Each fall Libbie would join him on a trip back east, perhaps going on to Chicago or New York for some of the bright lights and bustling activity of those teeming cities. Yet the sophisticated veneer wore thin all too quickly, and he found himself suffering that gnawing emptiness once more … needing to replenish the well of his own soul with those desolate prairies and high plains of the far west. Only there on the wild land did he feel himself near whole again—as near to being whole as he had been for the seven years since that long winter gone.
Only then did Custer feel somewhat closer to the Cheyenne woman’s wildness once more.
“Your mount is ready, Mr. Burkman?”
“It is, General.” The private shoved the stub of the pencil back in his pocket and stuffed his notebook in his blue tunic. “I saddled Vic for you, sir. And the troop farrier has Dandy ready for Mrs. Custer—just as you requested, sir.”
“Splendid! I want both those fine animals to get their fill of clean prairie air on this campaign.”
Burkman watched the general remove his hat and swipe his forearm across his brow. In the short time he had known Custer, the young private had watched the general’s hairline recede at a steady pace. Burkman declared cheerily, “Gonna be a hot one for sure today, General.”
He winked at his orderly. “Not even summer yet, John. I’ll just bet you can’t wait.”
Custer stood in Dakota Territory after all, where every scorching summer the land lay blistered like steamy rawhide beneath a merciless one-eyed sun. Winters were just as deadly if not even more brutal, with nothing to slow the arctic wind but the grasslands of Canada.
Still, winter or summer, one of the biggest problems remained that the fort had no well, not even a cistern. Every day water wagons made that bumpy ride down to the river to draw the day’s rations. By late December or early January, those on the water detail would have to chop through as much as five feet of ice before they could haul water up from the Missouri.
If it wasn’t the snow swirling like white buckshot in an eye-stinging winter blizzard, then the soldiers of the Seventh found the summer sky turned black with grasshoppers. If the grasshoppers clinging to everything and everybody wasn’t enough, all a man had to do was wait until the cool of the evening for relief from the excruciating temperatures, when the hordes of mosquitoes would rise up above the Big Muddy like a biting, bloody curse suffered upon the land. Some of the soldiers who had to be outdoors at that time of day had even taken to wearing a balloonlike helmet made with wire and draped with a special netting for protection from the bloodsucking monsters.
After a while a lot of those old-timers with the Seventh Cavalry cursed their lot, wondering what they had done to deserve their imprisonment in this hellhole on the Upper Missouri. Many of them joked that Satan’s roaring fires of sulfur and brimstone could be no worse than late summer at Fort Abraham Lincoln when the thermometer still hovered at better than ninety degrees come sunset and the clock chiming off nine bells.
“Thank you, Mr. Burkman.” Custer admired his stocking-footed, blaze-faced sorrel. “Vic looks ready as ever, doesn’t she?”
Handing the general his reins, John said, “She does that, sir. Even more splendid when you’re in the saddle.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say my orderly was bucking for a promotion!”
Custer laughed easily as he tightened Vic’s reins to turn his mare toward the massive parade where the troops gathered for review. Most of the men had spent the last few nights in tents off a distance from the post on a shakedown to ready them for what lay ahead on their march across the western prairie.
“Be sure to fetch Dandy for Mrs. Custer and have him saddled promptly, John,” Custer reminded as he pranced away, waving his big cream-colored hat in the humid dawn air. “Her luggage is down in the foyer, just inside the front door. Have it thrown in my wagon, will you?”
Burkman nodded. He watched the general bring the hat down to strike Vic on her right flank, spurring the mare into that bustle of activity that was the Seventh U.S. Cavalry marching to war.
CHAPTER 2
THE sun hung a hand high above the horizon when the last wagon was hitched and all troopers stood in formation for parade review through the fort. Libbie, and Custer’s own sister Margaret, who had married handsome, solemn James Calhoun of L Company, both sat sidesaddle, anxious and waiting to get under way. Earlier that spring Custer had applied for, and won, a transfer of Calhoun’s younger brother, Fred, from General Terry’s infantry to his own regiment of cavalry. Fred Calhoun, everyone knew, had married Custer’s young niece, Emma Reed. Custer wanted his family gathered round him with the coming campaign and his approaching hour of glory.
“Is all in readiness, Custer?”
General Alfred H. Terry, commander of the Department of Dakota, sat ramrod straight atop his gray charger.
“We’re ready, sir!” Custer exclaimed exuberantly. “Shall we press on?”
“By all means, Custer. Let’s march.”
He shouted to his bugler, Henry Voss. “‘Boots and Saddles,’ Sergeant!”
With the brassy explosion of those first few notes from Voss’s bugle, there arose over the baked-mud parade a chorus of cheers and huzzahs. The army would be hard-pressed to find a single one of these men clambering aboard their mounts who didn’t consider a march across the prairie highly preferable to a summer spent lollygagging around Fort Lincoln. Each and every one of these men in blue cheered and slapped themselves onto saddle leather, happy as only a horse soldier could be. Each knew he had a grand opportunity to whip some Sioux and come riding back home with a victory beneath his army belt. Word from the scouts themselves was that they’d have an easy time of it—what with joining up with Colonel John Gibbon riding out of the west leading his cavalry and infantry both, and General George Crook marching up from the south with thirteen hundred more.
A few of the old files had been grumbling over the last few days despite the promising odds, asking themselves why they had to go along anyway. With that many soldiers and those few redskins … why, there damn sure wouldn’t be enough warriors to go around to make this trip worth a teetotaler’s spit. Hardly enough Sioux bucks to make the fight worth the trouble of loading a carbine or working up a sweat arguing with a pack mule.
“Boston! Autie! You ride back with Tom. Hear, now?” ordered Custer.
The two young men pulled their horses out, whipping them back to Captain Tom Custer’s C Company. Brother Boston, youngest of the Custer boys, all of twenty-five and a civilian forager on the army payroll for seventy-five dollars per month for these past five years, had taken a leave of absence since the third of March to accompany his two older brothers on this Sioux campaign. And young Autie—Harry Armstrong Reed—named after his famous uncle, an adventuresome, fresh-faced farm boy of eighteen years, loped after his Uncle Boston back to join Uncle Tom’s troops.
“Bugler!” Custer roared at Voss. “Sound the advance! Center guide, forward, ho!”
Custer nodded to General Terry before he spurred off to fetch Libbie. Sister Margaret would await the passing of husband James Calhoun’s L Company.
Behind General Terry arose that familiar creak of slat bed, freight-wagon wood, tire iron, and harness leather, the slaps and curses of wagon master and teamsters as they set the regiments in motion. Custer’s cavalry and Terry’s infantry, hooves and boots and wheels all cutting and chopping at the rain-soaked, sun-hardened dreariness of the parade. Having spent the last two days and nights on Cannon Ball Creek some three miles below the fort in preparation for this campaign, the men were itching to head west at last.