Wolf Mountain Moon: The Battle of the Butte, 1877

Miles said, “I’ll send one or two of the captives with Johnny when he goes, Mr. Donegan. They can tell their own people how my heart is right when I offer them good terms of surrender.”

Shrugging, Bruguier added, “I gotta try, Donegan. Soon there’s no more buffalo. And always the army keeps coming—until there will be no more warriors to feed the women and children anyway. I gotta try.”

He held out his hand to the half-breed, a begrudging grin crossing his cold face. “All right, Bruguier. I wish you all the luck in the world.” Then the Irishman turned back to the colonel. “I imagine if anyone can talk the Crazy Horse and Lone Wolf people in … I expect it will be one of their own people, General. You’re smart to send some of them along with Johnny to talk surrender to the chiefs.”

“I only pray my strategy works,” Miles replied. “One way or the other—surrender or annihilation—this winter has been the beginning of the end for these people.”

“And if your peace strategy doesn’t work?” Kelly asked.

Miles turned to his chief of scouts. “Then the Fifth Infantry will be on the march again by spring.”

That first night after the battle, Wooden Leg joined the small group of warriors who slipped back after nightfall and crept up through the snow to get close to the soldier camp. They did not need to stalk quietly through the snow flurries—the ve-ho-e had started big fires, and the white men were talking loud, laughing too, not at all worried about making noise.

Perhaps … one man or two might slip in among the shadows and the loud clamor, take out his knife, and cut the prisoners free.

But they found a tight ring of camp guards surrounding Bear Coat’s men, so Crazy Horse’s warriors could not get as close to the soldiers as they had planned, much less slip in to free the captives, as they had hoped. In utter frustration one of the Lakota fired his rifle at a tall shadow that crossed one of the roaring fires. That began a scary time of it for the warriors out beyond the last rings of dancing firelight. Soldiers fired back into the night. Warriors answered in kind as the big ve-ho-e fires were snuffed out one by one, frightened men kicking snow and dumping water onto the flames.

“Sister! Can you hear me?” Wooden Leg called out several times before she answered him.

In the midst of the yelling white men and the sporadic, infrequent gunfire, Crooked Nose Woman hollered back, “We are all right, Wooden Leg! Go back and tell our people we are all right. The soldiers are taking us to their home on the Elk River. We have food and are warm. Do not worry about us. We will be all right.”

“Know that we will come for you there!”

“Do not throw your lives away on account of us,” Crooked Nose Woman answered. “The soldiers have treated us kindly. Look to yourselves now. Protect those in the village.”

“I will see you again soon!” Wooden Leg promised.

“That is my prayer too!” Crooked Nose Woman shouted. “Until I am back among my people. When this war is over and there is peace once again … be safe, Wooden Leg!”

Then he heard another Tse-Tsehese voice. It sounded old. Perhaps it was Old Wool Woman’s. She was singing a news song—the way a camp crier would sing to tell others in the village of some important event.

Young men, do not fight.

Young men, the fighting is over.

The ve-ho-e are not hurting us,

Your people are not harmed.

Young men, let the soldiers go.

Young men, let the Bear Coat go

in peace now.

One by one the Ohmeseheso warriors told the Lakota what Old Wool Woman was singing, and eventually the Indian guns fell silent. With a cracking voice she continued to sing her calming song as the warriors slipped back, back away from the outer ring of firelight.

Young men, do not fight.

Young men, the fighting is over.

The ve-ho-e are taking us to the Elk River.

Wait to see if the Bear Coat truly means

his talk of peace.

Let the soldiers go, young warriors.

You cannot protect us any longer—

Go back to our village

And protect your families,

Protect the Tse-Tsehese who are left

With your bodies.

Wooden Leg lay there on the mushy snow in the dark, listening to the soldiers whisper in their camp, hearing the heavy, icy rain tumble through the skeletal branches of the aged cottonwoods over his head, thinking on Old Wool Woman’s words.

How many of the People were left alive and free? After a winter, a spring, then a long summer and autumn, and now another winter of fighting the soldiers—how many? With very few lodges and ponies, very few weapons and sacred objects left them, the Tse-Tsehese truly had little. But now Wooden Leg was forced to consider just how few of them there were.

Once a rich people, the most powerful warriors on the northern plains … now reduced to living in shabby rock-and-branch shelters, women and children running in fear of the soldiers because with so many battles, there were no longer enough warriors to protect them. No longer enough warriors to turn back all the soldiers.

They kept coming. And coming. And coming.

It seemed the ve-ho-e were like the stars. There were too many to count. Whenever Wooden Leg looked up at a summer sky, he was sure the stars covered everything from one edge of the earth to the other. From one distant point of the four winds to the other.

Although the clouds hid everything above this night, Wooden Leg began to weep with realization in that freezing drizzle of a rain.

Soon the white man would cover everything in the same way the stars covered the sky.

Chapter 38

Tioheynuka Wi 1877

BY TELEGRAPH