Cry of the Hawk

Were it not for Moser’s skill in tracking deer and finding antelope out on this rolling tableland of central Kansas, they might not have fared as well as they had through that prairie winter. But both men had emerged from the dark days and endless nights of that dugout renewed in some unspoken way. Clearly closer to one another.

With that time behind them both, Jonah better understood his cousin’s need of him here in this foreign land, and dared not tug on that bond hard enough to snap it in two like a rawhide whang.

And without saying anything, Artus showed he understood his cousin’s need for the woman through those long weeks. Hook was clearly grieving in his own way the loss of Gritta, perhaps drowning himself in the squaw’s flesh in some way to numb the pain come of the loss of his family.

Moser put his own thoughts on the coming campaign, his muscles to the task, thereby finding a way to salve his own wounds brought of deep loss.

In this late March there were fourteen hundred soldiers gathering for the coming campaign General Winfield S. Hancock would lead. Besides infantry foot soldiers, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer would ride at the head of eight companies of his Seventh Cavalry: the sword Hancock intended using to punish the Sioux and Cheyenne who had been raiding and killing, stealing, raping and kidnapping up and down central and western Kansas.

Every bit as pressing to the morale of the army itself was the news of a late-December disaster now common knowledge on the high plains. For what was still an inexplicable reason, Captain William Judd Fetterman had disobeyed the orders of his commanding officer and led another eighty soldiers and two civilians to their deaths up on the Bozeman Road, lured into a seductive trap miles from Fort Phil Kearny. Two thousand warriors wiped out the entire command in less than thirty minutes of battle.

The frontier army clearly chafed at the bit, anxious to even the score.

While the military on the plains for the past two years had labored to separate itself from the wholesale slaughter of Indians committed at Sand Creek by some Colorado volunteer militia, the leadership in both the War Department and in the Department of the Missouri were not much concerned now in any distinction between the horse-mounted warriors committing the depredations and the noncombatants back in the villages.

“We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children,” wrote William Tecumseh Sherman to his superior back in Washington City, Ulysses S. Grant.

Indeed, General John B. Sanborn, one of the commissioners appointed to interview frontier officers in his investigation of the Fetterman Massacre found that, “Army officers of high grade openly proclaim their intentions to shoot down any Indian they see, and say that they instruct their men to do likewise.”

Sales of weapons and ammunition to the Indians were suspended in the Department of the Platte in July of 1866. Yet it was not until January of 1867 that General Hancock issued the same order forbidding such sales in his Department of the Missouri. Forever the one given to thoughtful deliberation, Hancock had waited until both his superiors in Washington City, Grant and Sherman, agreed on the need for keeping weapons out of Indian hands.

“You hear the news?” Moser asked.

Jonah Hook turned as his cousin came up. “What news?” He went back to lashing his bedroll into a gum poncho.

“About that Dakota Territory where you was last year. The Powder River country and all.”

“What about it?”

“Whole fort’s buzzing about it. Half a regiment wiped out by Injuns up there just afore Christmas.”

He stopped, slowly looking over his shoulder at the man who cast a shadow over him this early morning. “Where?”

“Place called Fort Phil Kearny they say,” Moser explained. “Cap’n named Fetterman marched off over a ridge with his men—and it was over in less’n half an hour.”

Hook wagged his head in disbelief. “Where’s this fort?”

“They say northwest of the Powder. Near a river called the Tongue.”

“I know that country.”

“That’s why I come to tell you soon as I heard.”

A fear suddenly clutched him in its talons. “Any civilians killed with them soldiers?”

“Word has it two was killed. They was all butchered like hogs for slaughter, Jonah.”

“I don’t doubt it, cousin.” He swallowed hard, rising. “I had two friends up there scouting for the army.”

“Bridger and Sweete?”

He nodded. “Lord, I pray they weren’t the ones butchered with those soldier-boys gone off marching where they shouldn’t.”

Moser wrung his hands in front of him, searching for the right thing to say. “Then just what the hell we doing—marching off with these soldiers?”

Jonah gazed off onto the distant prairie, past the fort grounds and buildings and spring-dampened parade. “Let’s just hope this bunch of soldiers is more’n those Injuns wanna tackle right now.”

“Hope, hell, Jonah! I’m all for praying!”