barracks, on toward their tiny room, where they would celebrate their own family Christmas, where they would see in their own festive New Year.
“It will be a Christmas to remember,” he whispered at the side of the wool shawl she had wrapped over her head. “I have me a good deal of money to pick up from post commander Evans for my recent services to the army.”
“Back pay?”
“You might say that, Sam,” he answered, so relieved that no soldier, officer, or chaplain had come to call on her, bearing the terrible news along with that princely ransom paid for carrying Crook’s message all the way up to Nelson A. Miles, alone through the heart of Crazy Horse country.
She laid her head into the crook of his shoulder and closed her eyes, holding the boy tightly in the cradle of her left arm. “Oh, Seamus,” she whispered in a puff of frost, “I’ve feared more in the last three months than I think I’ve ever feared in my whole life.”
He looked down at her, love filling his heart all over again. “Feared what, Samantha? Feared that I would not return?”
She blinked, clearing her eyes as she smiled with those beautiful teeth of hers. “No, you silly goose—I feared most that if you did not come back to us, your son would go through life without a name of his own!”
“You wouldn’t have named him on your own … if I hadn’t come back to you both?”
“Yes,” she admitted, finally. “I suppose I would have—eventually. When I could at last pull all the pieces of my shattered soul back together … I would have named this boy after his father.”
“His … h-his father?”
Samantha stopped him, gazing up into her husband’s face. “Yes, named our son after the bravest, most gentle and selfless father a child could ever have.”
Afterword
Ah, the very stuff of history oft makes for some interesting speculation!
Crook and Miles did not enjoy a mutual respect during their years serving the Army of the West. Simmering animosities begun during this year of war on the northern plains would later boil to the surface during the final Apache campaigns in the southwest when Crook (who had experienced much success during the earlier Apache wars) was eventually “nudged” aside and Miles assigned to replace him.
At the time of this Great Sioux War there was clearly no affection shared between these two great military figures. If they communicated at all, they would have done so through normal military channels, which would have taken an excruciatingly long time. Today we realize just how little one column knew of the disposition of another column back then: their whereabouts, their contact with the roaming warrior bands, the status of their logistical lines of supply.
Back in 1876-77 great distances across the trackless and “wireless” wilderness dictated that Crook operate from the south not knowing what Miles was doing along the Yellowstone. And it meant that Miles continued to operate as he always had: wary of superiors Crook and Terry; seeking to better his own position with Sheridan and Sherman by accomplishing against the Sioux and Cheyenne what Crook had consistently failed to do; and in the end putting all his energies into earning his general’s star.
From my reading of the two men, from giving so much thought to who they were down under their uniforms, and ultimately from trying to walk around in their boots as much as I can on the ground where these professional soldiers plied their deadly trade … if any overture had been attempted between the two armies, I’d put money on its having been Crook trying to get word to Miles.
Completely out of touch on the Belle Fourche in the Black Hills country, knowing that the Crazy Horse camps lay not all that far to the northwest, realizing that just beyond that dangerous country lay the Yellowstone and the mouth of the Tongue, where Miles might well be doing all he could to keep Sitting Bull from joining back up with Crazy Horse—it’s simply not that great a leap of imagination to conceive of George Crook attempting to courier some dispatches to Colonel Miles.
After all, you have to consider what the alternative would have been: sending a rider south to Reno Cantonment, beyond to Fetterman; from there the message could be wired to Laramie, then along the Platte until the electronic impulses in that simple wire reached a point back east, where George Crook’s questions could start north toward Chicago; from there they would travel across Phil Sheridan’s desk, on to Minneapolis, where Alfred Terry would have his look at them prior to forwarding Crook’s dispatches through a few more miles of telegraph to Fort Abraham Lincoln, and from there they would all rely on a network of overland, horse-mounted couriers because there was simply no paddle-wheel traffic on the upper rivers at that season!
Racing across the upper tier of territories just below the Canadian border, the army couriers might—and I emphasize
If any such attempt was made, I believe the smart money would have been on a rider making it from the Belle Fourche region across the Powder River country to the mouth of the Tongue. Look at your regional map in the front of the book. Trace a finger across the route I’ve just described. Then look at a map of the U.S. and trace another route from Minneapolis to Bismarck, on across Dakota Territory to Tongue River Cantonment. If Crook had wanted to find out what campaign Miles was pursuing in those weeks prior to Christmas when he was being forced to disband his own campaign due to supply problems, wouldn’t Crook have gotten himself a volunteer?
Was Miles the sort who would have sent a courier off to communicate with Crook? I don’t think so—not as jealous and thin-skinned as he was.
From the military record we know for a fact that Crook and Mackenzie sent out Lakota scouts (who had been invaluable during the Dull Knife campaign) from the Belle Fourche to the Little Powder, from there down to the Powder to look for any sign of the Crazy Horse village that continued to elude Crook in this most frustrating year of fight-and-chase-and-wait-for-resupply. From that point it wouldn’t take a horseman much more than a week to complete the trip across that frozen winter wilderness. Just how much of a frozen wilderness it is in the winter … well, you’ll have to come up here and see for yourself. That is, if you truly want to experience what these plainsmen, soldiers, and roaming villages endured that winter of record.
If I had to speculate, I’ll say it happened just as I wrote it: Crook to Miles, Belle Fourche to the Yellowstone, a single rider traveling as fast as he dared across an icy landscape, suffering terribly from the cold and hunger and fear, but enduring not only because he had a job to do, but because he had others who were counting on him to provide for them.
Of course, as far as we know, Crook did not send a scout (civilian or otherwise) to Miles that winter, so we’ve taken a wee bit of license to get Seamus shipped off to this next battlefront of the Great Sioux War.
If you’ve found some fault with my line of reasoning, be sure to drop me a line. After all, one of my most important tasks in writing each of these twenty novels is to have everything plausible, probable, if not entirely possible. Much, much different from what I too often see on television, more different still from what Hollywood spends millions on to show us in the movie theaters.
Remember: you have my promise that I’ll continue to do my best to make every one of Seamus Donegan’s adventures so real that you will say, “If it didn’t really happen that way, then—by God—Terry sure makes it seem like
And while we’re on the subject of speculation, can you imagine the lively debates, and what might have easily turned into fistfights, between the Democrats and Republicans counted among the officers of the Fifth Infantry as they argued over the controversy of just who would eventually be elected president back east? Those weeks dragging into months during that winter were very much akin to those weeks and months just before the Civil War broke out. In 1876 Reconstruction Republicans were aligned against the growing strength of the Democratic party in the defeated South. If, as President Grant was prepared to do to protect the Union, he had
