Trumpet on the Land: The Aftermath of Custer's Massacre, 1876

“What’s wrong, Mr. King?” Stanton asked as he strode up.

“Shouldn’t happen this way.”

“You mean Merritt riding in to take over the regiment?”

“Right, Major. Not in the field like this.”

Stanton nodded. “Carr resents Merritt already, don’t he?”

“No,” King answered firmly. “I don’t think he does. He figured Merritt was up for the post. After all, for a long time Merritt’s been part of Sheridan’s Chicago staff. Carr knew he wouldn’t get it himself—even though the man deserves it, many times over … but that’s not the way things work back in Washington City, do they? Not even the way things work back with Sheridan in Chicago, either. But this, taking over in the field like this. Yanking the field command right out of Carr’s hands when he’s led the Fifth against every kind of fighting Injun you can imagine—”

“A colonel’s not a fighting position, is it?”

King looked at Stanton squarely. “You tell me, Major. With old man Emory as this regiment’s colonel, Carr’s had actual fighting and field command of the Fifth since 1868. Seems to me the government’s going to spend a hell of a lot of money and get a bunch of soldiers killed teaching all these armchair generals like Crook and Terry and Merritt how to fight. But what have you got to say, Major? You were with Reynolds on the Powder River yourself. Reynolds is a colonel. So you tell me, sir. Should Reynolds have been in charge on the Powder … or should he have left the fighting to the men who know how to fight Injuns?”

Turning on his heel, King stomped off, feeling the anger rising in himself like a boil, sensing what he was sure had to be Carr’s own great personal disappointment at being stripped of field command of the Fighting Fifth, here as his beloved regiment stood on the brink of jumping into the Sioux War with both boots.

Chapter 6

26 June 1876

“What do you figure that is?” Seamus asked the half-breed scout, who was stretched on his belly beside the Irishman atop a hill a few miles north of Crook’s Goose Creek base camp early that Monday afternoon.

Frank Grouard squinted, rubbed his eyes, blinked them repeatedly, and stared into the sunlit distance marred only by a few high, thin clouds. “Could be dust from that village we was about to bump into a week back.”

“There, along the horizon,” Donegan said, pointing north by east, “looks to be it’s darker than dust raised by a pony herd—even a big one.”

“They’ll have lots of drags,” Grouard said. “Bound to stir up a lot of dust moving a village that big.”

With a shake of his head Donegan replied, “That’s smoke.”

The half-breed appeared to weigh the heft of that a moment. “You figure they’re firing the grass behind them, eh? Maybe so, Irishman.”

“Crook will want to know.”

“He’s got hunting on his mind,” Grouard replied. “Thinking of heading into the Big Horns in a week or so.”

“With that enemy camp escaping, moving north?”

Grouard looked at Donegan. “How you so sure they’re moving north?”

His gray eyes danced impishly. “I just figured they would be skedaddling in the opposite direction from us.”

“How far you make it to be?”

This time Seamus calculated, slowly chewing a cracked lower lip that oozed from sunburn. “Less than a hundred miles from here.”

“Naw. Closer to sixty, maybe seventy at the most, I’d make it. That’s how far it would be to the Greasy Grass.”

“Greasy Grass?”

“What the Injins call the Little Bighorn River. A favorite camping place as they wander every summer toward the Big Horn Mountains to cut lodgepoles.”

Seamus slapped Grouard on the back. “See? I told you! Those Injins ain’t headed south, they’re going west toward the mountains.”

Frank stared into the distance again, then said, “Could be they’re moving this way—to keep away from that army north of ’em.”

“Gibbon and Terry’s bunch?”

“And Long Hair Custer’s Seventh Cavalry too,” the half-breed said. “C’mon, Irishman. Let’s go see if Crook figures now is the time for you and me to go sniff around to the north.”

As the fates would have it, George Crook was off hunting in the foothills for the day, and Lieutenant Bourke did not think the general would return with his party until late in the afternoon. Seamus waited nearby as Frank told his story to Crook’s aide, as well as to some of the other officers and newsmen who quickly gathered to hear the half-breed’s report of telltale smoke along the northern horizon.

“Indian signals?” sniffed Reuben Davenport, reporter for the New York Herald. “What of them?”

“No such a thing,” declared Captain Henry E. Noyes of the Second Cavalry. “Balderdash.”

“Where are you going, Grouard?” Bourke asked the moment the rest of the group began laughing at the scout’s assertions, causing Frank to turn on his heel and stomp off in Donegan’s direction.

All the half-breed did was whirl about and point.

Seamus said, “We’re riding north, Johnny.”

Bourke asked, “So you’re in on this cold-hatched scheme too?”

“I saw the smoke with me own eyes.”

Grouard turned away again, prodding Donegan off. “Let’s go, Irishman.”