt, and Carr debated their next move. A murmur of no little excitement came rippling through their midday bivouac from the north.
“Indians!”
“By the devil!” Crook growled, slapping his gauntlet against his leg, whirling on his battalion commanders. “Form up! Form up!”
No one really needed to shout orders—the infantry was already coming into line and the cavalry were already catching up their horses. Panic and fear, the jingle of harness, and the slap of carbine against McClellan thundered through that valley as noncoms barked and screamed and formed up the commands, making them ready to receive the enemy’s charge.
Behind that racket rose the screeches and war cries, the drone of war songs and the beating of hand-held drums, as the allies quickly made their medicine before they would ride off to fight their ancient enemies. Washakie’s scouts and the Ute were leaping atop their ponies, whipping the animals in a merciless gallop to the north hoping to catch a glimpse of the Sioux who had stymied the Three Stars Crook, then killed the Long Hair named Custer.
Bile clogged the back of Donegan’s throat. God-and-bloody-damn, he thought. This was just as things had been that morning Crook’s command had made their halt along the banks of the Rosebud back on the seventeenth of June.
Here we are again: not just caught flat-footed with our pants down again—but caught completely napping!
*The Plainsmen Series, Vol. 7,
Chapter 27
10 August 1876
Later from Crazy Horse
CHEYENNE, July 29—Previous reports via the Missouri River agencies are in part confirmed by news received at Fort Laramie from Red Cloud today. Runners have arrived at that agency, said to have come from Crazy Horse’s band of Menneconjous, and stating that that chief, with a portion of his band, had left Sitting Bull’s domain and are en route to the agencies avowedly to treat for peace. The turning over of the agencies at Red Cloud and Spotted Tail has not been without difficulty. While a majority of the Indians are disposed to submit gracefully there is quite a number who express dissatisfaction at having soldiers placed over them, and a final council is being held at Red Cloud today.
Some dissatisfaction is felt by the Indians at the meager supply of food, which consists entirely of corn, flour and beef. They insist on sugar, coffee, and tobacco, in fulfillment of stipulations, and further attributing the departure from the agencies of those who have joined the hostiles to this fact rather than a desire for war.
If Crook had put Eugene Carr in charge of this column with himself as scout, brooded an unhappy Bill Cody, why—they’d likely be about the business of catching the fleeing Sioux by now. But, he considered with a sigh, even though he and the Fifth’s lieutenant colonel shared the same mind in that respect, and even though Crook had him assigned as chief of scouts, no one had thought to ask Cody for anything more than the most minimal advice.
Thank God for the sun that had warmed the air by midmorning.
On either side of Cody the valley began to widen, the scorched hills rolling away toward the striated bluffs that rose like yellow-and-red walls on the east and west. Far to the north, perhaps as much as ten miles or more, Bill spotted the wisps of a distant dust column. He would keep his eye on it as he probed far ahead of the marching infantry, Merritt’s cavalry bringing up the rear behind them. Keep his eyes moving across the slopes of the timbered
