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  TO THE DEATH

  Together they stood, back to back, the Shoshone and the Irishman, prepared to meet the enemy’s rush. The yelling of blood oaths, the grunts of pain as the Sioux and Cheyenne lunged forward toward the two who stood over the bodies. Running with a fury into the fire the rest of the allies poured into their enemies across the narrowing distance along the slope.

  First came three of the Lakota who made it through the dusty haze to reach the bodies before they fell to the bullets that could not miss. Then the rush of a handful as the Irishman and Shoshone levered cartridges through their overheated weapons again and again and again. And finally more than ten appeared like apparitions out of the dust, vaulting over the bodies of their fallen to rush the lonely pair.

  Weapons empty now, both defenders swung their rifles savagely, like two long and slender scythes reaping those stalks of wheat rushing before the giant blades.

  Swinging and singing as they cut through the dust and gunsmoke, chopping viciously through the curses and war songs and shrieks of pain and grunts of terror as bones were broken and skulls cracked and bullets struck bare flesh and sinew.

  And brave men went down in blood, thinking of loved ones back home.

  As brave men always will.

  BOOKS BY TERRY C. JOHNSTON

  Dance on the Wind

  Buffalo Palace

  Crack in the Sky

  Ride the Moon Down

  Death Rattle

  Carry the Wind

  BorderLords

  One-Eyed Dream

  Cry of the Hawk

  Winter Rain

  Dream Catcher

  SON 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 Mountains Low

  FOR NEIL MANGUM

  of the National Park Service—

  author, historian, friend—

  the one who, more than anyone else,

  helped me put this story together

  and made three battles

  make sense as one

  In the barracks, the men knew too. Some took [Crook’s pending summer campaign to the Rosebud] with the veteran’s professional calm; such firebrands as the fighting Irish were jubilant. Full-dress uniforms and the new spiked helmets, along with sabers, were packed and stored; field uniforms donned. Blankets were rolled and tents and stoves, sure to be dropped in the first forced march, were stowed in wagons. In contrast with the general exhilaration was the patent disgust of officers ordered to remain in garrison. They could only wait for news from the front and scan the casualty lists. They would, they knew, pause in grief over the name of a brother officer killed in action but shortly be irresistibly drawn to thumb through the pages of the Army Register murmuring: “Poor fellow, I’m sorry he’s gone. Now how many files does that give me?”

  There would be a spate of promotions in this bloody year of 1876.

  —Fairfax Downey

  Indian-Fighting Army

  The Battle of the Rosebud … represents an atypical encounter on the Western frontier because large masses of troops rarely clashed with extensive Indian forces.

  —Neil Mangum

  Battle of the Rosebud: Prelude to the Little Bighorn

  I believe if it had not been for the Crows, the Sioux would have killed off half of our command before the soldiers were in a position to meet the attack.

  —Frank Grouard

  Frank Grouard, Army Scout

  The Battle of the Rosebud represents a strategic victory for the Sioux and Cheyenne against the U.S. military troops staged at the zenith of the Sioux War of 1876-1877…. The Indian victory at the Rosebud was a prelude to and directly led to a still greater triumph eight days later on June 25, 1876, when Lt. Col. George A. Custer and his immediate command were wiped out to a man by these same warriors who had opposed Crook on the Rosebud.

  J. W. Vaughn

  With Crook at the Rosebud

  Old soldiers who had served in the Civil War commented later that this was as desperate a struggle as any they had experienced in the great war.

  —Fred H. Werner

  Before the Little Big Horn

  The [Battle of the] Rosebud was lost not because of poor tactics or negligence on the part of any of the participants, but because of the overwhelming superiority of manpower and firepower on the side of the Indians. They outnumbered the soldiers three to one and were armed with the latest model repeating rifles. For one of the few times in the history of Indian warfare the whites were confronted with a really superior force, which, though composed of “savages,” used a system of tactics, dividing the troops and attempting to destroy them in sections. This same condition obtained once more, eight days later [on the Little Bighorn].

  —Martin F. Schmitt, editor

  General George Crook, His Autobiography

  One point that has been made by practically all the historians—the Indians were very short of guns and ammunition. War clubs, bows and arrows, and lances were used by most of the warriors in this battle. Most of the cartridge cases and slugs that I found [on the Rosebud Battlefield site] were those used by the soldiers.

  —Fred H. Werner

  Before the Little Big Horn

  In [Crook’s] retreat [to Goose Creek after the Battle of the Rosebud], rather than the casualties, lay the full measure of the defeat, for it neutralized him at the most critical juncture of the [Great Sioux Campaign of 1876].

  —Robert M. Utley

  Frontier Regulars

  … It seems reasonable to say that the Battle of the Little Bighorn would not have been fought or would have ended quite differently had Crook’s campaign been successful or had he taken what appears at this late date to have been reasonable action, by sending information about the fight to the military forces under [General Alfred] Terry.

  —J. A. Leermakers

  “The Battle of the Rosebud”

  Great Western Indian Fights

  By stopping General Crook, the Indians also gained renewed confidence in their ability to cope with the white soldiers. Just one week later, these same Indians met Custer on the Little Big Horn River and recorded a victory that shook our nation to its very foundation.

  —Fred H. Werner

  Before the Little Big Horn

  If General Crook is to serve further against the Indians it should be in a subordinate capacity.

  —Editorial

  The New York Herald

  Thursday, July 6, 1876

  The Indians reached the zenith of their power at the Rosebud and the Little Big Horn. After expending their supply of ammunition in these battles, they were strictly on the defensive and did not dare to meet the soldiers in open combat.

  —J. W. Vaughn

  With Crook at the Rosebud

  Sheridan and Crook, Gibbon and Terry and Custer were numbered among the most renowned generals of the Civil War, their reputation won on many a hardfought field. Yet they totally failed to corner the Sioux, who inflicted two severe defeats upon the converging armies, and in the end [those Indians] succumbed only to superior resources and to paucity of food and other supplies.

  —Milo Milton Quaife, Editor

  War-Path and Bivouac, by John F. Finerty
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  … [The Indians] were patriots fighting for the possession of their native land. Bravely they fought and well … and with what brilliant success they battled, until they were run down, worn out, scattered, killed or captured.

  —Cyrus Townsend Brady

  Indian Fights and Fighters

  Late April 1876

  Him?

  Going to be a father?

  Why, it had been the better part of three weeks already and still Seamus Donegan was having a bit of a real donnybrook of it with some of the innermost parts of himself—those places where he kept buried the sentimental shreds of family: his memories of a beloved mother; his remembrances of that playful leprechaun of an uncle Liam O’Roarke; and finally his thoughts back on the solidness of Uncle Ian, a man firmly and undeniably rooted in the soil of that Oregon country* like his crops, raising family and stock.

  Raising children? Sure, and it was a fact that if ever there was a man born to be a father, Ian was truly that man. Dependable he was, rock solid and responsible—that one of the O’Roarke boys. Seamus could almost see him still, standing there with the moist dirt of that farm country splattered on the man’s boots, forever caked beneath Ian’s nails, forever darkening every wrinkle and crack and crevice worn into the farmer’s hands. Such permanent tattooing bothered Ian not, Seamus knew. For Ian possessed the earthy, heady scent of that land buried deep within his nostrils—like the musky perfume of a willing woman stretching herself below him, beckoning, reaching out to pull him to her bosom, to bury him in her moist richness.

  But for this big, square-jawed Irishman who stood some three fingers over six feet, it was almost too frightening: him, to settle down with one woman, with a child coming … in one place? Begora! Faith, but did such a trembling thought as that give a man like him real pause. More pause than he had felt when facing down the barrels or staring back at the howling maw of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers.* But pass up Samantha Pike he could not. To live without the smell of her rising to him, the way her fingers licked traces of fire along his skin, and how the very feel of her had crept well below his hide. His passion for her was something he could not deny.

  Truly, it hadn’t been until somewhere on that trail north from the Panhandle country of Texas that Seamus had finally admitted that marrying a fertile woman like Sam would one day mean the coming of children. Still, the reality of hearing the news of it come from those lips, finding himself speechless as she gently drew his head down to her swelling belly, told to listen to his child growing deep within her. It was there that he first stroked that rounding tummy of the full-bodied Samantha Donegan—not as if caressing a woman he was about to mount and mate, but instead as if it were truly the face of his own child he could feel beneath the callused fingers of a man more comfortable in the company of other horsemen and their animals on the distant prairie.

  Since that first night listening intently to the unknown, Seamus had returned again and again to lay his ear against that smooth, taut skin just below the generous curves of Sam’s flowering breasts. Watching his wife, studying her changing shape, straining to hear something each time she did and murmuring to their child deep in the womb, Seamus had come to believe in the reality that this child was every bit as tangible and real as the hand he could hold before his face. Though he would have to wait to clumsily hold that wee one in arms unaccustomed to cradling babes, Seamus believed and truly accepted that he was already a father.

  So he had taken to him a wife, vowing before friends and Goda’mighty Himself to settle down with that one woman until death did them part this earthly plane. And now in these last few weeks Seamus had come to experience the terror of those newfound emotions of fatherhood. Paternity still scared the bejasus out of this man of bone and sinew and whipcord muscle. But with each new day he was coming to terms with his misgivings, even his outright fears after these precious hours they spent walking down to the rain-swollen river below the log-and-stone buildings of Fort Laramie, those long nights alone with Sam, holding her budding body against him as she fell to sleep.

  No, it wasn’t the fact of cleaving to a woman, nor even the reality of the child coming that still gave the Irishman pause. It was this thing of settling down. What Ian had done so easily, nephew Seamus struggled with most. It was there with putting down roots that the heart of Liam O’Roarke in Donegan grew faint.

  Seamus was having himself a struggle with something he could not see, something he could not test his muscles against, some thing he could not bring into the buckhorn and blade sights down that worn, blued barrel of his trailweary seventeen-shot 1866 Henry repeater. As much as he hated to, Seamus had finally come to admit he was again wrestling with some thing in himself. This dread of settling down. Taking a wife along with him as he moved from one river valley on over the verdant crests to the next swell of hill and prairie sky was one thing. Trudging along with a babe, a child, a youngster … was something entirely different.

  To have to put down roots now?

  Why, it shook Seamus to his marrow.

  His was a struggle to grapple with the true meaning of the news Samantha gave him upon his return from Fort Fetterman. Upon his escape out of the frozen wilderness of the Tongue and the Powder rivers.

  In the end it had been enough just to emerge whole in mind and body from that winter wasteland—the power of Crook’s cavalry squandered by Colonel Joseph J. Reynolds in his aborted attack on a sleepy Powder River village every military man in the entire Department had chosen to believe was the camp of none other than the feared war chief Crazy Horse.*

  It had been a campaign that made Seamus wonder on this life of wandering, this profession of leading the soldiers against the hostile warrior bands, this trail of blood and war he had chosen as far back as sixty-one when first he became a horse soldier for Lincoln’s Union Army. Those early weeks and months of the great war had been much like the first days of Crook’s Powder River Expedition: rich in zeal and rife in the promise to end the conflict early—exactly as the army had believed that one swift strike against the wild northern bands would drive them all back to the reservations and peace would descend like a long-awaited benediction upon the frontier. The Northern Pacific Railroad would push west, the Black Hills would at last revert back to the white man, and settlers would pour in to bring Christian industry and virtue to the wilderness. Such was the thing of hopes, of fond dreams.

  What else but tragedy does a man call it when his dreams are shattered? What less than tragedy itself?

  Following the disastrous war against Red Cloud’s Bad Faces in 1866-67,† the army abandoned its three northernmost posts along the Bozeman Road into Montana Territory and ceded to the wild tribes all rights to the Black Hills as well as their beloved hunting grounds along the Tongue, the Powder, and the Rosebud.

  But two years ago gold had been discovered among those streams and pine-draped hills the Lakota called their Paha Sapa—the white man’s precious yellow rocks found dangerously near the sacred Bear Butte where the Northern Cheyenne for generations had come to seek the wisdom taught their grandfathers in vision quests. Crazed prospectors who would rather take the chance of being scalped than live poor flooded into the Hills where the gulches of the Spearfish and Deadwood and Rapid creeks bustled with the profane placer camps like Deadwood City itself, each new tent and clapboard settlement filled with gamblers and the gaudy, painted women, gold camps overflowing in whiskey and blood, camps deafening with the sound of pistols fired in anger and avarice. Gold dust was the currency, whiskey the lifeblood. Quartz and placer claims were worshiped as most precious above all. And life was cheap.

  This was a fever the government would not be able to deny.

  That discovery meant that the populist administration of Sam Grant found itself perched precariously on the sharp horns of an uncomfortable dilemma: to take the Hills away from the Indians, which action would break the law of the land; or, find some way to force the wild tribes themselves to break the treaty they had been living under since 1
868.

  In midwinter when the Bureau of Indian Affairs sent runners out from the agencies to inform the warrior bands that they had to be in to the reservations and accounted for, only a select handful of government and military leaders knew the true course already plotted for events yet to come. Secret plans were laid in Washington City that when the hostile bands did not uproot themselves and plod obediently back to the agencies in the dead of winter’s worst, the Indian Bureau would then turn over the disposition of those refractory bands to the War Department. William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip H. Sheridan would then have the war for which they had been waiting a decade, the war they knew would end the struggle on the Plains for all time. Their armies would drive the hostile bands back to the reservations, where the warriors would become farmers and God-fearing wards of the government at long last.

  While any who would not go back in peace would be exterminated.

  With the 31 January deadline come and gone, the obedient Indian Bureau informed the War Department that the hostiles were now in the army’s lap. Sherman and Sheridan set about putting the cogs of their Sioux Campaign in motion, whereby they would snare the villages between three prongs, three armies, any one of which was surely strong enough to crush the few warriors the Indian agents claimed were off the reservation for that winter. But back in February, General Alfred Terry’s army was winter-locked at Fort Lincoln, and Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer was to become a political prisoner held hostage back in President Grant’s Washington City, while Colonel John Gibbon’s troops were struggling to move out of Forts Ellis and Shaw in a Montana Territory racked with the snow and subzero cold of a hundred-year winter come to visit its fury on the northern plains.

  This left Phil Sheridan with one and only one army capable of moving against the hostiles, capable of probing and penetrating the last great hunting ground of the wild tribes. As Sheridan’s hammer, General George C. Crook hurriedly forged the spearhead of his assault from the Second and Third cavalries and pushed them north from Fort Fetterman that first day of March, pointing their noses toward the land of the Tongue and the Powder, dead on into the brutal, icy torture of an arctic winter visited once in a lifetime on the high plains. Theirs would be the lance the army would use to prod the hostiles loose, to push the hostiles back to the agencies, to deliver the death-strike straight to the heart of those wild tribes. Once and for all time.