of the Cheyenne River, having put fifteen hard miles behind them, that the trackers returned to report that the trio of riders they had trailed all day had turned out to be white men.
“Miners, I’d wager,” Seamus declared.
“More’n likely horse thieves,” Dick Closter argued. The white-bearded packer spat a stream of brown tobacco juice out of the side of his mouth as he knelt to stir some beans in a blackened pot that steamed fragrantly, then smeared some of the brown dribble ever deeper into his snowy whiskers.
That night the entire command—cavalry, infantry, wagon and mule train, along with the Indian auxiliaries—all camped together for the first time, spread out along the Cheyenne where they could find enough room to graze the animals and throw down their bedrolls against the dropping temperatures as the stars winked into sight, the sheer and utter blackness of that clear winter sky sucking every last gesture of warmth from the heated breast of the earth.
Each night Seamus did as most of the others, bunking in with another man to share their blankets and body heat, after spreading their saddle blankets over “mattresses” fashioned from what dried grass and sagebrush they could gather to insulate them from the frozen ground.
At first light the column moved out again on the sixteenth, with Mackenzie’s cavalry once more beating the fuming Dodge onto the trail the horses churned into a sodden mush for the foot-sloggers. Less than an hour after starting, all hands were halted and turned out to get the wagons and ambulances hauled up an especially bad stretch of the Reno Road, where the narrow iron tires skidded out of control on the icy prairie, unable to gain any purchase. Grunting and cursing side by side with the teams, muscling the laden wagons up a foot at a time by rope, the men finally reached the top of the long rise where they could at last gaze at the distant horizon, north by east at the hulking mounds of the Pumpkin Buttes. For the rest of the day most of the column was in plain sight of the rest of the outfit, even though it was strung out for at least five miles or more.
“Make no mistake about it,” the old mule-whacker told Donegan that night at camp after another eighteen exhausting miles, “we’re in Injun country now, sonny. How’s your belly?”
“Just a touch of the bad water, Dick,” Seamus replied. He lay by the fire, an arm slung over his eyes, feeling the rumble of that dysentery bubble through his system. “I’ll be fine by morning.”
Donegan wasn’t alone. Almost half the command suffered diarrhea to one degree or another already, forced to drink from the mineral-laced streams. The horses fared no better, many of them suffering the same symptoms, which made for a messy stretch of trail for the infantry forced to plod along behind them.
Seamus slept fitfully that night as the sky closed down upon them, dreaming of holding Sam again, of clutching his son to his breast, smelling the babe’s breath after it had suckled Sam’s warm milk.
Dear God in heaven—make this a swift strike. Keep your hand at my shoulder as you have always done, I pray. For their sake … for their sake and not for mine.
That night of the sixteenth as William Earl Smith worked at the mess fire with two other orderlies, a courier rode in from Fetterman carrying parcels bursting with mail for the men. All those smoky, glowing fires fed with greasewood helped to hold back the gloom as men read one another their news from the States, greetings from loved ones back East, or clippings from newspapers many weeks old. Spirits ran high, despite the plummeting temperatures as the wind quartered out of the north, rank with the smell of snow in the air.
One man was far from buoyant at that campsite halfway to Reno Cantonment. Colonel Richard Irving Dodge figured he had taken just about all he could of the brash and arrogant Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, and stomped over to the cavalry camp to have matters settled once and for all.
After presenting himself at Mackenzie’s tent, the colonels had themselves a good heart-to-heart—finding more in common than Dodge had supposed. The cavalry commander offered the infantry commander the use of two of his orderlies for the remainder of the march, besides suggesting they alternate days taking up the lead. In that way they would eliminate entirely the competition to be the first to arrive at the good camping grounds. Mackenzie’s largess must have relaxed Dodge, for they soon began to confide in one another their common complaints about their superior.
“General Crook passes for a Sybarite,” the high-fashioned and fastidious Dodge whined, “who is utterly contemptuous of anything like luxury or even comfort—yet he has the most luxurious surroundings considering the necessity for short allowance that I have ever seen taken to the field by a general officer.”
“I suppose I’ll have to agree with you,” Mackenzie admitted, an officer who took pride in his uniform and the dashing figure he cut. “The way he dresses himself—you couldn’t tell him from the lowliest man along.”
“There is no doubt of Crook’s courage, energy, will,” Dodge continued, “but I am loath to say I begin to believe he is a humbug—who hopes to make his reputation by assuming qualities foreign to him. One thing is most certain. He is the very worst-mannered man I have ever seen in his position, though his ill manners seem to be the result rather of ignorance than of deliberate will. I believe him to be warm-hearted, but his estimate of a man will, I think, be discovered to be founded not on what a man can or will do for the service, but what he can or will do for Crook.”
“He does have his own way about things, doesn’t he?” Mackenzie observed wryly. “Far different is he from the man I served in the Shenandoah.”
“Quite. Yes,” Dodge snorted sourly. “I arrived here an hour before my men this afternoon to hunt up a good campsite and reported to the general for instructions. He sent me on my way to hunt for myself—all the choice spots already appropriated for his Indians and his mules.”
“I’ve got the feeling those Indians and mules are Crook’s favorite hobbies,” Mackenzie observed. “Hobbies he plays with while we are about the business of making war on the hostiles.”
“It disgusts me that those damned redskins wash the entrails from the beef carcasses in the creeks where our men are forced to drink somewhere downstream. He scarcely treats you and me with the dignity we deserve,” Dodge grumped, “while he’ll talk for hours with a stinking redskin or one of his dirty scouts.”
By the time the two colonels shook hands and the infantry commander parted for his bivouac, it was clear to William Earl Smith, that unlettered former railroad brakeman from Peoria, that Dodge loathed the general while Mackenzie merely tolerated Crook until the time arrived for him to break off on his own with the cavalry. That very evening two men had forged a bond that would last out the waning of the Powder River Expedition.
Wind and icy snow returned to batter the command with the gray light of false dawn the morning of the seventeenth. Horses and mules stood facing south, their rumps and tails tucked into the freezing gale. Crook sent the wagons to the front of the march while the cavalry hung back in camp until nearly nine A.M. Fires were all but futile as the horse soldiers shivered and stomped about, finally allowed to break camp and set out on the road into the teeth of the growing fury.
Rather than flakes, the storm flung icy pellets at them, coating every man and beast with a layer of white, stinging the eyes and every patch of bare skin. Horses and mules plodded into the shifting winds, their muzzles straining forward with their task, barely able to breathe. Stout-hearted infantrymen struggled forward a foot at a time, hunched over, heads lowered as they covered mile after mile of that high, rolling mesa country. Somewhere past midday the command climbed to the top of the divide, where they finally looked down upon the Powder River Valley. Far to the northwest lay the Big Horn Mountains, all but their base hidden by the storm that failed to let up, icy flakes lancing down from a sky that continued to close in about the column with every passing hour, obscuring all but a frosty ring around the sun and creating that peculiar western phenomenon the frontiersmen referred to as a sun dog.
It was not until the late afternoon that the snow let up and the wind finally died, about the time Crook passed the order to make camp where the men could find room for their bedrolls and graze for the stock along the Dry Fork of the Powder. Some of Tom Moore’s packers had reached the campsite an hour before the first of the column, reporting that they had flushed out a small party of Indians who had scurried off east toward Pumpkin Buttes. The weary, cold men had struggled through another twenty miles of high prairie.
Just after dark two ice-coated frontiersmen showed up at the cavalry bivouac with a trio of Shoshone warriors, asking for General Crook’s camp. Mackenzie came out of his tent and introduced himself in a wreath of frost tinged orange by the nearby fire.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, General Mackenzie,” the taller of the pair replied as he dismounted and walked up to shake hands. “Name’s Tom Cosgrove. This here’s Texas Bob Eckles—but he goes by Yancy. We come to report in to Crook.”
“You’ve brought in the Snakes, I take it.”
“A hundred five of ’em, waiting up the road at Reno Cantonment for you,” Cosgrove declared. “Every last one
