Long Winter Gone: Son of the Plains - Volume 1 (3 page)

“Go now, Autie,” she said bravely. “We’re all so happy for you.”

Bending to kiss her pale, upturned cheek, Custer then
dashed from the room. The ground flew beneath him as he leapt from the porch, tearing down the brick walks to the telegraph office.

Giddy with excitement, he shook hands with everyone he met along the way, breathlessly telling them of the coming campaign and that he had been selected to lead his gallant Seventh into action again. He wildly pumped the arm of the telegraph operator before setting the old gentleman to work pounding out the message to his friend Philip.

As a rusty sun came up in the east that very next morning, Custer boarded the first express train out of Michigan heading south and west toward the frontier and the shining destiny that beckoned him. He knew he would ache for her from time to time, but reminded himself:
No, Libbie chose to remain behind. It is the right choice. This is to be a winter campaign. No telling how long I’ll be out. The fighting could last all winter long.

That evening he stared into a sky dripping like coal oil across the western horizon, scratching the ears of his favorite pointer, Blucher. Dear Blucher and Maida, two staghound pups, were Custer’s only companions now. Dusk became night and the locomotive spit cinders into the sky.

At that very moment out on that aching expanse of the western prairie those same bloody atrocities committed by the roving bands of Kiowa, Arapaho, and Cheyenne warriors coupled with the army’s blessed clemency for their own marvelous, curly-headed “Boy General” both conspired to set in motion the gears of a crude bit of machinery that would grind slowly, inexorably slowly, over the next eight years.

*    *    *

Nipped by the cold frosts of lengthening autumn nights, the tall grasses across the prairie turned and dried withering in the incessant winds. Deer and elk grew restless, fought, and mated in their own ancient ritual of love and combat. Ponds slicked over with ice each night until the morning sun came to break the grip of so many things dead and dying on the land.

Near midmorning on 9 October 1868, a large band of painted, feathered warriors swept off the sandy hills, tearing down upon a civilian caravan of wagons returning to Kansas from Colorado Territory along the Old Arkansas Road. The Kiowas and Cheyennes caught the white farmers by surprise some ten miles east of the mouth of Sand Creek.

Blankets flapping, war cries splitting the air, they scared off the loose livestock herded beside the settlers’ train. What few oxen and cattle the first rush left behind were hitched to the wagons. Before the first sun went down on those farmers, the warriors finished off the harnessed animals, leaving the oxen to die a slow and noisy death while the battle raged around their bleeding carcasses.

The siege lasted for days with little hope for relief. Early the third morning the Indians captured Mrs. Clara Blinn and her two-year-old son Willie. When the warriors decided they’d had enough of these farmers, they hoisted their booty and two captives atop war ponies and spirited them over the low hills. Only Mrs. Blinn’s seriously wounded husband and the wagon master were left behind to send their prayers heavenward before limping to Fort Lyon.

It came as no surprise that before long those same young warriors sent word to the pony soldiers and Brevet Major General William B. Hazen, commander at Fort Cobb down
in Indian Territory, stating their desire to ransom the white woman and her son.

Still, no one in the army’s higher echelons would wager on who the captors were—Cheyenne or Kiowa or Arapaho. An unfortunate ignorance, for at the same time, from his winter camping grounds along the Washita River, Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle began to mediate the negotiations between the army’s General Hazen and those warriors holding the captives. Just when it looked like Black Kettle and the white general would make some headway in ransoming the white prisoners, General Sheridan himself learned of the negotiations and squashed Hazen’s peace machinery in midstream.

“I may not have learned much in my short tenure as commander of the Department of the Missouri,” the general snorted to his aide Lieutenant Colonel J. Schuyler Crosby, “but now, by God, I can connect Black Kettle’s bloody band of Southern Cheyenne with some of the white captives.”

“You’ve got them red-handed, sir!”

“And an old horse soldier like me knows where there’s that much smoke, there’s bound to be fire!”

“This is your winter to crush them, General.”

“Damn right it is, Crosby!” From his office he watched some infantry at drill across the parade of Fort Leavenworth. “It took us too damned long to realize the army was inadequate to catch mounted warriors fleeing across the plains. The only way to stop those warriors is to find their villages, then hit the bastards where they’re content to sit out the winter.”

“Sherman agrees?”

“Damn right he does. That’s why we’re pressing ahead with this winter campaign to wipe out—once and for
all—this Indian problem down here. In fact—” he shuffled through papers on his desk until he located what he wanted, “in Sherman’s reply of fifteen October, the old warhorse says it is up to the Indians themselves to decide whether they are to live or suffer extermination. These are Sherman’s own words, Crosby:

“Every man in army blue hungers for a decisive victory, General.”

“The cold weather this coming winter will keep those marauding sonsabitches home by their lodge fires, won’t it? Damn right, it will. Home in their villages—where Custer’s Seventh Cavalry can find them.”

“But, sir—what about General Sully? He’ll expect to head the expedition you send down into the Territories, won’t he?”

“I’ll handle Sully when the time comes, Crosby. I owe Custer that much.”

“T
HE
buffalo are plenty,” Chief Black Kettle said with satisfaction. “Here we will stay the winter.” His band of Southern Cheyenne spread out along the Washita River just east of the Texas Panhandle. One by one their browned, buffalo-hide lodges yearned toward the autumn-blue skies. Smoke from many fires rose to join the clouds dancing across the blue dome, pushed by the eager fall winds that foretold a taste of winter.

Black Kettle’s people did not camp alone this robe season. His village of fifty Cheyenne lodges had been joined by one lodge of visiting Arapaho and two Sioux lodges desiring to winter a little farther south than they normally did. Small as it was, Black Kettle’s village stood on the western border of a grander encampment spreading itself some twelve to fifteen miles along the looping river. Arapaho, Kiowa, Comanche, along with other bands of Southern Cheyenne and even a small village of Apache—in all, some six thousand strong—had erected their winter lodges in that ancient valley.

“Here to this valley dotted with hills that will break up winter’s icy blasts has the Earth Mother herself invited us. Here we will laugh and sleep, hunt and dance—safe for the winter.”

He smiled in that gentle way of his, watching his wife waddle off to unload the single travois of their simple possessions. Medicine Woman Later, his lifelong partner, gurgled in the back of her throat, a sound she used whenever she wanted to tell him he should do less talking about the trees and the land. A little less talking and a little more work.

It gave his heart a fierce pride to watch this raising of the few lodges left to his small band, smaller now after the slaughter at Sand Creek four winters ago. These few had survived, clung to life like ticks on summer buffalo. They had moved across the plains and along the river valleys with the seasons, persisting in life as The People had lived it for centuries already. They knew nothing else but to go on as they had lived for time beyond any one man’s memory.

In the heart of this river basin the southern tribes had long visited, the Washita wound its lazy trail in tight twists before it finally looped northward to form a large horseshoe. Black Kettle’s tribe selected that same bend in the river for their winter home. Here they were protected by the sandy red bluffs to the north across the river and the shaded knolls rising behind them. Here they would find no end to fresh water and abundant grazing for their pony herd of nearly a thousand animals. For fires to ward off the chill of autumn mornings and the numbing cold of winter nights, timber grew thick along the bottoms choked with plant life of all description ablaze in color.

One clear, frosty morning, the Cheyenne awoke to find
a thin slick of ice coating the water kettles. It was a magical time of year along the Washita. The buffalo hunted by the young men who left camp each day had already grown fat from a long summer grazing on the rich grasses carpeting the southern plains, their curly coats grown thick—a sign of an early and cold winter.

Chief Black Kettle sighed as he bent to retrieve a bundle his wife expected him to bring to her in their lodge. His heart swelled with happiness.

The Cheyenne will sleep here for the Time of Deep Snows.

“Good to have you here with us,” Major Joel Elliott said, dropping his salute. “You belong here, sir. At the head of your men.”

“Thank you, Major.” Custer flashed that famous peg-toothed smile and shook Elliott’s hand.

“Damn good to have you back!” First Lieutenant Thomas W. Custer shouldered his way through the crowd clustered about his older brother.

“Tom!”

“Can’t begin to tell you what it means to us having you leading us into this one, Autie.”

“Trouble?” Custer asked.

“Nothing we can’t handle
now!
Right, boys?”

Custer waited until the cheering died. “So, tell me. Something’s afoot. I can smell it.” His eyes moved from man to man, watching each of his old friends and fellow officers avoid his look.

“Tom?”

“It ain’t been a pretty sight here,” Tom replied. “Under siege practically every day … small bands of warriors
wandering past here heading north out of the Territories. Some bands not so small.”

“That’s trouble?” Custer rocked back on his heels and smiled beneath the corn-straw mustache. “You worried about a handful of roving warriors?”

“They’ve proved us idiots so far,” Elliott answered grimly.

“Buck up, gentlemen!” Custer said. “A new day is coming. We’ll soon show them a force to be reckoned with—our own beloved Seventh!”

“Hear, hear! To the Seventh!” Tom roared, slapping his brother on the back. “To the regiment that will pacify the plains!”

On the morning of 30 September, George Armstrong Custer had arrived at Fort Hays, Kansas, new duty station of the Seventh Cavalry. There he reported to General Sheridan, who had moved his departmental headquarters farther west to station himself closer to the main theater of hostilities.

After less than a day of rest and some final instructions, the young lieutenant colonel pushed west with a small escort, arriving at Fort Dodge on 4 October. There he had learned his regiment was encamped some thirty miles southeast of the fort along Bluff Creek, a small tributary of the Arkansas River. Into this besieged camp the regimental commander had galloped on the afternoon of the fifth to find brother Tom, Major Elliott and the others relieved that he had arrived at last to lead the regiment into the winter campaign.

Along with orders to reorganize the Seventh, Custer brought new ideas for some specialized training he and General Sheridan had designed for troops unaccustomed to
winter warfare. Although General Alfred Sully commanded this District of the Arkansas, Sheridan had devised an operational force of eleven companies of the Seventh Cavalry to ride under Custer, along with five companies of infantry and twelve companies of the Nineteenth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry that had yet to march south from Topeka. This massive force would then push out of Kansas Territory due south a hundred miles from Fort Dodge to establish a supply base from which Sheridan would begin his strikes against the hostiles.….

“You haven’t wasted any time getting the regiment shaped up, Autie,” Tom said one cold evening as he slipped through the tent flaps. His brother sat hunched over a lap desk. “Orders? Or another letter home to Libbie?”

That smile flashed again. Custer could keep nothing from his little brother.

“Orders first, Tom. Then, yes, I’ll get another letter off to Libbie tonight.”

“All work and no play. You’ve heard me say it many a time.”

“You! Preferring the cards or the bottle—even the ladies—to your soldier’s work.”

“By the heavens, Autie! Your brother? Wouldst that I prefer the feel of a perfumed breast beneath my hands or the sting of strong whiskey upon my tongue to drilling and target practice?”

Laughter came easily to them both, laughter rooted in a bond nurtured from childhood, a closeness now mellowed like aged Kentucky whiskey.

“Be gone with you, then.” Custer shooed with his left hand, the right bringing the nub of a pencil to his tongue once more. “I’ve too much work to be done and so little
time to do it. Go off and play then while your poor brother works his fingers and his pencil to the bone!”

Tom’s easy laughter rang through the tent flaps as Custer returned to his sheet of foolscap atop the small lap desk.
So bloody much to do
, he thought.
All of it riding on a perfect execution of Philip’s plans for this winter campaign.