Just one. Still no general firing, no yelps and war whoops. Yet Baldwin knew those cries of battle could come at any minute when the warriors swooped down on the main body of the Fifth.
But as quickly as the first shot had surprised them all, the first half-dozen soldiers onto the prairie turned back against the flow of the hundreds, waving their arms, shrieking above the panic as they split the ranks to trot down among the general’s nervous staff onshore. In less than a minute Bailey was at the water’s edge, shouting out to the raft.
“What’s he say?” Miles demanded of the men around him.
Baldwin repeated, “Bailey’s saying it’s only a false alarm, General.”
“No Indians?” Pope inquired.
“Says it was elk,” Frank explained with a wag of his head. “One of the pickets started shooting at a herd of goddamned elk.”
“Who announced that it was Indians?” Miles growled.
“Some nervous Nelly,” Baldwin said, then chuckled. “General, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be in that man’s shoes when you get your hands on him!”
“Damn right,” Miles growled. “Here we are without weapons, at the mercy of this blessed river—”
The raft suddenly convulsed against the powerful current, shifting a little more to the side as it came around and stopped—even more firmly locked against the snag.
As the following minutes rolled by, the men found their raft beginning slowly to list even more to one side in the ice-laden current, forcing more of the slushy river over the sides of their raft, pushing a swirl of bitterly cold water up to froth around their knees. Clinging to the ropes for their lives, the soldiers began to shiver, their teeth chattering as Baldwin and Pope shouted back and forth to those on the north bank.
It wasn’t long before some of the men in Wyllys Lyman’s I Company had the canvas-covered wagon-box boat down the shore and into the water, a complement of soldiers kneeling inside at the gunwales, using army spades as paddles. Again, sheer muscle was pitted against the growing strength of the river’s frightening ice floes. As the rescuers bobbed close, one of Baldwin’s soldiers tossed the end of their longest section of rope to those in the wagon box. Lyman’s men promptly tied it off before the wagon boat was carried on across the Missouri’s current.
Struggling against the powerful current and the battering of the huge grating ice chunks, the soldiers from I Company finally paddled their way to the south shore, where Private Thomas Kelly leaped over the gunwale and waded through the chilling water that boiled up to his armpits, dodging hunks of ice to clamber eventually onto a section of solid ice. Once there, he crabbed onto the bank. On firm footing at last, Kelly shook himself like a dog before his trembling hands fought to tie off the other end of the long rope around a cottonwood of generous girth.
That task completed, the men of I Company pulled themselves to the south bank, where several of the soldiers remained behind in the hope that the rest of their regiment would soon be joining them before nightfall. Then those left of the wagon-boat crew turned around inside their craft and dipped their spades into the river once more, pushing back toward the raft as the hundreds on the north bank erupted into a spontaneous cheer.
When Lyman’s soldiers reached Baldwin’s raft, the lieutenant tossed them the end of another length of one- inch rope he had secured to his tilting craft still snagged near the middle of the river. As the wagon boat slipped away into the current, its crew paddling for the north bank a soldier slowly played out the rope connected to the raft. Thunking, scraping, groaning—more and more ice chunks smacked against the side of the wagon box, slid along the side with a noisy, frightening racket, then bobbed free, floating on downriver.
Of a sudden the solitary wagon-box soldier reached the end of that rope. “Goddammit—help me, for the love of God!”
Nearly all the rest of the paddlers dropped their shovels into the bed for those next desperate moments at midstream, every one of them clutching the rope as the current shoved against them, starting to urge them downstream in a bobbing arc.
“There’s no way we can do this, General!” Baldwin shouted above the cries of the men on both shores who watched helplessly, the soldiers trapped in both rivercraft wobbling with the icy current. “They just don’t have enough rope to make the north bank!”
“Tie it off there, men!” Miles commanded the wagon-box sailors, pointing to a large snag that poked its thick branches above the surface near the bobbing craft.
“Secure it to that sawyer!” Baldwin echoed.
As half the men in the wagon boat returned to their paddles, fighting to bring their craft back toward the snag against the power of the current, the rest held on to the waterlogged rope with the last of their strength, blue hands and soaked mittens gripping for all they were worth.
Meanwhile onshore several of the officers recognized the dilemma and ordered another wagon box taken from its running gear and quickly wrapped in oiled canvas. After more than an hour and a half of watching the crews of both the raft and the wagon boat barely holding their own against the mighty Missouri, the second wagon boat was shoved into the current by some men of ? Company, loaded with several long sections of rope, the end of which was attached to a cottonwood on the north bank.
Here at midafternoon, with Miles, Baldwin, Pope, and their dozen soldiers still stranded on the rocking raft and water continuing to swirl up to their knees, men on both banks began to cheer, for it appeared the rescue was about to take place … just as bigger and bigger ice floes began to bear down the river’s surface. Rubbing, jabbing, creaking against one another—blocks as big as boulders. The Missouri was beginning to fill with ice scum once more as the temperature continued to drop, and with it the late-autumn sun.
“Sweet God in heaven!” one of the men of I Company in the nearby wagon boat shrieked.
The rest of the soldiers on the raft and the second wagon boat looked upstream where he was pointing. Better than a mile away they could see it coming, tumbling slowly, roiling on the river’s surface: a chunk of ice as big as a cabin itself. It’s dirty luster bobbed in the current, easily filling a third of the Missouri’s span.
“Don’t panic, men!” Baldwin cheered them. “We don’t know for sure where it will go! Just hang on!”
“Cut the rope!” came the immediate cry from the second wagon boat as the soldiers squirmed in fear while that huge chunk of ice bore down on them.
“Cut the goddamned rope!” another rescuer shouted.
Then another bellowed like a stuck calf—crying that they had to save themselves.
“No—don’t do that!” Lieutenant Pope ordered. “You can’t abandon us!”
“Steady, men! Steady! Pull yourselves in here!” Baldwin demanded. “Now, heave against that line. Hurry! Hurry!”
Inside that rocking second wagon boat the frightened men scrambled for their spade paddles, dipping deep and sure into the river, trying their best to steady the craft as Private Richard Bellows of ? Company seized the rope securing them to the north bank and began to fight the waterlogged knot. Alone.
“No—cut the son of a bitch!” one of his companions cried.
Instead, Bellows hunched over his work with numbed fingers, struggling.
The others began to take up the chorus. “Cut it! Cut the line now!”
The ice chunk rumbled closer and closer.
With the danger no more than twenty-five yards away Bellows finally got the knot untied in the waterlogged rope, looped it around both his trembling hands, and hunkered down in the bottom of the wagon box, where he braced his legs against the creaking gunwale just as the huge chunk hit them.
As the box spun around, two other soldiers threw down their spades and leaped to Bellows’s aid, each of them grabbing hold of the rope to join the courageous private. They grunted as the ice groaned and banged against the side of the wagon box.
“We can’t hold it!”
“Let go of the bastard!”
Then Baldwin shouted above the noise of men onshore and the rumbling clatter of ice whacking and creaking against the raft and wagon boats, “Let go and save yourselves! For God’s sake—let go and make for shore before you’re swamped!”
Just then the three soldiers on the line were jerked to their feet as another side of the tumbling ice chunk keeled around and slammed into the wagon box.
“Let the damn thing go or we’ll be broken to splinters!”
