As the steamer’s crew was swinging in the gangplank, Omohundro called out from the rail, “You watch your hair, Buffalo Bill!”
“I sure as hell will, Texas Jack—at least until Lulu can run her fingers through it!”
As Cody had left to ride back to Whistler through the badlands in the rain and the darkness of that night before, an anxious Terry wrote Crook an afterthought, seeking to persuade Crook one last time to join him in his concentration of troops along the Yellowstone.
There is one thing which I forgot to say and that is that it appears to me that the band which has gone north, if any have gone there, is the heart and soul of the Indian mutiny. It is the nucleus around which the whole body of disaffected Indians gathers. If it were destroyed, this thing would be over, and it is for that reason that I so strongly feel that even if a larger trail is found leading south, we should make a united effort to settle these particular people.
Crook would not be deterred. He would not be turned. He would have his victory. And he was determined to share it with no one.
Six hours after leaving Whistler on the Josephine, Cody reached the muddy outskirts of Terry’s camp along the Powder, just as the column was about to undertake its march back to the Yellowstone. Bill had just covered over 120 miles in less than twenty-two hours, pushing through some of the roughest country on the high plains, across badlands clearly infested with warriors still bristling and brazen following their victory over Custer’s Seventh.
That dawn Terry cheered, “Never thought I’d see you back here so soon, Mr. Cody!”
“Didn’t really count on it myself, General. Whistler needed a courier—and it appears I was the only one who wanted a breath of fresh air!”
Chapter 32
26-29 August 1876
What Forsythe Says.
ST. PAUL, August 10—General Forsythe, of General Sheridan’s staff, passed through the city yesterday, having left Terry’s camp at South Rosebud a week ago last Tuesday. In conversation with army officers while here General Forsyth corrected many erroneous statements recently telegraphed from Bismarck … It was stated that General Terry had fallen back eighty miles, which is mere nonsense, and gives a false impression to the public … The evening before General Forsythe left General Terry, a scout from General Crook’s command had reached General Terry. General Crook was then somewhere near the head waters of the Rosebud river, or between that and Tongue river. Now, at this time General Terry was at the mouth of the Big Horn river, and in order to make communication between himself and General Crook easier, he dropped down the river to the mouth of the Rosebud …
The scout alluded to furnished the news that Indian trails had been found leading to the east between Gen. Crook and the Yellowstone. A junction of Gens. Terry and Crook at a point further east than the Big Horn was likely to prevent the escape of the Indians to the east and north of the present scene of operations. Another misstatement is to the effect that the troops under General Terry are disheartened at the prospect before them … On the contrary, Gen. Terry and his men are in the best possible spirits, and are only too anxious to meet the horde of savages in a square fight. There is no fear as to the result.
The Indians, he learned, were still supposed to be massed somewhere between the Rosebud river and the Big Horn. The impression prevailed that one of two alternatives was left them—either to scatter to the eastward and toward British America, or southward to the Big Horn mountains. Though they were in front or in close proximity to Gen. Crook’s command, it is not believed that they would show fight or allow Gen. Crook or Gen. Terry to get a chance at them in a body.
In a predawn mist that twenty-sixth day of August, with Terry’s latest appeal in hand, George Crook once more sought to make his point as diplomatically as possible, without expressing that he did not want to chase Terry’s Sioux. He wanted to chase his own. Taking pen in hand, he wrote:
My understanding has always been that Crazy Horse, who is an Oglala and represents the disaffected people belonging to the Southern Agencies, is about equal in strength to Sitting Bull, who similarly represents the Northern Sioux; besides, it is known that at least 1500 additional warriors left Red Cloud Agency and joined Crazy Horse this spring and summer and are supposed to be with him here.
Should any considerable part of the main trail lead in the direction of the Southern Agencies, I take it for granted that it must be his, which will not only increase the embarrassment of protecting the settlements in my department, but will make me apprehensive for the safety of my wagon train.
Should I not find any decided trail going southward, but on the contrary find it scattering in this country, or crossing to the north of the Yellowstone, you can calculate on my remaining with you until the unpleasantness ends, or we are ordered to the contrary.
We march this morning. Good bye.
As the infantry slogged into the lead through the mud, sergeants bawled orders for the cavalry to form up for inspection. Chewing on a little of that tobacco he could beg off Lieutenant Bubb’s commissary, Seamus Donegan sat with half-breed Frank Grouard, both of them sullenly waiting, watching Terry’s far-off column inch its own way toward the Yellowstone.
One trooper nearby began to grump, “I’ll sooner desert than come on another one of Crook’s Injun campaigns!”
“Och!” swore his Irish companion. “It was the devil’s own whiskey that brought me to ruin—with no place to go but enlist!”
“Whiskey!” hollered a third. “Ah, sweet whiskey! Now, George—wouldn’t you just wish you had a little drop of whiskey to mix with all this water here’bouts?”
“Mix?” the second soldier replied with a snort of objection. “No fear of you mixing any water with your whiskey, Tim! You always take it straight!”
Tim spat in disgust, saying, “Bad luck to the ship that brought me over, then. If I had taken my old mother’s advice and remained in Cashel, it isn’t a drowned rat I’d be this morning.”
“Och! Be-jaysus!” grouched George. “If this isn’t the most god-damnblest outfit I ever struck in my twenty-five years of sarvice!”
“Aye,” agreed Tim as the sergeants ordered the units into a column of fours. “Devil shoot the generals and the shoulder straps all around! Sure and they have no more compassion on a poor crayture of a soldier than a hungry wolf has on a helpless little lamb!”
The horse soldier behind Tim hollered out, “A tough old lamb you’d be, Timmy! A wolf would have to hold his head a long way from the wall afore he could eat you.”
“No coffee till night,” Tim continued to complain. “And we’ll likely eat our bacon raw again come supper— for the sagebrush won’t burn worth a lick, even if the rain would let up!”
The Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition put its nose down to the trail, on the hunt once more.
But while Crook, Bourke, Finerty, and many of the other soldiers and civilians who would chronicle this leg of the expedition all wrote that they took up the “Indian trail” that dreary, sodden morning of 26 August—the column was instead following the heavy wagon trail that General Terry’s engineers had graded and bridged on their westbound march back in May.
Grouard, Donegan, and Charlie White all had their own suspicions early on, but it was a pair of Ree Terry had loaned the expedition who weren’t long in confirming Crook’s mistake. After all, those Arikara trackers should know: they had been part of that great forty-plus force who had marched out of Fort Abraham Lincoln with a hopeful Terry and an ebullient Custer on the seventeenth of May.