“Damn right!” Baldwin replied, turning to the commander of his front line. “Mr. Hinkle! Prepare to pitch in when the third salvo is fired!”
“Very good, Lieutenant!” answered H Company’s lieutenant.
Then the second shot belched from that cannon, which again pitched itself backward off its wooden carriage with a great, spewing, tumbling velocity. Suddenly small arms cracked to their left and right upstream. Not that far away. Enemy guns.
Frank whirled to look in that direction, finding a trio of warriors on horseback cresting the top of a hill to his left. He snapped off a shot with his pistol as the three bolted out of sight, just as the yelling and screeching exploded from the camp upstream.
The last of those three howitzer shells whined in over the snowy brush, crashing in among the village, sending up a spray of ice, water, and creek-bottom sand.
Women and children were screaming as the cannon’s roar faded from the nearby bluff.
“Come on, men!” Hinkle yelled to his company.
At long last Baldwin felt at the marrow of him that it truly was to be their day. Time for him to pitch into the enemy. Seize the day, once and for all. Just as he had at Gray Beard’s camp on McClellan Creek.
“C’mon, men!” Frank hollered at the rest as Hinkle’s men started away. “Remember the seventh of December!” He waved his pistol overhead. “Now we can pay our respects to Sitting Bull himself for that terrible day!”
As the first warriors appeared in their front, Hinkle’s skirmishers slowed their advance until Rousseau’s G Company came up. Then they noticed how the horsemen began to fall back under the pressure.
In the village beyond, pandemonium reigned. Screaming women and crying children scattered like dung beetles from beneath an overturned buffalo chip on the prairie, all of them beginning to scurry upstream through the waist-deep snowdrifts toward the far end of the elongated camp.
Less than fifty yards out from the first of the Hunkpapa tents, Baldwin ordered his wagons to halt. Leaving a small force of Whitten’s I Company behind for the protection of their dwindling supplies and that precious ammunition, Frank quickly moved the bulk of G and I companies forward in support of Hinkle’s H. Back, back, slowly back the warriors fell.
All too easily, Frank feared.
Trying his best to fight down his suspicion of an ambush that might well immobilize his advance, cut him off from his wagon train and ammunition at a crucial moment, Baldwin worried that he could see far too few warriors attempting to hold back his troops. Where were the others?
His skin prickled with apprehension as Hinkle’s men continued into the village.
Looking about, he decided there were simply too many lodges and tents and wickiups covered with blankets and green hides for these few warriors. Perhaps no more than a hundred making a valiant but feeble stand against his soldiers when there had been at least five times that number just days ago. As the seconds crawled by, Frank grew more convinced it simply had to be a ruse to pull his battalion into the village, where the Sioux would snap the jaws shut on their trap.
Swallowing down his doubt, he hollered out encouragement to his men again and again—shouting down his private fears each time his threatened instincts began to whisper in his ear.
There among the wagons he saw the first of them from the corner of his eye: a pair of soldiers lifting themselves from their places in the wagon beds assigned to bear the sick, the frostbitten, the severely fatigued— any of those men so done in they could no longer move about on their own. But there those two were, lumbering over the rear gate of one of those wagons, calling out to their comrades to join them.
Then a handful of others in three more wagons shoved aside their blankets, fighting to get to their knees, clutching their rifles to spill over the back gate onto the snowy, trampled ground. They cheered one another, waving the rest of those forty ailing soldiers out of the wagons.
“C’mon, boys!” cried one of them. “You won’t have another chance like this’un!”
“I’m a’comin’,” shouted a soldier who wobbled shakily on leaden legs, righting himself against a wagon bed. “To hell with my frozen feet—I’m gonna shoot Sitting Bull in the ass for myself.”
One by one the others rose from the wagon beds now to rejoin their units, bringing a sour ball of pride to the back of Baldwin’s throat as he watched those sick, injured, hurting men tumble out to join the attack. Frank turned away, knowing at that moment they had won the day. No matter what the Sioux might throw at them—if these men refused to give up, if these men fought so selflessly, then Sitting Bull had better be on the run.
He turned back to the village to find Culbertson and Lambert loping toward the column driving at least a dozen ponies and mules before them.
“The rest of the men must be out hunting!” Culbertson announced with boyish enthusiasm as he came skidding to a halt in the icy sand near Baldwin.
“Out hunting?”
“Best time of a winter day,” the youngster replied. “Your soldiers attacked at dawn, or late in the winter afternoon—this village be crawling with fighters.” Culbertson grinned widely. “You’re one lucky man, Lieutenant Baldwin!”
In less than a half hour after the first cannon salvo, the village was deserted. Sitting Bull’s people had squirted out of the south end of camp, then crossed to the west bank of Ash Creek, fighting the deep snow every step of the way, floundering and falling down in the crusty drifts, scrambling back to their feet again as they clambered into the icy bluffs beyond. Now that the women and children had escaped, the few warriors were falling back. And back. Crossing the creek themselves. Following their families—none of the Hunkpapa carrying very much, no more than what they had on their backs and what little they could snatch into their arms when that first shot was fired.
For the next three hours, until the last shreds of light began to fade at sundown, some of Baldwin’s battalion rounded up more than sixty Indian ponies and mules while other soldiers pulled weapons, ammunition, dried buffalo meat, and blankets from the lodges and tents. Then they began their destruction of Sitting Bull’s camp. First one fire, then a second, and finally more than twenty pyres were blazing, each with its ring of soldiers merrily pitching tons of agency-issued goods—sugar, tea, flour, and calico—into the flames that warmed those soldiers for the first time in days.
It was about time he allowed himself some of the congratulations too, Baldwin figured. Although they still had to worry about their livestock suffering without army grain, the battalion no longer had to concern itself with running out of food. Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa hunters had seen to that. His hearty infantrymen could sustain the rest of their campaign chasing the Sioux all the way to the Yellowstone.
But what gave Frank the deepest sense of pride was the fact that in another forced march of at least a hundred miles after departing Fort Peck, his three companies had routed the fierce warriors who, eleven days before, had forced his battalion to fort up and fight for their very lives. On top of that was the fact that Baldwin’s battalion had put the entire village to flight, forcing the Sioux into the wilderness without food, robes, blankets, and very little clothing in subzero weather.
“If anything, Father Winter might well finish the job we’ve started here today,” Frank told his officers late that afternoon as the mercury began its hoary descent, eventually to fall beyond forty below after nightfall. “Though we only killed one warrior in our fight—the enemy has no choice now but to scamper on back to their agency, where we damn well know the Indian Bureau will feed and clothe and protect these murderers until we can catch up to them again.”
Chapter 17
18 December 1876
“The hand of God Himself delivered you through that Sioux-infested country, Mr. Donegan!” Nelson A. Miles roared as he motioned for the tall Irishman to take a seat on one of the half-log benches in the colonel’s cramped,
