“Raided? What’d they come for?”
“The beef, General. That herd you had brought down the Yellowstone from Fort Ellis came in. The civilian wranglers had it near the post.”
“All of the beeves?”
“Maybe half.”
“Damn,” the colonel muttered. “Where’d those warriors come from—”
“Riders coming in, General!”
Interrupted, Miles stood immediately, accompanied by Kelly and the Crow trackers as he moved away from the fire. “More riders?”
A soldier turned and shouted, pointing. “From the northeast, sir!”
Turning quickly to Kelly as the two horsemen appeared on the crest of the nearby hill, Miles said, “I’ll bet that’s some word from Mitchell. He’s agent up at Fort Peck. I told him to let me know as soon as he had any news on where Sitting Bull was going … where I could find that red son of a bitch.”
Kelly squinted into the glare, asking, “General, isn’t that the half-breed?”
Miles shaded his eyes with a hand as he peered into the middistance, watching the two horsemen approach. “Half-breed?”
“Bruguier.”
The dark rider called, “General Bear Coat!”
The colonel sang out, “Johnny Bruguier? Is that really you?”
The half-breed and his companion came to a halt nearby but did not immediately swing out of the saddle. “Johnny Bruguier. Here to tell you I done what you wanted from me, Bear Coat.”
“How’s that?”
Bruguier pointed back to the north. “At the fort I told your soldier chief where he would find Sitting Bull before he send me here to find you.”
“My soldier chief?” Miles asked. “You mean agent Mitchell?”
Kelly interrupted, “I figure it must’ve been Baldwin, General.”
“You told Baldwin where Sitting Bull was camped?” Miles asked with gusto. “Hot damn!” He slapped his hands together again, then went back to rubbing them over the fire. “He go pitch into ’em, right?”
With a shrug Bruguier replied. “Maybeso. He send me here with these.”
Miles watched the half-breed reach inside his coat and bring out a small, flat leather parcel he handed the colonel. Untying the rawhide strings, Miles pulled out the two sheets of paper and began reading.
“By Jupiter—Baldwin’s probably got that old warhorse already rounded up by now!” Miles exclaimed, shaking the papers once he was done reading.
“Baldwin went after them, General?” asked Hobart Bailey.
“Damn right. He says here that after Bruguier told him where the Sitting Bull camp was to the east on Porcupine Creek, he was planning to march straight for it and engage the hostiles. Tells me to expect word as soon as he has destroyed the village and has something conclusive on the disposition of Sitting Bull himself.”
Kelly turned to Bruguier, asking, “You fellas want some coffee?”
They both nodded, starting out of the saddle while Miles motioned forward his dog-robber with a pair of cups. “Have you boys eaten lately?”
“Last night,” Johnny admitted.
“Here, eat what’s left here,” Miles offered. “We’re breaking camp, but I’ll see that my mess sergeant issues you two some rations for the next four days.”
“Four days?” Johnny asked.
“Yes,” Miles replied. “I’m turning you right around with a message I want you to take back to Baldwin. Besides, Bruguier—I can’t wait to hear what’s become of his attack on Sitting Bull!”
That morning of the eleventh, before he put his battalion back on the trail to Tongue River, Nelson Miles composed his dispatch to Lieutenant Frank Baldwin, known to be somewhere east of the Fort Peck Agency.
If you meet with ill-success I can take the responsibility of the movement; if you are successful it will be very creditable to you.
Then, knowing how the Sioux villages always fled once attacked, he urged that Baldwin notify him as soon as the lieutenant might know the direction the Sitting Bull people were taking in their escape.
If I get the information in time [I] will endeavor to intercept them.
“Get these back to Baldwin as soon as you can, Bruguier,” he instructed the half-breed. “You’ve been on the army payroll since the middle of November—so I expect you to keep on earning your pay.”
“I take this for the Bear Coat to the little soldier chief.”
“You find him and tell him to stay on Sitting Bull’s tail until I can rendezvous with his battalion to help.”
With a nod Bruguier and the other scout rose to their saddles and reined away.
“All right, gentlemen!” Miles bellowed, kicking snow into the fire pit of hissing limbs. “Let’s get this column back to Tongue River, where we can reoutfit ourselves to surround Sitting Bull!”
The following day they awoke to another heavy snowstorm. Breaking camp without taking time for fires and coffee, the men pushed on through the cold, dancing veil of white. The clouds continued to lower throughout the morning, but they nonetheless managed to locate Snyder’s in-bound trail early that afternoon of the twelfth. Miles’s foot soldiers fell grimly silent as they began to pass by one dead animal after another, all abandoned where the creatures had dropped out of hunger and utter exhaustion. As the storm thickened, the Jackson brothers and the staff officers often resorted to using their compasses to stay their course homeward.
Twilight came and still Miles pushed on. When darkness fell the trail became more difficult to follow, every man having nothing more to see than the soldier in front of him. Miles kept marching, with William and Robert Jackson to lead them south through the swirling darkness. From time to time the scouts would fire their pistols in the air to signal those coming behind at the head of the command. And so the firing would continue back along the column, other men clinking their noisy tin cups to alert those following on their rear in the dark.
Through most of that day and into night’s woolly cloaking of the land, the first men marching at the front of each company would plow through the snow until they became absolutely weary. Then they would fall to the rear of their company, and the next pair of men would break the icy snow and waist-deep drifts for the rest to follow. On and on in that way the men moved up to take their turn, falling back when they had little strength left them.
By eight P.M. the colonel himself grew too weary to sit the saddle or spell his horse by walking beside it. They had reached the divide above the headwaters of Sunday Creek. Here Miles gave the order to bivouac where they were. Those men not so utterly done in scrambled through the greasewood and stunted pine of that high country to scrounge up what firewood they could. While the snow tapered off sometime after midnight, the wind continued through the night, torturing man and beast and playing havoc with their sputtering sagebrush fires.
That Tuesday they managed to put another twenty-four torturous miles behind them by forging on through the howling storm without once stopping nor slowing their grueling pace. But the lack of proper forage was plainly telling on the livestock. Later that night, after the snow stopped falling, Miles heard one of the drivers boasting with his gallows humor that his team of mules had grown so thin, he could almost read a newspaper through them.
Not long after the men pulled themselves out of the snowbanks the next morning and rolled up their blankets for the day’s march, moving off below the clouds hovering over that divide, Miles was plodding through the deep snow when he heard the Jackson brothers fire pistol shots beyond the nearby hills. His heart hammering with dread, the colonel immediately kicked his horse into motion, getting no more than a rolling lope out of the weary, ill-fed animal. More pistol shots, followed by a ragged volley; then the firing tapered off. Dread became fear: certain that his forward scouts had been caught in an ambush.
Quickly looking behind him, Nelson found some of his staff on their own poor horses, straining to keep up with him as he reached the top of the hill, pistol drawn, prepared to signal the column of the attack.
Instead—farther down the slope of that branch to Sunday Creek, he spotted his half-breed trackers circling their horses: both of the Jackson brothers whooping, waving their hats in the air. And on the far side of the valley, another group of horsemen did the same, brandishing their pistols in the freezing air, gun smoke drifting above them all in tattered remnants. Men on horses. In the next moment, there at the ridgetop, appeared the first team and its wagon. And another. Then a third, all of them escorted by a line of foot soldiers slogging along on either
