Cry of the Hawk

It is not easy to visualize the enormous spread of frontier where these 6,000 [galvanized Yankees] marched and fought and endured the tedium of garrison duties. From Fort Kearney to Julesburg. From Julesburg to Laramie and along the Sweetwater through South Pass to Utah. From Julesburg up the South Platte to Denver, by Cache la Poudre to the Laramie Plains and Fort Bridger …. They made themselves a part of all the raw and racy names on that wild land of buffalo and Indians—Cottonwood Springs and Three Crossings, Lodgepole and Alkali Station, Medicine Creek and Sleeping Water, Fort Zarah and White Earth River, St. Mary’s, Fort Wicked, Laughing Wood, Soldier Creek, Rabbit Ear Mound, Dead Man’s Ranche, and Lightning’s Nest.

—Dee Brown

The Galvanized Yankees

Led by desperate men … the guerillas, most of them only boys, fought a total war. West of the Mississippi they plunged a fairly stable … society into intense partisan conflict that was felt by every man, woman and child. This was not a war of great armies and captains, this was bloody local insurrection, a war between friends and neighbors—a civil war in the precise definition of that term. Here organized bands of men killed each other and the civil population hundreds of miles behind the recognized battlefronts. Here there was ambush, arson, execution and murder; warfare without rules, law or quarter.

—Richard S. Brownlee

Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy

Prologue

Late Summer, 1908

“THERE AIN’T TIME for you to make it back to town before dark,” the old frontiersman said. “I best make you comfortable here.”

Nate Deidecker marveled at the old man’s vitality. Something on the order of seventy-one years old now, and still the former plains scout stood as straight as a fresh-split fence rail. Only the careful, considered pace he gave to all things betrayed his true age.

“I appreciate that, Mr. Hook.”

“Told you—you’re to call me Jonah.” The old man smiled, a few of his teeth missing. Not unexpected. “We’re friends, Nate.”

Nathan appreciated that, having made a friend like Jonah Hook so quickly. Yet there was something that bothered the newspaperman who had traveled to Wyoming from Omaha, on a hunch and a limited budget begrudged him from a tightfisted managing editor at the Omaha Bee. In 1908 there weren’t many newsmen actively following up the old warriors who still had stories to tell.

Having heard whisper of an unknown former scout living somewhere at the base of the Big Horn Mountains, Deidecker had finally convinced his editor and publisher to open their wallets and spring for a round-trip rail ticket, along with expenses for hiring the horse and carriage he had driven down from Sheridan.

   Stepping off the railroad platform, he had been met by the aging newsman who had founded and owned the Sheridan Press.

“How’d you end up picking me, Mr. Kemper?” Deidecker asked as the two sat down for coffee once a carriage and horse had been secured outside the bustling Sheridan café. The summer sunlight was startlingly bright on the high plains. Even here in the café, Deidecker found himself squinting.

“You been writing stories, haven’t you?”

Nate swallowed the hot coffee, its scorch something akin to the hot August weather that had accompanied him all the way west across Nebraska. “What stories?”

The old newsman chuckled. “Your stories about the old plainsmen. I don’t mean those goddamned bragging, strutting peacocks we’ve seen time and again.” He quickly leaned across the table, head close, grasping Deidecker’s wrist between his old hands. “We’re talking a different sort of man here, you understand.”

Nate Deidecker looked down at the waxy hands gripping him, the ink forever tattooed in dark crescents at the base of the man’s fingernails. “I understand, Mr. Kemper. Just as you said when you wrote me—not like Buffalo Bill over at Cody, or Pawnee Bill down in Oklahoma. You said Will Kemper would steer me to the real thing.”

Kemper leaned back and seemed to suck on a tooth a moment before speaking. “This man’s the real thing. Those others you’ve been writing about either been honest-to-goodness grandstanders or they simply aren’t the caliber of the man I want you to meet.”

“What’s his name?”

“Jonah Hook.”

“Why haven’t I ever heard of him?”

Kemper smiled, running a single finger around the rim of his white china cup. “As long as I’ve been writing stories out here, it seems the ones who got the best stories to tell are always the ones who keep most to themselves.”

Deidecker ruminated on that, sipping the hot coffee he really didn’t relish on this hot summer afternoon. Something else to drink was on his mind, like a beer in that shadowy, beckoning place across the street. Unconsciously he wiped a hand across his lips before he replied.

“One thing’s bothered me ever since that first letter you wrote me.”