Monaseetah held them both in front of her on the pony’s back. “Warm too.” She knew the handsome Oglalla warrior had eyes for her alone.
He waited a long, aggravating moment, as if searching for something more to say to the woman who did not want to talk to him.
“We ride to The Horse’s camp now, Monaseetah. You will survive. Your sons will survive as well. We have strong ponies between our legs now, and the Cheyenne have always been a strong people. You will survive—and you will remember the night the soldiers burned your village!”
White-Cow-Bull suddenly yanked his pony away from the slow march, leaving the woman behind. He hammered his heels against the pony’s ribs as he galloped toward the front of the column, kicking up a spray of snow into the new red light emerging at the edge of the world.
“Ride, Shahiyena!” the Oglalla shouted down the line. “Follow me to freedom!”
For three days the Cheyenne marched before coming to the camp of Oglalla chief Crazy Horse. There the Sioux took in their friends, giving them clothes to replace the frozen, tattered remnants of what they had carried away on their backs from Old Bear’s winter camp.
Empty, gnawing bellies were filled from the store of dried buffalo and antelope put away for this winter season by the Oglalla. Old Bear’s people warmed themselves around Sioux fires, talking about the Black Night March they had survived. After three days it was decided that together Crazy Horse would lead them all to join up with Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapas.
When at last all three bands would camp together, they could decide how to defend themselves from the soldiers who had come to force them back onto their reservations.
Three more suns rose and fell before they found The Bull’s Hunkpapa village along the Creek of Beavers, nestled for protection against the late-season snows beneath the Blue Mountains.
After many hours of council, it was decided the survivors of Red Beard’s attack could travel with the Sioux. The three formed an alliance for the protection of those Northern Cheyenne of Old Bear. After all, the tribes agreed, the soldiers had attacked a Cheyenne village. Not the Sioux. The soldiers had not burned and plundered an Oglalla or Hunkpapa winter camp.
Talk was that the soldiers must be hunting Cheyenne once more, as they did on the Little Dried River in Colorado Territory twelve winters ago. As they stalked down the Cheyenne on the Washita eight winters gone.
This three-way alliance was formed for their mutual safety during the buffalo-hunting season drawing near. And because the Cheyenne themselves were the hunted ones, they would act as the point of the march on these nomadic wanderings come the short-grass time.
Following the march leaders were the Oglallas, while the Hunkpapas of Sitting Bull would act as rear guard. It was The Bull’s contention that the best way to avoid trouble was to stay as far from the white man as possible. If they could but avoid the army, he reasoned, there would be no worry of attack.
Slow marches of a few miles each day that winter-into-spring as the three villages moved up the Powder. With the full warming of spring awash over the northern prairies, they marched over to the Tongue.
And slowly, slowly, on to the Rosebud.
Every day The Bull sent out runners to the other bands trapped in bitter despair on the reservations.
“Look what I have!” Bull boasted. “You on the agencies have nothing but what the white man chooses to give you … when he chooses to give it. While I and the others have what Wakan Tanka has always given His people. Come, bring your guns! We will hunt in the old way. On our old lands. Where the white man will bother us no longer.”
All through the spring and the first reaching of the short-grass to the sun, many trails from north and south and east slowly began to merge together like strips of sinew wrapped into bowstring. Days of spring sped into summer, and one by one the little tracks of a lodge or two moved off the agencies, eventually joining others, their travois poles scratching the earth like the little streams and creeks feeding the mighty torrent of a river.
The Sioux were now as they had not been for many, many winters. Once again they were gathering with the old spirit, the old courage, the ageless power. There flowed a new life vibrant in every man, woman, and little babe strapped on the travois. They would go where the white man could not reach them.
Sitting Bull would take his people to those ancient hunting grounds, where they would not be bothered by the white man.
Sitting Bull would take them to the Rosebud.
By four o’clock that first afternoon, Custer halted the command on those open, minty bottomlands fragrant along the west bank of the Rosebud. Here the westerly breezes sweeping down from the Wolf Mountains would drive away troublesome mosquitoes come nightfall. The river at this point ran some thirty to forty feet in width, only three to five feet in depth, clear running but slightly alkaline, and with a gravel bottom that caressed the tired feet of many a trooper wishing to cool himself in its pleasant ripples that evening.
At sunset “Officers’ Call” was sounded by Custer’s chief trumpeter, Henry Voss. Word buzzed through camp that the officers would find Custer’s bivouac beneath his headquarters’ flag tied to a bullberry bush in the direction of the march.
By the time Fred Benteen, senior captain in the regiment, had squatted in the grass near the general’s bedroll, he could see Custer was nowhere near as jovial as he had been that morning nor the previous evening. Benteen unbuttoned his blue blouse and swatted at a troublesome mosquito, sensing a sudden and serious mood seeping along the Rosebud as the last stragglers trotted up.
Fred scratched at the reinforced crotch of his cavalry trousers, then pulled out his ever-present pipe and stoked the bowl to a cheery glow.
“Cooke, how do we stand?” Custer barked with a taste of iron to it.
“All present and accounted for, sir!”
“Very good.” Custer paced a moment, gathering his thoughts. “Since we’re all here now, let me begin. I’m sure we each have better things to do that spend endless sessions listening to orders of march. Most of you have accompanied me many times before. You’ll find little changed on this journey.”
Tearing off a small limb from the bullberry bush spread like an awning over his bedroll, Custer continued. “I want to be assured that this scout is successful. And, I believe, success is marked by finding the Sioux. Am I correct, gentlemen?”
“Yes, sir!” Calhoun answered, then nervously glanced around at some of the more silent of his fellow officers.
“To assure our success, I am reminding you all of some of the primary orders of march I must insist upon upholding—the most important of which is that each of you must see that your trumpeters bury their bugles in their saddlebags and don’t bring the bloody things out again until I order them brought out. There will be no more trumpet calls except in the gravest of emergencies. Good,” he answered himself, slapping the limb across his left palm.
“At five A.M. each day we will begin our march. Five—promptly! That means your troops should be rousted by three for breakfast and to ready their mounts. You company commanders are experienced men and know well enough what to do, plus knowing when to do what’s necessary for your men, so there are but two things I feel should be regulated from headquarters: when to move out and when to go into camp at the end of each day’s march.”
He paced a moment, tapping an index finger against his lips. “All other details, such as reveille, stables, watering, halting, grazing—everything will be left to the judgment and discretion of the troop commanders. I want you all to keep paramount in your minds you must remain in supporting distance of one another and don’t dare get ahead of the scouts I will have out at all times in advance of our columns. And please, gentlemen—don’t lag behind the main body of the march. I don’t want any stragglers butchered. Understood?”
When he heard mumbling agreement from most of the weary men, Custer plunged ahead. “From all the intelligence General Terry has gleaned, in addition to the scout of Major Reno here, who found much evidence of lodge fires on that reconnaissance, we just might meet something in the order a thousand Sioux warriors. Now, fellas—if what the reports say is true about the Indians jumping the reservations like gnats off a hot plate this summer to join up with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse … well, it looks like we might run onto something closer to fifteen hundred warriors.”
“Fifteen hundred?” Wallace gulped.
