“Here we will be a stone rolled squarely into the hostiles’ garden,” Miles was fond of saying as summer waned and slid headlong into autumn.
The days gradually shortened as Terry and Crook lumbered about in search of the Sioux. And then the soldier chief called the Red Beard found a band of them camped beside the Slim Buttes. Yet in the end, Crook’s men—infantry and cavalry alike—had barely survived getting the hell out of Sioux country, down to eating their horses.
Somewhere out there Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse still wandered about with their war camps filled with souvenirs from the fight along the Little Bighorn.
“It won’t be Crook who gets a crack at them now,” Miles had told his officers. “Terry’s scampered back to Lincoln for the winter. And Crook’s gone lame with that horsemeat march. He’s headed back to Laramie with his tail stuck between his legs.”
By autumn the free-flowing creeks were down to a trickle, no longer carrying a rush of water through this fickle country to the Yellowstone. And with the great river growing more shallow with every day, the steamer captains could no longer urge their paddle wheels clear up to the mouth of the Tongue, where Miles was building his base of operations for the winter. Instead, the pilots could navigate no farther than the mouth of Glendive Creek, a full 110 miles downstream from the Tongue. It was there that Miles had six companies of the Twenty-second Infantry go into camp, guarding the supplies off-loaded from the steamers, soldiers to act as escort for those wagon trains bound up the Yellowstone Valley before winter closed its fist upon this high land.
In the last few weeks two companies of the Seventeenth Infantry had also arrived on a supply steamer. But they were both small companies—no more than thirty-five men each, which made for long days of weary tedium in their escort duties, what with at least three trips to the Tongue River and back each month. As well as keeping an eye out for the Indians rumor hinted were headed for the Yellowstone.
But since August, Smith and the rest hadn’t seen so much as a feather, not so much as a warrior along the skyline. Except for the cold and their boring rations, and that grueling work offloading the steamers and loading the wagons … it was pretty tame duty. Then a few days back they had received intelligence from their scouts that some six hundred lodges of hostiles were south of the Yellowstone and moving north. With any luck the Sioux would be more interested in hunting buffalo than in making a nuisance of themselves.
They had pulled those ninety-four freight wagons and an ambulance away from the Glendive Cantonment just past ten-thirty A.M. yesterday. It hadn’t been long before Smith had noticed the first of the columns of white smoke far in their front beyond the hills. Instantly he recalled how Captain Miner had told his small cadre of officers about his uneasiness, at their breakfast fire when others complained that things had been too quiet.
“Those Sioux might even intend to intercept us.”
By the time Smith had reined about and rode back that two hundred yards to the front of the column with his sergeant, most of the soldiers and civilians had already sighted the shafts of signal smoke. Refusing to halt for no reason, Miner kept them moving for the time being as the men grumbled among themselves and the wagons creaked with the cold trace chains jangling in sharp bursts of metallic chatter in the dry air.
Beneath a brilliant autumn sun things remained quiet throughout the afternoon, despite those ominous signal fires ahead of their line of march. Near five o’clock yesterday the column went into camp at Spring Creek,* at a place the soldiers and teamsters had come to call Fourteen-mile Camp. By firelight Captain Miner wrote in his official journal for the day:
The camp is in the bed of a creek, and commanded by hills at short range on all sides but the south, where it is open toward the Yellowstone River. There is a good deal of brush, and some timber along the banks of the creek. The corrals were made as compactly as possible for the night, and secured with ropes; the companies were camped close to them, two on each side; thirty-six men and four noncommissioned officers were detailed for guard; two reserves were formed and placed on the flanks not protected by the companies.
“With all that smoke, them savages surely must be telling someone about us coming,” First Lieutenant Benjamin C. Lockwood had said as night had come down on the 160 men of Miner’s command.
“Then that means they’re not strong enough to chance hitting us,” First Lieutenant William Conway replied confidently.
“Those fires just means they’re calling for more warriors,” Second Lieutenant William H. Kell advised. “We best cover some ground tomorrow.”
Just past eleven o’clock last night the entire camp was put on alert by a single rifle shot. Smith joined other officers rushing into the dark toward the ring of pickets Miner had thrown out around the wagon camp and the grazing mules.
“I’s the one fired that shot, sir!” a soldier admitted from the inky blackness of that night.
“What for, soldier?” Miner prodded as the man stepped closer.
“Saw a figure—took it to be a Injun, sir. Give him the challenge word, and he skedaddled off like I’d painted his ass with turpentine. I give a shot to either drop ’im, or speed ’im on his way.
Miner rotated the pickets an hour later at midnight and the men had settled back in their bedrolls.
Near three-thirty a brief rattle of gunfire brought Smith and the rest out of their blankets. Shot after shot was fired into camp from a distant bluff. As the rounds whistled overhead or smacked into the earth around him, the lieutenant could make out the bright, flaring muzzle flashes of the enemy guns as all the men were formed up, put on alert, ready for action. Here and there in camp a spent bullet whacked against the side of a wagon or clanged against a cast-iron kettle. Because of the distance, Miner declined to engage the warriors in a long-range duel. Instead, he kept his men ready for any try the warriors might make for the herd. It wasn’t long before Smith realized the warriors did indeed have the herd in mind: most of the shots were landing in and among the corral, wounding some of the mules, scattering many others that pulled up their picket pins and broke their sidelines.
After no more than an hour the firing died off—without the soldiers firing a shot. Orders were passed along that a cold breakfast was scheduled for later that morning: no fires to be kindled that would backlight the soldiers and thereby provide easy targets for any of the skulking redskins. Only water from their canteens and hardtack. Nothing more than that as the men struck their tents and reloaded their wagons.
And with the first graying of the horizon that Wednesday morning, the wagon master brought the worst news.
“How many did you say?” Miner squealed in dismay.
“Fifty-seven mules, Cap’n,” the civilian repeated. “Likely run off by the Injuns when they went to shooting into camp last night.”
The nervous teamsters anxiously hitched up what mules they had left to pull the freight, down to five-mule hitches on more than half the wagons. The sun hadn’t yet put in its debut when Miner ordered the march, assigning Captain Malcom McArthur’s C Company of the Seventeenth Infantry to act as rearguard. Their column had no more than strung itself out, jangling little more than a mile, when McArthur’s men came under attack by a war party concealed in a ravine no more than two hundred yards to their left. From there, concealed by thick brush and stunted cedar, the warriors laid down a galling fire on the soldiers as the column ground to an immediate halt.