Tongue River Cantonment, 1876-1877.
(Courtesy National Archives)
Artillery at Tongue River Cantonment,
December 29, 1876.
(Courtesy National Archives)
First Lt. Frank D. Baldwin.
(Courtesy Library of Congress)
As his mother began to wash the white man’s head and face, the boy turned away.
She used a strip of dirty, stiffened white cloth—one of the dead soldier’s stockings. If only these white men wore moccasins instead of the clumsy black boots that made their feet hot and sticky. With moccasins the white men would not need to wear these silly stockings. He smiled and began to feel better for it.
This was his seventh summer. He was too old to act like a child, the boy decided.
Finally he turned back to watch his mother scrub the last of the black grainy smudges from the edges of the bullet hole in the soldier’s left temple. Little blood had oozed from the wound.
Perhaps this pale man had already been dying from that messy bullet wound in his side. The boy had seen enough deer and elk, antelope and buffalo, brought down with bullets. And he knew no man could live long after suffering a wound in the chest as terrible as this. This soldier had been dying, and he was shot in the head to assure his death.
Someone had wanted to make certain that this soldier was not taken alive. Someone had saved this pale-skinned soldier from the possibility of torture by sending a bullet through his brain.
George Armstrong Custer, in one of
the last portraits made of him in April, 1876.
(courtesy of Custer Battlefield National Monument)
John “Liver-Eating” Johnston.
(Courtesy Denver Public Library, Western History Section)
Luther S. “Yellowstone” Kelly.
(Courtesy Denver Public Library, Western History Section)
Colonel Nelson A. Miles and officers of the Fifth Infantry, December 29, 1876. From left: Lt. O.F. Long, Surgeon H.R. Tilton, Lt. J.W. Pope, Col. N.A. Miles, Lt. F.D. Baldwin, Lt. C.E. Hargous, and Lt. H.K. Bailey.
(Courtesy Montana Historical Society)
Wooden Leg’s drawing of his rescue of Big Crow.
(Courtesy Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument)
Fifth Infantry soldiers at Tongue River Cantonment in winter dress.
(Courtesy Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument)
BOOKS BY TERRY C. JOHNSTON
Cry of the Hawk
Winter Rain
Dream Catcher
Carry the Wind
Borderlords
One-Eyed Dream
Dance on the Wind
Buffalo Palace
Crack in the Sky
Ride the Moon Down
Death Rattle
Wind Walker
SONS OF THE PLAINS NOVELS
Long Winter Gone
Seize the Sky
Whisper of the Wolf
THE PLAINSMEN NOVELS
Sioux Dawn
Red Cloud’s Revenge
The Stalkers
Black Sun
Devil’s Backbone
Shadow Riders
Dying Thunder
Blood Song
Reap the Whirlwind
Trumpet on the Land
A Cold Day in Hell
Wolf Mountain Moon
Ashes of Heaven
Cries from the Earth
for all his enthusiastic assistance
helping me write
the past four Plainsmen novels,
the dedication of this novel to
the widely respected National Park Service historian
and published Indian Wars authority
Jerome A. Greene
is long overdue
Cast of Characters
Seamus Donegan Samantha Donegan
Military
Brigadier General George C. Crook—Department of the Platte
Colonel William B. Hazen—commanding Sixth U.S. Infantry, Fort Buford, M.T.
Colonel Nelson A. Miles—commanding Fifth U.S. Infantry, Tongue River Cantonment, M.T.
Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie—commanding Fourth U.S. Cavalry
Lieutenant Colonel Elwell S. Otis—Twenty-second U.S. Infantry
Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Whistler—Fifth U.S. Infantry
Major Alfred L. Hough—Seventeenth U.S. Infantry, commanding at Glendive Cantonment
Major Henry R. Tilton—Surgeon, Fifth U.S. Infantry
Major Edwin F. Townsend—Commanding Officer, Fort Laramie, W.T.
Captain Charles J. Dickey—E Company, Twenty-second Infantry
Captain Ezra P. Ewers—E Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry
Captain—Randall—Quartermaster, Fifth U.S. Infantry, Tongue River Cantonment, M.T.
Captain Wyllys Lyman—I Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry
Captain James S. Casey—A Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry
Captain Andrew S. Bennett—B Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry
Captain Edmond Butler—C Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry
Captain Simon Snyder—F Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry
Captain Edwin Pollock—Ninth U.S. Infantry, commander of Reno Cantonment
First Lieutenant Frank D. Baldwin—Fifth U.S. Infantry
First Lieutenant Cornelius C. Cusick—F Company, Twenty-second Infantry
First Lieutenant Mason Carter—K Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry
First Lieutenant George W. Baird—regimental adjutant, Fifth U.S. Infantry
First Lieutenant Robert McDonald—D Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry
Second Lieutenant Russell H. Day—Sixth U.S. Infantry, commanding garrison at Fort Peck
Second Lieutenant David Q. Rousseau—G Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry
Second Lieutenant William H. Wheeler—Eleventh U.S. Infantry
Second Lieutenant Frank S. Hinkle—H Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry
Second Lieutenant Charles E. Hargous—Fifth U.S. Infantry, commanding mounted infantry to Wolf Mountain
Second Lieutenant Hobart K. Bailey—Fifth U.S. Infantry, aide-de-camp to Miles
Second Lieutenant James Worden Pope—E Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry, commanding Rodman gun
Second Lieutenant Edward W. Casey—Twenty-second U.S. Infantry, assisting Pope’s artillery detail: in charge of Napoleon gun
Second Lieutenant Oscar F. Long—Fifth U.S. Infantry, acting engineering officer
Second Lieutenant William H. C. Bowen—Fifth U.S. Infantry, in charge of supply wagons
Second Lieutenant James H. Whitten—I Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry, in charge of pack animals
Trumpeter Edwin M. Brown
Private Thomas Kelly—I Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry
Private Richard Bellows—E Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry
Private Philip Kennedy—C Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry Private
Patton G. Whited—C Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry
Assistant Surgeon Louis S. Tesson
Civilians
Thomas J. Mitchell—agent at Fort Peck
Elizabeth Burt
Martha Luhn
Nettie Capron
Army Scouts
Johnny Bruguier / “Big Leggings”
Luther S. (Sage) “Yellowstone” Kelly
Robert Jackson William Jackson
Victor Smith John Johnston
George Johnson James Parker
William Cross Jim Woods
Tom Leforge Joe Culbertson
Edward Lambert George Boyd
Left Hand—Yanktonai scout for Baldwin on Fort Peck expedition
Buffalo Horn—Bannock scout for Miles on Wolf Mountain Campaign
Lakota
&
nbsp; Sitting Bull Gall
Three Bears Little Big Man
Pretty Bear Foolish Thunder
White Bull Bull Eagle
Small Bear Touch-the-Clouds
Roman Nose Spotted Elk
Red Horse Tall Bull
Packs the Drum / “Sitting Bull the Good”
Yellow Eagle Foolish Bear
Important Man Long Dog
Black Moon Little Knife
Crow Spotted Blackbird
Iron Dog Yellow Liver
Four Horns Red Horn
Drag Hollow Horns
White Horse Red Horses
Fat Hide / Fat on the Beef The Yearling
Lame Red Skirt / Red Cloth Lone Horn
Bad Leg No Neck
Long Feather Rising Sun
Jumping Bull Black Shawl
Crazy Horse Runs-the-Bear
He Dog Hump
Long Hair
Cheyenne
“Tse-tsehese-staeste”
“Those Who Are Hearted Alike”
White Bull Wooden Leg
Black Moccasin (Limber Lance) Yellow Weasel
Black Hawk Yellow Hair
Big Crow Crow Split Nose
Sits in the Night Morning Star
Little Wolf Old Bear
Young Two Moon Beaver Claws
Left-Handed Wolf Beaver Dam
Big Horse Crow Necklace
Gypsum Brave Wolf
High Wolf Box Elder
Coal Bear Long Jaw
Medicine Bear
Cheyenne Party Captured by Miles’s Scouts
Old Wool Woman / Sweet Taste Woman
Crooked Nose Woman Fingers Woman
Twin Woman Crane Woman
Red Hood Black Horse
Crow
Half Yellow Face Old Bear
Assiniboine
White Dog
Casualties:
* Private William H. Batty—C Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry
* Corporal Augustus Rothman—A Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry
* / † Private Bernard McCann—F Company, Twenty-second U.S. Infantry
† Sergeant Hiram Spangenberg—F Company, Twenty-second U.S. Infantry
† Corporal Thomas Roehm—F Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry
† Private Henry Rodenburgh—A Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry
† Private George Danha—H Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry
† Private William H. Daily—D Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry
† Private —— McHugh—H Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry
† Private —— Simond—D Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry
* —killed in action
† partial listing of wounded in action
During the Indian Wars, the [Regular Army] soldier, isolated from his own people and faced by a skilled enemy, lived under conditions that would have broken the spirit of most groups. Badly armed and clothed, underfed and plopped into holes on the prairie, the soldier made do and “re-upped,” left the army after a single hitch, or deserted. It is most remarkable that they did not all desert.
—Neil Baird Thompson
Crazy Horse Called Them
Walk-a-Heaps
The Sioux campaigns of 1876 were marked with few engagements, but those that did take place were conspicuous for the desperateness with which they were fought and the severe losses sustained. Nearly four hundred and fifty officers and men of the army were killed and wounded during the year…. The enemy’s loss is now known to have been severe at the Rosebud, Little Big Horn, Slim Buttes and Bates Creek. But the far-reaching results of the campaigns extended beyond the consideration of how many were killed and wounded. They led to the disintegration of many of the hostile bands of savages, who gladly sought safety upon the reservations and who have not since attempted any warlike demonstrations.
—George F. Price
Across the Continent with
the Fifth Cavalry
Desperate, hungry, and weary of fighting, the rapidly weakening Indian coalition rallied one last time at Wolf Mountains, when the soldiers threatened the sanctity of their homes. But for the Sioux and Cheyennes, offensive warfare was over. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse never again united. Instead, the disintegration of the massive Indian resistance was finally at hand. As Miles averred, “We … had taught the destroyers of Custer that there was one small command that could whip them as long as they dared face it.”
—Jerome Greene
Yellowstone Command
It is the opinion of some who had had years of experience in Indian fighting, that there has rarely, if ever, been a fight before in which the Sioux and Cheyennes showed such determination and persistency, where they were finally defeated.
—Captain Edmond Butler
“Army and Navy Journal”
March 31, 1877
If a Crazy Horse camp could be struck, where would the people be safe?
—Man Sandoz
Crazy Horse—Strange Man of
the Oglala
Foreword
While Seamus Donegan pushes north by west away from Crook and Mackenzie’s camp on the Belle Fourche River, you and I are going to have to step back in time a few weeks so that we can catch up with all that’s been happening in the Yellowstone country, where Miles’s Fifth Infantry are scrambling about trying to find out where Sitting Bull scampered off to after the fight at Cedar Creek.
To write with continuity the final half of A Cold Day in Hell our previous volume, I was faced with a dilemma. I could chop up the action in the Mackenzie / Fourth Cavalry / Morning Star story line by yanking the reader back and forth from the Bighorn country to the northern plains patrolled by the Fifth Infantry … or I could charge straight ahead with one story line instead of dealing with two simultaneously. I chose this second option.
Since this present novel deals with the tale of Nelson A. Miles’s efforts in the rugged country north of the Yellowstone, we are free now to drop back a few weeks in time before the conclusion of A Cold Day in Hell so that we might learn how the colonel’s men were faring in their hunt for Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa at the same moment Crook and Mackenzie were crushing the last of Northern Cheyenne resistance.
This means that after we get Seamus riding off to the north into Crazy Horse country, we’re going to leave him for a few days as we leap on north to catch up with all the action we’ve missed while we’ve been busy with the Fourth Cavalry and their Battle of the Red Fork.
And because we are going back on the calendar, we won’t be starting out right away with the newspaper headlines as we normally do. Once we bring all our characters closer to mid-December, when the Irishman reaches the Tongue River Cantonment, those news reports will continue.
At the beginning of some chapters and some scenes you’re going to read the very same news stories devoured by the officers’ wives and those civilians employed at army posts or those living in adjacent frontier settlements, taken from the front page of the daily newspapers just as Samantha Donegan herself would read them—newspapers that arrived as much as a week or more late, due to the wilderness distances to be traveled by freight carriers.
Copied verbatim from the headlines and graphic accounts of the day, these reports and stories were the only news available for those people who had a most personal interest in the frontier army’s last great campaign—those families who had tearfully watched a loved one march off to war that winter of the Great Sioux War of 1876.
My hope is that you will be struck with the immediacy of each day’s front page as you finish reading that day’s news—just as Samantha Donegan would have read the sometimes reassuring, ofttimes terrifying, news from her relative safety at Fort Laramie. But unlike her and the rest of those left behind at the posts and frontier settlements, you will be thrust back into the footsteps of those cold, frightened infantrymen and the harried villages of hungry people the army is searching for here in the maw of that most terrible winter.
An army knowing it is now only a matter of t
ime until they succeed in what was begun many months before in the trampled, bloody snow along the Powder River.
The Lakota and Cheyenne realizing at last that their culture, an ancient way of life, is taking its last breath.
To be no more.
PROLOGUE
Mid-December 1876
He watched the three of them until they dropped out of sight beyond that last far rise to the south.
Then he watched that snowy sliver of empty ground a little while longer, just to be sure those three horsemen might not reappear there where the icy gray blanket of earth pressed against the lowering slate-gray sky. Hoping the riders might … but knowing they wouldn’t.
Seamus Donegan took a deep breath—so deep, the sub-freezing air shocked his chest. Then he gently nudged the roan to the left and pointed their noses north.
To the Yellowstone.
Right through the heart of the country where the Cheyenne survivors of Mackenzie’s attack on Morning Star’s village were fleeing. Dead center through the land where Crazy Horse was said to be wintering.
As if it had been lying in wait for those three Indian scouts to sign talk their hurried farewells in the bitter cold—as if it had been patient only long enough until he could turn his face back to the north—the wind came up, leaping out of hiding suddenly that midday. The Irishman glanced back over his shoulder at the southern rim of that monochrome sky, unable to make out where the sun was hanging in its low travels. Nothing but a slate of clouds for as far as the eye could see. Gray above, and gray-white below.
He glanced one last time at the top of that ridge where he’d last seen the faraway figures of Three Bears and the other two scouts, knowing they were long gone now. Only a foolish man would tarry in these parts. This was enemy country if ever there was one. Here between Sitting Bull’s Yellowstone and Crazy Horse’s Powder. No matter that Three Bears and his scouts were all three Lakota: truth was, they had just led the soldiers north against the winter roamers.
Already the great hoop was cracking. Agency Indian against free Indian. Good Injun against hostile.