rising wail of the wind. “March! Fast or slow … I don’t care. Just stay on your feet and keep moving!”
It had been that way since dark. How many hours ago now?
Just before they had set off into the raging blizzard, as the last of the men were stuffing themselves with their rations, Baldwin had gone from company to company, ordering each commander to choose the eight or ten who were strongest of body and will to walk at the rear of each outfit with the officers, all of them with their bayonets fixed.
Their situation grew all the more desperate as the night wore on. Sometime well past midnight and after miles of grueling march—Frank could not get his turnip watch freed, for his pockets had frozen shut—he ordered those hearty soldiers assigned the pack string to lash all the unused rope to the sawbucks and string the lines out to the rear. Then the call was made up and down the column of wobbly, weaving, near-dead men.
“Every one of you who believes you can’t possibly go on under your own steam—grab hold of the rope,” Baldwin instructed each group within the sound of his voice as he yelled against the keening wind. “And hold on for your life.”
He knew the next few miles and hours might well be their lives.
There were times when he had to coax what he thought would be the last bit of strength out of his horse, prodding it to the front of the column repeatedly, where he would give his order to those soldiers with the mules who were following a half-dead Vic Smith.
“By damn, boys! It’s a sad, sad sight back there. This walking isn’t near enough. For fifteen minutes we’ve got to trot these beasts!”
“T-trot ’em, Lieutenant?”
“Trot ’em, soldier,” Baldwin snapped. “At a walk is no longer good enough. The men are fading on me—I must get their blood moving! Keep these dumb brutes moving at a trot. Now!”
With stiff salutes the first half-dozen soldiers turned back to their duty, whipping the balky, braying animals until first one, then another, and finally the rest of the snow-crusted beasts lumbered into a rolling trot, yanking on the ropes that pulled the hapless, frozen, blizzard-beaten soldiers along through the snowdrifts being broken by those hooves.
On and on Frank went, in and out of the saddle himself, up and down the line, many times pulling his flagging horse behind him just so he could stir up his own circulation by walking, so he could show them that he wasn’t above busting through the icy, crusty snow himself. Baldwin wasn’t sure just when it happened, so numb was his mind, so splintered was his judgment—but he stood among a half-dozen men, lending a hand to their struggle to hoist one half-dead man atop Baldwin’s horse when—
“Listen, sir!”
Frank turned dumbly, blinking, his face so cold, his eyelids barely moved in the swirl of snow.
“I don’t hear anything, goddammit!” one of the others grunted, holding up his share of the soldier’s weight as they shoved the unconscious man across the lieutenant’s saddle like a wet sack of oats.
A nearby voice cried, “That’s all of it!”
“Exactly!”
“The wind …,” Baldwin whimpered with exhaustion, so tired he didn’t even have the strength to cry with relief. “It’s stopped.”
Another man yelped with glee. “The gol-danged storm’s gone and blowed over us!”
All around them men began to lumber to a halt, slowly able to stand straighter now that they did not have to hunch over against the gale-force winds, able to open their eyes fully and peer out beneath the frost-crusted eyelashes. Slowly each one came to understand, causing some to pound one another clumsily on the backs, croaking their cheers and congratulations with cracking voices.
Then near the front of the march the men started demanding quiet, silence … like a flow, the call rippled back along the column as every one went dumb, listening.
There, every now and then beneath the rustle and shove of the dying wind, they heard a gunshot. Distant. So far away the gunshots were almost muffled.
“That’s gotta be the fort!” one cried out.
The rest celebrated all over again. To be within hearing distance of Fort Peck.
Baldwin didn’t have the heart to tell them it might well be nothing more than the ice thickening in the river, no more than the cottonwoods popping in the brutal, soul-numbing cold.
Somewhere deep inside him he knew he had to let them go on believing they were nearing the post. Keep them moving … and believing that it was just beyond the next hill, perhaps. So he reminded them. Then, when they were beyond that rise and the fort still did not loom into sight, Frank told them he was certain the post lay just around the next big bend in the Missouri.
“Yes, yes,” one of the soldiers cried. “I remember it ’sactly that way. Same’s the lieutenant said!”
And so they somehow continued to stumble on through the darkness, and into the coming gray of day.
The sun never appeared at sunrise that Friday, the eighth of December. Nothing more than a dull lightening patch at the horizon behind the fury of the storm rumbling east. On through the snowdrifts they persevered, mules pulling the weakest among them, soldiers prodding their fellow soldiers, Baldwin clutching the horse’s reins for dear life so that he himself would not fall there beside the trail. Praying that the stumbling horse would not go down.
Not until they reached Fort Peck.
Images danced and swam in front of him with the stark-white landscape: the spiderwebs of leafless brush and tall cottonwoods, the stark outline of ridge and bluff top against the graying sky here two, maybe three, hours past sunrise. Dim mirages leaped out of the darkness at the periphery of his vision so sudden, they scared him, bringing him instantly awake. So otherworldly was it all that Frank wondered at times if he was still alive.
Each time he worried, Baldwin worked up the strength to call out to the soldiers around him, to hear his own voice, mostly, before he slipped completely away. “C’mon, men! Just a few more yards! Yes—I think I see it now!”
Frank found himself longing to see the post materialize out of all that white more than anything since he had wanted sweet, pretty Alice Blackwood to marry him during the insurrection of the Southern states. Trying so hard to remember her face with his cold, numb mind while he licked at his frozen lips that cracked and oozed—how did her mouth taste on his … then heard the soldiers up front with the mules shout.
He looked up, expecting to find Alice before him, hoping she could wrap her arms around him and make him warm again.
But it was only a group of buildings swimming dark and shadowlike out of the frozen mist that coated every branch and rock. Buildings. Logs stacked on top of one another. At first he could smell the smoke, then saw each curl rising from the stone chimneys.
“W-we made it, boys!” His voice cracked with cold and emotion as he turned, nearly stumbling in the deep snow as his horse continued on without him.
Baldwin jerked in a grotesque, wild motion to free his frozen, cramped hand from the reins so he could lurch back along the column, hollering at the top of his lungs.
“We made it, boys!” he bellowed. “I see it! There’s fires and food and shelter. Keep going! Keep going!”
Later that morning after the men had shed their empty haversacks and dumped weapons in the corners of every cabin within Fort Peck’s stockade, the battalion gave Baldwin three cheers, and then three more for those men who had kept the mules pulling the ropes, and finally three cheers for the old files so good with their bayonets. And when the cheering died down and the men had wiped their eyes dry once more, those three companies of the Fifth Infantry roared their huzzahs to Frank Baldwin for pulling them all through that blizzard.
Not an animal down. Not one man lost.
Chapter 11
8-14 December 1876
