Cry of the Hawk (4 page)

Black Kettle’s survivors sent out pipe bearers to other bands of Shahiyena, Lakota, and Arapaho, calling for a wholesale war on the white man. The warrior bands had argued and disagreed as to strategy, but when the vote came down, all the villages but one marched north from that council held near the Bunch of Timber on the Smoky Hill River. Only Black Kettle and the remnants of his band headed south. They would not carry the war pipe against the white man.

In that first week of the Moon of Seven Cold Nights, what the white man called January, the warrior bands had arrived on the hills overlooking the settlement of Julesburg. At least ten-times-ten-times-ten fighting men had prepared for this major attack on the white man. A small number of women had accompanied the horsemen north from Cherry Creek to cook meals and wrangle the herd of extra war ponies. Their march had been orderly, for this had not been a simple raid by a handful of warriors. Flankers and scouts had been thrown out along the path of their march, with camp police to assure that no hot-blooded young warrior eager for an early coup would ruin the surprise the war chiefs had planned for the white men along the South Platte River.

The Brule Lakota of Spotted Tail and Pawnee Killer led the way, carrying the war pipe. They knew this land better than the Southern Cheyenne or the Oglalla from the north. They brought the warrior army to the sand hills where Julesburg lay, nearby Fort Rankin.

Julesburg was a small settlement compared to Denver City farther south on the river. It served as a stage stop and crossing place of the river for the Holladay coach lines going on west to Salt Lake City. The stage ranch itself was constructed of cedar logs hauled in from Cottonwood Canyon a hundred miles away. A cluster of low-roofed buildings: telegraph office, stables and corrals for fresh teams, in addition to a large store and an adobe warehouse filled with Ben Holladay’s Overland Stage property and commodities. Only a mile to the west stood the strong stockade of Fort Rankin, established in August of 1864 and garrisoned by one company of the Seventh Iowa Cavalry.

At dawn the following winter morning, Crazy Horse and six other decoys joined the Shahiyena Crooked Lance Society chief named Big Crow in riding out of the sand hills into plain sight of the settlement and soldiers. They hurried their ponies down to attack a small body of soldiers who withdrew, escaping back into the stockade. Minutes later a large body of horse soldiers and citizens burst from the fort gates in pursuit of the decoys.

Big Crow and Crazy Horse retreated into the sand hills, drawing the eager soldiers behind them.

Yet some impatient young warriors spoiled the trap and burst past the camp police too early, alerting the soldiers before they had ridden into the noose.

The soldier chief called to his sixty men, turning them about in a clumsy group, and tore off at a gallop. Crazy Horse wheeled about with the white men and was soon riding among the stragglers, hitting the frightened ones with his bow before he shot them from their horses.

Some of the white men reined up and dropped from their mounts to fight on foot. When the main body of warriors came up, most of the soldiers were quickly overrun. The rest cut their way back to the stockade, where the gate was hurriedly shut behind them, abandoning the bodies of fourteen soldiers and four civilians for the warriors to mutilate.

The rest of the thousand warriors then turned their attention to the settlement of Julesburg and the stage station. By the time the women came up with the extra ponies, the warriors were hauling plunder out of the warehouse: bolts of colorful cloth, sacks of shelled corn, flour, sugar, along with canned oysters, catsup, and an entire display case filled with gold and silver watches dragged out the door using a buffalo-hair lariat tied to a pony. Some of the warriors located a sturdy box they hacked open with their axes, finding inside bundles of green paper, which they promptly sliced apart and hurled into the cold breeze of that winter morning.

It was not until late that afternoon that the ponies were loaded with everything they could carry and the cattle herd across the river was herded south for their return to the great encampment at Cherry Creek.

Less than ten days later, the warrior force was back to pillage Julesburg again. Other parties ranged up and down the South Platte, searching for more road-ranches to plunder. Crazy Horse joined some of Pawnee Killer’s band, who carefully spread sand across the frozen river west of the plundered settlement of Julesburg and crossed to the north bank. They attacked Harlow’s Ranch and killed everyone there but a lone white woman and her child, who were taken prisoner. The place left a bad taste in the Horse’s mouth for he would never forget how the warriors found some small kegs of the white man’s whiskey and got drunk. So drunk that a Cheyenne waving his pistol around accidentally shot an Arapaho warrior in the head, killing him to the raucous laughter of many others.

Crazy Horse had escaped that place, moving upstream a mile before he halted among some willow and cottonwood and made himself a lonely camp for the night.

For five more days the warriors ranged up and down the river, cutting off the supply routes and dragging down telegraph poles, using their ponies to pull the white man’s talking wire far across the prairie. More stations were burned, their employees killed. Cattle were driven off by the young men.

By the time their week of raiding was complete, the villages were brimming with plunder. Nervous ponies were hitched to many wagons groaning under sacks of flour and cornmeal, rice and coffee. There were barrels of the white man’s pig meat and crates filled with sugar-coated citron fruits along with small tins of dark, sweet molasses. Shoes, clothing, boots, belts, and hats, besides the bolts of bright cloth the women argued over.

And on the last day of raiding, a party of Shahiyena and a few Oglalla led by Crazy Horse had chanced across a party of nine men who had been members of Chivington’s Colorado volunteers and were on their way east when they were ambushed. Searching the valises belonging to the dead men, the warriors discovered two scalps. To one of the scalps still clung the peculiar shell that identified it as Little Wolf’s hair. The other scalp was identified by its light color as having been White Leaf’s.

Both were warriors killed at Sand Creek.

Yet what stirred the maddening hate within Crazy Horse even more were those other bits of hair and flesh the soldiers carried as souvenirs of the massacre at Little Dried River—easily recognizable as the genitals hacked from the bodies of Shahiyena women.

After their second raid on Julesburg, the entire armada moved north, unhurried in crossing the South Platte, Lodgepole Creek, then the North Platte. Heading for the Niobrara, and away from the bluecoat soldiers at Fort Laramie.

2

Early Spring, 1865

I
T
HADN’T ALWAYS
been this cold. Nor had it always taken so long for the morning sun to drive the chill from his marrow.

But for a man with fifty-four winters behind him, come morning Shadrach Sweete moved a touch bit slower, shedding himself of the thick buffalo-hide sleeping robes, than he had when first he came to the mountains with General William H. Ashley back in 1825.

A big bull-sized kid whose immense size belied his youth back then, Shad Sweete had parlayed that muscle into a spot among Ashley’s One Hundred. Across the next few years that quickly wore the green off his novice hide, Sweete trapped elbow to elbow in the mountain streams with the likes of Jim Bridger, Davey Jackson, mulattos Jim Beckwith and Edward Rose, Billy Sublette, Joe Meek, and all the rest who went on to have their names given to rivers, creeks, passes, and mountain peaks.

Yet among them in those early years Shad Sweete had stood out, and stood out did he still. Six and one-half feet tall and nudging something shy of three hundred pounds, he was the sort who more readily blocked out the sun than moved with nothing more than the whisper of wind beneath his huge moccasins. Times were when he had been faced with riding a short-backed Indian pony, his buckskin-clad toes almost dragging the ground when he did.

Shad glanced now over at the big Morgan mare he had purchased years ago off a Mormon emigrant along the Holy Road, up near Devil’s Gate. He had never been sorry for the handsome price paid, nor the years shared since.

He stretched within his warm cocoon of buffalo robes and wool blankets, sensing the first far-off hint of coffee on the wind. Rubbing sleep from his gritty eyes, Shad sat up, his nose leading him now as it had across all the years past to find food or avoid brownskins. But this morning it was Indian coffee he’d drink, with a heap of army sugar to sweeten it.

Standing to shake out the kinks from those ropy muscles slower to respond these years on the downside of fifty, he pulled on his moccasins, then slipped over them another, larger pair sewn from the neck-hide of an old bull by his Cheyenne wife. How he missed Shell Woman at times like these, pulling on the clothing she had fashioned for him, or smelling in the wind a certain whiff of sage and wildflower—any of it too easily put him in remembrance of her.

And her so far away to the south now, where he hoped she would remain safe from the flames of all-out war threatening to engulf the central plains.

His toes dug into the sandy soil as he skirted through the gray sage, heading for the nearby lodges of loafers, those Brule Sioux who camped in the shadow of Fort Laramie rather than follow the herds back and forth across the plains in their seasonal migrations. The white man had come first to take the beaver from the streams, next to lead others west through the mountains to Oregon and California, and finally to plant himself here and there with his farming and his settlements. So by now there were a number of Indians who hugged the fringes of forts such as these, where flour and sugar and coffee and bolts of calico or gingham could be had—rather than chasing after the buffalo season after season.

Winters were dull here with the soldiers, but they were damned well more secure for the loafers as well.

He had tried loafing himself of a time, when the price of beaver fell through the floor and what traders took in plew didn’t know prime from stinkum. When the end came to those glorious, shining times, after following the beaver in their retreat farther and farther into the recesses of the cold mountains, some of Shad Sweete’s companions as well retreated back east to make a living at one endeavor or another. Fewer still of those veterans of the heyday of the twenties and thirties moseyed on west themselves, some to the valleys of California. Most to timber-shrouded hills of old Oregon.

Sweete himself had followed the elephant to the Northwest, where many former employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company, as well as American Fur and Rocky Mountain Fur, all attempted to put down what roots they could, now that there wasn’t all that much for a rootless man to make a decent living at.

“Coffee,” he said in Lakota, handing the Brule woman his battered tin cup with the rawhide-wrapped handle. He broke off a chunk of the tobacco twist and dropped it into the cup before she took the huge tin from him.

She flicked her tired, red-rimmed eyes at him, then dug the tobacco wad from the cup with two fingers. The others were stubby, chopped off in some past mourning. The woman plopped the tobacco quid in her mouth and began chewing noisily.

After she had poured him coffee from the small kettle on the smoky fire and disappeared into her lodge, Shad settled to the ground beside the tiny flames, and grunted his own prayer to the Everywhere Spirit for this blessing of coffee on cold spring mornings such as this one.

The woman was back, carrying a small burlap sack at the end of her arm. She stood over him, opening it for the white man’s inspection. From it he scooped a fistful of sugar and poured it into the steamy coffee with a smile for her. She disappeared again. He pulled one of the two knives from his belt and stirred while he drank in the heady aroma that did so much to arouse his senses of a morning. Quickly he dragged both sides of the blade across his leather britches long ago turned a rich brown patina with seasons of grease and smoke, then stuffed the skinner home in its colorful porcupine-quilled scabbard.

After the first few sips, Sweete pulled free a tiny clay pipe from the pouch ever present beneath the left arm and crumbled some tobacco leaf into the bowl. With a twig from the Brule woman’s fire, he sat back and drank deep of the heady smoke, drawing it far into his lungs as an elixir stirring the cobwebs from his mind.

Coffee and tobacco and the cool, clean air of these plains of a spring morning … If he could not have his wife with him, at least a man like Shad Sweete had everything else worthwhile in life.

First one winter, then a second, he and his wife had survived in Oregon—then the trapper had no choice left but to admit that Oregon was not for him. He hungered for the far places, the wide stretches of the mountain west where the purple peaks hugged the far horizon in one direction, and in turning in almost any direction, a man found more peaks raking the undersides of the fluffy clouds. Such was the land more to the liking of Shad Sweete.

While some of his kind, former trappers all, were content to drag a plow behind a mule through the rich soil of Oregon, others were content to do nothing at all—hunting a little, loafing a lot. Staying as long as they wanted in one valley before moving on.

He was not cut out to do either, neither a homesteader nor a layabout could he be.

In remembering that morning he had announced they were returning to the high lonesome of the Shining Mountains, going home to the great stretch of endless, rolling plains her people knew so well, Shad recalled the joy welling in the eyes of his Cheyenne wife.

“I no more belong here in this Oregon country than Gabe Bridger belongs eating at the same table with Brigham Young himself!” he had cried out as wife and young children scurried about their camp, packing what they owned in parfleche and rawhide pouch, loading everything on a groaning travois inside of twenty minutes, the time it took for the sun to travel from one lodgepole to the next.