firing down on them.
“We can take the hill!” Sharpe shouted as the enemy fire began to taper off. “Now, men! On the double:
Like fiends themselves, H Company sprinted and skidded, slipped and clawed their way up the slope toward the Sioux. Some cursed, others screamed, and most silently went about their reloading, shell after shell after shell, foot by foot pushing back the enemy.
Atop the bluff now they could see that the last of the warriors had set fire to the tall tinder-dry grass. The flames leaped and crackled beneath each strong gust of wind, driving layers of stifling smoke down on the soldiers as they clambered up the rocky slope.
Near the top, Sharpe turned to look behind him for but a moment, and in that moment saw Otis himself leading the first of the wagons out of the stream and up the trail. By damn! H Company had secured the crossing. Wagon by wagon, the teamsters and soldiers were stopping in the shallow creek to water the stock as they reached the stream. Beside each wagon soldiers quickly refilled the water barrels before more teams pushed on down into the creek bottom. Two or three wagons at a time now rumbled up to the west bank of Clear Creek—which meant that now the warriors might swarm in on all sides of H Company and the supply train.
What made things all the more frightening for the lieutenant was that with the smoke and the fires, the noise and the way the battle rolled here, then there—for the life of him it seemed even more warriors were coming to reinforce the horsemen all the time.
Behind them Lieutenant Kell’s K Company closed the file as the last wagons reached the creek and began taking on water before crossing—when suddenly more than a hundred warriors roared down on them from behind, yipping and firing on that little band of soldiers just moving into the water from the east bank. When Kell sent word to Otis that his men were running low on ammunition, the lieutenant colonel ordered down another thousand rounds and a few reinforcements.
About the same time that ammunition was reaching K Company, the last of the wagons began pulling farther and farther away across the stream. For a few minutes it appeared Kell’s men would be cut off and surrounded by the hostiles—sure to be overwhelmed. Time and again the horsemen surged forward, sweeping past and dropping to the far side of their ponies, firing beneath the animals’ necks before clattering away, hooves churning up clods of prairie. Charge after charge after charge—
“Major Sanger!” Otis screamed above the noise of wagons and men, mules and Sioux. “Take your men and break through to K Company. Bring them up to rejoin the column!”
Answering with only a salute, Sanger got his G Company off at a lope to reinforce Kell’s besieged troops barely holding up the rear of the column. By now the Sioux had fired the tall dried grass on both flanks of the column on the west bank and to the rear, where they began to withdraw with Sanger’s reinforcement of Kell’s soldiers.
The air burned their lungs as they struggled to close up with the wagons. Men coughed, dropped to their knees as they were robbed of breath, sucking desperately at the air as black flecks of smoldering grass littered the sky all around them like July fireflies.
“Keep those goddamned wagons moving!” Otis yelled far to the front, prodding his drivers. “We stop here— we’re all done for!”
Inch by inch, foot by foot, the mules and wagons formed up by fours once more having reached that high ground. Together with what was left of the escort not fighting in their front or to their rear, they ground their way along the rutted Tongue River Road.
They came to a jangling halt, men bellowing and the mules noisily fighting their harness—for out of the north and east swarmed a reinforced party of yelping horsemen.
“Keep those goddamned wagons moving!” Otis hollered, weaving in and among the leaders atop one of the five horses left for his men at Glendive Cantonment.
When things appeared their worst, the warriors on the right flank suddenly broke off their attack and boiled to the front of the column, where some of the horsemen crossed and reinforced their numbers, suddenly putting extreme pressure on the left side while the rest remained to stubbornly harass the front of the train. It was there the first wagons slowed even more until the entire line was all but stopped.
In heartbeats Otis lumbered up to his advance guard, ordering, “Mr. Sharpe—detach Mr. Conway with a squad of ten men and keep the way cleared!”
With Lieutenant Conway and his soldiers off to punch their way against the warriors at their front, Sharpe remained with the rest of his H Company as well as G Company to hold back the extreme pressure of those warriors reinforced on their left flank. It took the better part of an hour before the wagons were once more able to move down the road. By that time the smoke became even more suffocating from the grass fires that raged around them on all sides—some of the wagons and mule teams forced to frantically dash through the leaping flames, men hollering in panic and mules braying in fear … when within moments the winds shifted around from the west and for the most part raised that thick, choking pall—preventing the gray, stinging blanket from completely swallowing the movement of the soldier column.
Someone cried out on Sharpe’s far right. He whirled to watch a soldier from G Company spin to the ground, clutching his knee. The man’s bunkie was on him in an instant, ripping off his belt and tightening it above the wound. It wasn’t but a minute before Surgeon Charles T. Gibson was there to lend a hand.
At that very moment Sharpe realized just how cut off they were: on all sides the rolling prairie lay blackened, smoldering, a great gray shroud blotting out the midafternoon sun hung like a red ball above them in the autumn sky. It reminded the lieutenant of the waste Napoleon had laid to the steppes of Russia in his disastrous retreat more than half a century before. Then he chided himself—to think that his little struggle was of any consequence compared to the great European campaigns he had studied at the Academy.
Then almost immediately he decided theirs was a worthy struggle. While Napoleon battled against a civilized enemy—Otis’s column found itself surrounded by a fiendish enemy who fought not only with bullets, but with smoke and fire and devilish noise. In addition, they each struggled privately against the twin demons of a soldier’s nightmare: hunger and thirst.
From this high ground they had struggled so hard to reach and to hold against terrible odds, the lieutenant now dared look back at the narrow valley where the Indians swarmed against the rear guard. Now the Sioux held the valley behind them. The enemy had possession of water and wood while the soldiers had only what they hurriedly had taken on in crossing the creek. To attempt to run that gauntlet back to the creek for water would be nothing short of sheer suicide.
Up here on the high ground there was little to no firewood. What there had been was now all but burned to ash as every footstep and every hoof raised the stifling black dust into the air. As a biting wind came up, the sun continued its rapid fall, closing on the far horizon.
Out there to the west … where Miles and his Fifth Infantry knew nothing of their predicament.
Chapter 5
15 October 1876
“We are not done yet, brother,” William Jackson said as he sat down beside Robert at the small fire they had dug into the prairie so that its low flames would not show.
There wasn’t much wood to speak of in that cold bivouac the soldier column made on a broad depression that dominated the high ground that night. But at least they had plenty of food to eat—if a man could call hard bread and pig meat real food. And water. At least they had taken on enough water to see to the mules, enough for each man to refill his canteen for the night.
William’s stomach rumbled. He stared at the tiny fire and remembered the meals his mother had set before them when they had been boys on the high Missouri: the boiled buffalo boss ribs, pemmican sweetened with chokecherries, stewed
