Even as it is occurring, the hillsides in our own front bristle with the savage warriors, too far off as yet for close shooting, but threateningly near. Our horses must be kept under cover in the ravines, and the lines thrown out to meet the foe, so "Forward" is sounded.
Upham"s battalion scramble up the ridge in their front, and the fun begins. All around the rocky amphitheatre the Indians come bobbing into sight on their active ponies, darting from behind rocks and ledges, appearing for a brief instant over the rise of open ground eight hundred yards away, then as suddenly dipping out of sight into some intervening "swale," or depression. The first thing, while the general"s horse and mine are being saddled, is to get the other animals into the ravine under shelter, and while I"m at it, Bourke, the aide-de-camp we last saw petting and feeding his baby-captive, comes rattling up the pebbly stream-bed and rides out to the front with that marvellous wreck of a straw hat flapping about his ears. He never hears the laughing hail of "How did you leave your baby, John?" but is the first mounted officer I see along the line.
"Press where you see my old hat shine, Amid the ranks of war, And be your oriflamme to-day This tile from Omaha."
Macaulay barbarously paraphrased in the mud of Slim b.u.t.tes.
As the general swings into saddle and out to the front, the skirmish line is spreading out like a fan, the men running nimbly forward up the ridges. They are not well in hand, for they fire rapidly as they run.
The volleys sound like a second Spottsylvania, a grand success as a _feu de joie_, but, as the colonel indignantly remarks, "They couldn"t hit a flock of barns at that distance, much less an Indian skipping about like a flea," and orders are sent to stop the wild shooting. That there are hundreds of Indians is plainly apparent from their rapid fire, but they keep five or six hundred yards away behind the ridges, peppering at every exposed point of our line. Upham"s battalion is swinging around to the west; Mason has pushed his five companies square out to the front along the plateau, driving the Indians before him. To his right the Second and Third Cavalry, fighting dismounted too, are making merry music. And now, filing over the ridge, comes the long column of infantry; and when they get to work with their "long toms" the Indians will have to skip in earnest. The shrill voice of their gray-bearded old chief sends his skirmishers rapidly out on Upham"s left, and a minute more the rocks are ringing with the deeper notes of his musketry.
Meantime I have counted at least two hundred and fifty Indian warriors darting down from one single opening among the bluffs square in Mason"s front, and the wounded are drifting in from his line far more rapidly than from other exposed points. The brunt of the attack coming along that plateau falls on him and his five companies.
It is growing darker, and the flashes from our guns take a ruddier tinge. The princ.i.p.al occupation of our officers, staff and line, has been to move along among the men and prevent the waste of ammunition.
Every now and then some young redskin, ambitious of distinction, will suddenly pop from behind a sheltering hummock and dash at the top of his pony"s speed along our front, but over three hundred yards away, taunting and blackguarding us in shrill vernacular as he does so. Then the whole brigade wants to let drive at him and squander ammunition at the rate of five dollars a second on that one pestiferous vagabond.
"Hold your fire, men!" is the order. "Give them half a chance and some of the painted humbugs will ride in closer."
By 5.30 the light is so uncertain that we, who are facing west along the plateau, and have the grim b.u.t.tresses of the b.u.t.tes in our front, can barely distinguish the scudding forms of the Indians; but the flash of their rifles is incessant, and now that they are forced back beyond the possibility of harm to our centre, the orders are to lie down and stand them off. These men crouching along the ridge are Company "F," of the Fifth. They and their captain (Payne) you have heard more of in the Ute campaign. One of them, a keen shot, has just succeeded in knocking an Indian out of his saddle and capturing his pony, and even while his comrades are shouting their congratulations, up comes Jack Finerty, who seeks his items on the skirmish line, and uses pencil and carbine with equal facility. Finerty wants the name of the man who killed that Indian, and, learning from the eager voices of the men that it is "Paddy" Nihil, he delightedly heads a new paragraph of his despatch "Nihil Fit," shakes hands with his brother Patlander, and scurries off to take a hand in the uproar on the left.
"The war that for a s.p.a.ce did fail Now trebly thundering swelled the gale."
Colonel Chambers, with his plucky infantrymen, has clambered up the cliff on the south, changed front forward on his right--practically, not tactically--and got in a flank fire along the very depressions in which the Indians are settled. This is more than they can stand. The sun goes down at Slim b.u.t.tes on hundreds of baffled and discomfited Sioux. They have lost their village; lost three hundred tip-top ponies. A dozen of their warriors and squaws are in our hands, and a dozen more are dead and dying in the attempt to recapture them; and the big white chief Crook has managed to gain all this with starving men and skeleton horses.
Drawing in for the night, we post strong pickets well out in every direction, but they are undisturbed. Now comes the summing-up of casualties. The adjutants make the weary round of their regiments through wind and rain, taking the reports of company commanders, and then repairing to the surgeons to verify the lists. Two or three lodges have been converted into field hospitals; and in one of these, among our own wounded, two of the surgeons are turning their attention to a captive--the warrior American Horse. He lies upon some muddy robes, with the life-blood ebbing from a ghastly hole in his side. Dr. Clements examines his savage patient tenderly, gently as he would a child; and, though he sees that nothing can save life, he does all that art can suggest. It is a painful task to both surgeon and subject. The latter scorns chloroform, and mutters some order to a squaw crouching at his feet. She glides silently from the tepee, and returns with a bit of hard stick; this he thrusts between his teeth, and then, as the surgeons work, and the sweat of agony breaks out upon his forehead, he bites deep into the wood, but never groans nor shrinks. Before the dawn his fierce spirit has taken its flight, and the squaws are crooning the death-chant by his side.
Our own dead are fortunately few, and they are buried deep in the ravine before we move southward in the morning--not only buried deep, but a thousand horses, in column of twos, tramp over the new-made graves and obliterate the trace. You think this is but poor respect to show to a soldier"s grave, no doubt; but then you don"t know Indians, and cannot be expected to know that as soon as we are gone the skulking rascals will come prowling into the camp, hunting high and low for those graves, and, if they find them, will dig up the bodies we would honor, secure the scalps as trophies of their prowess, and then, after indescribable hackings and mutilations, consign the poor remains to their four-footed relatives, the prairie wolves.
Our wounded are many, and a hard time the patient fellows are having.
Such rude shelter as their comrades can improvise from the Indian tepees we interpose between them and the dripping skies above. The rain-drops sputter in the flickering watch-fires around their cheerless bivouac; the night wind stirs the moaning pines upon the cliffs, and sweeps down in chill discordance through creaking lodge-poles and flapping roof of hide; the gaunt horses huddle close for warmth and shelter; the m.u.f.fled challenge of the outlying picket is answered by the yelp of skulking coyote; and wet, cold, muddy, and, oh! so hungry, the victors hug their drenched blankets about their ears, and, grasping their carbines, pillowed on their saddles, sleep the sleep of the deserving.
CHAPTER XIII.
A RACE FOR RATIONS.
The village of Slim b.u.t.tes destroyed, General Crook pushed ahead on his southward march in search of the Black Hills and rations. All Sunday morning Upham"s battalion of the Fifth Cavalry covered the rear, and fought back the savage attacks upon the column; but, once well away from the smoking ruins, we were but little molested, and soon after noon caught up with the rest of the regiment, and found the entire command going into bivouac along a little stream flowing northward from an opening among towering cliffs that were thrown like a barrier athwart our line of march. It was cold, cheerless, rainy weather, but here we found gra.s.s and water for our famished cattle; plenty of timber for our fires, though we had not a thing to cook, but men and horses were weak and chilled, and glad of a chance to rest.
Here Doctors Clements, Hartsuff, and Patzki, with their a.s.sistants, went busily to work perfecting the improvised transportation for the wounded.
There was not an ambulance or a field-litter in the command. Two officers--Bache, of the Fifth, and Von Luettwitz, of the Third Cavalry--were utterly _hors du combat_, the latter having left his leg at the fight on the previous day, and some twenty-five men, more or less severely wounded, were unable either to walk or ride a horse.
Frontiersmen are quick to take lessons from the Indians, the most practical of transportation masters. Saplings twelve feet in length were cut (Indian lodge-poles were utilized); the slender ends of two of these were lashed securely on either side of a spare pack-mule, the heavy ends trailing along the ground, and fastened some three feet apart by cross-bars. Canvas and blankets were stretched across the s.p.a.ce between; hereon one wounded man was laid, and what the Indians and plainsmen call a _travois_ was complete. Over prairie or rockless road it does very well, but for the severely wounded a far more comfortable litter was devised. Two mules were lashed "fore and aft" between two longer saplings; the intervening s.p.a.ce was rudely but comfortably upholstered with robes and blankets, and therein the invalid might ride for hours as smoothly as in a palace car. Once, in the Arizona mountains, I was carried an entire week in a similar contrivance, and never enjoyed easier locomotion--so long as the mules behaved. But just here it may be remarked that comfort which is in the faintest degree dependent upon the uniform and steadfast serenity of the army mule is of most uncertain tenure. Poor McKinstry, our wagon-master (who was killed in Payne"s fight with the Utes last September, and whose unflattering comparison may have been provoked by unhappy experiences with the s.e.x), used to say: "Most mules could swap ends quicker"n a woman could change her mind;" and it was by no means required that the mule should "swap ends"
to render the situation of the poor fellow in the _travois_ undesirable, if, indeed, he was permitted to retain it.
[Ill.u.s.tration: A SICK SOLDIER ON A "TRAVOIS."]
Sunday afternoon was spent in doing the little that could be done towards making the wounded comfortable, and the manufacture of rude leggins, moccasins, etc., from the skins captured from the Indians on the previous day. Sharp lookouts were kept, but no enemy appeared.
Evidently the Sioux were more than satisfied that Crook was worse than a badger in a barrel--a bad one to tackle.
Early on the morning of the 11th we climbed stiffly into saddle, and pushed on after our chief. Our way for some two miles or more led up grade through wooded bluffs and heights. A dense fog hung low upon the landscape, and we could only follow blindly in the trail of our leaders.
It was part of my duty to record each day"s progress, and to sketch in my note-book the topography of the line of march. A compa.s.s was always in the cuff of my gauntlet, and note-book in the breast of my hunting-shirt, but for three or four days only the trail itself, with streams we crossed and the heights within a mile or two of the flank, had been jotted down. Nothing further could be seen. It rained eleven days and nights without perceptible stop, and the whole country was flooded--so far as the mist would let us judge.
But this wretched Monday morning, an hour out from bivouac, we came upon a view I never shall forget. Riding along in the Fifth Cavalry column--every man wrapped in his own thoughts, and wishing himself wrapped in something warmer, all too cold and wet and dispirited to talk--we were aroused by exclamations of surprise and wonder among the troopers ahead. A moment more and we arrived in amaze at a veritable jumping-off place, a sheer precipice, and I reined out to the right to dismount and jot down the situation. We had been winding along up, up, for over an hour, following some old Indian trail that seemed to lead to the moon, and all of a sudden had come apparently to the end of the world. General Crook, his staff and escort, the dismounted men and the infantry battalion away ahead had turned sharp to the left, and could be faintly seen winding off into cloud-land some three hundred feet below.
Directly in our front, to the south, rolling, eddying ma.s.ses of fog were the only visible features. We were standing on the brink of a vertical cliff, its base lost in clouds far beneath. Here and there a faint breeze tore rents through the misty veil, and we caught glimpses of a treeless, shrubless plain beneath. Soon there came st.u.r.dier puffs of air; the sun somewhere aloft was shining brightly. We could neither see nor feel it--had begun to lose faith in its existence--but the clouds yielded to its force, and, swayed by the rising wind, drew away upward.
Divested of the glow of colored fires, the glare of calcium light, the shimmering, spangled radiance of the stage, the symphony of sweet orchestra, we were treated to a transformation scene the like of which I have never witnessed, and never want to see again.
The first curtain of fog uplifting, revealed rolling away five hundred feet beneath a brown barren, that ghastly compound of spongy ashes, yielding sand, and soilless, soulless earth, on which even greasewood cannot grow, and sage-brush sickens and dies--the "_mauvaises terres_"
of the French missionaries and fur-traders--the curt "bad lands" of the Plains vernacular, the meanest country under the sun. A second curtain, rising farther away to the slow music of muttered profanity from the audience, revealed only worse and more of it. The third curtain exposed the same rolling barren miles to the southward. The fourth reached away to the very horizon, and vouchsafed not a glimpse of the longed-for Hills, nor a sign of the needed succor. Hope died from hungry eyes, and strong men turned away with stifled groans.
One or two of us there were who knew that, long before we got sight of the Black Hills, we must pa.s.s the Sioux landmark of "Deer"s Ears"--twin conical heights that could be seen for miles in every direction, and even they were beyond range of my field-gla.s.ses. My poor horse, ugly, raw-boned, starved, but faithful "Blatherskite," was it in wretched premonition of your fate, I wonder, that you added your equine groan to the human chorus? You and your partner, "Donnybrook," were ugly enough when I picked you out of the quartermaster"s herd at Fort Hays the night we made our sudden start for the Sioux campaign. You had little to recommend you beyond the facility with which you could rattle your heels like shillalahs about the ribs of your companions--a trait which led to your Celtic t.i.tles--but you never thought so poorly of your rider as to suppose that, after you had worn yourselves down to skin and bone in carrying him those bleak two thousand miles, he would help eat you; but he did--and it seemed like cannibalism.
Well! The story of that day"s march isn"t worth the telling. We went afoot, dragging pounds of mud with every step, and towing our wretched steeds by the bridle-rein; envying the gaunt infantry, who had naught but their rifles to carry, and could march two miles to our one. But late that afternoon, with Deer"s Ears close at hand at last, we sank down along the banks of Owl Creek, the Heecha Wakpa of the Sioux; built huge fires, scorched our ragged garments, gnawed at tough horse meat, and wondered whether we really ever had tasted such luxuries as ham and eggs or porter-house steak. All night we lay there in the rain; and at dawn Upham"s battalion, with such horses as were thought capable of carrying a rider, were sent off down stream to the southeast on the trail of some wandering Indians who had crossed our front. The rest of us rolled our blankets and trudged out southward. It was Tuesday, the 12th of September, 1876--a day long to be remembered in the annals of the officers and men of the Big Horn and Yellowstone expedition; a day that can never be thoroughly described, even could it bear description; a day when scores of our horses dropped exhausted on the trail--when starving men toiled piteously along through thick clinging mud, or flung themselves, weeping and worn out, upon the broad, flooded prairie.
Happily, we got out of the Bad Lands before noon; but one and all were weak with hunger, and as we dragged through boggy stream-bed, men would sink hopelessly in the mire and never try to rise of themselves; _travois_ mules would plunge frantically in bog and quicksand, and pitch the wounded screaming from their litters. I hate to recall it. Duties kept me with the rear-guard, picking up and driving in stragglers. It was seven a.m. when we marched from Owl Creek. It was after midnight when Kellogg"s rearmost files reached the bivouac along the Crow. The night was pitchy dark, the rain was pitiless; half our horses were gone, many of the men were scattered over the cheerless prairie far behind.
But relief was at hand; the Belle Fourche was only a few miles away; beyond it lay the Black Hills and the stores of Crook City and Deadwood.
Commissary and couriers had been sent ahead to hurry back provisions; by noon of the coming sun there would be abundance.
The morning came slowly enough. All night it had rained in torrents; no gleam of sunlight came to gladden our eyes or thaw the stiffened limbs of our soldiers. Crow Creek was running like a mill-race. A third of the command had managed to cross it the evening before, but the rest had halted upon the northern bank. Roll-call showed that many men had still failed to catch up, and an examination of the ford revealed the fact that, with precipitous banks above and below, and deep water rushing over quicksands and treacherous bottom at the one available point, it must be patched up in some manner before a crossing could be effected.
An orderly summoned me to the general"s headquarters, and there I found him as deep in the mud as the rest of us. He simply wanted me to go down and put that ford into shape. "You will find Lieutenant Young there,"
said he, "and fifty men will report to you for duty." Lieutenant Young was there sure enough, and some fifty men did report, but there were no tools and the men were jaded; not more than ten or twelve could do a stroke of work. We hewed down willows and saplings with our hunting knives, brought huge bundles of these to the ford, waded in to the waist, and anch.o.r.ed them as best we could to the yielding bottom; worked like beavers until noon, and at last reported it practicable despite its looks. General Crook and his staff mounted and rode to the brink, but appearances were against us, and he plunged in to find a crossing for himself. Vigorous spurring carried him through, though twice we thought him down. But his horse scrambled up the opposite bank, the staff followed, dripping, and the next horseman of the escort went under, horse and all, and came sputtering to the surface at our shaky causeway, reached it in safety and floundered ash.o.r.e. Then all stuck to our ford--the long column of cavalry, the wounded on their _travois_ and the stragglers--and by two p.m. all were safely over. The Belle Fourche was only five miles away, but it took two good hours to reach it. The stream was broad, rapid, turbid, but the bottom solid as rock. Men clung to horses" tails or the stirrups of their mounted comrades, and were towed through, and then saddles were whipped off in a dense grove of timber, fires glowed in every direction, herd guards drove the weary horses to rich pastures among the slopes and hillsides south of the creek bottom, and all unoccupied men swarmed out upon the nearest ridge to watch for the coming wagons. Such a shout as went up when the cry was heard, "Rations coming." Such a mob as gathered when the foremost wagon drove in among the famished men. Guards were quickly stationed, but before that could be done the boxes were fairly s.n.a.t.c.hed from their owner and their contents scattered through the surging crowd. Discipline for a moment was forgotten, men fought like tigers for crackers and plugs of tobacco. Officers ran to the scene and soon restored order, but I know that three ginger-snaps I picked up from the mud under the horses" feet and shared with Colonel Mason and Captain Woodson--the first bite of bread we had tasted in three days--were the sweetest morsels we had tasted in years.
By five p.m. wagon after wagon had driven in. Deadwood and Crook City had rallied to the occasion. All they heard was that Crook"s army had reached the Belle Fourche, starving. Our commissary, Captain Bubb, had bought, at owners" prices, all the bacon, flour, and coffee to be had.
Local dealers had loaded up with every eatable item in their establishments. Company commanders secured everything the men could need. Then prominent citizens came driving out with welcoming hands and appreciated luxuries, and just as the sun went down Colonel Mason and I were emptying tin cups of steaming coffee and for two mortal hours eating flap-jacks as fast as the cook could turn them out. Then came the blessed pipe of peace, warm, dry blankets, and the soundest sleep that ever tired soldier enjoyed. Our troubles were forgotten.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE BLACK HILLS.
It was on Wednesday evening that our good friends, the pioneers of Deadwood and Crook City, reached us with their wagons, plethoric with all manner of provender, and the next day, as though in congratulation, the bright sunshine streamed in upon us, and so did rations. The only hard-worked men were the cooks, and from before dawn to late at evening not an hour"s respite did they enjoy. Towards sundown we caught sight of Upham"s battalion, coming in from its weary scout down stream. They had not seen an Indian, yet one poor fellow, Milner of Company "A," riding half a mile ahead of them in eager pursuit of an antelope, was found ten minutes after, stripped, scalped, and frightfully gashed and mutilated with knives, stone dead, of course, though still warm. Pony tracks were fresh in the springy sod all around him, but ponies and riders had vanished. Pursuit was impossible. Upham had not a horse that could more than stagger a few yards at a time. The maddest man about it was our Sergeant-Major, Humme, an admirable shot and a man of superhuman nerve and courage; yet only a few months ago you read how he, with Lieutenant Weir, met a similar fate at the hands of the Utes. He fought a half-score of them single-handed, and sent one of them to his final account before he himself succ.u.mbed to the missiles they poured upon him from their shelter in the rocks. A better soldier never lived, and there was grim humor in the statement of the eleven surviving Ute warriors, that they didn"t want to fight Weir and Humme, but were obliged to kill them in self-defence. Weir was shot dead before he really saw the adversary, and those twelve unfortunate warriors, armed with their repeaters, would undoubtedly have suffered severely at the hands of Humme and his single shooter if they hadn"t killed him too.
This is digressing, but it is so exquisitely characteristic of the Indian Bureau"s way of doing things that, now that the peace commissioners have triumphantly announced that the attack on Thornburg"s command was all an accident, and have allowed the Indians to bully, temporize, and hoodwink them into weeks of fruitless delay (the rascals never meant to surrender the Meeker murderers so long as they had only peace commissioners to deal with), and now that, after all, the army has probably got to do over again what it started to do last October, and could readily have accomplished long ere this had they not been hauled off by the Bureau, the question naturally suggests itself, how often is this sort of thing to be repeated? Year after year it has been done. A small force of soldiers sent to punish a large band of Indian murderers or marauders. The small band has been well-nigh annihilated in many instances. Then the country wakes up, a large force concentrates at vast expense, and the day of retribution has come, when, sure as shooting, the Bureau has stepped in with restraining hand. No end of silk-hatted functionaries have hurried out from Washington, shaken hands and smoked a pipe with a score of big Indians; there has been a vast amount of cheap oratory and buncombe talk about the Great Father and guileless red men, at the end of which we are told to go back to camp and bury our dead, and our late antagonists, laughing in their sleeves, link arms with their aldermanic friends, are "dead-headed" off to Washington, where they are lionized at the White House, and sent the rounds of the great cities, and finally return to their reservations laden down with new and improved rifles and ammunition, stove-pipe hats, and Saratoga trunks, more than ever convinced that the one way to get what they want out of Uncle Sam is to slap his face every spring and shake hands in the fall. The apparent theory of the Bureau is that the soldier is made to be killed, the Indian to be coddled.
However, deeply as my comrades and myself may feel on this subject, it does not properly enter into a narrative article. Let us get back to Upham"s battalion, who reached us late on the afternoon of the fourteenth, desperately tired and hungry. We lost no time in ministering to their wants, though we still had no grain for our horses, but the men made merry over abundant coffee, bacon and beans, and bread and mola.s.ses, and were unspeakably happy.
That evening the general decided to send back to the crossings of the swollen streams that had impeded our march on the 12th, and in which many horses and mules and boxes of rifle ammunition had been lost.
Indians prowling along our trail would come upon that ammunition as the stream subsided, and reap a rich harvest.
The detail fell upon the Fifth Cavalry. One officer and thirty men to take the back track, dig up the boxes thirty miles away, and bring them in. With every prospect of meeting hundreds of the Sioux following our trail for abandoned horses, the duty promised to be trying and perilous, and when the colonel received the orders from headquarters, and, turning to me, said, "Detail a lieutenant," I looked at the roster with no little interest. Of ten companies of the Fifth Cavalry present, each was commanded by its captain, but subalterns were scarce, and with us such duties were a.s.signed in turn, and the officer "longest in" from scout or detachment service was Lieutenant Keyes. So that young gentleman, being hunted up and notified of his selection, girded up his loins and was about ready to start alone on his perilous trip, when there came swinging up to me an officer of infantry--an old West Point comrade who had obtained permission to make the campaign with the Fifth Cavalry and had been a.s.signed to Company "I" for duty, but who was not detailable, strictly speaking, for such service as Keyes"s, from our roster. "Look here, King, you haven"t given me half a chance this last month, and if I"m not to have this detail, I want to go with Keyes, as subordinate, or anything; I don"t care, only I want to go." The result was that he did go, and when a few days since we read in the _Sentinel_ that Satterlee Plummer, a native of Wisconsin and a graduate of West Point, had been reinstated in the army on the special recommendation of General Crook, for gallantry in Indian campaign, I remembered this instance of the Sioux war of 1876, and, looking back to my note-book, there I found the record and result of their experience on the back track--they brought in fourteen horses and all the ammunition without losing a man.
[Ill.u.s.tration: DEADWOOD CITY, BLACK HILLS OF DAKOTA.]
Now our whole attention was given to the recuperation of our horses--the cavalryman"s first thought. Each day we moved camp a few miles up the lovely Whitewood valley, seeking fresh gra.s.s for the animals, and on September 18th we marched through the little hamlet of Crook City, and bivouacked again in a beautiful amphitheatre of the hills, called Centennial Park. From here, dozens of the officers and men wandered off to visit the mining gulches and settlements in the neighborhood, and numbers were taken prisoners by the denizens of Deadwood and royally entertained. General Crook and his staff, with a small escort, had left us early on the morning of the 16th, to push ahead to Fort Laramie and set about the organization of a force for immediate resumption of business. This threw General Merritt in command of the expedition, and meant that our horses should become the objects of the utmost thought and care. Leaving Centennial Park on the 19th, we marched southward through the Hills, and that afternoon came upon a pretty stream named, as many another is throughout the Northwest, the Box Elder, and there we met a train of wagons, guarded by spruce artillerymen fresh from their casemates on the seaboard, who looked upon our rags with undisguised astonishment, not unmixed with suspicion. But they were eagerly greeted, and that night, for the first time in four long weeks, small measures of oats and corn were dealt out to our emaciated animals. It was touching to see how carefully and tenderly the rough-looking men spread the precious morsels before their steeds, petting them the while, and talking as fond nonsense to their faithful friends as ever mother crooned to sleeping child. It was only a bite for the poor creatures, and their eyes begged wistfully for more. We gave them two nights" rest, and then, having consumed all the gra.s.s to be had, pushed on to Rapid Creek, thence again to the southern limits of the Hills, pa.s.sing through many a mining camp or little town with a name suggestive of the wealth and population of London. We found Custer City a deserted village--many a store and dozens of houses utterly untenanted. No forage to be had for love or money. Our horses could go no farther, so for weeks we lay along French Creek, moving camp every day or two a mile or more for fresh gra.s.s. It was dull work, but the men enjoyed it; they were revelling in plenty to eat and no drills, and every evening would gather in crowds around the camp-fires, listening to some favorite vocalist or yarn-spinner. Once in a while letters began to reach us from anxious ones at home, and make us long to see them; and yet no orders came, no definite prospects of relief from our exile. At last, the second week in October started us out on a welcome raid down the valley of the South Cheyenne, but not an Indian was caught napping, and finally, on the 23d of October, we were all concentrated in the vicinity of the Red Cloud Agency to take part in the closing scene of the campaign and a.s.sist in the disarming and unhorsing of all the reservation Indians.
General MacKenzie, with the Fourth Cavalry and a strong force of artillery and infantry, was already there, and as we marched southward to surround the Indian camps and villages from the direction of Hat Creek our array was not unimposing, numerically. The infantry, with the "weak-horsed" cavalry, moved along the prairie road. Colonel Royall"s command (Third Cavalry and Noyes"s Battalion of the Second) was away over to the eastward, and well advanced, so as to envelope the doomed villages from that direction. We of the Fifth spread out over the rolling plain to the west, and in this order all moved towards Red Cloud, twenty odd miles away. It was prettily planned, but scores of wary, savage eyes had watched all Crook"s preparations at the agency.
The wily Indian was quick to divine that his arms and ponies were threatened, and by noon we had the dismal news by courier that they had stampeded in vast numbers. We enjoyed the further satisfaction of sighting with our gla.s.ses the distant clouds of dust kicked up by their scurrying ponies. A few hundred warriors, old men and "blanket Indians,"
surrendered to MacKenzie, but we of the Big Horn were empty-handed when once more we met our brigadier upon the following day.