Black Sun, The Battle of Summit Springs, 1869 (33 page)

Best to be on the trail of the fleeing Cheyenne, better that than back in the village, alone with his memories. Struggling with the frustration—not knowing where to go but farther west to find Liam's brother, Ian O'Roarke. West now …

Anything at this moment to keep his mind off the thought he felt himself lashed to and bound by like a rawhide hobble.

Knowing the chances were very good that lying dead back in that village of Tall Bull's Dog Soldiers, if not very much alive and up ahead with the fleeing Cheyenne, was the nameless, faceless warrior who had taken the life of Liam O'Roarke.

*   *   *

Late that night of the eleventh Bill Cody watched as Major Royall led his detail back to the Indian camp. The Cheyenne had scattered in all directions like a flushed covey of quail. Royall's men returned empty-handed except for the rain and hail they brought with them.

North's Pawnees had earlier wrangled the Cheyenne herd, capturing the pride of the Dog Soldiers. More than four hundred ponies and mules Carr's troops would drive north to Fort Sedgwick.

All afternoon and through the night, troopers of the Fifth Cavalry straggled into the village on foot, having left behind any horses done in from the last four days of exhausting chase.

After breakfast around the many smoky fires the following morning, most of the soldiers gathered beside the nearby spring at Major Carr's request. Cody stood with Donegan and the scouts as the hat was passed among the hundreds. Both the soldiers and Pawnee trackers turned over nine hundred dollars in gold and cash they had found among the looted lodges.

“Last night after supper, Dr. Tesson, who is seeing to the needs of Mrs. Weichel, made a suggestion to me—something I want to put before you men,” Carr told them as the morning breeze caressed the place with a hallowed sense of the occasion.

“I think his suggestion appropriate in light of the fact that Mrs. Weichel lost her husband in the raids upon Kansas made by these very warriors earlier in the year,” Carr said, then cleared his throat. It was evident that he felt a tugging sentiment in the moment.

“Dr. Tesson suggested that this money be donated to the woman who defiantly survived the horrid atrocities visited upon her by the Indians who held her prisoner. Without saying more, I know every one of you men can imagine the unspeakable horrors she had to endure at the hands of her captors.”

He waited in silence while the hats circulated among the soldiers.

“Our final duty this morning is to lay another poor woman to rest, here where she fell—her life given in blood to her captors.”

Those soldiers who had not uncovered, quickly removed their kepis or wide-brimmed slouch hats in a nervous rustling there beneath the shady cottonwoods.

As Carr went on, from time to time uttering a phrase of his fluent French, Cody continued to gaze at the bundle near the major's feet. In lieu of a coffin, a pair of unnamed soldiers had wrapped Mrs. Susanna Alderdice in a buffalo robe and bound her securely with rawhide ropes found among the lodges. From the back of the worn Bible Carr carried in a saddlebag, he read the brief funeral service and two scriptures.

Behind him, Cody listened to the sniffles of a hundred men and the shuffling of half a thousand feet made nervous by this spiritual moment beside the spring. Men unaccustomed to showing tears wept openly as Carr ordered the body of Mrs. Alderdice lowered into a deep grave.

“We will conclude this service with the singing of ‘Blest Be the Tie that Binds.' Any of you who would like to throw a handful of sod on the mortal remains of this poor woman, let him come forward in a single, orderly column as we end this service in song.”

One by one the silent hundreds lined up to march slowly by the darkened pit scooped out of the grassy earth beside the gurgling spring. Each one knelt for but a moment, scooping a handful of crusty, sandy soil, tossing it upon the buffalo-hide coffin of Susanna Alderdice.

“Before our Father's Throne,

We pour our ardent prayers;

Our fears, our hopes, our aims are one,

Our comforts and our cares.

“We share each other's woes,

Each other's burdens bear,

And often for each other flows

The sympathizing tear.

“When we are called to part

It give us inward pain,

But we shall still be joined in heart,

And hope to meet again.”

Thinking of Lulu and little Arta back home, safe and far away, from this dangerous land, Bill's fingertips raked across the words carved in the crude marker driven into the sand at the head of the grave. Boards torn from a hardtack box, nailed together as the last memorial to the woman who had followed her husband into this dangerous land.

Susanna Alderdice

wife of Tom

died 11 July 1869

Buried by her friends in

the Fifth Cavalry

“We knew her pain.”

Chapter 28

Moon of Cherries Blackening

White Horse did not like the taste of fleeing in his mouth. Not only the taste, but the stone of a feeling in his belly that sickened him with turning his back on the soldiers.

He listened patiently as Two Crows and many of the older ones talked. It had been three sunrises since the soldiers drove his people from Tall Bull's village.

He thought that ironic, especially as Tall Bull's second-in-command. Tall Bull was dead. At least half a hundred, perhaps more, warriors dead, left behind when the village fled into the hills and Platte River bluffs. The count very well might go higher, he was afraid. But for now, no one knew for sure how many warriors they had lost. Women and children too. Many of them cut down in the first frantic minutes of fighting and flight.

How many still wandered the open prairie this night, after all these days without food, perhaps without water … he found it hard to know.

Something every bit as hard to understand was why the old ones were advising that summer would soon end, and with the coming of the new season would be the death-song to their old way of life. They were for giving in and going south.

“Last summer we lost Roman Nose on what our people call Warrior River,” Two Crows said to the assembled Cheyenne who had wandered the plains with Tall Bull. “This last winter, in the time of first snows, our people who camped with Black Kettle died beneath the hooves of Yellow Hair's pony soldiers. But Yellow Hair did not stop with the destruction of Black Kettle's village. Yellow Hair continued the chase through the winter and captured the mighty Rock Forehead—keeper of the powerful Medicine Arrows of our people.”

“But now they live like the white man's spotted cows, kept like prisoners on their reservation far to the south of here,” White Horse said when it was his turn to speak.

“I am tired,” Bull Bear admitted when Two Crows did not rise to speak against White Horse. “My wife and children … we cannot live like this anymore. We strike back at the white man—he follows us until he catches us and drives us from our homes. We strike again—the white man sends even more soldiers after us. And each time we leave more Cheyenne bodies behind.”

“So you will surrender?”

Bull Bear evidently felt the full force of White Horse's glare. He could not bring himself to look in the warrior's face as he answered.

“Too many of my friends … my relations—they are no longer among the living. I will go south and join Rock Forehead's people on the Sweetwater … perhaps Little Robe's band on the Washita. They live in peace.”

“Where there is no buffalo!” White Horse shouted, startling the entire assembly gathered beneath the dark summer canopy endlessly dusted with stars like flecks of tiny foam.

“They live,” Bull Bear replied finally.

“No—they do not live. And like them, if you go live south on the reservation—you will slowly die. You will walk, and you will sleep. You will eat and you will hunt for rabbits. But this is not living for Shahiyena!”

“I will go with Bull Bear and Two Crows,” said White Man's Ladder.

“Go then,” White Horse declared, feeling something disintegrating around him. “The rest of you who would call life on the reservation living—go with tomorrow's first light. I do not want to look upon your faces. Tuck your tails between your legs and run south. I pray the white soldiers who drove us from our village will not find you and leave your bodies to bleach on the prairie.”

“We will go west before turning south,” Two Crows said. “And stay away from the soldiers.”

“Yes,” White Horse agreed. “You should stay far away from the soldiers. For if they found you—there would be no warriors among you to fight.”

“I will be with Two Crows's people,” declared Standing Bear.

White Horse glowered at him. “And your heart will not turn to water at the sight of the pony soldiers?”

“No—I will fight to protect my people.”

He puffed his chest proudly. “Then stay and fight with me, Standing Bear. Come with my people … north—where the water runs clear and so cold that it will hurt your teeth to drink it.”

“You speak of the land of the Lakota?”

“Yes. We will join them in their hunting grounds fed by the waters of the Elk River.”
*

“The waters are cold there.”

White Horse smiled, pointing south. “On Rock Forehead's reservation the water is too warm for a fighting man to drink.”

Standing Bear finally shook his head. “I do not want to have to fight for a drink of water.”

“Go then—eat the white man's bacon and his flour. The heart of the Shahiyena will remain free on this prairie—wandering with the seasons as our brother the buffalo taught us in the time of our grandfather's grandfather. My heart is free.”

“My children's bellies are pinched and empty, White Horse,” said Bobtailed Porcupine. “We have little to eat running from the white man.”

“We will find the buffalo—make meat and cure robes for new lodges,” White Horse retorted.

Bobtailed Porcupine wagged his head sadly. “I cannot go on listening to the little ones cry in hunger and fear—or in missing a mother or father killed by the soldiers.”

“You rode with me on every raid, my friend.”

The Porcupine nodded now. “Yes, I was with you when we killed many of the white men building their earth houses on the sacred ground once roamed by only the buffalo. Now the iron footprints of the smoking horse cross the prairie—so the buffalo stay far to the south in the land of Kiowa and Comanche.”

“Come, my friends,” White Horse cheered. “We will roam the buffalo land again and live as the Everywhere Spirit intended us to live.”

Bobtailed Porcupine turned slightly, only half his face shown in firelight. “I go now—to sleep, so that I can rise and be on the trail before the sun rises. My heart is heavy, White Horse. Do not hold bad thoughts against me because I wish to protect my family.”

White Horse wanted to strike back with his words, but he believed the time of word-fighting had come and gone. Many others were restlessly turning behind Two Crows and Standing Bear and the others. Less than half remained resolutely behind the new war-chief of the feared Dog Soldiers.

“My prayers will be like the wings of the war-eagle over you on this trail you take south to safety, my old friends,” White Horse declared in a strong voice he flung across the departing crowd.

“Know that you have brothers who will always roam this wild and untamed land like our brother buffalo. And like the buffalo, I will never be herded and penned up by the white man. When I die—it will be the free wind that blows through my bones as they lay bleaching beneath the sun!”

*   *   *

On the afternoon of 12 July, Major Eugene A. Carr had dispatched a ten-man detail of scouts and soldiers to ride northeast for Fort Sedgwick with his official report of the action.

Hold the train until further orders. We have captured the Dog Soldiers Village … All well.

With the dispatch bearers on their way, Carr turned next to the destruction of the village. When every freight wagon had been loaded with all the Indian plunder it could carry, he ordered the lodges put to the torch. He wrote:

There were 160 fires burning at once to destroy the property.

Only then did he send the order among his company commanders to begin the first of their marches that would take them away from Summit Springs. Across the next four days Carr refrained from pushing his men. Short marches were the order of the day as most of the men, and certainly the greatest number of the horses, were poor and used up.

What had raised its ugly head as jealousy the day of the battle had for those next four days become full-blown rage on the part of Captain Luther North. Despite all of North's efforts, Major Carr had continued to distrust having Indians along on his campaign. It would have taken a blind and deaf man not to realize that Carr still very much favored Bill Cody over the North brothers and their much-touted Pawnee Battalion.

Luther North was not a man given to letting go a grudge. Bill Cody and the favor Carr curried with the young scout made for many constant and growing disagreements immediately following the Battle of Summit Springs. Sharp words spoken and not easily taken back on that homebound trip spelled the end of Luther North's career with the Fifth Cavalry.

The captain resigned his commission upon arrival at Fort Sedgwick, 15 July.

“You ready to track some more Injuns?” Bill Cody asked as he walked up to the patch of shade the Irishman had found beneath a cottonwood.

Seamus pushed back the dusty slouch hat from his eyes and squinted into the sun at the tall youth. “No. Go away.”

Cody chuckled, dropping to the grass beside Donegan. He leaned back against the tree and let out with a long sigh.

“Don't know what I'll do without you, Irishman—if you don't come along.”

“Where you going this time, Cody?”