Wolf Mountain Moon Read online

  Tongue River Cantonment, 1876-1877.

  (Courtesy National Archives)

  Artillery at Tongue River Cantonment,

  December 29, 1876.

  (Courtesy National Archives)

  First Lt. Frank D. Baldwin.

  (Courtesy Library of Congress)

  As his mother began to wash the white man’s head and face, the boy turned away.

  She used a strip of dirty, stiffened white cloth—one of the dead soldier’s stockings. If only these white men wore moccasins instead of the clumsy black boots that made their feet hot and sticky. With moccasins the white men would not need to wear these silly stockings. He smiled and began to feel better for it.

  This was his seventh summer. He was too old to act like a child, the boy decided.

  Finally he turned back to watch his mother scrub the last of the black grainy smudges from the edges of the bullet hole in the soldier’s left temple. Little blood had oozed from the wound.

  Perhaps this pale man had already been dying from that messy bullet wound in his side. The boy had seen enough deer and elk, antelope and buffalo, brought down with bullets. And he knew no man could live long after suffering a wound in the chest as terrible as this. This soldier had been dying, and he was shot in the head to assure his death.

  Someone had wanted to make certain that this soldier was not taken alive. Someone had saved this pale-skinned soldier from the possibility of torture by sending a bullet through his brain.

  George Armstrong Custer, in one of

  the last portraits made of him in April, 1876.

  (courtesy of Custer Battlefield National Monument)

  John “Liver-Eating” Johnston.

  (Courtesy Denver Public Library, Western History Section)

  Luther S. “Yellowstone” Kelly.

  (Courtesy Denver Public Library, Western History Section)

  Colonel Nelson A. Miles and officers of the Fifth Infantry, December 29, 1876. From left: Lt. O.F. Long, Surgeon H.R. Tilton, Lt. J.W. Pope, Col. N.A. Miles, Lt. F.D. Baldwin, Lt. C.E. Hargous, and Lt. H.K. Bailey.

  (Courtesy Montana Historical Society)

  Wooden Leg’s drawing of his rescue of Big Crow.

  (Courtesy Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument)

  Fifth Infantry soldiers at Tongue River Cantonment in winter dress.

  (Courtesy Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument)

  BOOKS BY TERRY C. JOHNSTON

  Cry of the Hawk

  Winter Rain

  Dream Catcher

  Carry the Wind

  Borderlords

  One-Eyed Dream

  Dance on the Wind

  Buffalo Palace

  Crack in the Sky

  Ride the Moon Down

  Death Rattle

  Wind Walker

  SONS OF THE PLAINS NOVELS

  Long Winter Gone

  Seize the Sky

  Whisper of the Wolf

  THE PLAINSMEN NOVELS

  Sioux Dawn

  Red Cloud’s Revenge

  The Stalkers

  Black Sun

  Devil’s Backbone

  Shadow Riders

  Dying Thunder

  Blood Song

  Reap the Whirlwind

  Trumpet on the Land

  A Cold Day in Hell

  Wolf Mountain Moon

  Ashes of Heaven

  Cries from the Earth

  Lay the Mountain Low

  for all his enthusiastic assistance

  helping me write

  the past four Plainsmen novels,

  the dedication of this novel to

  the widely respected National Park Service historian

  and published Indian Wars authority

  Jerome A. Greene

  is long overdue

  Cast of Characters

  Seamus Donegan Samantha Donegan

  Military

  Brigadier General George C. Crook—Department of the Platte

  Colonel William B. Hazen—commanding Sixth U.S. Infantry, Fort Buford, M.T.

  Colonel Nelson A. Miles—commanding Fifth U.S. Infantry, Tongue River Cantonment, M.T.

  Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie—commanding Fourth U.S. Cavalry

  Lieutenant Colonel Elwell S. Otis—Twenty-second U.S. Infantry

  Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Whistler—Fifth U.S. Infantry

  Major Alfred L. Hough—Seventeenth U.S. Infantry, commanding at Glendive Cantonment

  Major Henry R. Tilton—Surgeon, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  Major Edwin F. Townsend—Commanding Officer, Fort Laramie, W.T.

  Captain Charles J. Dickey—E Company, Twenty-second Infantry

  Captain Ezra P. Ewers—E Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  Captain—Randall—Quartermaster, Fifth U.S. Infantry, Tongue River Cantonment, M.T.

  Captain Wyllys Lyman—I Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  Captain James S. Casey—A Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  Captain Andrew S. Bennett—B Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  Captain Edmond Butler—C Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  Captain Simon Snyder—F Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  Captain Edwin Pollock—Ninth U.S. Infantry, commander of Reno Cantonment

  First Lieutenant Frank D. Baldwin—Fifth U.S. Infantry

  First Lieutenant Cornelius C. Cusick—F Company, Twenty-second Infantry

  First Lieutenant Mason Carter—K Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  First Lieutenant George W. Baird—regimental adjutant, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  First Lieutenant Robert McDonald—D Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  Second Lieutenant Russell H. Day—Sixth U.S. Infantry, commanding garrison at Fort Peck

  Second Lieutenant David Q. Rousseau—G Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  Second Lieutenant William H. Wheeler—Eleventh U.S. Infantry

  Second Lieutenant Frank S. Hinkle—H Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  Second Lieutenant Charles E. Hargous—Fifth U.S. Infantry, commanding mounted infantry to Wolf Mountain

  Second Lieutenant Hobart K. Bailey—Fifth U.S. Infantry, aide-de-camp to Miles

  Second Lieutenant James Worden Pope—E Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry, commanding Rodman gun

  Second Lieutenant Edward W. Casey—Twenty-second U.S. Infantry, assisting Pope’s artillery detail: in charge of Napoleon gun

  Second Lieutenant Oscar F. Long—Fifth U.S. Infantry, acting engineering officer

  Second Lieutenant William H. C. Bowen—Fifth U.S. Infantry, in charge of supply wagons

  Second Lieutenant James H. Whitten—I Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry, in charge of pack animals

  Trumpeter Edwin M. Brown

  Private Thomas Kelly—I Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  Private Richard Bellows—E Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  Private Philip Kennedy—C Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry Private

  Patton G. Whited—C Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  Assistant Surgeon Louis S. Tesson

  Civilians

  Thomas J. Mitchell—agent at Fort Peck

  Elizabeth Burt

  Martha Luhn

  Nettie Capron

  Army Scouts

  Johnny Bruguier / “Big Leggings”

  Luther S. (Sage) “Yellowstone” Kelly

  Robert Jackson William Jackson

  Victor Smith John Johnston

  George Johnson James Parker

  William Cross Jim Woods

  Tom Leforge Joe Culbertson

  Edward Lambert George Boyd

  Left Hand—Yanktonai scout for Baldwin on Fort Peck expedition

  Buffalo Horn—Bannock scout for Miles on Wolf Mountain Campaign

  Lakota

&
nbsp; Sitting Bull Gall

  Three Bears Little Big Man

  Pretty Bear Foolish Thunder

  White Bull Bull Eagle

  Small Bear Touch-the-Clouds

  Roman Nose Spotted Elk

  Red Horse Tall Bull

  Packs the Drum / “Sitting Bull the Good”

  Yellow Eagle Foolish Bear

  Important Man Long Dog

  Black Moon Little Knife

  Crow Spotted Blackbird

  Iron Dog Yellow Liver

  Four Horns Red Horn

  Drag Hollow Horns

  White Horse Red Horses

  Fat Hide / Fat on the Beef The Yearling

  Lame Red Skirt / Red Cloth Lone Horn

  Bad Leg No Neck

  Long Feather Rising Sun

  Jumping Bull Black Shawl

  Crazy Horse Runs-the-Bear

  He Dog Hump

  Long Hair

  Cheyenne

  “Tse-tsehese-staeste”

  “Those Who Are Hearted Alike”

  White Bull Wooden Leg

  Black Moccasin (Limber Lance) Yellow Weasel

  Black Hawk Yellow Hair

  Big Crow Crow Split Nose

  Sits in the Night Morning Star

  Little Wolf Old Bear

  Young Two Moon Beaver Claws

  Left-Handed Wolf Beaver Dam

  Big Horse Crow Necklace

  Gypsum Brave Wolf

  High Wolf Box Elder

  Coal Bear Long Jaw

  Medicine Bear

  Cheyenne Party Captured by Miles’s Scouts

  Old Wool Woman / Sweet Taste Woman

  Crooked Nose Woman Fingers Woman

  Twin Woman Crane Woman

  Red Hood Black Horse

  Crow

  Half Yellow Face Old Bear

  Assiniboine

  White Dog

  Casualties:

  * Private William H. Batty—C Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  * Corporal Augustus Rothman—A Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  * / † Private Bernard McCann—F Company, Twenty-second U.S. Infantry

  † Sergeant Hiram Spangenberg—F Company, Twenty-second U.S. Infantry

  † Corporal Thomas Roehm—F Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  † Private Henry Rodenburgh—A Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  † Private George Danha—H Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  † Private William H. Daily—D Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  † Private —— McHugh—H Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  † Private —— Simond—D Company, Fifth U.S. Infantry

  * —killed in action

  † partial listing of wounded in action

  During the Indian Wars, the [Regular Army] soldier, isolated from his own people and faced by a skilled enemy, lived under conditions that would have broken the spirit of most groups. Badly armed and clothed, underfed and plopped into holes on the prairie, the soldier made do and “re-upped,” left the army after a single hitch, or deserted. It is most remarkable that they did not all desert.

  —Neil Baird Thompson

  Crazy Horse Called Them

  Walk-a-Heaps

  The Sioux campaigns of 1876 were marked with few engagements, but those that did take place were conspicuous for the desperateness with which they were fought and the severe losses sustained. Nearly four hundred and fifty officers and men of the army were killed and wounded during the year…. The enemy’s loss is now known to have been severe at the Rosebud, Little Big Horn, Slim Buttes and Bates Creek. But the far-reaching results of the campaigns extended beyond the consideration of how many were killed and wounded. They led to the disintegration of many of the hostile bands of savages, who gladly sought safety upon the reservations and who have not since attempted any warlike demonstrations.

  —George F. Price

  Across the Continent with

  the Fifth Cavalry

  Desperate, hungry, and weary of fighting, the rapidly weakening Indian coalition rallied one last time at Wolf Mountains, when the soldiers threatened the sanctity of their homes. But for the Sioux and Cheyennes, offensive warfare was over. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse never again united. Instead, the disintegration of the massive Indian resistance was finally at hand. As Miles averred, “We … had taught the destroyers of Custer that there was one small command that could whip them as long as they dared face it.”

  —Jerome Greene

  Yellowstone Command

  It is the opinion of some who had had years of experience in Indian fighting, that there has rarely, if ever, been a fight before in which the Sioux and Cheyennes showed such determination and persistency, where they were finally defeated.

  —Captain Edmond Butler

  “Army and Navy Journal”

  March 31, 1877

  If a Crazy Horse camp could be struck, where would the people be safe?

  —Man Sandoz

  Crazy Horse—Strange Man of

  the Oglala

  Foreword

  While Seamus Donegan pushes north by west away from Crook and Mackenzie’s camp on the Belle Fourche River, you and I are going to have to step back in time a few weeks so that we can catch up with all that’s been happening in the Yellowstone country, where Miles’s Fifth Infantry are scrambling about trying to find out where Sitting Bull scampered off to after the fight at Cedar Creek.

  To write with continuity the final half of A Cold Day in Hell our previous volume, I was faced with a dilemma. I could chop up the action in the Mackenzie / Fourth Cavalry / Morning Star story line by yanking the reader back and forth from the Bighorn country to the northern plains patrolled by the Fifth Infantry … or I could charge straight ahead with one story line instead of dealing with two simultaneously. I chose this second option.

  Since this present novel deals with the tale of Nelson A. Miles’s efforts in the rugged country north of the Yellowstone, we are free now to drop back a few weeks in time before the conclusion of A Cold Day in Hell so that we might learn how the colonel’s men were faring in their hunt for Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa at the same moment Crook and Mackenzie were crushing the last of Northern Cheyenne resistance.

  This means that after we get Seamus riding off to the north into Crazy Horse country, we’re going to leave him for a few days as we leap on north to catch up with all the action we’ve missed while we’ve been busy with the Fourth Cavalry and their Battle of the Red Fork.

  And because we are going back on the calendar, we won’t be starting out right away with the newspaper headlines as we normally do. Once we bring all our characters closer to mid-December, when the Irishman reaches the Tongue River Cantonment, those news reports will continue.

  At the beginning of some chapters and some scenes you’re going to read the very same news stories devoured by the officers’ wives and those civilians employed at army posts or those living in adjacent frontier settlements, taken from the front page of the daily newspapers just as Samantha Donegan herself would read them—newspapers that arrived as much as a week or more late, due to the wilderness distances to be traveled by freight carriers.

  Copied verbatim from the headlines and graphic accounts of the day, these reports and stories were the only news available for those people who had a most personal interest in the frontier army’s last great campaign—those families who had tearfully watched a loved one march off to war that winter of the Great Sioux War of 1876.

  My hope is that you will be struck with the immediacy of each day’s front page as you finish reading that day’s news—just as Samantha Donegan would have read the sometimes reassuring, ofttimes terrifying, news from her relative safety at Fort Laramie. But unlike her and the rest of those left behind at the posts and frontier settlements, you will be thrust back into the footsteps of those cold, frightened infantrymen and the harried villages of hungry people the army is searching for here in the maw of that most terrible winter.

  An army knowing it is now only a matter of t
ime until they succeed in what was begun many months before in the trampled, bloody snow along the Powder River.

  The Lakota and Cheyenne realizing at last that their culture, an ancient way of life, is taking its last breath.

  To be no more.

  PROLOGUE

  Mid-December 1876

  He watched the three of them until they dropped out of sight beyond that last far rise to the south.

  Then he watched that snowy sliver of empty ground a little while longer, just to be sure those three horsemen might not reappear there where the icy gray blanket of earth pressed against the lowering slate-gray sky. Hoping the riders might … but knowing they wouldn’t.

  Seamus Donegan took a deep breath—so deep, the sub-freezing air shocked his chest. Then he gently nudged the roan to the left and pointed their noses north.

  To the Yellowstone.

  Right through the heart of the country where the Cheyenne survivors of Mackenzie’s attack on Morning Star’s village were fleeing. Dead center through the land where Crazy Horse was said to be wintering.

  As if it had been lying in wait for those three Indian scouts to sign talk their hurried farewells in the bitter cold—as if it had been patient only long enough until he could turn his face back to the north—the wind came up, leaping out of hiding suddenly that midday. The Irishman glanced back over his shoulder at the southern rim of that monochrome sky, unable to make out where the sun was hanging in its low travels. Nothing but a slate of clouds for as far as the eye could see. Gray above, and gray-white below.

  He glanced one last time at the top of that ridge where he’d last seen the faraway figures of Three Bears and the other two scouts, knowing they were long gone now. Only a foolish man would tarry in these parts. This was enemy country if ever there was one. Here between Sitting Bull’s Yellowstone and Crazy Horse’s Powder. No matter that Three Bears and his scouts were all three Lakota: truth was, they had just led the soldiers north against the winter roamers.

  Already the great hoop was cracking. Agency Indian against free Indian. Good Injun against hostile.