Donegan’s brow knitted as he brooded on that a moment, then pulled the stub of his briar pipe from his lips and said, “It’s true that the red man’s done his best to raise my hair—that much is for sure, Johnny. But to paint them all with that same black brush—why, I’m not about to do it. I’ve seen too much good in some Injins, scouts and trackers and others, to condemn the whole of them. I could have stayed back east in Boston, even your Chicago, and not seen a single Indian for all my life. Maybe some white men brought this on themselves—taking what ain’t theirs.”
“Wait a minute, Irishman,” said Frederick Van Vliet of the Third Cavalry. “So what should become of those good, God-fearing folks who want to come out here to settle, raise a family, and make a new life for themselves?”
Seamus wagged his head. “You’re asking the wrong man, Captain. I’m for sure no politician, and I don’t have any easy answers on the tip of my silver tongue.”
“Then perhaps you should think things over,” Finerty advised, “until you know what you want to believe in.”
“Oh, I know what I believe in, Johnny boy. I damn well know what I believe in,” he replied, his bile rising at the challenge. “Seems to me what should happen to folks who come out to settle on land that belongs to other people should be what happens to any folks who steal something that don’t belong to ’em.”
“What?” Finerty demanded in a shrill voice. “You’re saying white folks should pay those black-hearted savages for the land they want to farm?”
“Can’t you see, Donegan?” Mills jumped into the argument. “That’s exactly what the land commission is doing at this very moment: trying to strike an accord for the purchase of the Black Hills. But the Indians are balking.”
Seamus shook his head in disbelief. “So we don’t get what we want—we’ll take it anyway?”
“I say we were meant to pacify this land from sea to shining sea,” Captain Peter D. Vroom said. “To make it fruitful and we to prosper thereby.”
“But to do that,” Donegan said, “the fighting men on both sides are made victims of the war between the War Department, sent to fight the Indians, and the Interior Department, supposed to watch over the welfare of the Indians.”
Finerty cheered, “I say the Grant administration’s done the right thing: turning the Indians over to the army. Now it’s time to let the army settle this once and for all!”
“Odd, don’t you think, Johnny—that the men on both sides of this war are being killed by government bullets?”
With a snap of his fingers the newsman said, “By the saints—I think you’ve got something there, Seamus. That could well be the germination of a great editorial I could write on the utter insanity of the government giving weapons and bullets to our helpless red wards, who then escape their assigned reservations, using those bullets to kill the soldiers that same government sends to drive the red savages back to their agencies.”
With the correspondent’s last few words, Donegan began to peer to the south over Finerty’s shoulder, his attention drawn to the nearby hills where pickets had been signaling with their semaphores. Suddenly the brow of a distant hill dippled with over two hundred horsemen.
“Johnny boy, looks like you’re gonna get another chance to show just how much you hate all red men,” Seamus said with a grin, “both friendly and otherwise.”
With a start Finerty and some of the others twisted about, stunned to see the tall lances carried by those distant warriors.
“Brazen sons of bitches, ain’t they?” John Bourke said. “To dare venture this close to an armed camp.”
“Those aren’t Sioux, Lieutenant,” Donegan said, as Pourier strode up. “Right, Bat?”
The half-breed replied, “Snake.”
“The Shoshone?” Finerty said. “They’re back?”
“They promised Crook they’d return,” Bourke marveled as he turned to leave. “By damn, the general will want to see this!”
Down from the slopes came that colorful procession of fluttering feathers and streaming scalp locks tied to halters, rifle muzzles, and buffalo-hide shields. Bright-red or dark-blue trade-cloth leggings were shown off by some, while most wore only a breechclout and moccasins under the warmth of that summer sun. They carried rifles and old muzzle-loading fusils, a few even proud to brandish a cap-and-ball revolver. Wolf-hide and puma-skin quivers stuffed with iron-tipped arrows and their sinew-backed horn bows hung at every back.
And at the head of them all rode Tom Cosgrove, that veteran of the Confederate cavalry who had made a new life for himself near Camp Brown on the Wind River Reservation after the war, marrying into the tribe and raising a family of his own, then once more answering the patriot’s call when what he loved most was threatened by the enemy. With his two closest friends, former rebels Nelson Yarnell and Yancy Eckles, Cosgrove had brought eighty-six Shoshone warriors over the mountains last month to answer Three Stars’s plea for scouts and Indian auxiliaries. After the army’s stalemate on the Rosebud, the Snake had abandoned Crook to return home.
Now the three were back, this time bringing 220 warriors.
Yet it was an old, stately warrior who caused the greatest stir as the picturesque parade approached camp: a handsome, wrinkled, and gray-haired war chief who sat proudly erect as he led his tribesmen to the camp of the Three Stars.
“Who is that, Bat?” Seamus asked.
“Only can be Washakie.”
“The old chief himself,” the Irishman replied. “Old Big Throat himself told me Washakie goes back to the first time white men came to these mountains.”
Pourier nodded. “Days of Jim Bridger, Shad Sweete, and Titus Bass—old trappers like them. Why, Washakie’s put some seventy-two or -three winters behind him already. And he still looks strong as a bull in spring! Lookee there, he’s brought his two sons along with him. Those boys right behind Washakie, riding with Yarnell and Eckles.”
“By damn!” Finerty said. “Even back east we’ve heard that year in and year out Washakie has been one of the most loyal allies the army could ever hope to have.”
Donegan turned to the newsman with a grin to ask, “You mean you’re gonna get soft on Injins now, John? Figuring maybe the army shouldn’t go and kill ’em all?”
“Maybe you just oughtta let me be, Irishman!” Finerty snapped. “Say, Bat—who are them two squaws riding behind the old boy? His wives?”
Pourier shook his head. “I don’t figure Washakie to bring his women. They must be the wives of the two Snakes who stayed with us.”
Donegan asked, “That pair of warriors what were too badly wounded for the others to take back to Wind River on travois?”
With a nod Pourier replied, “Yeah. Likely those women come to be with their husbands, help put ’em on the mend.”
Finerty shook a raised fist in the air and cheered, “Hurrah! Hurrah for Washakie’s soldiers! Now Crook can go whip Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse!”
“I don’t think we’ll be going anytime soon,” Anson Mills grumbled. “No matter that the Shoshone have returned, I’ll wager Crook will wait some more, at least until the Fifth gets here.”
“Why tarry so long—if the enemy is all around us?” Robert Strahorn asked.
“I suppose it’s an old military axiom I learned at the academy,” Mills replied. “A commander must never, never underestimate his enemy.”
“With this army made to retreat from the Rosebud, followed only days later by Custer’s regiment being butchered,” said Captain William H. Andrews of the Third Cavalry, “we’ve twice felt the savage, brutal, and bloody power of our enemy.”
“Don’t you fear. When we finally do march,” Mills told them, “it will be to destroy what bands we don’t drive into the agencies. When we march—it will be to end this Sioux War once and for all.”