from Buffalo Springs. The trail over which the army marched was a very bad one. There is no information as to the exact location of the hostiles. Crook will remain here several days to rest and recuperate the animals, and then move to the mouth of the Little Powder. Weather mild, and not much snow has fallen.
After a miserably cold night suffered down in the snowy bottomland of Ash Creek, Lieutenant Frank Baldwin had the men of his battalion awakened for their breakfast of quarter rations. That meant they ate not much more than a corner of one of their hardtack biscuits and a bite or two of frozen salt pork the soldiers could let thaw inside the warmth of their mouths, savoring the taste of the animal fat and grease.
As the last of his lieutenants came up to form a tight knot around Baldwin, each man huffing a thick cloud of hoarfrost, Frank quickly looked at the half-breed who had walked his horse up to the pickets in the subfreezing darkness some two hours before dawn. Johnny Bruguier had just covered a lot of country in a very short time.
After taking Baldwin’s message to Miles, whom he found in the country north of the cantonment, the scout turned back around with a dispatch from the colonel. He found Baldwin’s battalion already gone on its chase across the Missouri when he reached Fort Peck. By that time scout Billy Cross was all but done in and elected to stay behind at the agency while the half-breed mounted up to follow the soldier trail east, slipping south across the frozen river, then cross-country to the Redwater, traveling fast, and damn near nonstop.
“Bruguier here comes with word from the general,” Baldwin announced to his officers now, once they were gathered close. “Miles confirmed our orders to track Sitting Bull and pitch into his camp. The general reports that he’ll bring the rest of our regiment up to support. So I’m sending Bruguier back to Tongue River, where the general was taking his battalion.”
“When do you suppose we’ll find the Sioux?” asked Lieutenant Hinkle with an edge of impatience.
“Smith and our other scouts tell me chances are good we’ll run onto the village sometime in the next two or three days,” Frank said in a way calculated to buoy the flagging spirits of those men who had spent long days of marching and long nights of cold, all in an attempt to catch up to the warriors who had nearly wiped them out ten days before.
Looking at their faces for a moment that gray dawn of the eighteenth while the battalion stomped around to work up circulation in their feet and legs, Baldwin added, “And that village should be somewhere this side of the Yellowstone if we’re lucky.”
“I want to have a crack at them myself, sir,” said Lieutenant Rousseau. “Sooner us than the companies with General Miles.”
The rest of the officers echoed that sentiment.
Ever since they had crossed the Missouri near the mouth of Bark Creek, those three companies of foot soldiers had been slogging through the snow and frozen mud in the wake of Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa village. For all that they had endured in silence, Baldwin prayed it would be theirs to capture the greatest of the Sioux chiefs and drive the rest of his people back to the reservation.
His men deserved it for all they had suffered, for all they had gone without, for the way they had stood off the Hunkpapa back on the seventh.
Just past seven A.M. he watched Bruguier climb back into the saddle and point his nose south by west, toward the Tongue River Cantonment, carrying word to Miles of Baldwin’s present location, his direction of travel, the battalion’s condition, and their disposition to fight any and all Sioux encountered. With the half-breed on his way, Frank ordered the men out, on Sitting Bull’s trail once more.
Through that morning they first marched east, then eventually south, keeping to the bottoms of the tiny tributaries feeding Ash Creek, doing all that they could to stay hidden from any enemy rear guard. Despite all their efforts after some five hours, close to one P.M. a solitary horseman appeared on the brow of a hill ahead of the column, watched the soldiers for a few moments, then disappeared.
Frank was certain they had been discovered.
“Keep up the pace now, men!” he cheered them. “This is the time to show the enemy what we’re made of!”
Within minutes a flight of ring-necked doves burst from the leafless branches of a nearby grove of cottonwood saplings, causing Baldwin to notice the sky beyond the hilltops. “Look there.”
“I see it, Lieutenant,” replied Lieutenant Whitten.
A few columns of smoke poked wispy fingers into the air.
His throat constricting, Frank held up his arm and gave the command to halt the column. “Perhaps it’s not too much to hope for,” he told the officers at the head of the march.
Hinkle asked, “What’s that, sir?”
“I’m praying that smoke means they haven’t broken camp and fled when they learned we were coming.”
“If that scout of theirs spied us,” Rousseau warned, “and the village isn’t running … that can only mean they’re lying in wait for us.”
“And have an ambush ready,” agreed Whitten.
Baldwin nodded. “What say I go have a look for myself?”
Taking only Whitten with him, Frank crept ahead on foot a quarter of a mile, a half mile, then reached the brow of a ridge close to a mile from the head of his battalion. At that point the two officers were less than two miles north of the divide that separated the drainages of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers.
Here above the frozen, sandy bottom of Ash Creek the two officers lay on their bellies—surprised to look down at Sitting Bull’s village.
A few horsemen moved in and out of the cluster of 122 lodges situated beneath a bluff on the east side of the creek, women going about their work and children staying close to the camp circle that midday. None of the canvas or hide lodges and tents were coming down in a panic to flee. Indeed, Baldwin was shocked to find that there did not seem to be any great anxiety or alarm in the village.
Perhaps they’re not afraid, Baldwin thought as he looked over his enemy. They figure they beat us once, so they can do it again.
“It’s no wonder the Sioux would feel like they could whip us on a rematch,” Frank whispered to Whitten at his side. “When we last heard of Sitting Bull’s strength after Cedar Creek, all he had was thirty lodges.”
“And look at them now,” Whitten said. “Enough warriors in there to make this a good scrap for us, sir.”
“I’ll wager every last one of those warriors is loaded for bear.”
Baldwin and Whitten hurried back to the column, where the lieutenant quickly issued his orders for the attack, then had young Joe Culbertson and Lambert lead the battalion around to the left, where he could approach the camp from the more favorable ground northwest of the village. He deployed his three companies much as he’d prepared for his attack against Gray Beard’s Southern Cheyenne at McClellan Creek: with one company attacking as skirmishers in front of his wagons advancing four abreast, his other two companies deployed along either side of the train, with a small rear guard to protect his supplies and ammunition from a flanking maneuver by the Sioux.
Culbertson and Lambert rode at the point of attack with Baldwin, all three of them growing even more astounded to confirm they had crept up on the village—so certain had they been that the lone horseman had galloped off to raise the alarm.
“Bring that caisson and limber up!” Frank ordered the moment the tops of the lodges came into view.
Beyond the trees the village began to bustle now.
They must surely know we’re coming, know we’re at their door, he thought as the artillery crew dragged the Fort Peck howitzer around the wagons, right up to the head of the columns, where some of the crew unhitched the pair of mules while others scurried to wheel the cannon about in a half circle.
“Gauge elevation the best you can, men,” Baldwin ordered as his gun squad went through its paces, loading the cannon’s throat with a satchel of black powder and a solid ball weighing twelve pounds.
“Ready, Lieutenant!”
Frank glanced at the nearby lodges. “Fire!”
Punk was laid against the touchhole, where it fizzed; then the howitzer suddenly belched spears of bright- orange flame from its muzzle, heaving itself backward off its makeshift carriage.
“Help me get that back up there, dammit!” the gunnery sergeant growled at his crew.
In less than a heartbeat a half-dozen men were scooping the howitzer tube out of the snow, shuffling forward to perch it atop its wobbly carriage once more.
Frank cried, “Fire two more, Sergeant!”
The old file cheered, “That oughtta soften the red bastards up, sir!”
