Reap the Whirlwind (60 page)

John Bourke nodded. “That’s what the half-breed said. Grouard knew Crazy Horse from the way he always dressed going into battle, knew the red bastard’s war pony too.”

Donegan said, “Maybe that was the son of a bitch you and Randall said you kept seeing, striding around out in the open before you made your charge on that conical hill.”

“A damned good chance of it,” Bourke said. “Seemed to be orchestrating the warriors in their charges on us, so the major had his Crow scouts direct some fire in that bastard’s direction. Can’t believe it—but for all the lead we flung his way, not a single shot hit him as he pranced back and forth, back and forth as if immune to our bullets.”

“No matter—we had to hurt them, and hurt them good,” Davenport boasted. “Much more than they hurt this outfit of Crook’s. How many of the red infidels do you think did we kill today? Maybe a hundred?”

“Maybe,” Bourke replied, staring at the low flames.

“Well,” Davenport continued, “I’ll tell you that I have
no doubt in my mind, and have emphatically stated so in my first dispatch from this battlefield, that we here encountered all the Sioux warriors there are on the northern plains. Besides showing them we won’t shrink from a fight, we proved we can cripple their kind.”

Davenport’s bravado was not shared up the slope at Crook’s headquarters. While no one could find argument with the fact that the casualties were very light compared to the amount of rounds fired through those six long hours of constant fighting, nonetheless, a palpable sense of gloom had descended over that entire camp as the sun slid from the sky. Perhaps it was nothing more than weariness. Battle fatigue. Maybe nothing more than the coming of night and darkness, that long-held realm of the dead. If nothing more, it was a time each man had alone with his thoughts.

It was much as Anson Mills gave voice later as the officers gathered here and there in knots and began to recite the wrongs committed during the day’s action.

“Every last officer I’ve talked with this afternoon realizes just as I do that we were lucky not to have been entirely vanquished,” the captain declared. “In fact, we have been humiliatingly defeated.”

That evening Donegan knew of only two men—George Crook and John Bourke—who maintained a paper-thin, shaky facade, a temporary masquerade in which they simply refused to acknowledge the suddenness of the attack, the completeness of the surprise, or the total lack of readiness in the troops allowed to lollygag along the creekbank.

At the same time, the rest of the officer corps and the line troops had grown thoughtful, if not outright wary, had perhaps even reluctantly come to hold some profound respect for the abilities of the enemy met that day in battle, as well as for that enemy’s capable cavalry leader.

In walking down to the brushy swamp in the creek bottom to relieve himself, Seamus caught sight of Grouard moving through camp, heading through the maze of fires and soldiers, his horse behind him. Buttoning his canvas britches and slapping the suspenders back over his shoulders, the Irishman hurried to catch up.

“You just get back, Frank?”

The half-breed stopped and turned, waiting until
Seamus came close. Then he shook his head. “No. Leaving now.”

“Where you going this time of night?”

“The general figures someone ought to find out for sure about that ambush Crazy Horse planned for us downriver.”

“There really a deep canyon down there?”

With a shrug Grouard answered, “Lot of brush and deadfall. Boulders. Maybe no canyon. Maybe better to say a good place for a trap.”

“Everybody’s already calling it the ‘canyon of death,’ Frank. If it ain’t a narrow place for a trap—then why doesn’t Crook march right after the village?”

Grouard gazed back up the slope over the Irishman’s shoulder. “All I know, Donegan—is that them Crow know the Lakota as good as I know ’em. The way a man knows his enemy. If Crazy Horse wanted to chew up a bunch of soldiers for lunch today, that’d been the place to do it.”

Seamus watched the sullen half-breed turn away without another word, walking his mount on east past the last of the watch-fires, where Grouard climbed into the saddle and disappeared toward the dark hills. As the Irishman stood there gazing into the night sky, the mournful, solitary notes of a single trumpet floated over the encampment beside the Rosebud.
Tattoo.
Known to the nonarmy as “Taps.”

Going to satisfy his curiosity, Donegan found many of the soldiers from the various cavalry and infantry units gathered in a great assembly on the grassy creekbank. Many held torches, which cast an eerie, dancing otherworldly light over the solemn crowd as one after another of the officers spoke a few words of praise over the long mass grave where the bodies of their dead had been wrapped in blankets before being lowered into the ground. The remains of one soldier, Private Richard Bennett of Vroom’s L Troop of the Third Cavalry, had been completely dismembered by the enemy. His friends had accomplished the grisly task of replacing what remained of the butchered soldier in a grain sack begged off one of Moore’s packers. That sack served as Bennett’s only shroud as it too was lowered into the creekside grave with the other corpses.

After Colonel Royall led them all in singing “Shall We Gather at the River,” some of the other officers continued in an impromptu serenade of heartfelt hymns and favorites like “The Old Hundredth,” “Sweet Annie Laurie,” and “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” sung while soldiers worked in relays to fill in the mass grave. That completed, a fire was kindled along the trench, the better, they hoped to disguise the site from plundering wolves or marauding Sioux and Cheyenne.

Later that night beneath the stars and a pale sliver of moonrind, Seamus found himself unable to sleep, wondering on Samantha and the child they had given life in her belly. Thinking on Frank Grouard gone to scout the “dead canyon.” Tossing fretfully in his blankets despite the cold of these summer nights come to the high plains.

In all the known civilized world there could be nothing more somber than a funeral for soldiers fallen far from home, far from the bosom of loved ones … laid here to eternal rest in the yawning, lonely wilderness where Seamus had come to wonder if God could even hear his prayers at all.

Moon of Fat Horses

“K
se-e se-wo-is-tan-i-we i-tat-an-e.”

That night following the long day’s battle, Wooden Leg’s people were already calling the fight by name:

“Where the Young Girl Saved Her Brother.”

In their winter counts the Shahiyena would long refer to the attack they made on Three Stars’s soldiers as the rescue of Chief Comes in Sight by his sister, Buffalo Calf Road Woman.

With much, much joy the great encampment began celebrating their victory that very night at sundown as the first warriors returned north from the battlefield to their camp on Sundance Creek
^*
with news of the victory. As the warriors fought that day, the women had moved the camp circles farther west down the creek, erecting their lodges a little closer to the Greasy Grass.
^†

Here they planned to remain for two nights before moving on to the mouth of the creek, where the Sundance itself flowed into the Greasy Grass. There the chiefs said they would stay for five or six sleeps while the young men
hunted the antelope herds reported in the nearby country. Although this was unknown territory to the Lakota, the Shahiyena had been returning to this very ground to hunt for the past ten summers.

For some in the village, it was not a happy return. Some of their own would never again charge the white man or his soldiers. Some would never again sit a pony, never again feel the wind caressing their hair as they darted through a buffalo herd on the run.

Although the count of the dead was already high, close to four-times-ten, Wooden Leg knew more of the wounded would not live long. There was not much even the medicine men could do once a bullet went through a man’s chest and he found it harder and harder to breathe. Or when a bullet penetrated a man’s belly and all he could expect was to die slowly, painfully, as his friends watched and prayed, beat their drums and shook their rattles, mumbling their prayers or speaking of the dying man’s many brave feats in battle.

Custom dictated that the celebration of victory was to come only after a proper period of mourning. But in this singular case of battling an overwhelming force of soldiers and their Indian scouts to a virtual standstill, the Lakota and Shahiyena found much to honor in their warriors who had ridden forth to protect the great village. Throughout that first night and on into the rising of the daybreak star, the horsemen streamed back to their camps, where friends and family sang of their bravery and cheered their return. Like Wooden Leg, those who were last to return were warriors who had elected to tie the many travois to their ponies, bringing back both the dead and wounded as two of the old chiefs from each tribal circle led in the procession of weary ponies from the south.

While the women brought new life to their fires and put kettles on to boil so the hungry warriors could be fed, the old shaman Charcoal Bear brought out the sacred Buffalo Hat and hung it from a tall tripod in the center of the Shahiyena camp circle. To it that evening was tied the scalp of the young Snake warrior they had killed among the ponies herded down by the creek in the first minutes of the battle. Around and around that most ancient and powerful
relic the women danced: mothers of young fighters, wives of older warriors, young and eligible maidens seeking to take a courageous husband who had proven himself in a great battle against the soldiers. So it was that the women danced with great vitality while most of the men watched, weary from their all-night ride south, as well as their all-day fight.

While there were some women of loss who keened and cut their hair, cried out in grief and cut themselves in mourning, there was much more joy, even laughter behind the hands when they learned how Jack Red Cloud had flown from the battlefield early that morning, fleeing south and east in great shame, straight back to the white man’s reservation where his father ruled the land of white flour and pig-meat.

Here, among the mountains and high plains, the free and wild Indian ruled.

“He will return to his father without his father’s bonnet!” Wooden Leg reminded his friends around that great, roaring bonfire.

“Without his father’s special rifle!” added Lame Sioux.

“No matter. Perhaps now the soldiers will stay away!” Crooked Nose cheered at one of the many leaping bonfires fed throughout that first night after the battle. “Now that they know we will never again wait until they attack our camps of little ones and women.”

“They should know we will attack them!” echoed Yellow Eagle.

“But—what of the great mystic’s vision?” asked White Elk.

“Yes,” agreed Young Black Bird. “What of Sitting Bull’s talk with the Everywhere Spirit?”

“The soldiers will not return,” Little Shield said as sour as gall.

Contrary Belly added, “They would not dare. There can be no soldiers falling into our camps now.”

“But the vision was so strong, in such detail,” Wooden Leg protested. “I hear from White Cow Bull that Sitting Bull has told the Lakota to expect another fight.”

“Let us savor this victory first, young one,” Brass Cartridge chided Wooden Leg.

“Yes,” agreed Spotted Wolf as he chuckled. “It will be a long, long time before we have to worry about any soldiers marching on us now.”

“They have learned their lesson well,” Crooked Nose stated. “The Everywhere Spirit has taught them a painful truth: never again come to attack a village of women and children. Like our southern cousin—chief Medicine Arrow—vowed seven winters ago in his prophecy to Hiestzi, the Yellow Hair called Custer. If the soldiers come, then they will all be destroyed.”

“Exactly as the shaman Sitting Bull has seen in his vision,” Wooden Leg reprimanded them for forgetting. “Soon, he says—the soldiers will fall headfirst like grasshoppers into our camp.”

With the coming of the sun the next morning, a very weary Wooden Leg reluctantly gave up the celebration and finally curled within his buffalo robe he laid beneath the blanket stretched over some willow branches to form a crude wickiup. Most young warriors too old to live with their parents but not yet married themselves used just such temporary shelters as the villages moved from campsite to campsite.

Inside, he felt the stirrings of his own true warriorhood at long last. It had been as Crazy Horse promised them when he led the hundreds south to meet Three Stars. This was indeed a new kind of fighting for the Shahiyena and Lakota.

Perhaps gone forever was the old way of doing battle: each man fighting on his own for coups and scalps and ponies; each man riding out ahead of the others to perform daring, risky, and often foolish deeds in the face of the enemy.

Perhaps from now on they would fight any soldier army come against the villages in this new way: riding knee to knee in massed bunches, swarming together over the white man as the bee flies in swarms that blackened the sky, charging into the soldier lines in numbers that could not help but roll over the helpless enemy.