Cry of the Hawk (5 page)

They moved east and south, until the ground beneath their moccasins felt more akin to home. But in the traveling itself, Shad Sweete once more felt the peace that came from the tonic of wandering. While most men wandered in search of a place to set down roots, Sweete was himself a born nomad.

In joy they had returned to the central plains, where years before he had found, fallen for, and purchased his Southern Cheyenne wife, Shell Woman, whom he promptly named “Toote” Sweete, commemorating a fragment of the French language he had learned from bandy-legged Canadian voyageurs in the north country. He thought the name fit her nicely, what with the way she could whistle him in for supper or their handful of ponies out of the village herd. Toote loved him every bit as fiercely as he loved her, and gave Shad a son back in the summer of forty-five, then a daughter one terrible winter night in forty-six when something tore inside her belly with the birthing.

Toote had cried in those first days to follow, telling him of her certainty she could never give him any more children. And each time he had always cradled the infant’s tiny frame within the shelter of his huge arms and rocked his daughter, telling his wife that their healthy son, High-Backed Bull, and now this daughter with the wide eyes and the mouth always curved in a smile, would be all any man could ask for. Shad Sweete could ask for no more than them.

Pipe Woman grew up doting on her father, and he made her in turn his special pet—teaching her everything he taught High-Backed Bull. Toote taught Pipe Woman everything a Cheyenne woman should know.

During those early years on the plains, Shad hired out to the Bent brothers, who traded from that huge mud fort of theirs down on the Arkansas River in Colorado Territory. But more and more he yearned to be wandering once again. He soon gave in to that siren of the plains and hunted buffalo on his own; his wife, son, and daughter helped him skin the hides that bought bangles and foofarraw enough to make the dark Cheyenne eyes shine.

“You’re Sweete, ain’t you?” asked the soldier with the well-seamed face.

Shad had watched him approaching on horseback, plodding slowly all the way from the cluster of buildings that was Fort Laramie. Sweete gazed up into the early light, finished his swallow of sweetened coffee, and answered.

“I am.”

“Colonel Moonlight sent me to fetch you.”

“He did, did he? Why? We’re supposed to be waiting.”

“Don’t know nothing about your waiting, Sweete. Colonel just sent me to fetch you to his office.”

“Say what for?”

“Said to tell you Bridger come in late last night.”

He could not deny the old tingle that made his every muscle sing at that news. “Gabe?”

Shad stood, throwing back the last of the coffee and strapping the tin cup at his wide belt decorated with dull brass tacks.

“By God! Let’s go soldier-boy!” he hollered as he took off on an easy lope, leaving the horseman behind.

It was a thing Shad Sweete could do; once he hit this easy stride, he was able to keep it up for distances and time beyond most men.

But especially this morning, hearing that his old friend Jim Bridger had finally come in.

Now they would palaver of old times shared in the high lonesome, and do a little scouting for the army once more.

As stirred up as the Cheyenne and Sioux were in these parts, he figured it just might prove to be a real bloody time for these poor soldier-boys before the last dance of the night was called and played through.

At Fort Leavenworth
, Kansas, Jonah Hook heard some of the first whispers of what they were headed into.

From the lips of wagon teamsters, scouts, and soldiers just in off the prairie came the word that anything west of Fort Riley, Kansas, or west of Fort Kearney, Nebraska Territory, was a trip into hell itself. The plains were afire, lit for sure by that Methodist minister turned Injun killer, John M. Chivington himself, down at Sand Creek. The Cheyenne broke loose, headed north after Chivington had tried to exterminate them all, and in their dash for freedom the Cheyenne were spreading the flames of war among the Arapaho and Sioux.

“This ain’t no Injun scare,” said the men gathered at the sutler’s place each sundown. “This is a goddanged Injun war.”

General Grenville M. Dodge had ordered the Second Regiment of Volunteers out of Leavenworth on 1 March. The Third wasn’t ready to march west until the twenty-sixth. On muddy, rutted roads, accompanied by a few mule-drawn wagons, they trudged on foot, bound to the northwest for Fort Kearney across the wide, rolling plains that threatened to swallow Jonah wherever he cared to cast his eyes.

The stinking, hulking cottonwood-plank barracks like forgotten monuments on that Nebraska prairie beckoned the footsore Confederates turned Indian fighters after 350 miles of bone-numbing march.

“You Johnnies’re now under the command of General Patrick E. Connor, Department of the Plains!” hollered a mouthy lieutenant the next morning at assembly on the Fort Kearney parade. “General telegraphed us his wire last night when he learned you boys’d made it in. Two companies will be assigned to stay here,” the officer started to explain.

Hook glanced at others up and down the line, not knowing if the Fort Kearney assignment was blessing, or curse.

The officer went on, “Two more companies assigned to garrison each of the following: Cottonwood Station, Fort Rankin, Junction … and the last companies to report on to Fort Laramie. General Connor is establishing Fort Rankin as regimental headquarters. You Confederates—inside of a month, you’ll be guarding six hundred miles of road.”

Leaving companies A and B at Fort Kearney, then depositing companies C and D at Cottonwood Station, the rest of the regiment marched on into the northeastern corner of Colorado Territory, arriving at Julesburg on 25 April.

Without delaying, two days later companies I and K were formed up and marched north, leaving the rest behind to garrison the South Platte stations and to build the new Fort Sedgwick to replace the aging Fort Rankin. Captains Henry Leefeldt and A. Smith Lybe had their orders minutes after arriving at the sprawling Fort Laramie, like a beacon on those far plains.

“We’re to push on west,” explained Captain Lybe to his I Company that night as the men sopped up the last of their white beans with hardtack, supper in bivouac in the shadow of the Laramie barracks. “K Company will drop off at Camp Marshall, sixty-five miles west of here.”

“So where we going?” asked one of the Mississippi boys Jonah had been captured with at the battle of Corinth.

Lybe turned slowly on the speaker, pursing his lips for a moment in concentration. “We been handed the toughest row of all, boys.”

Some of the Confederates muttered among themselves. Others just stirred their fires with sticks or stared at the coffee going cold in their cups.

“I won’t bullshit you none. We’re all gonna count on each other out there—so I don’t want to start by telling you this is going to be a cakewalk. You all have those down south at Sunday socials, don’t you?”

Lybe smiled, trying to drive home his joke as some of the Confederates laughed self-consciously.

“Those of us what lived close enough to a church!” hollered someone behind Jonah.

The rest of them laughed now. Lybe too. Hook liked the Yankee for trying. The captain just might make this company of ragtag Confederates work, and keep them alive to boot.

“Well, now—we’ve got our orders.”

“Going where, Cap’n?”

Lybe cleared his throat. “We’ll push on to Three Crossings, where we’ll build our post.”

“We all gonna stay there?”

“No such luck, boys. We’re being spread thin along the telegraph. To keep it open.”

“How thin is thin?”

“This company’s got us three hundred miles to watch,” Lybe answered, wiping his palms on the tails of his tunic.

“Jesus God!” someone exclaimed.

“We’ll be spread out from Sweetwater Station, St. Mary’s, and clear up to South Pass itself.”

“The mountains? We going clear up into those goddamned mountains?” squeaked a questioner.

“No. South Pass isn’t in the mountains. You wouldn’t know you had crossed the Rockies if you didn’t pay attention and see the creeks and streams flowing west, instead of east.”

“Don’t say,” muttered the fellow beside Jonah. He smiled at Hook and went back to licking coffee off his finger.

“We won’t be alone though.”

“Hell, no. We’ll have all kinds of redskin company I bet.”

Lybe laughed easily at that. “No, boys. The Eleventh Ohio is out there, waiting for us to come on west.”

“Ohio boys?”

“Yes. I hear they’ve already got a few galvanized Rebs of their own on their rosters. Mostly Kentuckians who served under General John Morgan.”

“Kentucky boys are all right,” Jonah said. His voice carried loudly in the sudden stillness.

“Yes, soldier. I think Kentucky boys are all right. Just like the rest of you: Mississippi and Georgia, Virginia and Tennessee.”

“Don’t forget Ala-by-God-bama!” shouted one of them.

The rest hooted, singing out their home states.

Jonah watched Lybe drag a fist under his nose, not knowing if the man was touched by the homey kinship of these Southerners suddenly getting used to the ill-fitting blue uniforms and these far-flung, wide-open plains dotted with high purple mountains, or if the captain might truly be worried for what he was leading them into.

3

May, 1865

W
HEN
CRAZY HORSE
and Little Big Man rode in at the van of the long procession leading many fine horses swaybacked under all that fine plunder taken in the raids along the Platte River, the eyes of the Bad Face Oglalla warriors grew big as Cheyenne conchos.

By the Moon of First Eggs, Old Man Afraid could no longer talk his people into staying out of the way of the white man. Instead, both Red Cloud and the Old Man’s son were convincing more and more of the Oglalla that the time had come to make war on the white man. Raiding the Holy Road had never been so profitable, nor so easy—what with so few soldiers strung out along the road and the talking wire hung above those deep ruts pointing toward the setting sun.

Beneath the spring moon, Young Man Afraid of His Horses and Red Cloud called for an all-out effort to drive the white man and his soldiers from the North Platte by midsummer. Until then, small raiding parties would strike here and there along the Holy Road, feeling out the strength of the enemy, keeping the soldiers in a turmoil like a wasps’ nest stirred with a stick, and forcing the army to dart here, then there, with what strength the bluecoats could muster.

“These soldiers do not fight like men,” Young Man Afraid told the great assembly of more than fifteen hundred warriors. “We marched north from our raids along the Holy Road. Tell them, Crazy Horse—what happened to those soldiers sent against us.”

The Horse stood, his young frame and light unbound hair etched in firelight. “Southeast of the fort the white man calls Laramie, the soldiers tried to attack us as we crossed the North Platte with our families and herds. There were only two hundred Blue Coats sent against us—a powerful force of Lakota and Shahiyena more than one thousand warriors strong!”

“We pushed the soldiers aside like they were troublesome buffalo gnats!” added Young Man Afraid to the laughter of the Oglalla.

“The next day the soldier chief brought more soldiers riding from the fort, but this time we attacked him,” Crazy Horse continued. “The Blue Coats forted up inside a ring of their wagons and made it hard in a day-long fight to steal any of their American horses. We lost no warriors in either of those battles before moving north once more into the Sand Hills, on farther to the Paha Sapa.”

“This march made in the teeth of winter,” Young Man Afraid reminded the assembly.

“I think that is why Spotted Tail left us and returned to Fort Laramie to join the Loafers,” said Crazy Horse. “The Arapaho went their way as well.”

“But now with two full moons of the young grass in the bellies of our ponies, we are ready once more to ride after the buffalo and lay in the meat our warriors will need for the war trail,” Young Man Afraid said. “Then once we hold our sun dance, we can march south to drive the white man out of our hunting land, for all time.”

“Man’s gotta be
careful sitting alone out here,” Shad Sweete said quietly as he came up out of the dark behind the young soldier sitting at the edge of the hill not far from the camp fires, but far enough that only the old plainsman’s experienced eye could make out the dark shape blotting out a piece of the spring nightsky.

The soldier turned to the scout with a withering look. “Didn’t hear nobody make you my nursemaid, old man. Why don’t you go on back with them others and let a fella have some peace to himself out here.”

Shad stood there, staring down at the soldier he took for half his age, measuring the size of the chip the man carried on his shoulder. The scout tried to place the inflection to the stranger’s voice. It had been so many years. He settled down a few feet from the soldier.

“You from Kentucky, ain’t you?” Sweete asked.

Again the soldier regarded him like he was meat gone bad. “No, old man. Virginia—for all it matters to you.”

He pulled at some sage, rolled it between his palms, then drank deep of it into his nostrils. “Don’t matter, I suppose. Just come from southern Ohio myself. So long ago I figure it don’t really matter after all.”

“I could’ve told you.”

He held out his hand to the stranger. “Shadrach Sweete. I didn’t catch yours.”

“Didn’t give it.”

Shad withdrew the hand. “I figure someone foolish as you sitting alone out here in the middle of Injun country ought to have himself some company.”

“I ain’t alone—not now,” the stranger replied, and threw a thumb over his shoulder. “Got all the company I can stand back there.”

“Oh, you best understand you are damned well alone out here, son.”

The stranger snorted a quick, humorless laugh. “What—some Injun going to come pluck my hair off here in sight of those fires yonder?”