chiefs had barely gotten to their feet when a runner from downriver at Wolf Point burst into the crowd, jabbering so excitedly that Johnny had trouble making sense of his electrifying news at first.
“Soldiers! They come up the river on the house that walks on water! Many soldiers come this way!”
Sure enough, the following morning of 1 November, Colonel William B. Hazen and 140 of his Sixth Infantry from Fort Buford docked their paddle-wheel steamer at Fort Peck to unload supplies and forage for Miles’s column expected up any day from Tongue River. Hazen left Second Lieutenant Russell H. Day and a company of thirty-one soldiers behind with Agent Mitchell, then turned the paddle wheeler about and started downriver to return to his post at the mouth of the Yellowstone.
No matter.
The damage to Mitchell’s efforts at diplomacy was already done. Moments after the news burst through the nearby camps, there wasn’t a Hunkpapa lodge left within miles of Fort Peck.
But Johnny Bruguier had stayed behind.
Having been raised by his mother on the Standing Rock, Bruguier thirsted to see this Fort Peck, to hear the familiar sounds, smell the familiar fragrances, maybe cure a little of his own homesickness. For more than a week now he had stayed among the agency Indians, neglecting to return to Sitting Bull’s camp, eating and talking, singing and flirting with the young doe-eyed women.
For many years the place had been a fur-trading post before becoming the agency for the Yanktonais, Gros Ventre, Assiniboine, and any assorted Lakota bands who wandered about in search of buffalo north of the Yellowstone in Missouri River country. Rough-hewn log cabins stood fortresslike on the riverbank, themselves shadowed by the bluffs towering more than a hundred feet over the stockade walls. Mitchell provided annuities for more than seven thousand Indians, not to mention the recent additions who were scattering to the four winds, fleeing the soldiers in this year of the Great Sioux War.
Curious, Johnny watched the arriving soldiers work from dawn to dusk that Wednesday and Thursday snaking their supplies to their bivouac on the south bank using a rope and baskets suspended from a system of pulleys because the river ice was not yet thick enough to support the weight of loaded wagons. Then on Friday the white men continued their labors as a small band of riders came down to the bank to cautiously cross the Missouri’s frozen surface.
The closer the soldiers came to the stockade, the more certain Bruguier grew that he had seen some of those bearded fur-wrapped white men during those Cedar Creek parleys.* Especially the long-haired white scout, those two dark-skinned half-breeds who rode with him, and that tall soldier chief now known among the Lakota as the “Bear Coat.” Johnny snorted, readily recalling just how angry the soldier chief had become during the inconclusive, roundabout talks with Sitting Bull and the other Lakota headmen.
At least the Bear Coat was true to his word, Johnny brooded. The soldier chief had promised the Sioux they would get no rest. He had promised he would make war on them again soon if they did not go in to their reservations, even if it meant fighting through the coming winter.
Bruguier adjusted the blanket over his head and watched the soldiers approach from the shadows he made over his face. As the group ascended the icy riverbank and approached the stockade’s open gates, the long-haired scout gazed in Johnny’s direction. Then looked away. And then glanced again. But the white man did not stop as the horsemen passed on by. Instead, it looked as if the long-haired one murmured something to the two half-breeds who rode on either side of him.
Johnny waited for the riders to enter the gate before he turned to follow, keeping to the shadows as the wind kicked up the old snow around his wool leggings. He stopped, hugging the stockade wall as the soldiers dismounted. Then his belly flopped. Bruguier grew frightened as the long-haired scout handed his reins over to one of the soldiers and stepped up to Bear Coat, saying something as he nodded toward Johnny.
The soldier chief turned slowly, raising a hand to shade his eyes, and peered at the gate they had just entered. He said something to the scout, and together the two of them started in Bruguier’s direction.
With his heart rising in his throat, Johnny’s eyes flicked this way, then that—not certain where he could go or how he would escape.
Now the rest of the soldiers in the group were following the Bear Coat, their hands on their belt weapons. If Johnny tried to run, it was certain one of them would shoot.
Perhaps that fate was better than hanging at the end of a rope for killing a worthless white man.
As Bruguier was slipping his hand inside the blanket, wrapping his fingers around the butt of the big army pistol he had stuffed into his belt, the soldier chief said something to the scout.
Gesturing, the long-haired civilian shouted in English, “Bruguier! Is that you, half-breed?”
Beneath the folds of his blanket, Johnny pulled the long barrel free of the belt and began to click back the hammer.
“By Jupiter—it is him, isn’t it, Kelly!” exclaimed the Bear Coat.
And he was smiling. The soldier chief was smiling!
“Bruguier!” the Bear Coat bellowed, yanking off a mitten and holding out his hand as he came up. “You’re just the man I could hope to see!”
*
Chapter 3
All the good that Bear Coat Miles had done at Cedar Creek was gone—evaporated like a puff of smoke in this Winter Moon.
First Hazen’s soldiers had scattered the Sioux bands right at the very moment they had decided to abandon Sitting Bull and surrender. And now Miles himself had shown up in that Fort Peck country—convincing the chiefs that the government spoke with two tongues: agent Mitchell with one voice, promising blankets and bacon … while the soldiers crept up to speak with the throats of their weapons.
So just about the time Sitting Bull was feeling the most isolated and disconsolate with his thirty paltry lodges of loyal followers, suddenly there were more than four times that number camped with him in the valley of the Big Dry as the Fifth Infantry reached Fort Peck. Once again Gall of the Hunkpapa, Lame Red Skirt, Small Bear, and Bull Eagle of the Miniconjou were convinced that instead of surrendering, their only hope lay in running, their only salvation lay in fighting.
“We will never give up,” Sitting Bull told them solemnly when the chiefs informed him of the soldiers’ arrival at the agency. “Even if it means that we keep running all the way north to the Land of the Grandmother. No matter that it may mean I will have to live on the scrawny flesh of prairie dogs—I will never surrender!”
The shouts, war cries, and death songs grew deafening in the valley of the Big Dry that night as the sun went down and the wind came up.
Those who had been fortunate enough to tear their lodges down before the Bear Coat’s soldiers invaded their camp at Cedar Creek had been taking in all of the very old and the very young they could shelter, while the rest simply made do under bowers of blankets and robes—anything at all that would turn the hoarfrost and even the light snow of another night of winter-coming.
These were a wounded people. They had been robbed of all the greatness that had been theirs for so long. But we will survive, Sitting Bull vowed in private. As long as we do not allow the
“The people, they are hungry,” Gall tried to explain, a man who had lost wives, whose children had been killed by soldiers. “So many little ones with their empty bellies.”
The Bull looked at the muscular war chief who had lost so much to the pony soldiers at the Greasy Grass, and felt a sharp pang of sadness for his old friend. “From the very same moment of my vision of those soldiers falling into camp—I warned our people not to take anything from the dead. I told all who could hear my voice that we
