Wolf Mountain Moon (6 page)

But first the army had to catch the winter roamers.

During the two days following his arrival at Tongue River
Cantonment, Frank Baldwin, Miles's newly appointed adjutant for the campaign, joined the other officers readying their command to take to the field. Miles purchased a small herd of cattle from a private contractor upriver—enough beef to supply ten thousand rations for his troops on the coming march. Two civilian wranglers were hired to watch over the herd. In the meantime a supply train of Bozeman vegetables arrived from the mouth of the Bighorn, escorted by elements of Lieutenant Colonel Elwell S. Otis's Twenty-second Infantry.

Otis himself was on his way downriver, replaced back on the twenty-eighth of October by Major Alfred L. Hough as commander of the Glendive Cantonment, charged with protecting the wagon trains that supplied Tongue River. An old war veteran himself, Hough was galled to find the horrid conditions his men suffered at their outpost as the season turned cold. The paltry number of crude huts Otis expected to protect the soldiers from the coming winter were woefully inadequate. With no cots nor mattresses at Glendive, the Seventeenth were forced to sleep on a corduroy of poles and sagebrush to keep their bodies off the cold ground. In those last few days of October, Hough's men immediately began to construct more dugouts while others labored to lay in more firewood once they learned from army command that they would not be abandoning the upper river for the approaching winter.

Miles wanted the Seventeenth to remain active and alert, guarding the country along the Yellowstone east of the Tongue while he himself went in search of Sitting Bull.

On the fourth of November the quartermaster at Tongue River issued the Fifth Infantry some of that special clothing Miles had ordered sent upriver so that his regiment could conduct their continued campaign.

“I am satisfied that if the Indians can live here on the northern plains in the winter,” Miles told his officer corps, “white men can also—if properly equipped with all the advantages we can give our troops, which are certainly superior to those obtainable by the Indians.”

Baldwin and many of the others agreed. They and their men had suffered during the winter campaign against the Southern Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche during the Buffalo Wars. Still, as cold as the weather had been in the panhandle
of Texas, it in no way prepared the Fifth Infantry for what they were about to be asked to endure on the plains of Montana Territory.

Even Sherman himself had written to Miles, “Winter on the Yellowstone is another matter from winter on the Red River.”

While General Terry did not actually expect Miles to conduct a campaign under the frigid conditions known to batter the northern prairie, the colonel had never been the sort to sit on his hands. North of the Yellowstone, where Miles planned to pursue the hostiles of Sitting Bull, the capricious weather could one day be pleasant and sunny, whereas the next could find a man fighting a blizzard as temperatures plummeted far enough to freeze the mercury at the bottom of a surgeon's thermometer. And then there was the much-feared factor of windchill. An ambient temperature of ten degrees below zero—which was the daily high documented time and again by the written record of the Fifth Infantry over the next month—would with any sort of wind behind it have the brutal effect of anywhere between fifty-eight to sixty-eight below.

As the Fifth had already learned about being stationed in Montana Territory, the wind is a constant companion.

Already the colonel had requested the Quartermaster Corps to ship him arctic clothing from the closest supply depot, as well as asking that buffalo coats and leggings be constructed for his men. But that equipment, along with the Sibley tents he had begged for, had yet to arrive. Miles remained undeterred—his regiment would march in the best they could muster for the moment: layers of army wool draped them from head to toe, as well as some burlap feed sacks the men wrapped around their feet to do what they could to prevent frostbite.

At dawn on Sunday, 5 November, the Fifth Infantry began muscling the ropes lashed to their crude ferries, cordelling those ungainly craft across the Yellowstone to the north bank. Back and forth the ferries plied the frothy current, every trip burdened with two of the campaign's thirty-eight supply wagons all loaded with a month's rations, each wagon to be pulled by a six-mule hitch. Already the river's surface was beginning to slake with ice and the wind was blustering down the valley.
It was destined to be an early, and long, winter on the northern plains.

Plowing through three additional inches of new snow the following morning, the entire command eventually marched away from the north bank to begin their search for Sitting Bull. While two companies of Hough's Twenty-second Infantry stayed behind to garrison the post, Miles rode at the head of 15 officers and more than 430 foot soldiers. Joining the infantry were 10 civilians and 2 Indian scouts. With them came the twelve-pound Napoleon gun and three-inch Rodman ordnance rifle, both of which had proved so successful in putting the Sioux village to flight at Cedar Creek. In addition to his wagon train—which carried 250 rounds of rifle ammunition for each man—Miles brought along two ambulances, an assortment of pack mules, and that small beef herd.

After reaching Sunday Creek the scouts led the command roughly north across a rugged piece of country, where many times the men were required to construct crude bridges or corduroy the sides of ravines for their wagons. After making no more than nine grueling miles, the Fifth went into camp late that first afternoon as the sun began to set.

“It's election day, General,” Baldwin cheered the morning of the seventh as Miles stomped up to the fire in the gray light of dawn.

“Let's hope the folks back east get us a president who won't let the army shrink any more than Congress has done to us already.”

The sun came out, eventually warming the air and turning the snow to slush beneath every hoof, wagon wheel, and waterlogged boot. Through a countryside dotted with greasewood and cactus the men trudged and shivered, forced to cross and recross Sunday Creek more than a dozen times in less than five hours. At twilight many of the weary men gathered around hasty fires, wolfed down their rations, and curled into their two blankets with a bunkie.

Setting off before dawn beneath a bright moon, they made nineteen miles that eighth day of November, following the tributaries of Sunday Creek as the command climbed the barren divide that would eventually drop them into the drainage of the alkali-laced Little Dry Creek. Here they began to see more in the way of buffalo and antelope along their route.

Frank Baldwin spotted the long-haired civilian scout appear on the hilltop ahead, loping back to rejoin Miles at the head of the column.

“The Jackson brothers agree with me, General.”

“How's that, Kelly?”

“This country east of the Musselshell and south of the Missouri just happens to be some of the prime feeding grounds for buffalo at this season of the year.”

“Oh?” Miles replied. “Have these buffalo migrated up from the south?”

“Out of the north, General,” Kelly explained. “They find shelter in the lee of the Bear's Paw Mountains and the valley of the Milk River. For many a generation traders and half-breeds have been coming down from the Canadian side to hunt and make robes, or trade them for some Red River rum.”

Miles shivered as the wind gusted. “A little rum right now would sure as hell warm the inner man in me, gentlemen!”

Without finding much in the way of timber, the men at sunset hunkered around their smoldering buffalo-chip fires to boil coffee and warm frozen hands and feet.

Under a clear and starry sky the following morning, the Fifth moved out behind Miles, his staff, and the scouts, who all rode some two to three miles ahead of the column, watching from the high ground for any sign of warriors. Early that afternoon of the ninth they reached a branch of Big Dry Creek, where they made camp after putting another twenty miles behind them.

On Friday afternoon just past two
P.M
., as the command was going into camp among the cottonwoods along the Big Dry, Yellowstone Kelly and William “Billy” Cross arrived to report that they had discovered a fresh Indian trail ahead. It was clear the village was on its way north to the Missouri.

The following morning the men awoke to a keen north wind whistling down the valley, driving an icy snow at their backs as they moved out for the day. It wasn't long before they crossed the lodgepole trail Kelly had discovered the day before. An hour later they came across some butchered buffalo carcasses. But by late morning the drifting, blowing snow had completely masked all sign of the enemy. On down the creek bottom the soldiers pressed despite the dropping temperatures. At times the wagons broke through the thickening ice as
they rumbled along the dry bed of the Big Dry, no more than some twenty feet wide. Courageously managing to plod some fourteen miles in the teeth of that storm, the Fifth settled in for the night at the site of a camp used by the northbound Sioux only days before. The surgeon reported that the temperature stood at ten below, continuing to drop.

“Kelly's scouts tell me we're following Iron Dog's village,” Miles explained to a hastily convened officers' meeting that night after sundown.

“How many's the lodge, General?” Baldwin asked, using Miles's brevet, or honorary, rank.

“Could be a hundred and twenty,” the colonel replied. “Seems they're planning to cross the Missouri, aiming to reach Fort Peck for supplies.”

“Maybe we can catch them before they do,” Baldwin said, feeling optimistic despite the weather and trail conditions.

“If we don't get to them by the time they reach Fort Peck,” Miles assured his officers, “then, by damned, we'll get them eventually.”

Knowing his commander wasn't the sort to give up a chase, Baldwin rubbed his mittens together in anticipation. “Maybe when this bunch has joined back up with Sitting Bull.”

But unlike the Sioux traveling on horseback and on foot through the falling temperatures and deepening snow, Miles found it tough going for his wagons the following day. Struggling to squeeze their way through nearly impassable ravines, climbing up and down nearly perpendicular bluffs, the column put no more than a dozen miles behind them that Sunday of driving wind and four more inches of snow. In the shelter of a Cottonwood grove the surgeon's thermometer read twelve below that night of the twelfth.

So cold was it with the howling wind the morning of the thirteenth that the colonel kept his men in camp to recoup both them and the stock. After sending a courier to Fort Buford to inform Colonel William B. Hazen of his movements and asking for any word on the Hunkpapa bands, Miles had his trusted Baldwin lead a battalion comprising E and H companies to comb the snowy countryside for any sign of the enemy. Frank returned empty-handed after covering more than thirteen miles of the valley. Just before sundown the
temperature climbed all the way to sixteen degrees before it began to plummet once more.

On the following day the men struggled valiantly to make twenty-three miles, what with their wagons continually breaking through the ice caked along the bottom of the Big Dry, or bogging down in the slushy quicksand of the creek bottom. That night the soldiers made their bivouac in country beginning to change from barren coulees and ravines to gently rolling hillsides covered with waist-high autumn-cured grasses tracked with thickly timbered water courses—a clear indication they were drawing close to the Missouri River. All day they marched in sight of growing herds of buffalo, as well as hundreds upon hundreds of antelope that dashed and cavorted on both sides of the column.

At midmorning on the fifteenth, some of Kelly's scouts came loping back to the head of the column with word that Indians had been spotted across the river ahead. After deploying his command into a protective square around his wagons and beef herd, Miles moved out once more, soon discovering that the enemy causing all the alarm was only agency Indians across the Missouri.

A real disappointment to Baldwin, who had yearned to have himself and his men a good fight of it after enduring the last ten days of arduous march and horrid temperatures.

In less than a month the lieutenant would have his wish come true.

Johnny Bruguier did not know who those soldiers camped across the river were, but soldiers were soldiers. And white men were white men.

For the better part of two days he did his best to lay low, and when he did have to move about the Fort Peck Agency, he did so wrapped in a blanket or with a buffalo robe pulled over his head.

Wouldn't be smart for him to take any chances—after all, some of those white men making camp across the Missouri just might be some of the soldiers who had attacked Sitting Bull's camp on Cedar Creek a matter of weeks ago in the Moon When Leaves Fall.

For most of the last month the half-breed had clung tight as a buffalo tick to Sitting Bull and his thirty lodges. Here was
the greatest of Lakota chiefs, the man who had single-handedly put together the largest confederation of warrior bands ever assembled on the plains … now forced to watch the Bear Coat chip away at his alliance. For the most part the Bull was alone now. And Johnny Bruguier knew what alone meant.

He had been running since the end of last summer, ever since killing a white man near the Standing Rock Agency. A sure-as-hell dance at the end of a rope for a half-breed like Johnny. So he had stolen a horse in Whitewood City and scampered off to the west—heading for Injun country, where the law and posses would not dare come looking for him. On down that outlaw trail he discovered the chaps tied up behind the saddle on that stolen horse, the chaps he had been wearing when he had bravely ridden right into the Hunkpapa village and dashed into what he had hoped would be the headman's lodge.

It turned out to belong to White Bull, the nephew of Sitting Bull himself.