command as he might otherwise fear. All along the wide, hoof-pocked trail the scouts and forward units came across abandoned lodgepoles and camp utensils, refuse abandoned along with a few lame ponies and mules—even more possessions taken from the bodies of Custer’s dead.
Personal things, the sort almost every soldier carried: photographs from family and loved ones, ledgers and journals, gauntlets and hats, a watch or blood-smeared blue tunic.
“They’re heading east, General,” Luther Kelly reported that midmorning as he reined up, bringing his mount around in a tight circle, having just returned from a scouting foray with Billy Cross and Vic Smith.
“No sign of them angling off to the north?” Miles inquired anxiously. No matter what—he had to keep himself between Sitting Bull and that border.
Kelly shook his head. “They’re hurrying for Bad Route Creek, east of here.”
By midafternoon the rising wind gave such muscle to the smoldering prairie fires on both flanks of his march that Miles ordered a halt as the men choked and sputtered helplessly, a wall of flame advancing right for them. Into the fury of that blanket of smoke and ash the colonel sent out two companies to start backfires before the entire command was finally able to continue its wearying pursuit.
It wasn’t long before the warriors figured out the soldiers had countered their strategy. More than three hundred horsemen suddenly bristled from the hilltops, spilling over the crests in a shouting, screaming, boiling mass, aiming straight for the plodding foot soldiers.
Platoon by platoon was ordered to strengthen both flanks as sergeants bellowed out their orders for the men to drop to their knees, aim, and fire before the next squad was brought up into position while the first reloaded. Above the steady, deep booming of those big Springfields, Miles made out the discordant rattle of the smaller weapons and the old muskets the Sioux were using to harass their march. A long-distance battle, and a slow crawl they made of it, throughout the agonizing hours that Sunday afternoon.
Marching in a hollow square, with four companies of skirmishers thrown out in front spaced five paces apart, two companies on each side and two at the rear, and with one final company bringing up the rear of the supply train and another supporting the Rodman gun, they made eighteen miles before the sun sank out of the clear, cold sky and the warriors disappeared.
The land breathed a sigh of relief as the men made their bivouac and lit their fires. Stars winked into sight. The night grew colder than any gone before.
Come the morning of the twenty-third, Miles put them to the march in that same magnificent formation, up and down the broken country in a hollow square. But this day they saw no Sioux, reaching the Yellowstone late in the afternoon nearly opposite the mouth of Cabin Creek. His exhausted men had put another twenty-eight miles under the soles of their boots that day—more than forty-two miles from their initial engagement with the Sioux at Cedar Creek.
Nelson stood watching Kelly and four other scouts head back his way, urging their mounts back to the north bank of the river. Miles had ordered the five of them to cross the Yellowstone to determine the depth of the ford. In midriver Luther Kelly eased out of the saddle and settled his boots into the river that had christened him for life. While he stomped around in the coming dusk, checking out the sands of the shifting bottom, Vic Smith probed on over toward the south bank. In the distance smoke hung in the air from the enemy’s fires.
How Miles wanted to cross now as the Sioux were making camp there on the south side of the Yellowstone. If only to be sure Sitting Bull was really settling in for the night, praying the chief would not pull a rabbit on him and suddenly turn back north, recross the Yellowstone, and make a dash for Canada. That was Nelson’s deepest, most unspoken fear as Luther Kelly splashed up the bank, into the cottonwoods, and dismounted near him.
“They’re across, by God,” the scout said, dripping from his waist down, shuddering with cold as the wind came up at twilight.
“And still moving south?”
Kelly looked over at Smith, who nodded; then Kelly said, “By all accounts, General.”
“How deep is it?”
Kelly gazed down at his britches. “I’m wet to the waist. No deeper than that. Your men can make it in fine order.”
‘You don’t think those Sioux will try to shake us and recross tonight?”
With that easy shrug of his, the mild-mannered Kelly regarded the south bank a bit, sniffled, then looked back at Nelson to say, “They’re every bit as tired as your men are, General Miles. Maybe even more tired. I can’t see ’em doing anything but stopping for a few hours—stopping to feed their children, bandage their wounded, and shiver out this goddamned cold night until they can start running again.”
Miles felt himself bristle with resentment. “Sounds to me like you don’t agree with my giving, chase?”
There was the scout’s quick, disarming smile, and Kelly said, “Nothing of the kind, General. Not many men would have the bottom you and this outfit have to herd those Sioux the way we’ve done. Pushed ’em real hard.”
“Because of it, I just might succeed in forcing their surrender,” Miles replied, finding himself becoming a bit testy not only by the extended chase, which had so far netted him nothing more than track soup, but by the scout’s easygoing attitude as well.
“I don’t doubt you’ll get someone to surrender before this is done,” Kelly said. “If it ain’t the Sioux, it may damn well be your own men.”
For a moment he stared at the scout’s face; then Kelly cracked a smile, his eyes crow-footing at their corners.
Finally Miles smiled along with him “Damn you, Kelly,” he said. “A laugh or two’s good for the soul when a man’s done himself proud.”
“It’s been a good chase, General,” the scout answered, taking up his rein and beginning to lead his horse away with the other scouts. “We’ll catch Sitting Bull yet.”
Monday. Some time after midnight. Twenty-three October. Damned cold too, here beside the frozen fog rising off Chadron Creek.
Keep the talk at a minimum were the orders. And no smoking.
Just after dark, Mackenzie led his command away from Camp Robinson and into the cold, clear winter night —more stars overhead than Seamus could recall seeing since last winter on the Powder River.
Since arriving on the central plains last August, the Fourth Cavalry had been quartered in three temporary cantonments: Camp Canby, the original Sioux Expedition cavalry camp; Camp Custer; and Camp of the Second Battalion. Earlier in the month, while Mackenzie was gone to Laramie conferring with Crook on the coming seizures of Sioux arms, his regiment had been reinforced by some 309 new recruits shipped in from Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis, bringing the companies up to full strength. Besides drilling three times a day with and without their mounts, the men of the Fourth Cavalry had been kept busy cutting, hauling, and trimming logs for their crude log barracks, mess halls, and storage rooms.
Last night, with each man packing one day’s rations and all of them in light marching order, Mackenzie had moved his troops away under the cover of darkness because the colonel did not want to be spotted by any agency tattletale who might scurry off to Red Cloud’s or Red Leaf’s and Swift Bear’s camps, letting the cat slip out of the bag.
A few hours back Mackenzie had briefly stopped his command at a predetermined rendezvous, where they awaited some riders who were to join up: the North brothers, Lieutenant S. E. Cushing, and forty-eight hardened trackers of their Pawnee Battalion, hurried north from the Sidney Barracks where they had been carried west, horses and all, along the Union Pacific line.
“By the Mither of God! I ain’t seen you since that summer with Carr!” Seamus growled happily in a harsh whisper at the two civilian brothers there in the dark as they waited while some of the Norths’ Pawnee probed ahead into the darkness.
Following the rendezvous, Mackenzie’s march was resumed across that hard, frozen ground, at a trot or at a gallop as the rugged land allowed, until early in the morning when the scouts reached the point where the trail leading north from the agency split: one branch leading to Red Cloud’s band, the other to Red Leaf’s Brule camp only a handful of miles away. It was there that Mackenzie deployed his command: sending M Company of his Fourth Cavalry along with the two troops assigned him from Wesley Merritt’s Fifth Cavalry to follow Captain Luther North and some of the Pawnee in the direction of Red Leaf’s village, that entire force under the command of Major George A. Gordon.
