The remaining five troops of the Fourth followed Mackenzie as Major Frank North and the rest of the Pawnee scouts led them on through the darkness toward Red Cloud’s camp.
“That hot July of sixty-nine. Has it been that long?” Frank North replied now, also in a whisper. Mackenzie demanded that none of his surprise be spoiled.
“Summit Springs, it were,” Donegan replied, tugging at his collar, pulling his big-brimmed hat down as he tried to turtle his head into his shoulders. The wind was coming up.
“We had us a grand chase that year, didn’t we?” North asked.
“I rode with Carr this summer.”
“Don’t say,” North said, then stared off into the darkness. “He was a good soldier.”
“By damn if he wasn’t that bloody hot day when we caught ol’ Tall Bull napping,” Seamus replied.*
“Bet you four to one we’ve got Red Cloud and the rest napping this time too.”
“We’ll know soon enough,” the Irishman responded as they watched some of the Pawnee emerge out of the dark.
They sat for close to an hour, waiting for some of the Indian trackers to return. The men were allowed to dismount and huddle out of the wind, but smoking and talk were forbidden. No telling if the Sioux would have camp guards out patrolling.
It seemed like an eternity until the order came to move out once more, marching a few more miles until Mackenzie halted his five troops and the Pawnee Battalion, saying they would wait right there until there was light enough to see the front sights on their carbines. Then they would send the scouts to seize the pony herd while they charged into the village.
So for now those three hundred men waited in the dark and the cold, knowing they had that unsuspecting Sioux camp in their noose.
While the government continued to press the “friendlies” to sell away the Black Hills as a condition for receiving their annuities of food, blankets, and ammunition, Sheridan nonetheless demanded that those same agency Indians were dismounted and disarmed. No two ways about it. If the winter roamers who were still out making trouble would ever be resupplied with ammunition and weapons to press on with their war, those supplies would have to come from the “friendlies” who had stayed behind at the reservations. To make sure Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and the rest were cut off from all such aid, Sheridan ordered Crook into action against the agency bands.
The little Irish general was positive that the hostiles could never have defeated Custer without aid from the agency Sioux. He expressed his steadfast belief in this position to William Tecumseh Sherman:
Our duty will be to occupy the game country and make it dangerous and when they are obliged from constant harassing and hunger to come in and surrender we can then dismount, disarm and punish them at the Agencies as was done with the Southern Indians in the last campaign.
Phil Sheridan had a staunch ally in Ranald Slidell Mackenzie. He too believed that the hostilities would all be over by the spring of 1877, provided that the hostiles were corralled and the “friendlies” forced to surrender their arms and ponies, the animals then sold on the open market and the funds thus acquired used to purchase cattle for the agency bands. Never disguised as an attempt to civilize the Sioux into becoming gentleman farmers, Sheridan’s plan was unashamedly to deny all mobility to the horse-mounted Lakota warriors.
Years before on the Staked Plain of West Texas, Seamus had come to admire Mackenzie’s patient even- handedness in pursuing his relentless war on the Comanche.* Yet, in many subtle ways, it was a different, a changed Mackenzie who last August marched eight companies of his Fourth Cavalry north to join in this grand Sioux campaign. Many times over dinner, or in officers’ meetings, in those off-the-cuff comments expressed to his cadre of scouts, the colonel made it exceedingly clear in so many subtle ways that he was no longer the same man: no more would he believe anything an Indian told him, nor could he believe that an Indian would honor his own word to a white man.
According to Mackenzie all this rumination and discourse over selling the Black Hills back to the government was nothing more than a waste of time—it was plain to see that the Indians had stalled the protracted negotiations at the agencies while their free-roaming brethren pursued their own hostile intentions in secret.
Like Sheridan, Mackenzie now believed the time for talk had come and gone with absolutely no lasting result.
For the colonel, one thing had grown more clear across the last five years in campaign after campaign against the hostiles—whether they were Kwahadi, Southern Cheyenne, or Red Cloud’s Sioux, what the Indian understood better than talk was
Upon his return to Camp Robinson, where more than 982 cavalry, infantry, and artillery soldiers had been marshaled to dismount the Sioux, he had wired Crook his recommendation that his command should indeed proceed with the capture of the two villages:
I do not think any of the principal bands will move in unless there is some strong power brought to bear to cause them to be obedient.
It was a sentiment shared by Sherman, Sheridan, and Crook.
Because the army had been receiving reports that three major camps would be wintering in the Powder River country—one band under Crazy Horse, another of Sans Arc, and a third of Northern Cheyenne—for weeks now Mackenzie made himself a nettlesome burr under Crook’s saddle, irritating the commanding general with dispatches from Camp Robinson, the likes of which:
A great many Indians have I think gone north quite recently and I wish that you would either come here or order me to get them together.
In the end Crook gave in and called Mackenzie to Laramie to plan this swift, decisive action against the agency Sioux.
Because he was certain the “friendlies” were harboring renegades responsible for raids off the reservation and would never cooperate with the Indian Bureau’s civilian authorities, Mackenzie had long espoused that the agency should be sealed off and that all communication with the resident bands be prohibited except through the military. It was a recommendation wholeheartedly agreed to by Sherman on down.
The Fourth Cavalry was now free to clamp down with whatever means were necessary.
Then, while Mackenzie was conferring with Crook at Fort Laramie for his march over to this northwestern corner of Nebraska bent on unhorsing and disarming the bands—a time consumed in requesting Winchester magazine arms for his men, a request the quartermaster corps never approved—the jumpy agent suddenly telegraphed his growing anxiety when those two troublesome bands under Red Cloud and Red Leaf just up and moved some twenty-five miles away from the agency, camping in the vicinity of Chadron Creek.
When Major George A. Gordon of the Fifth Cavalry, the commander at Camp Robinson, ordered the bands back, the stubborn chiefs turned a deaf ear to the soldier chief. From the rebellious camps there was even some grumbling talk of war, which made Crook fear the bands were preparing to flee north in whole or in part. Unknowingly, the Indians had just handed Sheridan, Crook, and Mackenzie the ideal raison d’etre for the coming action. Now the Fourth could move.
Only problem was that, to Donegan’s way of thinking, the government and the army were in cahoots once more to make the tribes out to be the villains—just as they had schemed to do almost a year before when they had ordered the wandering bands back to their reservations or suffer military action. Once more the white officials were dealing with the tribes using two faces: on the one hand, Washington had dispatched its blue-ribbon commission to treat with the reservation Sioux to sell the Black Hills; while the other hand was dispatching army units to impoverish those very same reservation bands.
This morning’s action against Red Cloud’s and Red Leaf’s runaways had been specifically designed by Sheridan, Crook, and Mackenzie to cripple, if not geld, that peace commission.
As well as designed to strengthen the military’s hand before Crook’s army marched north into the teeth of winter to capture Crazy Horse once and for all.
