Killdeer mountain, p.8
Killdeer Mountain, page 8
Selkirk knew that if his Galvanized Yankees were with General La Prade their presence would end his impersonation of Major Rawley. He tried in vain to persuade Herrick to leave him in command at Fort Standish, and then after the march to Burdache Creek he made up his mind to start for Canada that night. But he reckoned without the alert Sergeant O’Hara. When O’Hara hailed him as he rode out of the bivouac, Selkirk replied curtly that he was going to look for signs of a buffalo herd.
After riding two or three miles, with a purple dusk enveloping the monotonous landscape, he was certain that he had at last made his escape. But again the persistent O’Hara overtook him with a search party, and he was forced to pretend that he had lost his sense of direction in the darkness.
During the following days, Colonel Herrick’s troops were assigned to the rear of the column to guard the immigrant train, and Selkirk began riding far out on the flanks with the cavalry. He became resigned to the fact that he must await a more propitious opportunity to escape. By day the land was like an enormous flat stage spotlighted under the glare of the sun, with all privacy voided. By night pickets were posted at very close intervals outside the circles of wagons. But each day the column moved closer to the Canadian border, and there were constant rumors of an impending battle with the Indians that might create enough confusion for him to ride swiftly away.
And then he met Nettie Steever. Selkirk had never known a woman who was in any way like Nettie. He had grown up in the Kentucky bluegrass, in a society where women were esteemed merely because they were women. To see one treated the way Steever treated Nettie offended his sensibilities, brought out all the anger and pity in him. Virtually a prisoner of her brutish husband, Nettie yet maintained an air of self-determination. Like Selkirk she was seeking an opportunity to escape; she did not know how or where. In their first tentative efforts at communication they must have sensed their common fate, their mutual objective. He never told her he was someone other than Major Rawley; he spoke only of going to Canada to start a new life. After that, every time they met, gathering buffalo chips or bits of dead wood together, or kneeling beside the cooking fires, she whispered to him of that new life in Canada. On one occasion her husband must have overheard the whispering between them. Without warning he stormed out at her in the vilest of language, and when she defied him, he struck her in the face, raising a dark welt on her cheek. Selkirk wanted to kill him, but restrained himself with the silent promise that he would take Nettie with him when he fled to Canada.
The last night before the immigrants’ wagons were left at Heart River so that La Prade could make his forced march to Killdeer Mountain, Nettie slipped out of her wagon and came to Selkirk’s blankets. Clouds screened the stars; the darkness was thick as black mud; the only sounds were occasional soft snufflings of horses and faraway howls of wolves. She had bathed herself from a washbowl in the wagon and smelled of soap. She wanted to start for Canada then, at that moment, but he knew they would be challenged before they rode twenty yards past the wagons. He told her a better opportunity would come; he swore to her that he would not leave without her. They made love in the darkness. She had not known before, she told him, that men could be as tender as women. Her husband was a rutting animal, she said.
The next morning Colonel Herrick started his troops forward at daybreak, ordering Selkirk to lead out with the cavalry company. Selkirk was not expecting so sudden a departure; there was no way he could say good-bye to Nettie Steever. He was not even certain that she saw his gesture of farewell as he led the troopers quickly past her wagon.
Colonel Herrick’s troops, including Selkirk’s cavalry, were among the last to reach Killdeer Mountain. General La Prade already had his attack forces fairly well in position. Being a student of European tactics, the general had formed his soldiers into a hollow square, with his reduced train of supply wagons and the batteries of cannon inside the square.
Shortly after Colonel Herrick arrived, an orderly from La Prade’s headquarters came galloping with written orders to lengthen the rear of the hollow square. Because of the sharp ravines slashing down the slope of the mountain, cavalry charges were obviously impossible, and so Herrick ordered Selkirk to dismount his company and deploy the men in a skirmish line along the right side of the extended hollow square. One of each set of four troopers served as a horseholder, and they were told to keep the mounts close by within the square. During his months with General John Morgan of the Confederacy, Selkirk had never seen a hollow square, but he soon realized that his Minnesota cavalrymen were being held in reserve, ready to ride to any part of the field where they might be summoned.
While the troops were being aligned, Dr. Lieber’s ambulance rolled up only a few yards behind Selkirk. Before he could greet the surgeon, a half-dozen or so men in frontier garb rode in to an adjoining supply wagon and began exchanging their fringed buckskins for blue uniform blouses. They were Herrick’s scouts and were taking precautions against being mistaken for Indians if the fighting turned fast and furious. One of them asked Lieber if he could spare a swallow of whiskey. The surgeon got a bottle from the ambulance and the scouts quickly passed it around. The last one tossed the empty bottle to Selkirk with a hoot of laughter. “Not a drop left for you, Major Rawley. Y’ll have to trust in y’r native courage, sir, instead of whiskey bravado.”
Selkirk shrugged and turned to watch the Indian warriors who were beginning to ride out from their big tipi camp on the bench of the mountain. Why am I here? he asked himself, a man who calls himself Selkirk although that is not my name, a man who allows others to call him Major Rawley, although neither is that my name. What purpose brought me to this place? He could not answer, no more than he had been able to tell himself why he had ridden with John Morgan’s cavalry out of the bluegrass of Kentucky across the Ohio River to pillage towns and farms. Oh, they had enjoyed a high old time, playing foxes to the pursuing Yankee boys in blue, a testing time for all of them across Indiana and Ohio, but meaningless when one comes right down to it. Especially being captured and locked in that stinking prison in Illinois.
He looked up the sloping prairie where rank after rank of dust-streaked blue-uniformed men waited in the pitiless July heat, all watching that giant anthill of swarming Indians they called Killdeer Mountain. Why were they here, those Minnesotans and Iowans, most of whom had come from somewhere else far away at the beginning of America’s sunrise or from across the waters of the Atlantic. He’d heard Herrick’s scouts say that a few of the Minnesotans were seeking revenge for the uprising of the Santee Sioux some two years past. But the scouts also said there was only a scattering of Santees on Killdeer. Most of the woodland Sioux that escaped Minnesota had fled to Canada. The Indians up there in the smoke-stained tipis were Plains Sioux, not woodlanders. They’d had nothing to do with the Minnesota uprising. So why had the soldiers come here?
A small movement of wind surrounded him with a strong odor of horses, horse dung, and horse urine. He could smell his own salt-mottled sweat-soaked jacket, then a whiff of fragrance from wild tobacco.
Why had the Indians up there on Killdeer Mountain waited for the long columns of blue-clad enemy to come to them? Why did they not flee to the west? Their scouts surely had seen the twelve artillery pieces. Did they not know what thundering cannon could do to buffalo-skin tipis? Right then he noticed that some of the distant tipis were going down, dropping like skirts, vanishing against their background of gray rocks and green trees. Was it the women and children pulling back or were they all preparing to run, late as it was for them?
Riding with Morgan he had learned to read the landscape. Grand, dismal, majestic, a poet might say of that which lay before him. A cavalryman would avoid it. No surprise, no slashing charge was possible here. The tipi village was high on the bench, with ravine-split hills behind. The Indians could charge down the slope on horseback or pour out on foot from the gullies at either end. A withdrawal to the rear would be difficult for them, up those bare and rocky heights. If that was a camp of Union soldiers, John Morgan would bring up artillery to smite them. He guessed General La Prade would do the same, except it would not be the same because the Indians had no artillery with which to retaliate.
He could see a few warriors on foot now. They had worked their way down through the woody ravines so that they flanked the upper end of La Prade’s hollow square. Springing up then, as though by magic, on the rolling prairie below the tipi village was a line-front of horsed warriors. They cantered forward at an easy pace, almost leisurely, but they were stripped for battle and were waving their weapons in the air. He was surprised by the number armed only with bows and arrows.
Sergeant O’Hara was shouting Major Rawley’s name. He started at the sudden recognition of it; he’d enjoyed being himself during the reverie. Colonel Herrick wanted his officers to gather at the supply wagons for a hasty council. They were to come mounted, the sergeant explained, as he handed over the reins of the horse. “Are you feeling all right, sir?” O’Hara inquired politely.
Why have they come here, these soldiers? he asked himself, and partially answered the question when he rode up to salute Colonel Herrick, who sat arrogantly erect in his saddle, a gross man, his abundant flesh pouring with sweat, brown curls like wet tendrils growing from under his hat over ears and forehead, a huge sun-blistered nose, his face dark-red from alcohol in the blood, eyes cunning and expectant. Herrick wanted to be a man of importance—a governor, a territorial judge, a senator—anything that would give him more power. He needed glory, renown, his name in large black letters in the pages of the Saint Paul newspapers.
“Gentlemen,” he was saying to his officers as he held a tight rein on his nervous stallion, “I’ve just returned from a hasty meeting with General La Prade. We estimate near to two thousand Indian lodges up there on Killdeer, maybe six thousand warriors. Although we are outnumbered by three to one—”
General La Prade. Why did he bring us all to Killdeer Mountain? Two thousand and two hundred officers and enlisted men, against six thousand warriors. A lie. The scouts this very morning estimated the number of warriors at sixteen hundred. But six thousand defeated Indians would look better, sound better in the official dispatches. Sixteen hundred Indians bearing old trade guns and arrows against twenty-two hundred soldiers armed with the best Civil War rifles and twelve pieces of artillery. General La Prade. The rumors said he’d lost a whole brigade in the Shenandoah, trying for glory. The high command sent him out here to reshape himself. La Prade ached for a chance to sign a battle report that would shake the desk generals out of their chairs in the War Department back in Washington.
“Major Rawley, you will keep your men beside their mounts,” Colonel Herrick’s voice droned on, “in readiness to drive any Indians off our right flank. Should I give the order, charge them until you reach rough ground, then dismount and fight on foot. General La Prade will use the cannon to dislodge them from the heights, scatter them, draw them down here where we can finish them. Any questions?”
No one had any questions. They were all watching a single mounted warrior who had advanced some paces ahead of the rank of Indians that had cantered down from the tipi village. He wore a bright-colored war bonnet; his body was painted in streaks of orange, yellow, and black. Raising a rifle above his head, he called out a challenge in Lakota, and then began racing along the front of the dismounted Iowa cavalrymen facing him.
“Who is that crazy savage?” Colonel Herrick asked his chief of scouts. “Is that Spotted Horse, the Santee murderer?”
“Nah,” the scout replied. “He’s a Teton Sioux. Long Dog, maybe. Or that new leader, Sitting Bull.” The man spat tobacco juice on the ground. “Don’t matter much who ’tis, colonel. They mean to fight us.”
“If I could take Spotted Horse’s scalp back to Saint Paul, they’d—” He shook his head impatiently. “Why don’t the Iowa boys kill that goddamned show-off?”
Almost as Herrick spoke, a volley sounded from the rifles of the forward rank of Iowa cavalrymen. The challenging Teton stretched himself out flat along his horse’s back, digging one heel violently into the animal’s flank to send it into a gallop, and with a gesture of defiance disappeared from view over a fold in the prairie. The advancing line of warriors returned the cavalry fire with guns and arrows and then wheeled their mounts to the rear to reload and be joined by others racing down at full speed from the village.
“The ball is starting, colonel,” the chief of scouts said quietly.
“Yes!” In his excitement, Herrick sawed hard on his reins, setting the stallion to prancing. “To your commands, gentlemen!”
Now, if ever, will come my chance to escape this madness, he thought, to leave the names Selkirk and Rawley forever behind me and become myself again. The map shows less than a hundred miles to the border. Three days steady riding should do it. He checked his canteen, refilling it quickly from one of the kegs on the water wagon. His saddlepack held enough hard crackers and dried meat to see him through.
From somewhere up the slope, sharp commands rose above the irregular rifle fire. The hollow square that had been lengthened to an oblong by late arrivals began moving slowly toward Killdeer Mountain. He rode forward to take a position at the head of his untried cavalrymen, who stood beside their mounts awaiting orders, watching the developing action ahead.
Within the last few minutes a crowd of Indians had gathered on a rocky ledge above the tipi village. Through his field glass he saw they were mostly old men, women, and a few children, standing so they could look down upon the battle. Most stood behind a low rim of rock so that only the upper parts of their bodies were visible, giving them the surreal appearance of truncated spectators floating in the atmosphere. They look too confident, he thought, almost overweening in their sureness.
Shrill commands from an artillery officer cut across the staccato of small arms and the war cries of the mounted Indians. The cannon’s firing was like a distant cough overlaid by the scream of a projectile. It burst in the sky before reaching its target. Another cannon came quickly into action. The second ball exploded on target, hurling shrapnel among the non-combatants along the ledge.
John Morgan, he thought, would have shot any artilleryman in his command for such an act against the enemy. Morgan would have gone for the tipis, which were now being rapidly dismantled.
Concentrated rifle fire ripped suddenly along the left side of the hollow square, just opposite his position. To his surprise he saw a hundred or more warriors racing far out on the flat. Some had cuts of meat—antelope or deer—fastened to their ponies, a hunting party attempting to return to Killdeer Mountain.
A twelve-pounder cannon drawn by six horses came bouncing down the slope, men scurrying out of its path. The gunners quickly swung it into position and fired, the shell exploding among the galloping ponies of the Indians. When the dust and smoke cleared, five ponies were on the ground, mutilated, legs thrashing. Another galloped back the way it had come, snorting in terror, trailing its entrails in the dust. Five or six Indians were scattered among the downed ponies; one rose up, dragging a leg, trying desperately to reach cover.
Familiar cavalry commands resounded then above the rattle of rifles. Prepare to mount! Mount! The Iowans were going to charge the fleeing Indians. Draw sabers! Charge! In fours, the mounted platoons sprang out of the hollow square, horses’ hooves drumming on the hard dry earth.
Some members of the Indian hunting party meanwhile had wheeled to recover their dead and wounded. It was done with such expert horsemanship, the riders dashing at full speed while hanging from their ponies, that Selkirk could not help but admire their skill and courage. With the Iowa cavalrymen pounding down upon him, one Sioux warrior coolly slipped a lariat over the leg of an unconscious comrade and dragged him roughly across the prairie to the safety of a timbered ravine.
Most of the Sioux hunters escaped in this same manner, the pursuing cavalry pausing only long enough to discharge their carbines into the thick brush and then returning to their positions in the hollow square. For a few minutes the artillery shelled the timbered hollow, and then General La Prade evidently ordered them to shift their batteries into positions for new targets. Selkirk guessed that one of the targets would be the tipi village, although many of the lodges were now skeletons of poles, and some of these were being brought down with the skins to be transformed into travois for transportation.
He was suddenly aware of how low the sun was in the cloudless sky. Black shadows were beginning to form across the face of the mountain, but the dry heat persisted, drawing moisture from the flesh of men and horses: At first dusk, he told himself, no matter what is happening on the field of battle, I will leave it, ride east away from Killdeer Mountain and then turn straight north for the border.
Eight cannons fired simultaneously with a tremendous rocking roar that shook the ground and made his mount plunge forward, almost unhorsing him. As he steadied the jumpy animal, he saw Colonel Herrick and another officer approaching at a rapid trot. The officer wore light blue broadcloth, dusty and dark with sweat. A brigadier’s star was mounted on the front of his wide-brimmed black hat. General La Prade.
He’s in too big a hurry. He won’t stop. Who am I? Captain Selkirk or Major Rawley? God, it’s Rawley. How can I guess if he knew Rawley, and if he’ll know I’m not Rawley? He let the horse turn so that he would be facing away from them as they passed, but Herrick yelled out: “Major! Boots into stirrups and get ready to move!”
Reacting automatically, Selkirk shouted to the sergeants, and the cavalry company was already mounted when he turned his profile to the colonel. General La Prade pushed his horse in between them. The general’s face was flushed, his eyes bloodshot as he gave Selkirk a quick glance. “Major Rawley, is it?” Then he was staring, not at Selkirk but rather toward the east side of the mountain, pointing with a long forefinger that was just to the left of Selkirk’s nose. “I want your cavalry to act as the stopper in a bunghole, major. Right there, that brushy ravine. Leads up to something my scouts call Dead Man’s Gulch. Only way the red devils can get away without fighting us. We’re going to pound all hell out of their village up there, put down a barrage behind them and make them come down here and fight us.” La Prade’s voice was hoarse and he talked so rapidly that tiny drops of spittle sprayed the side of Selkirk’s face. “Your job is to work your way up that ravine to the gulch. Kill everything that comes down that trail. Your men have full cartridge boxes?”
