us again this winter.”
Fully a quarter of Baldwin’s men lumbered into Fort Peck suffering from frostbite: ears, noses, or cheeks blackened with dead, rotted flesh. Little wonder, Frank thought, what with the mercury in his thermometer having frozen at the bottom: forty-two degrees below zero. And that was without the wind.
What was more, every soldier in that battalion suffered from want of sleep. In the past two days the hardy foot soldiers had marched more than seventy-three miles through snowdrifts and a howling blizzard, grabbing five minutes of sleep here, ten minutes of rest there. In fact, many of the battalion were so fatigued that they had suffered hallucinations on that brutal march that had meant the difference between survival or death. In his report to General Alfred Terry at department headquarters, Frank wrote:
Some thought they were riding in steam cars … others thought they saw parks, lakes and cities when there was nothing but the vast snow-covered prairie before them.
In that dispatch Baldwin even confided, “I never experienced such suffering. … I myself got to sleep and fell off my horse.” One of the men had to use his bayonet to prod the lieutenant out of a snowbank—an act for which Baldwin said he would recommend the soldier for a medal.
But it had been an excruciating ordeal that he had not mentioned that night when he quickly penned a letter to Alice. Instead, he had chosen to boast to his wife: “Just think your old man whipping Sitting Bull & driving him across the river when he has set at defiance 2 Brig Genls all summer.”
From some of Mitchell’s friendly Yanktonais camping the winter near the agency, Baldwin learned that afternoon of 8 December that Sitting Bull had stopped long enough to send a threat to the soldier chief that his Hunkpapa warriors would attack the walk-a-heaps once they started south for the Tongue River, then would turn about and destroy Fort Peck itself. Quickly composing a report that would be carried by one of his mounted soldiers ordered to locate Miles somewhere between their backtrail and the cantonment, Baldwin suggested that the colonel’s battalion march east immediately for Bark Creek, and together they might just capture the elusive Sioux between them. If for some reason the colonel was unable to act in concert with him, Frank requested that supplies be forwarded down the Yellowstone to meet him.
Then he told his commander that in another three days—with his men rested and reoutfitted with rations—he planned to start again for Fort Buford as originally ordered. Frank disclosed that he planned on hiring a number of Indian scouts from the Fort Peck Agency, men who would provide a great service because they knew the surrounding area intimately.
But first there was the matter of empty soldier bellies and bone-numbing fatigue to be reckoned with. Frank’s battalion immediately consumed one whole buffalo brought in by the Yanktonais; then the men promptly fell asleep. They awoke later in the afternoon to eat even more. Never had a warm meal and a place out of the winter wind meant so much to the men of the Fifth Infantry. Baldwin himself finished his first reports, ate every bite he could get his hands on, then collapsed into a deep slumber.
Not stirring until the following day, 9 December, Frank called his company commanders together to begin planning their next moves to trail, surround, and capture Sitting Bull’s village. Their first item of business was to learn where the Hunkpapa had gone. From the direction taken by the fleeing Sioux, their best guess had the enemy moving south by east toward the timbered bottoms along the Redwater. To determine with more certainty, the lieutenant sent out Left Hand, an agency Assiniboine mustered onto the rolls the previous day.
“Mr. Baldwin, I’m sure that I speak for more than just myself when I say that some of the men are concerned that we might again run into the same situation with the Sioux attacking us in force,” said I Company’s Second Lieutenant, James H. Whitten.
“If we only had some artillery,” grumbled David Rousseau.
Slowly, the grin came across Baldwin’s face. “Why, gentlemen—we might just come up with something that will work.”
“You can get your hands on a c-cannon?” asked Whitten.
Frank nodded. “I bet I can show you something we can put to good use.”
“Jumping Jesus, sir! Show us!” exclaimed Frank Hinkle. “If we had a cannon—then those redskins never would get the upper hand on us!”
Frank immediately led the other officers to the north side of one of the agency buildings, where under a partial pile of firewood and a battered sheet of canvas rested an old mountain howitzer.
“But, Mr. Baldwin!” Whitten griped. “One of the wheels is broken beyond repair.”
Rousseau joined in, “And the goddamned thing’s got no limber, Lieutenant!”
“Hell, if I listened to you two, I might well never got our battalion back to the agency night before last!” Baldwin snapped. “Mark my words, and heed them, gentlemen: nothing was ever done by a man who said it couldn’t be done!”
After he sent Lieutenant Hinkle to chase down the agency carpenter, Baldwin and the others tore off the canvas shroud and dug the howitzer out of the snow. The first step was to assign a work detail to detach one of their wagon boxes from its running gear. The next stage saw the soldiers unhooking the front truck of the wagon’s running gear so that it could be pulled along by a team of mules much like a cannon’s caisson or “limber”—that detachable front part of a gun carriage that usually serves to transport a large chest of ammunition for the twelve- pounder going into the field.
At the same time, a detail of soldiers laid in a store of dried buffalo meat while others repaired their own thirteen creaky wagons and readied another nine from the agency so that the six-mule teams could transport the foot soldiers this trip out.
At midday on Sunday, the tenth, agent Mitchell returned from Wolf Point with fifty Assiniboine he had enlisted, having learned that, once again on the south side of the Missouri, Sitting Bull had again taken his village east to the Redwater country.
The enemy was clearly moving farther and farther away. And very well might be headed for the Yellowstone country. If the victory was to belong to his battalion, Frank knew he had to act.
In his anxiousness to be on Sitting Bull’s trail, the lieutenant decided he would have to overlook his battalion’s need for replacement clothing, as well as the additional rest he’d planned for the men after what he’d put them through in the last few days. To replace the bootees and shoes that were falling apart—stitching coming loose and soles peeling off—many of Baldwin’s men fashioned some crude but serviceable footwear from the green hides of those buffalo recently killed near the fort to feed them.
That afternoon Frank wrote another letter to Miles, this time explaining what he was about to embark upon, stating that though he apologized for not pursuing his attack upon the overwhelming numbers of Hunkpapa at Bark Creek, he nonetheless had every intention of herding Sitting Bull’s village south toward the Yellowstone, where Miles himself might have a crack at them.
Having solved his problem of fatigued men by loading them onto his wagons, Baldwin put Fort Peck behind him on the eleventh. In addition to Mitchell’s fifty Assiniboine, and those two new scouts hired to help Vic Smith—a young Joseph Culbertson and half-breed Edward Lambert—Frank had even convinced Second Lieutenant William H. Wheeler of the Eleventh Infantry, stationed at the agency, to join in their chase. Pushing east through the snowdrifts crusted along the ice-rutted Fort Buford Road, no more than a half mile beyond the site of the Sioux crossing and their fight of the seventh, the battalion went into camp for the night.
Overnight a Chinook wind blew in and, with the “snow-eater,” temperatures moderated enough to turn the frozen, snowy road into a muddy quagmire. Late the afternoon of the twelfth Baldwin’s wagons rumbled into Wolf Point, where the battalion acquired some sacks of oats for the stock, as well as some flour and hams for their own rations. While they were taking on supplies, the Assiniboine went off to visit their families camped nearby, but a local Assiniboine war chief named White Dog promised Baldwin that his fifty warriors would indeed continue in the search for Sitting Bull. However, by the time the battalion was crawling into their blankets that night, the Assiniboine had not yet shown up.
Nonetheless, later that night White Dog returned to give the lieutenant a report that the Hunkpapa had left the Redwater and were pushing south across the high divide toward the Yellowstone—just what Baldwin had already figured Sitting Bull would do. But the Assiniboine war chief went on to explain that news from the Lakota camps indicated the Hunkpapa intended on rallying and uniting other Indians to their cause on their way south … south toward the Powder River country, to reunite with Crazy Horse.
On the morning of the fourteenth, with no more than three sacks of grain for 150 animals and a paltry three
