inspection. Chewing on a little of that tobacco he could beg off Lieutenant Bubb’s commissary, Seamus Donegan sat with half-breed Frank Grouard, both of them sullenly waiting, watching Terry’s far-off column inch its own way toward the Yellowstone.
One trooper nearby began to grump, “I’ll sooner desert than come on another one of Crook’s Injun campaigns!”
“Och!” swore his Irish companion. “It was the devil’s own whiskey that brought me to ruin—with no place to go but enlist!”
“Whiskey!” hollered a third. “Ah, sweet whiskey! Now, George—wouldn’t you just wish you had a little drop of whiskey to mix with all this water here’bouts?”
“Mix?” the second soldier replied with a snort of objection. “No fear of you mixing any water with your whiskey, Tim! You always take it straight!”
Tim spat in disgust, saying, “Bad luck to the ship that brought me over, then. If I had taken my old mother’s advice and remained in Cashel, it isn’t a drowned rat I’d be this morning.”
“Och! Be-jaysus!” grouched George. “If this isn’t the most god-damnblest outfit I ever struck in my twenty- five years of sarvice!”
“Aye,” agreed Tim as the sergeants ordered the units into a column of fours. “Devil shoot the generals and the shoulder straps all around! Sure and they have no more compassion on a poor crayture of a soldier than a hungry wolf has on a helpless little lamb!”
The horse soldier behind Tim hollered out, “A tough old lamb you’d be, Timmy! A wolf would have to hold his head a long way from the wall afore he could eat you.”
“No coffee till night,” Tim continued to complain. “And we’ll likely eat our bacon raw again come supper— for the sagebrush won’t burn worth a lick, even if the rain would let up!”
The Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition put its nose down to the trail, on the hunt once more.
But while Crook, Bourke, Finerty, and many of the other soldiers and civilians who would chronicle this leg of the expedition all wrote that they took up the “Indian trail” that dreary, sodden morning of 26 August—the column was instead following the heavy wagon trail that General Terry’s engineers had graded and bridged on their westbound march back in May.
Grouard, Donegan, and Charlie White all had their own suspicions early on, but it was a pair of Ree Terry had loaned the expedition who weren’t long in confirming Crook’s mistake. After all, those Arikara trackers should know: they had been part of that great forty-plus force who had marched out of Fort Abraham Lincoln with a hopeful Terry and an ebullient Custer on the seventeenth of May.
Later that Saturday morning the Ree came to Grouard, plainly confused, wondering why Three Stars was merely backtracking a soldier road instead of pursuing the Sioux trail.
“Sweet Mither of God! If this isn’t a glorious start,” Donegan grumbled. “We’re told we’re giving stern chase to the enemy, when all we’re about is going on a grand fishing trip!”
“Ain’t you ever fished for Sioux?” Grouard asked, looking disgusted. “Terry and Gibbon done a lot of it lately. The secret is, you just don’t ever bait your hook.”
With a nod Seamus replied, “Yeah—so you don’t ever have to worry about catching something.”
Stripped to the bone, packing along two days’ less rations than that pitiful fifteen days’ supplies would have allowed them, and without bringing along a single nose bag of grain for their gaunt, worn-out animals, they pointed their column to the northeast. Crook had his men marching into fire-blackened prairie, a country cut with a hundred muddy, alkaline creeks, making for the Little Missouri badlands.
That afternoon about four o’clock the command settled into the adhesive mud along the West Fork of O’Fallon’s Creek after marching more than twenty miles, a camp made all the more miserable by a wind-driven rain. At sundown many of the command saw signs of abundant game, but the general had issued strict orders against firing any weapon. Even the company trumpeters had been instructed to pack away their bugles. The enemy was out there, came the explanation.
Just where, it was any man’s guess.
North by east the infantry led them out at seven A.M. the following Sunday, the twenty-seventh, marching into a rolling country that showed no evidence of timber. Near noon they reached the main branch of O’Fallon’s Creek, where the packers had a problem forcing some of their mules across. In two more hours Crook had them in bivouac on the East Fork of O’Fallon’s, a small blessing for those older veterans who were already showing signs of approaching sickness: rheumatism and neuralgia.
Late that afternoon eight Arikara scouts rode in from Terry’s command with his instructions to the Ree that they were to serve the Wyoming column, as well as carry a letter for Crook.
I have had a reply to my dispatch to Whistler. Rice was not attacked, but the steamer
I shall send a steamer to Buford with orders to take on supplies and come up to Glendive and await orders. She will supply you.
Beginning to worry about the prospect of scurvy running rampant through the command, Crook met with his officers and instructed them to have the men eat the cactus and Indian turnips found in abundance along the line of march. That night a few soldiers pulled the spines from some prickly pear and tried frying it in their skillets over greasewood fires sputtering in the incessant drizzle. Most tried a single bite, then turned away to spit out what they had in their mouths.
“I’ll chance the scurvy,” one old file growled after hacking up the slimy pulp.
The sun put in an appearance at dawn on the twentyeighth, lifting the men’s spirits. Throughout the day the air stayed cool and the column covered a good piece of ground, finally going into camp on high ground that overlooked the valley of Beaver Creek still off to the east, and the sun-scoured badlands of southern Montana, with Cabin Creek just below them.
Grouard and Donegan took the eight Arikara scouts to look over the country around the Little Missouri still in their front. They hadn’t gone far when they began to run across recent sign. The farther they pushed to the east, the more nervous grew the half-breed and the Ree. Smoke was seen off in the distance behind the rise and fall of the land, great, smudgy columns spiraling into the sodden air.
“These Corn Indians seen with their own eyes what the Sioux did to Custer’s men,” Grouard said, trying to explain why he was choosing to return to Crook’s camp.
“You’re ‘bout as jumpy as they are, Frank.”
He pressed his thick lips together and nodded, turning his horse about. He pointed, saying, “I’m laying there’s more’n three hundred lodges down there. Over there and there too. All together, that makes more warriors than you and me wanna tangle with. You remember that graveyard beside the Little Horn, don’t you?”
Seamus nodded. “I remember.”
Many of the officers refused to believe Grouard’s report that night when the scouts wandered in close to dark, just as the rain blotted out the first stars. But it wasn’t just the rain that soaked them all again that night of the twentyeighth. A prairie hailstorm, with stones half the size of a hen’s egg, hammered man and beast, chilled the air more than twenty degrees, and left every last one of them frozen to the gills.
With the advent of a fierce lightning show, followed by the frightening hail, a few of the Fifth Cavalry’s horses broke free of their picket pins and started their run. Most of them floundered in the creek. Some died, others had to be shot after breaking their legs in that mad dash to freedom.
As far as Seamus Donegan was concerned, the only good thing to be said about that night was that the storm hadn’t succeeded in stampeding all their stock. Instead of breaking free, most of the horses and mules huddled in packs, frightened, making the most pitiful of humanlike noises throughout that long, miserable night.
It was already becoming clear to any horseman in that command that most of their animals simply didn’t have enough strength to stampede. All those horsemen could do was pray the stock would have enough strength to last out Crook’s chase.
Later the Irishman learned that the lightning had struck the prairie not far from their southernmost pickets, starting a grass fire that was whipped along in savage style by the wind but was as quickly extinguished as soon as
