grounds for buffalo at this season of the year.”
“Oh?” Miles replied. “Have these buffalo migrated up from the south?”
“Out of the north, General,” Kelly explained. “They find shelter in the lee of the Bear’s Paw Mountains and the valley of the Milk River. For many a generation traders and half-breeds have been coming down from the Canadian side to hunt and make robes, or trade them for some Red River rum.”
Miles shivered as the wind gusted. “A little rum right now would sure as hell warm the inner man in me, gentlemen!”
Without finding much in the way of timber, the men at sunset hunkered around their smoldering buffalo-chip fires to boil coffee and warm frozen hands and feet.
Under a clear and starry sky the following morning, the Fifth moved out behind Miles, his staff, and the scouts, who all rode some two to three miles ahead of the column, watching from the high ground for any sign of warriors. Early that afternoon of the ninth they reached a branch of Big Dry Creek, where they made camp after putting another twenty miles behind them.
On Friday afternoon just past two P.M., as the command was going into camp among the cottonwoods along the Big Dry, Yellowstone Kelly and William “Billy” Cross arrived to report that they had discovered a fresh Indian trail ahead. It was clear the village was on its way north to the Missouri.
The following morning the men awoke to a keen north wind whistling down the valley, driving an icy snow at their backs as they moved out for the day. It wasn’t long before they crossed the lodgepole trail Kelly had discovered the day before. An hour later they came across some butchered buffalo carcasses. But by late morning the drifting, blowing snow had completely masked all sign of the enemy. On down the creek bottom the soldiers pressed despite the dropping temperatures. At times the wagons broke through the thickening ice as they rumbled along the dry bed of the Big Dry, no more than some twenty feet wide. Courageously managing to plod some fourteen miles in the teeth of that storm, the Fifth settled in for the night at the site of a camp used by the northbound Sioux only days before. The surgeon reported that the temperature stood at ten below, continuing to drop.
“Kelly’s scouts tell me we’re following Iron Dog’s village,” Miles explained to a hastily convened officers’ meeting that night after sundown.
“How many’s the lodge, General?” Baldwin asked, using Miles’s brevet, or honorary, rank.
“Could be a hundred and twenty,” the colonel replied. “Seems they’re planning to cross the Missouri, aiming to reach Fort Peck for supplies.”
“Maybe we can catch them before they do,” Baldwin said, feeling optimistic despite the weather and trail conditions.
“If we don’t get to them by the time they reach Fort Peck,” Miles assured his officers, “then, by damned, we’ll get them eventually.”
Knowing his commander wasn’t the sort to give up a chase, Baldwin rubbed his mittens together in anticipation. “Maybe when this bunch has joined back up with Sitting Bull.”
But unlike the Sioux traveling on horseback and on foot through the falling temperatures and deepening snow, Miles found it tough going for his wagons the following day. Struggling to squeeze their way through nearly impassable ravines, climbing up and down nearly perpendicular bluffs, the column put no more than a dozen miles behind them that Sunday of driving wind and four more inches of snow. In the shelter of a Cottonwood grove the surgeon’s thermometer read twelve below that night of the twelfth.
So cold was it with the howling wind the morning of the thirteenth that the colonel kept his men in camp to recoup both them and the stock. After sending a courier to Fort Buford to inform Colonel William B. Hazen of his movements and asking for any word on the Hunkpapa bands, Miles had his trusted Baldwin lead a battalion comprising E and H companies to comb the snowy countryside for any sign of the enemy. Frank returned empty- handed after covering more than thirteen miles of the valley. Just before sundown the temperature climbed all the way to sixteen degrees before it began to plummet once more.
On the following day the men struggled valiantly to make twenty-three miles, what with their wagons continually breaking through the ice caked along the bottom of the Big Dry, or bogging down in the slushy quicksand of the creek bottom. That night the soldiers made their bivouac in country beginning to change from barren coulees and ravines to gently rolling hillsides covered with waist-high autumn-cured grasses tracked with thickly timbered water courses—a clear indication they were drawing close to the Missouri River. All day they marched in sight of growing herds of buffalo, as well as hundreds upon hundreds of antelope that dashed and cavorted on both sides of the column.
At midmorning on the fifteenth, some of Kelly’s scouts came loping back to the head of the column with word that Indians had been spotted across the river ahead. After deploying his command into a protective square around his wagons and beef herd, Miles moved out once more, soon discovering that the enemy causing all the alarm was only agency Indians across the Missouri.
A real disappointment to Baldwin, who had yearned to have himself and his men a good fight of it after enduring the last ten days of arduous march and horrid temperatures.
In less than a month the lieutenant would have his wish come true.
Johnny Bruguier did not know who those soldiers camped across the river were, but soldiers were soldiers. And white men were white men.
For the better part of two days he did his best to lay low, and when he did have to move about the Fort Peck Agency, he did so wrapped in a blanket or with a buffalo robe pulled over his head.
Wouldn’t be smart for him to take any chances—after all, some of those white men making camp across the Missouri just might be some of the soldiers who had attacked Sitting Bull’s camp on Cedar Creek a matter of weeks ago in the Moon When Leaves Fall.
For most of the last month the half-breed had clung tight as a buffalo tick to Sitting Bull and his thirty lodges. Here was the greatest of Lakota chiefs, the man who had single-handedly put together the largest confederation of warrior bands ever assembled on the plains … now forced to watch the Bear Coat chip away at his alliance. For the most part the Bull was alone now. And Johnny Bruguier knew what alone meant.
He had been running since the end of last summer, ever since killing a white man near the Standing Rock Agency. A sure-as-hell dance at the end of a rope for a half-breed like Johnny. So he had stolen a horse in Whitewood City and scampered off to the west—heading for Injun country, where the law and posses would not dare come looking for him. On down that outlaw trail he discovered the chaps tied up behind the saddle on that stolen horse, the chaps he had been wearing when he had bravely ridden right into the Hunkpapa village and dashed into what he had hoped would be the headman’s lodge.
It turned out to belong to White Bull, the nephew of Sitting Bull himself.
“If you are going to kill him, then kill him,” Sitting Bull had said to the angry Hunkpapa warriors that first day last autumn. “But if you are not, then feed this man and make him welcome.”
The Lakota had made a home for Johnny, and because of those chaps he wore, they had come to call him Big Leggings. And on more than half a dozen occasions his ability to speak both Lakota and the white man’s tongue proved invaluable. But now, like all the rest of Sitting Bull’s once-great confederation, he was on the run again.
Not long after fleeing the Bear Coat’s soldiers on the Yellowstone, Sitting Bull’s thirty lodges had moseyed north to camp some twenty-five miles south of Fort Peck in the valley of the Big Dry Creek. With him were Four Horns and Black Moon, all three bands hoping to trade with the Yanktonais and Red River Slota, who traditionally hung close to the agency.
In addition, another 125 Hunkpapa lodges—under chiefs Long Dog, Crow, Little Knife, and Iron Dog—had eventually marched north after the Cedar Creek fight and camped together a few miles below the agency in the Missouri River bottoms. Poor in clothing and shelter against the coming winter, the chiefs reluctantly gathered in council with agent Thomas J. Mitchell to discuss peace terms.
As Johnny listened, Mitchell’s interpreter told the Lakota, “The agent cannot offer you anything but complete surrender. You must turn over your weapons and all government booty taken from the soldier dead at the Greasy Grass.”
Angrily the Sioux leaders argued among themselves for much of that day, but in the end they guaranteed Mitchell they would surrender their people, arms, and ponies. In turn the agent distributed some rations as night began to fall, then instructed the chiefs to have their people return in the morning for the actual surrender. The
