should have been recruited overnight. We sat things out yesterday, but we’ll move on this morning. I’ll have you fellas stay with the column today.”
Donegan asked, “You going to march, General?”
“Yes, we will, Irishman. To the south I know we can find provisions.”
Lieutenant Colonel Carr asked, “In the Black Hills, General?”
“Yes. Either from Furey’s train—if he reaches the Hills in time—or from the settlements themselves. I’m sure of having a place to draw rations.”
Captain Anson Mills spoke up. “But what of Fort Lincoln, General? Wouldn’t we be closer to Lincoln than we are to the Black Hills?”
Crook stared at the ground for a long moment. “Gentlemen, I figure I’ve lost the better part of two days already waiting to find out that the hostiles have split in two. When we left the Powder, we were already sure they were east of us. Now we know Terry will have his share of them coming his way, and we’re pretty sure the rest are heading south by east. That’s the bunch I want to catch before they get to the Huls.”
“Perhaps we can herd them in to the agencies, General,” Colonel Merritt suggested.
Crook considered that momentarily, then said, “Likely not this bunch, General. I think sooner or later we’ll have to fight them rather than follow them.”
Donegan knew Crook meant what he said. In all likelihood he wasn’t even going to consider heading northeast to reoutfit at Fort Abraham Lincoln: that would put him once more in Terry’s department.
No matter where he headed, no matter how many or how few hostiles he chased or caught, George Crook was not about to put himself at the mercy of Alfred H. Terry ever again.
Crook at Last Heard From.
CHICAGO, August 16—Adjutant General Drum has just received a dispatch from Fort Brown, Wyoming, stating that a Shoshone Indian has just come in who left Gen. Crook on the 10th inst., well down on Tongue river. He thought Crook would strike the Indians on the 20th.
Pawnee Scouts.
WASHINGTON, August 18—The commissioner of Indian affairs has given permission to General Sheridan to raise a thousand Pawnee scouts for the Sioux war.
Now they had themselves a trail … a trail not all that old, either.
After crossing the Beaver, the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition marched east through the badlands for the Little Missouri and the headwaters of the Heart River. With five of the Ree sent to the left of the column’s advance, Crook had Grouard and the rest of his white and Indian scouts moving far afield—acting as his eyes and ears to avoid bumping into the enemy as he had back in June. Marching a little east of north down the valley of Beaver Creek, the soldiers were greeted with glimpses of the famous Sentinel Butte off to their right in the distance. Word was passing around, however, that the scouts had discovered their big trail was scattering again, the bands separating to find game where they could until winter forced them back onto the agencies.
Still, there were rare moments of relief, if not moments of small joy. In addition to clearing weather, the general had approved of hunting details to be allowed to work the forward flanks of the column as it continued its march, to bring in deer and antelope and even curious jackrabbits that haunted the countryside—a change of diet the surgeons begged for as they saw a swelling number of patients at sick call every morning. Not just the usual aches and pains, the blisters and the twisted ankles. Now it seemed the cold had begun its sinister ravaging of the command through more and more cases of rheumatism, various neuralgic complaints, and the more serious malarial fevers, not to mention the explosion in cases of scurvy and a debilitating diarrhea, which the whole command suffered, caused by the poor, mineral-laden water.
Even Charles King hadn’t been immune to bouts with despair as he hung his cold rump over the damp sagebrush and cursed these streams laced with the foulest salts imaginable. But upon reaching the clear, cold water of the Beaver, all but about fifty cases of diarrhea disappeared during their wait for the return of Grouard’s scouts.
Then on the last night of August the playful, capricious weather turned downright cruel. Shifting itself out of the north, the wind gusted through their bivouac as the soldiers tried to hunker down in the coulees and gulches beneath what poor shelter they could find, even if it was their sole blanket, every single blanket beaten to a sodden mess by the wailing storm. Few men slept that night, and everyone moved about stiffly on the first day of September as sergeants passed among the outfits issuing a verbal reveille in the cold coming of dawn.
All the command had left them in their haversacks and saddlebags that morning was four days’ rations.
Late in the afternoon, while going into camp along the Beaver, one of Chambers’s infantrymen was pulling up sagebrush to make himself a field mattress when he cried out and leaped back, shaking one of his hands as if he were beating a snare drum to a marching tune. Dangling at the end of his thumb clung a young rattlesnake.
A throng of soldiers immediately descended on the hapless victim, some wrestling him down into the sage, others yanking at the snake that had its jaws savagely locked around the end of the man’s thumb. With his folding knife one soldier slashed the body from its head and flung it writhing to the ground, then went on to use the blade to pry open the clamped jaws.
Screaming in pain through it all, swearing he was sure to die, the victim was carried between four of his companions across the sage, making for the surgeons’ camp. Among the limbs of the fire Julius H. Patzki had just kindled to heat himself some coffee, the doctor laid the blade to his own belt knife, deciding to use the superheated metal to cauterize the puncture wounds. As others held up the unconscious victim, Patzki administered ammonia to rouse the soldier, then held a stiff draught of whiskey beneath his nose. The soldier drank, then drank a second dose of that universal medication for snakebite.
“Whiskey,” King groaned at his mess fire that evening. “What I wouldn’t give to have the whiskey that man got for his bite.”
Eugene Carr snorted, pounding the young lieutenant on the back. “Just as long as you could have your whiskey without having the snakebite to earn it, eh?”
“General,” King said, suddenly going serious in that gathering of officers around Carr, “if only you would take the Fifth and go on our own march, we would find and whip the Indians.”
“Hear! Hear!” cheered many of the others.
The lieutenant colonel wagged his head dolefully. “To the heart of the truth you’ve gone, Lieutenant. I’m afraid it’s going to be as hard for Crook to find the enemy as it is for Mr. King here to find his whiskey!”
Two days later Grouard brought in four Indian ponies, telling Crook they must have been abandoned by the fleeing camp the general could now be certain knew of the column’s presence.
“The closer we come on their backtrail,” the scout advised during officers’ meeting that evening of 3 September, “we can figure on finding lodgepoles and all kinds of abandoned truck. Like them ponies they left behind.”
“And,” the Irishman named Donegan added, “when we get close enough—we’ll know all of that for certain.”
“Would you care to explain, Mr. Donegan?” asked George Crook.
“We’ll know because we can figure on having ourselves a little fight with their rear guard as they hurry the women and children off.”
Crook grinned, stroking at half of that braided beard of his, his eyes twinkling as he looked about that assembly of officers. “Indeed, nothing would please me more, gentlemen—than to get close enough to have a little scrap of it.”
*Present-day Sentinel Butte.
Chapter 34
3-7 September 1876
