Wolf Mountain Moon: The Battle of the Butte, 1877

their people and the soldiers, monitoring the Bear Coat’s advance up the Tongue, falling back slowly, ever so slowly.

It was enough to worry any battle veteran. By any calculation Crazy Horse had more than enough warriors to take on Miles’s infantry. So why didn’t the Sioux stand and fight?

And another thing was just as galling: the soldier column was being watched, constantly. The two recent attacks had proved that. That could only mean that Crazy Horse was falling back for a specific purpose.

It made Seamus shudder. Maybe, after all, this was like what John Buford had done when he’d been the first to arrive on the outskirts of that tiny Pennsylvania town called Gettysburg. Buford knew Lee’s Army of Virginia was coming—perhaps no more than hours away. So while he could, Buford chose the ground.

If a man could seize one advantage above all others, he must choose the ground where he would engage the enemy.

Crazy Horse was falling back, falling back … and when he stopped—that would be the ground where he would stake himself and go no farther. There Colonel Nelson A. Miles and his Fifth U.S. Infantry would have their hands full.

During the incessant rain throughout that day most of the snow melted. Only patches remained beneath the scrub cedar and stunted pine. Out where the army marched, the ground had become a quagmire. Late that afternoon the halt was called on the west side of the Tongue across from the mouth of Otter Creek.^* After Miles set up his rotation of pickets, the weary men did their best to scratch around to find some dry wood for their smoky fires, then curled up in their wet blankets and fell fast asleep.

By first light on the fifth the column was off and marching again, plodding through a steady, driving rain that gusted at their backs and turned the trail into a sticky gumbo yearning to pull a man’s boots off his frozen feet if he wasn’t careful. Back and forth they were forced to cross the softening ice of the Tongue as the sandstone bluffs crowded in first on one side, then on the other, narrowing the valley once more as the river snaked and twisted much more than it did farther north. Animals and wagons became mired in the mud or broke through the spongy ice, requiring the men to plunge in themselves to yank, and haul, and tow everything free.

From time to time men fell out of line to drag off their soaked and shapeless bootees and socks, scooping up a handful of snow and rubbing it on the stark-white foot—hoping to startle circulation back into their frozen, plodding extremities. Lips turned blue and teeth chattered, that dull gray day as the rain continued to fall. There was no drying off; there could be no changes of clothes, no stopping for fires. Only more miles of march, more rain, more watching the horizon for mounted warriors, more waiting.

Off to the southwest beneath the low-slung gray drizzle the men began to make out the gradually ascending heights of the Wolf Mountains. Back along the column more and more men began to talk quietly among themselves, wondering if the Sioux were drawing them farther and farther downriver, eventually to draw the army into the rugged fastness of those mountains in the distance. There finally to make their play—finally to stand and fight among the heights.

Seamus brooded on it too. With all the sign they were beginning to run across, it was of a sudden causing the Irishman to recall the dogs he had so often noticed around the forts and outposts and frontier towns in the last ten years he had been in this western country. Crazy Horse’s village of winter roamers was the bitch in heat luring Crook’s, or Terry’s, or Miles’s armies to follow … follow, as the softheaded, hard-dicked town dogs would always follow, fighting among themselves for the chance to be the first to crawl atop and hump the seductive, alluring bitch.

The farther they pushed that Friday, the more such a devilish plot on the part of Crazy Horse made sense to him. It seemed that with every hour, if not with every mile, they were marching past more and more recent Indian sign. More of the abandoned wickiups and war lodges. Here and there the trampled earth of lodge circles and fire rings. Meat-drying racks. Scattered and half-used piles of cottonwood bark stripped and peeled for their war ponies. More carcasses of cattle and oxen slaughtered in those migrating camps. Even a few live cattle contentedly grazing among the mud and boggy, grassy bottoms alongside the river, animals abandoned by the retreating village. A very large village that by necessity had spread itself for some distance along the riverbank.

Very late in the afternoon, after a grinding march of some fifteen miles at the mercy of a drenching rain, the column went into bivouac about the time the wind began to quarter around, for the first few hours of that night blowing out of the west. But just before dawn on the sixth the wind pounded at their backs, howling directly out of the north again, with the steely tang of snow in its bite.

^*Site of present-day Ashland, Montana.

Chapter 24

Hoop and Stick Moon 1877

Telegraphic Briefs

DAKOTA

Wild Bill’s Murderer.

YANKTON, January 3.—In the United States Court to-day, John McCall, convicted of the murder of Wild Bill, was sentenced by Chief Justice Sponnon to be hanged March 1. He will carry the case to the supreme court. The only ground of defense is that he was intoxicated, so as to be unconscious of the act.

Wooden Leg watched the soldier column through those first fat flakes of snow as dry as alder leaves became in late autumn. The wind caught them, spun each one in a whorl, then scutted them along the ground. At times there was no sense in trying to shade one’s eyes to peer into the downriver distance. But for a moment, perhaps no more than a heartbeat or two, the wind dance of the snow stopped as if the sky suddenly held its breath … while the young Shahiyela warrior could see clear enough to make out the shapes of the soldier scouts, walk-a-heaps, and wagons plodding out of the first pale light this stormy dawn.

“They won’t give up,” Yellow Weasel said dolefully.

Wooden Leg wanted to turn to the older warrior and tell him just how much of a fool he was for ever thinking the white man would give up.

But instead of angering Yellow Weasel, Wooden Leg swallowed down his youthful impulse and said quietly, “With my own eyes I have seen what the soldiers did to Old Bear’s village on the Powder last winter. Understand that there is something that does not let these ve-ho-e soldiers give up their chase of our villages. No matter the distance. No matter the cold.”

Wooden Leg would know. Born in the Black Hills near the Sacred Mountain, this was his nineteenth winter— having matured in many ways over the last three seasons of fighting the white man. Now a member of the Hemo-eoxeso, the Elk-horn Scrapers warrior society, he cast a long shadow upon the ground: there were only two Ohmeseheso warriors who stood taller than Wooden Leg.

How he would have loved to ask Yellow Weasel why any man could think the ve-ho- e would ever give up following the villages … but instead Wooden Leg bit down on his tongue. Sometimes it was more honorable not to say something than to show the foolishness of another.

“Go on now—vo-ve-he,”^* Sits in the Night ordered Beaver Claws, one of the younger scouts in his pack of wolves. “Ride back to our village to tell Crazy Horse, to tell the chiefs. The soldiers come on this morning!”

They all watched the youngster leap onto the bare back of the spotted pony, then pull his blanket about him. Beaver Claws kicked the animal in the flanks and leaned far forward as it spurted off into the snowstorm. Wooden Leg breathed deep of the sharp air. He hadn’t been able to sleep all that well last night wrapped in his one blanket and buffalo robe, cold as it was. They made themselves no fire, even after the whole long day of rain. Instead, the