For a moment American Horse turned to look back at the lone tepee his people were leaving behind as they migrated a few miles farther down the creek toward the valley of the Greasy Grass. A mourning family left it standing in the summer sun as a tribute to the warrior whose body lay inside—a warrior wounded grievously in the hips during the fight against Three Stars, one of those returned on travois to die among his kinsmen. With its smoke flaps wrapped tightly one over the other and the lodge door sewn shut against the elements, none who respected the dead would dare enter. Beside the body within the darkness lay the warrior’s favorite weapons—his true wealth in life—as well as his pipe and tobacco pouch, along with some venison soup to feed him on his journey toward the Star Road.
The past two days had witnessed even more new arrivals reaching the great encampment as the immense village eased down toward the Greasy Grass. Summer roamers, these late arrivals were called. Like American Horse’s band of some three dozen lodges, the summer roamers were those who fled the reservations when spring warmth caressed the northern plains, where they intended to hunt in the ancient way until autumn turned the buffalo herds south, when the clans would again turn back to the agencies to suffer through another winter.
Already there was much talk that this was to be the last great hunt, perhaps the greatest of all summers for the seven campfires of the Lakota Nation. Washtay! Hadn’t they defeated Three Stars and sent his soldiers scurrying south with their tails between their legs like whipped dogs? The hunting had never been better here in the timbered valleys among the Wolf Mountains.
With all that, they still had Sitting Bull’s prophetic vision yet to come!
American Horse was glad he had urged his people off the reservation early this year, happy to be included in the great strength all Lakota felt this summer. If what Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and the rest said was true—this Season of Making Fat might well hold the last great fight they would have with the white man.
And forever after the soldiers would dare not enter Lakota hunting ground.
Forever after the white man would stay far away.
No more would American Horse’s Miniconjou have to return to their agency to eat the white man’s moldy flour and rancid pig meat.
Life would be as it once was when American Horse was but a boy and he saw his first white man along the Holy Road.
Life would be so good again, with the wasichu gone forever and ever, gone forevermore.
*The Plainsmen Series, Vol. 9, Reap the Whirlwind.
*The North Platte River.
Chapter 2
Late June 1876
God! But the air out here smelled better than it did in those closed-in places back east.
William F. Cody drank deep of it this summer morning, chest swelling as he drew it into his lungs as one would drink a life-giving elixir. With that prairie air seeping through his body, Bill remembered his youth as teamster, those months as mail rider for the pony express, and finally his years as army scout. All of that adventure and fun, all that unfettered life crammed into his youth before he had gone and followed the siren song of fame and fortune, pursuing a career on the stage.
Now, as he led General Philip Sheridan and his headquarters staff toward Camp Robinson near the Sioux’s Red Cloud Agency in the heart of these Central Plains, his keen eyes squinting into the distance from beneath the expanse of his broad-brimmed sombrero, searching the horizon for smoke, or dust, or the dippling of human forms atop fleet ponies breaking the skyline at the crest of some hilltop, Bill Cody couldn’t for the life of him remember what had been so damned seductive about that career on the boards before the footlights that it had lured him away from the West Away from these wide and open places.
Lord, but he loved this life! A good horse beneath him, his favorite rifle—the one he had long ago affectionately named Lucretia Borgia—stuffed securely in the saddle pocket across the pommel, and the sweet smell of the tall grass trammeled beneath his buckskin’s hooves. This had to be the essence of living! Something few men would ever experience, or so Bill had long ago determined.
Leaving behind Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Carr’s Fifth Cavalry at Fort Laramie for a few days before the regiment would once again begin searching these hills and swales like an inland sea of grass, looking for any Indians trying to make it north to join the roaming hostiles, Cody itched to be shed of Phil Sheridan. He wanted to be back with the Fifth as they scoured this land for warriors fleeing the reservations. But not just any warriors. This summer they were hunting the young fighting men who were jumping the reservations to the south: the hotbloods who were stirring things up as they fled the agencies and rode out for the northern camps of those winter roamers, to join Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull.
Maybe Custer would get his chance, Bill thought. Maybe ol’ Yellow Hair will finish off those Sioux hostiles in one fell swoop like everyone back east thought only Custer would. Damn, but Bill wanted Carr’s Fifth to be the outfit that would have a crack at the action before this Indian war was nothing more than a few footnotes in dusty history books schoolboys would be reading in the decades to come.
God, how he hoped Custer and the rest of them up north left some of the fighting for the Fifth Cavalry.
He looked at the sky, wondering about God. If He really did listen to man. To a lone individual, anyway. Bill thought he’d pray, just in case God was listening right then and wasn’t too busy with other matters of more pressing concern. Out here, Cody had found, it was about as easy to pray as breathing. Out here it was damn sure as easy as breathing to know down in his marrow that there was for certain-sure a God. Just to look around him in all directions, why—a man had to realize some great hand had been at work here.
So Bill prayed, not at all embarrassed that he asked the Almighty to leave some of the hostiles for the Fifth Cavalry to fight.
After all, Bill figured—the Fifth Cavalry always had been an Injun-fighting outfit. And no matter where life might lead William F. Cody, no man—nor woman—would ever be able to take the magic of these plains from him.
He had been twenty-three years old that fall of eighteen and sixty-nine, following the summer he led the Fifth down on Tall Bull’s village of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers at Summit Springs. That first year of scouting for the army was crammed chock-full of adventure and even some downright belly-busting fun—like that time he had talked Wild Bill and that gray-eyed Irishman into stealing a shipment of Mexican beer bound for another regiment wandering the Staked Plain of the Texas Panhandle in search of Cheyenne and Comanche. After hijacking the load of foamy brew, the trio of scouts instead took their contraband back to their own camp and immediately set up shop for the boys of Carr’s Fifth Cavalry.
But now … well, now he couldn’t dare get away with such a stunt. Now that Buffalo Bill was the darling of the boards and theater lights back east. But Wild Bill? Well, Cody had heard Hickok had become quite the army scout before he turned lawman down in Abilene, Kansas, then finally had retired to become a knight of the green felt: ofttimes making his day’s wages over a single turn of the cards. And Donegan? Damn—Bill didn’t know what had ever become of the Irishman after that evening he plucked Donegan’s hash from the fire back behind the sutler’s bar at Fort McPherson in November sixty-nine.