Cry of the Hawk

“Ain’t you heard?” responded still another voice off in another column. “We’re being sent out yonder to fight all them Injuns the Yankees cain’t whip.”

Never before could he remember such a glorious chance to clear the white man’s Holy Road of emigrants in their wagons. So few soldiers left out here now that the white man was making war on himself back east.

Crazy Horse pulled the buffalo robe tighter beneath his chin. The sun shone brightly on the patches of old snow, it and the breeze cold enough to make his eyes smart.

For the past three winters while the warrior bands roaming to the south had hacked at the Holy Road, and the Santee Sioux to the east had waged war against the whites in Minnesota, this young Oglalla warrior had stayed north among the villages of his people, living off the buffalo grown fat on the tall grass. He had discovered that the solution to the white man moving onto the plains was to stay away from the white man altogether. Everything north of Fort Laramie was tranquil. The white man did not venture north into the land of the Lakota.

Yet in the time of drying grass last summer, even Crazy Horse had grown restive and yearned for the excitement talked about on everyone’s lips—ponies and plunder and coup to be found far to the south in the white man’s settlements just south of Fort Laramie.

Crazy Horse wanted to stay clear of the fort and its soldiers, not because he was afraid, but for more personal reasons. Fourteen winters gone, soldiers from Fort Laramie had come out to argue with a small band of Lakota over a skinny cow some warriors had appropriated for their families from one of the wagon trains passing through. There was shooting and much killing—more than enough blood for a young boy to remember.

But now in his twenty-fourth winter, Crazy Horse had formed a bond with a young soldier named Caspar Collins, who was stationed at Fort Laramie, where his father, Colonel William O. Collins, served as post commander.

Through the past winter the two young men had become friends. Oglalla teaching soldier to shoot the bow, taking him on hunts among the coulees and hills, instructing Collins on the rudiments of the Lakota tongue.

So when Crazy Horse had come south to raid with the southern bands, he gave Fort Laramie wide berth. Making war on the white man was one thing. Fighting a friend was something altogether different.

And now the bands of Shahiyena and Lakota were migrating north again, slowly. Herding before them their new horses and the hundreds of cattle stolen in their raids along the great Holy Road, not to mention the many travois groaning beneath all the plunder taken from the wagons and ranches and stage stops. Never before had the Sioux or the Shahiyena been so rich.

But for Crazy Horse—it was still too little salve on the wounds of the massacre at Sand Creek.

Three moons ago, white soldiers had attacked at dawn and killed not only the fighting men staying behind to cover the retreat of their families—but the white men had cut down women and children that cold November day, still fresh and painful as any open wound after all this time.

Black Kettle’s survivors sent out pipe bearers to other bands of Shahiyena, Lakota, and Arapaho, calling for a wholesale war on the white man. The warrior bands had argued and disagreed as to strategy, but when the vote came down, all the villages but one marched north from that council held near the Bunch of Timber on the Smoky Hill River. Only Black Kettle and the remnants of his band headed south. They would not carry the war pipe against the white man.

In that first week of the Moon of Seven Cold Nights, what the white man called January, the warrior bands had arrived on the hills overlooking the settlement of Julesburg. At least ten-times-ten-times-ten fighting men had prepared for this major attack on the white man. A small number of women had accompanied the horsemen north from Cherry Creek to cook meals and wrangle the herd of extra war ponies. Their march had been orderly, for this had not been a simple raid by a handful of warriors. Flankers and scouts had been thrown out along the path of their march, with camp police to assure that no hot-blooded young warrior eager for an early coup would ruin the surprise the war chiefs had planned for the white men along the South Platte River.

The Brule Lakota of Spotted Tail and Pawnee Killer led the way, carrying the war pipe. They knew this land better than the Southern Cheyenne or the Oglalla from the north. They brought the warrior army to the sand hills where Julesburg lay, nearby Fort Rankin.