In the meantime Miles himself planned to continue upstream with the remaining two companies, A and E, along with the Napoleon gun, making for Fort Hawley, where he would cross the Missouri ice to the south bank, explore the upper drainage of the Big Dry until his rendezvous with Snyder’s battalion. Together the two battalions would then march south to the Tongue River Cantonment for resupply.
Sloshing through thick mud, which at times turned into a quagmire of quicksand, forced to hack their way through a thick maze of brush and deep snowdrifts in those rough breaks north of the Missouri, Miles’s battalion finally limped into bivouac late that Friday night after a torturous nineteen miles. At dawn the next morning the command continued on upstream, cutting a path through the underbrush for their wagons and digging out a serviceable road until they reached a point opposite Fort Hawley, abandoned for some seven years. After they had corduroyed the riverbank, the wagons and men crossed the groaning ice to the south bank.
For a few moments Miles dismounted to stand among the ruins of the post—now nothing more than a few charred timbers sticking from the new snow like blackened broken bones jutting from a wound, an iron stove broken and turning to rust, and the fort cemetery. Nelson removed his hat and silently mouthed the words of a short prayer as he stared at all those faded, graying, faceless wooden headboards leaning a’kilter between earth and sky.
With the crossing of the frozen Missouri at the Hawley ford complete, the column was immediately faced with a new predicament. On the south side of the river the banks rose like an abrupt wall before them.
At first Miles tried hitching a double team of twelve mules to one of the nearly empty wagons to get his supplies up the bluffs. Yet the animals could not struggle up the sharp-pitched trail. Left with little choice, the soldiers emptied the wagon beds once more, then removed the boxes from their running gear—so box, running gear, and small loads of supplies could be dragged up on ropes by the men working in concert with the mule teams. Even as cold as it was, what with the way the wind blustered at the top of the bluffs, the soldiers sweated their way through the lion’s share of that day and into the coming of night.
By ten P.M. the battalion finally settled into their bivouac on the top of the prairie, high above the Missouri River among the pine and cedar that provided a little windbreak to their cookfires, where juicy slabs of venison roasted, in a spot the foot-sloggers affectionately named Camp Elevation.
As twilight deepened into night, the pickets were the first to spot some fires glowing on the north side of the river.
“In the morning,” Miles told William Jackson, “I want you to find out if that is friend or foe.”
“I think your captain—the one my brother Robert took to Carroll City.”
Miles nodded glumly. “Yes, I suppose you’re right, Jackson. What with the reports of Sitting Bull being far to the east of us, it’s not very likely that he’s camped over yonder, is it? Not when he’s eluded me a second time in as many months.”
Nelson was morose enough that night that he found it hard to sleep—thinking and rethinking how Sitting Bull had outsmarted him not just once, but twice now—brooding how chasing the Hunkpapa was like chasing after wisps of winter smoke. Close enough to smell his prey, near enough to see, perhaps, but nothing to grab hold of—not a damned thing in your hand once you opened it.
At dawn the next morning the men found the view glorious from that lofty plateau above the rugged Missouri Breaks. Everywhere ran the deepest of ravines and coulees, perpendicular bluffs and cotton-topped ridges, every landform striated with varicolored sandstone and draped in winter white. Here and there long borders of pine and cedar in emerald-green threaded across the landscape. Far to the northwest rose the snowcapped Little Rocky Mountains, while to the south and west in the cold, clear winter air stood the magnificent splendor of the Judith and Moccasin Mountains, beyond them the ever loftier Snowy range.
On south by east Miles led his column, trudging through the ankle-deep snow and icy drifts along the twisting ridgetop above the aptly named Crooked Creek before the column was forced into the valley to cross and recross the creekbed many times during the day. Curious deer bounded up along both sides of the march as the men continued downstream. Late in the afternoon of the fourth Captain Bennett’s ? Company finally rejoined Miles, having crossed the Missouri upriver that morning. Camp was made that night where the men could find shelter from the wind.
Late the following morning of the fifth, Miles reached the mouth of Crooked Creek in the lush, timbered, grassy valley of the Musselshell River. While hunting details were sent out, Miles dispatched the Jackson brothers to press upstream to determine the best route while the colonel saw the column across the thick ice on the Musselshell.
Early in the afternoon the half-breed scouts delivered their disappointing news to a frustrated Miles. Because of the ruggedness of the country and the snow depth they had encountered farther up the Musselshell, the soldier column would have to turn back to the Missouri. Once on the south bank, they would then continue along the river until reaching the mouth of Squaw Creek.
It was there that the going became even tougher. Not only were the teams and wagons breaking through the thin ice crusting every little shaded slough, but now some of the men were forced to use spades and picks to carve a crude road out of the side of a bluff for their wagons, while the rest of the soldiers unloaded those wagons and hauled on their backs what supplies they had left them up the steep sides of the bluff like a team of industrious ants at a country-fair picnic. Other men somehow persuaded the balky mules to pull the wagons up the precarious slopes by sheer muscle and rope power alone. It took the last of them until after sundown to reach the top of the prairie once more—putting no more than seven short miles behind them for the day.
On the sixth the men dropped down into more solid terrain in the Squaw Creek drainage, realizing that their forage for the wagon stock was running desperately low. Miles overheard a lot of the grumbling as both officers and enlisted men worried with the darkening skies, knowing that they weren’t prepared to sit out any more bad weather, realizing that another snowstorm just might do them in.
Shortly past midday on the seventh, Miles brought his command into sight of the Black Buttes rising just beyond the grassy, wooded valley of Big Dry Creek. Here the Jackson brothers returned with more depressing news for the colonel. They had discovered evidence that Snyder’s battalion had been there—and gone. From the swath cut through the thick, tall buffalo grass, it was clear that Snyder’s four companies had already turned southeast from the Buttes and were making for the cantonment.
That night as the wind howled and smelled of snow, Nelson Miles trudged through the camp where there was little cheer and not nearly enough firewood. While the men did what they could to clear away more than a foot of snow, the temperature continued to plummet. It was clear his soldiers were weary of the march, exhausted after the superhuman effort to cut roads and haul wagons up the sheer face of the ridges, hungry and tired and depressed in spirit.
As the first few icy flakes danced through the air, Miles decided he could ask no more of his men.
Come morning, he would lead them back to the Tongue River.
Chapter 7
2-7 December 1876
Yellowstone Kelly didn’t end up finding Miles on Crooked Creek in those two days that Captain Snyder had allotted him. That night of the thirtieth he slept cold and alone before starting back for the battalion in the gray light of dawn that first day of December.
On the second Kelly led the battalion out at first light, pushing south by east for the valley of the Big Dry, where Snyder abandoned a wagon because of a broken axle and worn-out mules. Herding the balky animals on with his little column, the captain pressed the men to put as much country behind them as they could, what with the dwindling rations and forage staring them in the face.
Over those next three days the mules and men visibly slowed their pace not only due to the deepening snow and rugged nature of the country, but to their worsening health as well. The march dragged slower and slower until Snyder grew extremely alarmed that he would not be able to force-march the men and animals all the way back to the cantonment.
