Sioux Dawn, The Fetterman Massacre, 1866 (2 page)

Now add the dream of untold wealth to be found by scraping a pick along the ground or washing some gravel from the bottom of a stream, and you'll have Sutter's Mill in California, Cripple Creek in Colorado, and Alder Gulch in Montana, the latest strike to land upon the ears of war-weary soldiers, Union and Confederate alike. To reach the northern goldfields, a man had to march west to Fort Laramie. From there he turned north toward Montana Territory, using John Bozeman's road, which pierced the heart of prime Sioux hunting ground.

Any man who laid eyes on that country had to come away understanding why the Indians guarded their land so jealously. The whole of the Big Horn country was laced with clear, cold streams fed of winter snows, feeding the luxuriant valleys teeming with abundant wildlife of all description. At the edge of the eastern plains, in the shadow of the Big Horns, roamed the mighty
pte,
the Sioux's buffalo, a nomadic animal, followed season after season by a nomadic people, providing the Indian with everything he required for his survival, century after century.

Into the heart of this red man's paradise Henry Carrington was sent to build his fort, to protect the Road. From its establishment in July of 1866 until the time of its abandonment some two years later, Fort Phil Kearny was under a state of seige. So constantly and vigilantly watched by war and scouting parties, those in the fort found little safety outside the timber stockade unless accompanied by a troop of soldiers. Even then, sheer numbers did not guarantee that the Indians would not swoop down to harass, burn, or drive off stock. It is no exaggeration to state that the hostiles surrounded the fort at all times. Not one log was cut for the stockade, nor was any hay mowed for the stock, nor any mail moved, without a heavy guard.

That enforced isolation and imprisonment brings about its own kind of claustrophobia, aggravating the raw sensitivities of men too long cooped up, under seige, watching comrades whittled away by unseen, unreachable enemies.

There is no richer story than to peer like voyeurs into the lives of people under the stress of life and death. Wondering, as only a reader in the safety of his easy chair can, if he would have measured up.

Important, too, is that the reader realize he's
reliving
the story of real people. From Col. Henry B. Carrington, the commanding officer at Fort Phil Kearny whose unjust reputation for faint-hearted mismanagement of his command hung over his head until shortly before his death … to Capt. William Judd Fetterman, the 18th Infantry's hero in General Sherman's Civil War “march to the sea” across Georgia. So it is that good historical fiction fuses the fortunes, adventures, and destinies of numerous characters. Gold hunters and chaplains, sutlers and cowards, soldiers and those few women who followed, clinging to some man's dream. All of these individuals you will read about were actual, living souls come to play a part on that crude stage erected by the gods below Cloud Peak of the Big Horns … all actual people, save three. Infantryman/musician Frank Noone and his young wife Abigail.

And one other …

Into the midst of this tragic drama I send my fictional character Seamus Donegan, late of the Union Army of the Shenandoah, cavalry sergeant turned soldier-of-fortune, seeking a change of scenery in the West and some relief, if not escape, for his lonely, aching heart. (At this point the reader should be reminded that Seamus is pronounced like “Shamus” … as you would pronounce Sean as “Shawn.”) Over a series of books that will encompass this era of the Indian Wars, you will follow Seamus Donegan as he marches through some of history's bloodiest hours. Not always doing the right thing, but trying nonetheless, for Donegan was no “plaster saint” nor “larger-than-life” dime-novel icon.

History has plenty of heroes—every one of them dead. Donegan represents the rest of us. Ordinary in every way, except that at some point we are each called upon by circumstances to do something extraordinary … what most might call heroic.

Forget the pain, the thirst and hunger. Forget the blood. Each man does what he must in the end.

That's the saga of Seamus Donegan which begins with
Sioux Dawn.
If you listen, you'll hear the wagonmasters cursing their balking mules, the warcries of Indians, along with the screams of frightened women and the prayers of untried soldiers. Test the air—you'll smell the stench of gunpowder and blood freezing on a wind that turns your cheeks to rawhide as you wait for the next rattle of gunfire or the hair-raising thunder of Indian pony hoofbeats bearing down on you.

There is, after all, a sense of something inevitable afoot here. Something of destiny's impelling course sweeping man up in its headlong rush into the future. So remember—what is written here happened. This story needs no false glamor, no shiny veneer of dash and daring. What has always been the story of man at war—of culture against culture, race against race—needs to be told without special lighting.

There's drama enough here for any man.

A very old tale indeed, my friends. One whose time has come at last. I've done my best telling the story in the pages that follow. No soul alive can say if I've succeeded or failed … save for that silent, simple stone monument standing alone on Massacre Hill, standing alone against the brutal wind and time itself.

Terry C. Johnston

Massacre Hill

Fort Phil Kearny Historical Site

December 21, 1989

Prologue

“Donegan!”

The big Irishman sprawled across the pine-frame cot in the corner of his cold, tiny cell didn't answer. A small piece of him recalled where he lay. This guardhouse in the winter shadows of the Big Horn Mountains. The twentieth … no, that was last night. Now the twenty-first of December. Recalling how he was trapped here by Red Cloud's Bad Face Sioux as he was on his way to the seductive gold fields of Alder Gulch, Montana Territory.

He burrowed deeper still into his straw tick mattress, swimming lazily through that thick, warm place a man finds himself when he is clawing his way up, half out of sleep, yet so far down in the dreaming soul of him.

Remembering days gone by and better times.

“Seamus Donegan!”

He heard his mother sing out, recalling the sweet sound of her voice as she would rouse him each morning to the weak tea and hard bread she set before him like a king's ransom on that cracked blue china, there in that starving land of Ireland. Land of his birth.

“You'll be late now, Seamus! Your uncles will not wait long, they'll have you know!”

His uncles. His mother's dear brothers. Each dawn young Seamus walked off between the two of them down the cobbled road, disappearing into the mist and the fog, the three of them to dig for potatoes, or hire themselves out to who might pay them a day's wages for a day's slave labors. Big, strong men, his uncles.

“And one day you'll grow every bit as big as they,” his mother sang many a morn as Seamus sipped at the weak tea and tore at the hard bread that was the staple of their poor larder there in County Kilkenny.

So many died, Seamus remembered now in that warm pool of the dreaming. So many starving, wilting away. Many more simply falling ill to the sickness come to blanket the land. And always the dying shared the same look, their skin every bit as sickly gray as the molds come to rob the Irish of their potato crop. Famine descending like the locusts upon the Egypt of old, his mother would whisper in the darkness of their room at night. Whispering, as if the angel of death himself must not hear her curses on the famine that had taken her husband and one child already.

“I'm sending you to America,” she had announced bravely one evening as they both held their hands over the small fire built among the moss-stones his dear, departed father had hauled to this small two-room house, one by one to build this fireplace for his new wife, expecting their first child. Their first was a boy they named Seamus O'Flynn Donegan.

“I've writ your uncles, to tell them you'll be coming to join them in that new land where they've gone.”

And when young Seamus had asked why he was going, she had explained that all things would be far better for a tall, strapping lad like he in that faraway land. And in her voice he read that there was no need of further discussion.

The worst day of his life, that. Standing pressed among the hundreds of others near the rail of that rat-infested ship, waving farewell to the small woman among his brothers and sisters, all of them disappearing on the wharf in a misting rain. His mother's damp hanky soon all he could see of her in the crowd. Great-Grandmother's linen, handed down from bride to bride, now waving to him, clutched in that threadbare mitten missing two fingers. Seeing her firstborn son off on his long journey to a new start.

Once clear of the rocky point of land that each Irishman understood would be the last glimpse he would long have of his native soil, the ship's crew began barking and whipping and shoving and snarling. Until the Irish passengers were all below decks. “Steerage,” they were called for the first time. Like so much baggage or cargo, kept below in the bowels of that stinking ship.

He would never forget that rocky point of land. Or that morning's gray mist, for it was the last glimpse of the sky young Seamus Donegan would see for the better part of three months.

Hunkered among the living, the half dead, and the few rotting corpses allowed to lie in their stench until taken topside and hurled without ceremony over the rail. “Steerage,” the British sailors called them all. Among the other crude things the British sailors called them as they eyed the young girls and attractive women among them.

So many times at his mother's table Seamus had never thought anything could be worse than what he and his family had had to eat back home in County Kilkenny. Until he looked down into a wooden bowl his first meal on that cursed ship. One bowl a day of something thick and slimy and mostly grease-scum. One bowl only. Far from enough to keep the new muscle on a youngster just beginning to fill out his tall, rawboned frame. Day after day in the dark, rat-swarm of a latrine where the desperate Irish lay beside one another, crawling over the weak and the dead like rats themselves. Reeking in their own urine and feces. Once a week they were allowed buckets of saltwater the British sailors roped down into the holds so these Irish passengers headed for Amerikay could wash down some of the stench. At such times they discovered a few more of the bodies that no longer moved beneath the splashing water. No longer fighting off the hungry, gnawing rats.

Seamus remembered that while his fellow Irish grew thin and sickly, and far too many died on that Godforsaken ship, the rats grew plump and sleek. Feeding on the flesh of dead Patlanders cursed with dreaming of something better in that new country called Amerikay.

Ship-borne carnivores every bit as big and fat and sleek as the rats of Boston when that cursed ship landed, spewing forth those who had survived the trip, like human refuse upon the far shore. Shoved across the deck and laughed at, each one spat upon by the British sailors as they scurried weakly down the gangway onto the foreign soil of Massachusetts. Boston, young Seamus had been told the sign above him read. Boston—where at last his uncles would be waiting with their arms open to take him in.

Donegan found no uncles waiting. Not so much a whisper of their coming, or of their going from Boston Town, Amerikay.

And that first night of countless many he spent huddled in an alley doorway out of the cold drizzle of a March rain turning slowly to snow, young Seamus Donegan promised himself he would find the two uncles who had led a mother to send her firstborn son to the new world. Promised himself until then to fill his belly and sleep dry—no matter what he had to do. No job too dirty or immoral. He would survive. And by god—Seamus Donegan promised himself. He would never sit in the rain again. Alone. Hungry. Drenched and frozen to his marrow. And crying.

“Donegan!”

He rolled his big frame slowly onto his shoulder. It hurt where some soldier had swung a chair leg or axe-handle against the meaty part of his arm. Wincing in pain, rising slowly out of that sweet, delicious dream-state, Seamus listened as the other prisoners shouted and scuffed their way out the rough-hewn guardhouse door.

“Donegan!”

That insistent voice loomed a lot closer. In the guardhouse itself. He heard the rough-hewn door of the guardhouse scrape across its jamb, then slam shut. He slept on a pine-wood frame cot, the tick suspended on a woven rope netting. Room enough in the tiny cell for that six-foot bed, inches too short for his frame. That bed, and room enough for the prisoner to pace back and forth beside it. Six tiny feet by six prison feet.

Maybe they'll all leave me alone now. Let me sleep off the rest of this blessed hangover.
Instead, he sensed someone at his cell door.
By the saints! Seamus Donegan'll get no more sleep this day!

“Talk to me, Mr. Donegan.” The boy's voice pleaded.

“Don't wanna talk to nobody!” Instantly feeling sorry for the young soldier, Seamus burrowed his head deeper beneath the smelly wool blankets the army grudgingly issued its prisoners.

Too gray a day to be worrying about a bleeming thing. The army may throw Seamus Donegan in another guardhouse, but they'll never have my stripes again.
He peeked from one bloodshot eye.
A little sun. Fine, that is for a man with a head as big as mine. Sun, and a helluva lot of blessed cold, just four days till Christmas, i'tis. Any good Irish lad likes to dream himself about good Christmas cheer. Especially Christmas cheer.

“Donegan, the colonel himself sent me fetch you. C'mon.”

For the first time he actually listened to the clatter outside the crude log guardhouse the 18th Infantry had built here in the middle of Sioux hunting-ground upon arriving last July. The thump of feet hammered across ground frozen like an iron-hardened anvil. Men hollering. He'd heard that peculiar sound in throats before, when soldiers stood on the edge of battle—not one soul among them knowing if he would return.