“We could do that: just sit down here and wait,”Crook replied. “But if we keep moving south, our men will be that much closer to relief when Mills brings supplies back from the Deadwood merchants.”
“How’s Mr. Bubb going to bring the provisions back?”
“Good question,” Crook answered. “I’ve already told Tom Moore he’s to select fifty of what he has left of his mules, along with fifteen packers, to accompany Colonel Mills to the south.”
Crook went on to explain the command structure of the relief expedition: with scouts Grouard, Crawford, and Donegan he was sending along Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka, who would act as Mills’s adjutant, as well as Lieutenants George F. Chase, Emmet Crawford, and Adolphus H. Von Leuttwitz, with assistant surgeon Charles R. Stephens. In addition, both Robert Strahorn and Reuben Davenport volunteered to go along. Mills’s relief patrol was to depart that evening as soon as the men and horses were selected.
As far as Seamus Donegan was concerned, Crook had to be given credit. Unlike most of those armchair generals who had commanded the Union’s armies during the early years of the war, George C. Crook had always suffered no less than the greenest recruit in his command.
As much as other, lesser men might snipe and find fault in the general’s decisions, for the most part the Irishman believed Crook had done what he thought best. The general had marched and countermarched his expeditionary force on just about every trail he came across after the fleeing hostiles.
He had put his men on half rations, then reluctantly approved of butchering the horses.
And without fail Crook had always deployed his scouts to prowl in all directions to scare up a fresh trail for his men to pursue.
But now, to look at the man, Seamus knew even Crook was close to the end of his string. This was no longer an army campaign. This was no longer a matter of catching the enemy and driving them back to the agencies.
This had become nothing less than pure survival.
Another Trail Discovered.
ST. PAUL, September 4—A special dated bank of the Yellowstone, August 27, via Bismarck, 4th inst., says: The latest intelligence received concerning the movements of the Indians lead to the belief that Sitting Bull’s band of Unkpapas are trying to cross the Yellowstone and reach their proper hunting ground on the dry fork of the Missouri. Acting upon this belief General Terry directed General Crook, with his column, to move eastward to the Little Missouri, following the trail leading from the Rosebud, while General Terry with the Dakota column has crossed the Yellowstone and marched north and east to cut off any parties moving toward Fort Peck. You will hear no end of extravagant stories about the attack on the steamer Yellowstone on her late trip up the river. She was fired on by a few Indians, and one man was killed, but beyond this no harm was done, and the affair is quite destitute of significance.
Just past nine o’clock that night of September 7, Crook emerged from the dark to grip the bridle to Anson Mills’s horse as the captain rose to the saddle. For a moment the general peered into the rain, then turned back to the captain, saying, “Should you encounter a village, Colonel— you are to attack and hold it. But if you can successfully cut around their village, do so—for you must remember your primary mission is to secure supplies for this column.”
Atop his saddle, Mills saluted. “Very good, General.”
Crook replied, “We’ll be watching for your guidon, Colonel Mills. Praying. Until then.”
Donegan watched the old man back away, his shoulders rounded almost like a man who had been beaten, a man close to his last wick. Then the general slowly raised those shoulders, straightened his back, and squared the shapeless hat on his head before touching the fingers of his right hand to his brow.
“I know you’ll do us proud, men,” Crook told those 150 gathered behind Mills and his scouts. “We’re counting on you.”
The captain saluted, then tugged down the brim of his hat, cocking his head to the side to ward off the drizzle as he raised an arm in signal.
“At a walk!” Schwatka gave the order. “For-rad!”
Tom Moore’s packers ended up whipping sixty-one mules out of that misery-ridden bivouac on a small, northern branch of the North Fork of the Grand River. Desiring his party to travel in the lightest of marching orders, Mills had commanded his men to strip even more—they were to carry no more than fifty cartridges each for their Springfield carbines—half of what they had been carrying a month ago when they had marched out of Camp Cloud Peak on Goose Creek. Seamus worried: with all they had seen over the past few days, the chances were good the captain’s outfit would run into a sizable war party. That very afternoon, in fact, they had stumbled across the wide trail of a big village moving south for the Black Hills.
So if the soldiers did have a scrap of it, would they have enough ammunition? Crook had made it clear that he intended to lay over a day right where the column was. Scary thing was that should Mills run into the enemy, the general’s decision to give the column a day’s rest meant the captain could expect neither reinforcements nor resupply of ammunition in time to do any real good.
As Donegan rode to the front with Frank Grouard to pierce the utter gloom and darkness of that muddy wilderness, leading Mills and 150 troopers into the unknown, the Irishman felt all but crushed by the sudden realization.
From here on out, they were on their own.
Chapter 36
8-9 September 1876
The Inter-Ocean Special.
CHICAGO, September 4—The Inter-Ocean’s Bismarck special says the latest by couriers arriving to-day from the expedition is as follows: the general feeling among both officers and men is that the campaign has been and is likely to prove an immense wild goose chase. No Indians have been seen of late, with the exception of occasional small bands making their appearance for the purpose of stealing or harassing small parties engaged in the movement of supplies on the Yellowstone. The main column has not succeeded in overtaking slippery Sitting Bull, and is not likely to this season …
August 27 the Seventh cavalry were on Ofalens creek, and Crook had started the day before with his command for Glendive creek … Crook strikes down the south bank, and by this continued movement they expect to bring about a collision with the Indians who are along the banks of the river.
The dark and the rain were as suffocating as being inside a pair of these leather gloves he wore.
Like the lid to a well-scorched cast-iron Dutch oven, the sky seemed to hang above them, right overhead, all but a few inches beyond a man’s reach.
This endless wilderness swallowed every fragment of sound but his own. The jingle of the big curb bit. The squishy squeak of the saddle beneath him, the bobbing, plodding heave of the horse as it struggled on step by step with the rest that followed, and that peculiar sucking, wet-putty pop each time the animal pulled a hoof out of the muddy gumbo and plopped it down onto the prairie again, and again. And again over the next three hours.
Off to their left a little, the prairie sounds changed near midnight. If a man listened just right, he could tell that something out there was different. Not the same monotonous rhythm of the rain hammering the sodden prairie. Frank had Donegan signal back to Mills, stopping the long column. Then Grouard slipped down into the mud and knelt. A moment later a bright corona around the half-breed flared with sudden light as the head scout struck a match, holding it cupped in both hands.