On Tuesday morning Merritt marched his column on to Camp Robinson, where he and the rest of his command expected to enjoy as much as two days of layover while they waited for their wagon train to catch up before having to resume their journey to Fort Laramie. Captain Emil Adams’s Company C rejoined the regiment at Red Cloud Agency after Merritt had detached them on 14 July to watch over the crossing of the Running Water. The colonel used his time that night of the eighteenth to compose a report of the fight of the Warbonnet he would telegraph the following morning to Major Townsend, commander at Laramie. From there Townsend wired the news to headquarters in Omaha, the report flying on to Chicago and points east where everyone waited impatiently for any crumb of news about a victory—no matter how small—something good to come from all the disappointment and disaster that so far had greeted the nation that Centennial summer.
It was there at Red Cloud that the Fifth’s famed scout penned his own letter to wife Louisa, back at home with their children in Rochester, New York.
We have come in here for rations. We have had a fight. I killed Yellow Hand a Cheyenne Chief in a single-handed fight. You will no doubt hear of it through the paper. I am going as soon as I can reach Fort Laramie the place we are headed for now. Sent the war bonnet, bridle, whip, arms and his scalp to Kernwood to put up in his window.
… We are now ordered to join Gen. Crook and will be there in two weeks.
Merritt was indeed still under Sheridan’s explicit orders to reinforce Crook’s expedition languishing in the lee of the Big Horn Mountains. Every one of those troopers figured the wait at Camp Robinson for their supply wagons would give the regiment a welcome chance to recoup themselves. Instead, the surprising Lieutenant Hall hoved into sight at noon that Tuesday, leading his short column of his white-topped company wagons, a scant few hours behind the hard-marching cavalry.
Their reports complete, Merritt gave his company commanders no more than two hours to reoutfit, draw rations and ammunition from Hall’s train, then at two-thirty P.M. put the Fifth back on the trail to Fort Laramie. After a march of ten miles on the eighteenth, making another twenty-five miles on the nineteenth, they pushed a tiresome twenty-eight miles on the twentieth. Putting the last thirty miles behind them, the regiment marched into Fort Laramie just after three o’clock on the afternoon of the twenty-first.
That Friday evening Bill Cody found King at his mess fire, enjoying a cup of coffee and relishing some of the sutler’s tobacco in his battered pipe.
“Ho, Bill!” King called out cheerily. “Come join us!”
“You’re just the man I was hoping to find,” Cody replied, settling on a cottonwood stump at the fire.
The lieutenant said, “The fellas here would like you to tell us again of your fight with Yellow Hand.”
Cody leaned back, rubbing his palms across his thighs, and nodded. “All right—but with one guarantee from you, Lieutenant.”
“What’s that?” King asked.
“You write down what I tell you—since it happened to me and I’m the one ought to know.”
“Write it down?” the lieutenant inquired.
“Yes. That’s why I came to find you: wanted to ask you if you’d write a newspaper story.”
“A newspaper story?”
Cody nodded, again rubbing his hands expectantly on his buckskin britches. “There’s others—these correspondents and such—they’re going to write their own stories their own versions of what happened … but I want to be sure there’s one story written just the way it really happened, Lieutenant.”
“Why, sure!” King answered enthusiastically. “I can do that, Bill. I’d be honored to do that for you, in fact. Have you got a paper in mind you want me to see gets your own story?”
“The Herald.”
“New York?”
“That’s right.”
King got to his feet, anxious. “I’ll get some paper from my tent and be right back.”
After that first night the lieutenant, that famed scout, and the Fifth Cavalry did not have long to tarry at Fort Laramie. Sheridan was ordering up the rest of the regiment to join in the march to reinforce Crook. Dispatches awaiting Merritt with post commander Townsend stated that Captain George F. Price’s E Company was already on its way from Fort Hays by rail. F Company under Captain J. Scott Payne was to join Price along the Smoky Hill line so that both companies would ride to Cheyenne together.
But after Sheridan had Company H coming from Fort Wallace, Kansas, and L Troop on its way from Fort Lyon in Colorado, the lieutenant general changed his mind. Instead of sending them on north with Merritt to reinforce Crook, Sheridan decided that once they arrived at Laramie, both companies were ordered east to bolster the defenses at Camp Robinson in the wake of the Cheyenne’s attempt to flee the reservation.
After resting no more than twelve hours at Fort Laramie, Merritt and Carr had the men up at first light on the twenty-second, intending to use only one day to take on supplies from the post quartermaster for Hall’s wagon train, as well as force the fort’s and regimental blacksmiths to work overtime at their fires, anvils, and hammers, reshoeing every animal that needed work before heading north to the Big Horn country.
Before the Fighting Fifth would again march into harm’s way.
This time against Crazy Horse and that Hunkpapa visionary known as Sitting Bull.
It wasn’t women.
But the supply train those seven companies of Chambers’s infantry escorted up to Camp Cloud Peak from Fort Fetterman had brought with it the most seductive lure just shy of rounded breasts and full thighs.
Whiskey.
A civilian peddler had lived up to his reputation and become a bummer, talking Major Alexander Chambers into allowing him to bring his own wagon and two teamsters along for the trip north with the army’s supply wagons. Having learned that Major Arthur, the district’s temporary paymaster, would accompany Chambers north to pay Crook’s men in the field, this wily civilian realized he’d have a captive market all to himself: soldiers with nowhere to spend what little money they might have in their pockets after seeing to it some of their pay was sent back east, home to loved ones. No matter what army scrip those soldiers would have left, that whiskey trader was bound and determined to relieve them of every last farthing.
And for his special customers—those who had a bit more money jangling down in the pockets of their wool britches—the peddler even let the grapevine know that he had a couple of women who wouldn’t mind servicing the inhabitants of Crook’s cavalry camp—for a small fee, of course.
That pair who came all the way north from Fetterman disguised as teamsters went right to work lying down on the job to earn their wages the very next day, the fourteenth of July. Problem was, there didn’t seem to be that many soldiers who could afford the trader’s pricey whiskey, much less his more seductive wares.
At Camp Cloud Peak was one soldier who did have just enough money to get himself into a fine mess—Captain Alexander Sutorious.
A good man he was, Seamus believed, thinking back now to that Monday, the seventeenth, when Crook finally discovered what had been going on behind his back all the while the general was coming and going, in and out of camp on his hunting trips into the hills. When Crook got wind of the shenanigans—his pale, mottled face turned a pure crimson.