The two soldiers released their hold on the rope and instead locked their arms around Bellows, who struggled to maintain his grip. With an agonized cry of pain as the rope burned through the cold flesh of his hands he freed himself, and their raft, into the mercy of that merciless current.
“Row, goddammit! Row for shore!” Miles shouted above the crash of ice against wood.
As Private Bellows sank exhausted to the bottom of the wagon box, the rest of the men dived to take up their paddles, bending to their knees, rocking forward again and again as they forced their spades into the ice scum while the box swung slowly around and around, swept downstream in the midst of those growing chunks of ice. They were struck again by a huge lump of ice, then a patch of clear water appeared above them, upstream. That would be their one chance.
All the chance brave men would ever need.
Now the drenched soldiers sank their oars in deadly earnest, gradually turning the wagon box against the current that frothed over the sides of the gunwales as they brought it crosswise. Slowly, demanding the last bit of strength from their bodies, the last flicker of sheer grit from their will, the soldiers inched their wagon box toward the north shore as they were tossed downstream.
More than a mile later those men of E Company reached the willow and some cottonwood saplings against the bank. Two of the soldiers, then a third, lunged over the sides of the box, into the freezing water that lapped at their waists, each one helping shove the box into the shallows, where they no longer were subject to the will of the powerful tug that was the Missouri’s current.
A spontaneous roar erupted from their mates upstream as men jumped up and down in joy, slapping one another in celebration of what bravery they had just witnessed from the dozen men aboard that second wagon boat.
“General—it’s high time we get the hell out of here ourselves,” Baldwin suggested quietly at Miles’s shoulder.
“I couldn’t agree with you more!” the colonel replied resolutely. “All right, boys—let’s cut ourselves free of the south bank there. Just cut the damned rope … that’s good. Now, pull away for all you’re worth! Make for the north shore!”
As the rope attaching them to the south bank was freed, the ungainly raft rocked against the river’s surface all the more, listing at an even more precarious angle in the strengthening current. Baldwin’s dozen began to scramble into position as the huge craft bobbed. Ahead of them the soldiers in the first wagon boat dipped their spades into the river and began their crawl toward the north shore—slowly, steadily slaving over their exertions as the river ice bore down on them.
“Pull now!” Baldwin ordered as the men on the raft came up and took their places along the ice-coated rope securing them to the north bank. “Pull as if your life depended on it!”
There wasn’t a man there who didn’t realize their lives did depend on it.
“There’s no one else going to free us from this snag now,” Miles reminded them as he took up his own place along the line. “We must do for ourselves, boys!”
Hunching over their work, the soldiers fought for balance on the rocking raft while water splashed and danced up to their waists. Then came the first loud creaking.
At first Baldwin feared their flimsy craft was breaking up—the strain simply too much for that wood and rope. But in that next moment the raft lurched sidelong in the current, pitching some of the soldiers to their knees, sliding toward the icy current as others on the raft shouted, every man holding out his hand to another. Together those fifteen kept one another from being hurled headlong into the river.
Into the frozen, slushy Missouri—where a man might have as little as half a minute, no more than two minutes at the most, to fight alone against the river before he was too cold to struggle any longer. Each of them knew if they were swept into the current that it would be a sure, quick sentence of death.
The minutes crawled past as Baldwin’s men strained beyond human endurance at their icy rope, Miles and Pope in among them—no officers and enlisted here. They were all in it together. Either they would reach the shore as one, or they might well drown in the cold Missouri, one, by one, by lonely one.
“Goddammit—pull you sonuvabitch!” one soldier grunted, then quickly glanced up to find the colonel was the one to whom he had just given that profane order. “B-beg pardon, Gen’ral!”
“Apology accepted, s-soldier,” Miles grunted with the rest. “The rest of you bloody well heard this man! Now, pull—goddammit!”
Foot by foot felt like inch by inch as the surface seemed to rise about them and the edge of the raft came free of the sawyer. Now they were level once more on the surface of the Missouri, no longer captive of that huge Cottonwood snag embedded in the river bottom. Now it was just the fifteen against that raging, icy river. What strength those soldiers still had in their aching shoulders, their trembling arms, the burning muscles in their legs that cried out in protest and quaked as the men braced themselves against the overwhelming roll of the powerful river … and what indomitable will.
Yard by yard now they were beginning to make some headway.
“That’s it, boys!” Baldwin cheered, feeling the burn of tears at his eyes.
A final third of the river’s width to go.
Onshore the hundreds of soldiers and civilians were jumping, cheering, calling out their encouragement, waving, pounding one another on the back, darting here and yon in a growing, swelling crowd that began to surge downstream, slowly following the raft as it was relentlessly whirled downriver by the current. Already at least half a hundred were sprinting in among the frozen willow and cottonwood saplings, helping the soldiers in the second wagon boat leap ashore, securing the box to the bank with those icy ropes.
There were still fifteen on the river.
“Ho—for General Miles!”
The cheer went up as the raft inched closer.
“Hurraw for our shipwrecked general!”
Suddenly there were two dozen or more splashing into the current as Baldwin’s men inched toward the bank. Slowly they worked their way out toward the raft—water up to their knees, then waists, and finally icy chunks bobbing at their armpits as they lunged out to help.
Not for a moment did the men onshore stop cheering as the first in the water reached out and grabbed hold of the blue, frozen hand offered by one of the soldiers on the raft. They clasped, then cheered themselves. In a heartbeat others were there, pulling and pushing on the raft as Baldwin’s men wearily unlocked their cramped, cold, icy fingers from the rope and sank back with a sigh, and some with tears in their eyes, as around them men danced in the shallow water and slapped their backs, laughing at the jokes many made of this biblical flood and how flimsy was this Noah’s ark.
Baldwin dragged a hand beneath his nose as he jumped into the shallows and turned, sputtering his thanks to all those soldiers who together had brought that raft in to shore here late in the day after they had been imprisoned midriver since morning.
“Huzzah!” Frank croaked with emotion above the noisy clamor.
“Huzzah for our shipwrecked general!” came the cry from a nearby enlisted man.
Baldwin tore his sealskin cap from his head and whirled it aloft. “Hazzah for the Fighting Fifth!”
Chapter 5
When the Bear Coat’s soldiers reached Fort Peck, the foxy old Sitting Bull instructed some of the agency Indians to give the army scouts some bad information.
“Tell them the Hunkpapa are fleeing west,” he ordered.
They did just that, and the scouts believed them.
But when the Yanktonais hurriedly returned to the Hunkpapa village, they carried news that cut Sitting Bull to
