The Jackson brothers and Bear Plume had scoured the scorched campground, pulling up the twisted branches and limbs of the scrub oak and cedar with their hands, gathering the charred wood within the flaps of their coats while the nameless Ree scout used his belt knife to dig a fire hole in the blackened earth. Now the four of them sat huddled around the low flames, talking in whispers.
From the best estimation of the soldiers, Otis’s column had made all of fifteen miles during their day-long running fight before making camp at five o’clock, close to sundown. The Lakota continued to flit around on all sides of the soldiers as the wagons were formed into a large corral, and shots were exchanged between pickets and the daring horsemen until darkness fell just past seven P.M. From time to time one of the infantrymen made his shot count, so that by the time night sank over that bivouac, Otis’s men could claim to have knocked at least half a dozen warriors from their ponies.
No soldiers had been killed during the day’s skirmishing, but three men had been slightly wounded by spent bullets—the infantry’s Long Toms had simply held the Lakota too far out of range to make effective use of their charges and whirling attacks. These foot-sloggers had, by and large, kept the maddening dash of those hundreds of horsemen at bay, holding them back at least a thousand yards, just beyond the range of their Springfield rifles. Otis had begun this journey with ten thousand rounds for his rifles. This evening his men reported they were down to less than half of that. Many miles yet to go, and surrounded by the enemy who outnumbered them as many as four to one.
“Tomorrow come,” Robert agreed. “That will be a new day for Sitting Bull.”
“Sitting Bull?” Bear Plume asked, recognizing the sound of the Lakota shaman’s name in English.
“Yes,” William answered as he held his hands over the glowing fire pit to warm them with the other men. “These are Sitting Bull’s warriors. They cross the Yellowstone. Come to hunt all these buffalo we see after leaving Tongue River. Good hunting—always means lots of Lakota around.”
Bear Plume grunted and fell silent.
Occasionally they would hear the clink of a tin cup against a rifle barrel, or the bray of a mule, a gust of muffled laughter, or the sneeze of some man down with a cold. It was that season of the year on the high plains. Even for men who spent most of their lives outdoors. With warm, sunny days and the sort of nights that could chill a man to his narrow—most folks out here simply put up with a seasonal cough or sniffle.
Tonight Otis’s men were all on alert, out there in the rifle pits the soldiers had hastily dug on a perimeter five hundred yards out from the corral where they huddled, quiet and sleepless, watchful through the cold autumn night.
As the high plains awaited the coming of another winter.
William Jackson had seen twenty-one winters since his Blackfoot mother had given birth to him at Fort Benton, far, far up the Missouri River at the head of navigation, just downstream from the Great Falls. At that time the American Fur Company was in the buffalo-robe trade with the western tribes. He had to do no more than close his eyes these days to remember the great adobe and picket walls, the two-story buildings enclosed within—a great place to be a child.
His grandfather, Hugh Monroe, had been an employee of the great Hudson’s Bay Company, first coming to its Mountain Fort on the Saskatchewan in 1816, where he married Fox Woman, daughter of a Blackfoot chief. He held the position of post hunter, and together they had two sons and two daughters. One of them, Amelia, would marry Thomas Jackson, the member of an old Virginia family who had joined American Fur in 1835. Unlike the rest of the company employees who followed the custom of marrying Pikuni women, a tribe of the Blackfoot Confederacy, Thomas had fallen in love with Amelia.
Robert was their firstborn. Two years later William came along. They were inseparable. What a life they shared! As children they learned the three languages spoken at the fort: English, French Creole, and Pikuni. The Blackfoot tongue dominated most trade talk. By the time the boys were six or seven, they could speak all three languages with equal ease. In addition, on those long winter nights huddled before their fires in the fort’s quarters, father Thomas had taken pains to teach his two sons to read and write.
“You will learn never to shame the noble blood that runs in your veins,” he instructed his boys. “Your mother comes from Pikuni royalty. And my own family goes back a long, long way in the Old Dominion.”
Every year with the summer steamer their father made sure he brought up toys and games and storybooks from the company’s offices in St. Louis. As boyhood slowly passed away, the boys learned to ride and shoot, use a knife and tomahawk from their mother’s people. Such training was vital, for any man who carried Indian blood in his veins, the northern Rockies meant he would have friends, and he would suffer enemies. In their youth William and Robert narrowly escaped an Assiniboine war party. Not long afterward the first settlers came and threw up their log huts in the shadow of Fort Benton.
“That marks the beginning of the end for us!” grandfather cried, shaking a fist at the newcomers.
“What does this mean?” young William had asked, frightened.
“It means the whites are invading our country,” the old white-head explained angrily. “They will build a town, right here! They will begin to swarm all over our plains and along the foot of our mountains. They will kill off our meat animals, trap out our fur animals. My young ones—they are the kind that will desolate our country with their cattle and make beggars of us!”
Occasionally the boys would go out for days and camp with “woodhawks”—those men who, at great risk to their lives, would cut the immense cords of wood they sold to river steamboats plying the northern rivers each summer. During those seasons of their lives, not a year went by without raids by the Northern Cheyenne or Lakota—taking the lives of many of these daring, hearty woodhawks who would move their camp every day, eat supper around a fire, then always float downstream a mile or so before making a fireless camp for the night.
In the early spring the ice began to break up in those northern rivers. Every day they watched the passing carcasses of buffalo, some of the beasts becoming lodged at the upper end of the islands or pinned against piles of driftwood. Some were creatures that had drowned, having broken through the river’s icy crust the previous winter. Even more had been captured by the quicksands, slowly sinking to their death. Buzzards and magpies, coyotes and wolves, even grizzlies feasted upon such rich carrion tangled with the trash-wood snarled along the banks each spring.
Together with their father and others, the Jackson boys had trapped the Milk, Deep Creek, the Judith, and the Musselshell both spring and fall, returning to the post for the winter. By the time they were in their teens, American soldiers had begun to occupy the old fort, making their presence known among the tribes of the northern plains. One by one a long line of stores, hotels, and saloons went up nearby, almost overnight, after gold was discovered in the nearby country. Their father decided it was time to move downriver, away from the goldfields.
At Fort Buford, Thomas became a clerk for Charles Larpenteur’s Northwest Company. Here they traded with the Yanktonais and some of the Lakota bands. The Sioux bands were a haughty, standoffish people who wanted nothing to do with the Jackson boys. Yet there were a few Arikara who camped near the fort. In fact, William and Robert became best friends with an older boy who was, like them, a half-breed. While his father was Sioux, his mother was Arikara—the two of them had married years before when the two tribes were enjoying a rare period of peace between them. With the coming of the white man, hostilities resumed between the tribes, so the woman returned to her own people and taught her son the Ankara’s hatred of the Lakota.
This night at his tiny fire, with the cold stars like pinpricks in the black curtain overhead, William remembered his good friend, the Arikara named Bloody Knife. Remembered how for three summers he boasted of being Custer’s favorite scout. So this night William thought on how Bloody Knife had died with Custer at the hands of his father’s people—the Lakota—there in the valley of the Greasy Grass. Killed not that many months ago by these same warriors who followed Sitting Bull north in search of the buffalo herds.
Bloody Knife had been a good friend, warning them almost from that first day about the Lakota—how the Lakota made enemies all too easily and would never get along with the white man. From him and other Rees, the brothers learned the Arikara language that summer of 1871.
Two summers later at Fort Buford they learned that the railroad would be coming west.
“This will be the beginning of a real war,” Bloody Knife had warned them. “The Lakota, the Cheyenne—now they will do everything they can to keep the white man out of their last buffalo ground.”
No matter, both Robert and William were eager to become army scouts. When they told their parents they had enlisted, Thomas frowned and bellowed that he would not have it.
“Thomas,” their mother intervened in that gentle way of hers, “the wild blood that is in these boys—the blood of Hugh Monroe and his fighting Scotch ancestors, the blood of many generations of Pikuni warriors—that blood
