approaching from up the valley, advancing on both sides of the river toward the soldier bivouac. Quickly again he tried to calculate their numbers—just to goad himself with the odds. Then Donegan remembered. Only once before had he ever seen such a disciplined formation of Indian horsemen: when Roman Nose had led his Northern Cheyenne and Pawnee Killer’s Sioux down on the twenty-eight men still able to fire their rifles from that nameless sandbar on the high plains of Colorado.*
As Donegan handed the glasses back to the colonel, Miles asked them both, “How many you make of it?”
Kelly shrugged. “Six hundred, maybe more.”
“I’d say that’s about right,” Seamus agreed.
“And that’s only the ones we can see,” Miles reminded them. “No telling how many we can’t count because of the fog behind them.” The colonel waved his peeled wand in the air. “No telling how many are already somewhere in these hills.”
“They easily have us two to one, General,” Kelly said quietly. “Maybe worse than that.”
For the next half hour the warriors pushed their ponies up from the river valley, on up the slopes of that ridgeline south of the soldier bivouac, emerging like black insects from the cottony, swirling fog that nestled among the trees and brush along the river. In addition to those horsemen gathering in clusters along the hills immediately across the river, the western end of the heights bristled with horsemen who gathered to look down at the soldiers on the flat-topped knob.
They began to call out to the soldiers in Lakota.
“You know any of that tongue?” Seamus asked Kelly.
Luther nodded, stepping out to the edge of the knoll with Miles and Donegan. “Listen.”
They did listen for a few moments more; then Kelly turned to the others and said, “From what I can make of it—they’re telling us that we’re not going to eat any more fat meat.”
“Fat meat?” Miles said, wagging his head in confusion. “I don’t get it.”
“Bacon,” Donegan declared. “They mean bacon, General. Don’t you see? What they’re trying to tell us white men is that we’ve eaten our last breakfast.”
Miles turned to Seamus, asking, “Eaten our last breakfast, have we?”
“That’s their strongest call to battle, General,” Kelly explained. “Those bucks are saying your men won’t live to have another meal.”
“You know their tongue,” Donegan said to Kelly, “so why don’t you go ahead and tell that bunch what we think of them as warriors?”
A smile crept across Kelly’s mouth there in the early light as the snow whipped around them in a whirling fury. “Not a thing to lose if I do.”
Seamus watched the chief of scouts take a step away from them to unbutton the bottom of his heavy buffalo-hide coat. Then Kelly grabbed his crotch and gyrated his hips forward, calling out in Lakota.
“I will have many breakfasts, for I am strong,” he hollered across the snowy heights. “But you will cower before me because you are women! None of you are men like me—for you are all women!”
They watched how that taunting challenge struck the warriors gathered on the heights to their left and across the river—angering the Sioux and Cheyenne beyond reason, working them into a fighting lather. It was just then seven A.M. as a few of the warriors began their first slow advance from the ridgeline down toward the open bowl where the soldier camp lay.
“I think you done just what you wanted to do,” Seamus told Kelly. “Looks like they’re ready to fight, General.”
“Then let’s be at them!” Miles roared enthusiastically, clapping his mittens together.
His first order sent back to camp directed First Lieutenant Mason Carter to take his ? Company across the ice on the Tongue River and establish a defensive line at the base of the hills should the warriors threaten to make a daring sweep right into the army’s bivouac. Next he ordered Captain Charles Dickey and First Lieutenant Cornelius Cusick to bring up companies ? and F of the Twenty-second to form a skirmish line at the base of the low plateau just north of the knoll where Miles stood. Then the colonel had Second Lieutenant William Bowen bring up the supply train and station it at the edge of the timber skirting the base of the plateau where the wagons and animals might be better protected in the event Crazy Horse made a cavalry sweep from across the river, seeking to surround the soldier camp.
“Bring Pope up with the artillery!” the colonel ordered. “I want him to support Carter’s company when those warriors charge his position.”
Within minutes mules were hauling the two carriages into position at the base of the oblong plateau where the canvas tops were stripped back from the iron bows, scattering a flurry of accumulated snow over the gun crews working feverishly under Lieutenant James W. Pope’s direction. First the twelve-pounder, under the command of Second Lieutenant Edward W. Casey, was rolled into position and its wheels chocked. Next came the men struggling with the Rodman gun, which would be under Pope’s personal command. Both crews took elevation grades for the first time, charting distance and targets on those ridges and ravines across the frozen river where hundreds of warriors were beginning to gather in angry knots as ? Company began its crossing of the ice.
Miles called out, “Major Casey!”
The captain hurried up and saluted. “General?”
“Station your company on either flank of our guns.”
“Very good, sir!”
Arrayed on either side of Pope’s and Casey’s gun crews was Captain James Casey’s A Company to act in support and defense of the artillery position. Then on the far left flank Miles called up Captain Ezra P. Ewers’s ? Company to position itself on the southwest side of the ridge, extending from the knoll below the artillery position, its own right flank suspended in the air.
Donegan stepped up into the midst of the frantic activity boiling around Nelson A. Miles. “They might cross below you, General.”
“Yes, I’ve thought of that,” Miles confided with a brooding squint of his eyes. “You were cavalry in the war, I take it?”
“The Second, sir.”
“A good outfit, Donegan.” Miles had a wry grin on his face as he continued. “So you would be the sort to think about horse troops sweeping around to take our rear, wouldn’t you?”
“Damn right.”
“Damn right indeed!” Miles agreed. “Mr. Baird, bring up Butler and McDonald. Place them down there, and there, flank to flank to protect against encirclement on our rear.”
“Very good, General,” and the adjutant hurried off toward the base of the knoll to convey his orders.
Within a matter of minutes the last of the troops in bivouac were trudging out through the snow already halfway to their knees, more falling around them. Captain Edmond Butler quickly arrayed his men, stretching C Company to the east as far as he dared so that its formation roughly paralleled the northern base of the plateau that Captain Casey, along with Lieutenants Pope and Casey, would be defending with the artillery. On Butler’s right flank Lieutenant Robert McDonald attached the left flank of his D Company in another dangerously thin skirmish line. Both companies were told to watch the trees and riverbank to the northwest where the entire outfit had just abandoned its bivouac. It was there the enemy horsemen were expected to sweep across the frozen Tongue.
With McDonald riding beside him Captain Butler slowly urged his horse down that skirmish line of cold, shivering men as the snow continued to fall and the cruel north wind slashed straight into their faces. Butler would not want any of them to think about, much less realize, just how short a line a few score of soldiers made on that rugged, snowy landscape when it came to facing down the coming assault.
“Every man must be a hero today!” Butler told them with hints of his Irish homeland still evident in his peaty brogue. “For when this fight begins, there will be no reassuring touch of a comrade’s elbow beside you! When the red bastards come for us, there will be no rear guard! This fight will be won or lost not by our regiment! Not even by our battalion—much less by a single company! No, men … today this fight will be won or lost by each and every man here, fighting alone!”
The cheer that Seamus heard erupt along that painfully thin line of infantry brought a mist of remembered camaraderie to his eyes, a tug at the sentimental strings of his heart—recalling how the officers of the Second Cavalry had worked up their horse soldiers before troop after troop would emerge slowly from the woods and halt,
