—Fairfax Downey
Indian Fighting Army
Neither the wild tribes, nor the Government Indian Scouts ever adopted any of the white soldiers’ tactics. They thought their own much better.
—Captain Luther H. North
Pawnee Battalion
The noble red man is not a fool. He is a cunning nomad, who hates civilization, and knows how to get all out of it that pleases him—whiskey, tobacco, rations and blankets, idleness in peace and a rattling fight whenever he is ready for it. And when he is beaten he returns to the arms of his guardians on the reservation, bringing his store of white scalps with him as pleasing memorials of the good time he had.
It is time to stop all that. The continent is getting too crowded.
—Editorial
New York Herald
This expedition was one of the best equipped that ever started on an Indian campaign … [The Cheyenne] were foemen worthy of Mackenzie’s or anybody else’s steel. The battle which ensued was in some respects one of the most terrible in Western history, and in its results exemplified, as few others have done, the horrible character of war.
—Cyrus Townsend Brady
Indian Fights and Fighters
Never again would Northern Cheyenne material culture reach the heights of richness and splendor that the people knew before that bitter day in the Big Horns.
—Peter J. Powell
Sweet Medicine
Foreword 
At the beginning of some chapters and some scenes, you will read the very same news stories devoured by the officers’ wives and the civilians employed at army posts or those living in adjacent frontier settlements—just what Samantha Donegan herself read—stories taken from the front page of the daily newspapers that arrived as much as a week or more late, that delay due to the wilderness distances to be traveled by freight carriers.
Copied verbatim, word for word, from the headlines and graphic accounts of the day, remember as you read that these newspaper stories were the only news available for those people who had a most personal stake in the army’s last great campaign—those people who had tearfully watched a loved one march off to war that autumn of the Great Sioux War of 1876.
By starting some chapters and scenes with an article taken right out of the day’s international, national, and regional headlines, I hope that you will be struck with the immediacy of each day’s front page as you finish reading that day’s news—just as Samantha Donegan would have been from her relative safety at Fort Laramie. But, unlike her and the rest of those left behind who would have to live out the days and weeks in apprehension and fear because the frontier was often terrifyingly bereft of reliable news, you will then find yourself thrust back into the historical action of an army once more marching into the teeth of a high plains winter—this time to finish what it had begun nine months before in the trampled snow along the Powder River.
Success, or failure … one thing was certain. It was destined to be another cold day in hell.
Prologue 6 October, 1876
“So when does Sheridan say he wants you riding off for Camp Robinson to keep an eye on Red Cloud’s camp?” asked Seamus Donegan, his gray eyes reflecting the pulsing gleam of that dim-red glow of his pipe bowl as he drew smoke through the stem, those eyes then flicking another anxious look at the building fondly called Old Bedlam by those stationed here at Fort Laramie.
“He’s give me till the morning,” Frank Grouard answered. Then cleared his throat before he continued in that way of a person about to address a grave matter. “Seems worrying is a man’s part in all of this birthing business, Irishman. ’Specially when it’s his first.”
The tall man with the thick crop of beard only nodded, sipping from his clay mug of whiskey, frosty streamers rising from his nostrils in the hoary cold of that night. The anxious father-to-be and the half-breed scout had stepped outside the sutler’s saloon to catch a breath of the cold, dry autumn air. “Aye. But it makes it no easier: I wish there were something I could do other’n this bleeming wait and this god-blame-med worrying”
Close by, a woman’s rising scream raised the hackles on the back of Frank’s own neck. He watched that eerie sound cause Donegan to sputter, drawing down on that last swallow, his gray eyes registering grave concern as he gazed with concentration and smoky intensity on the building right next door.
Pushing some of his long brown hair back over his shoulder, Seamus murmured, “Maybe there’s something I could be doing—”
“Come inside with me, Irishman,” Grouard suggested, gently tugging at Donegan’s elbow. “That’s what you can do. She’s got all the help in the world right now.”
“Dear Mither of God,” Seamus whispered as he turned toward the doorway with Grouard, gazing one last time over his shoulder at Old Bedlam where his wife lay—giving birth to their first born.
“C’mon,” Grouard urged again. “They’re all mothers with her, every last one of ’em. Ain’t nothing to it—women’s been giving birth this same way ever since the start of time.”
His bloodshot eyes found the half-breed’s as they turned the corner of the mud-walled building and stepped into the half circle of greasy yellow light splashing from the open doorway at that moment held open by John Bourke.
“Looks like I showed up at just the right moment,” the thirty-year-old Lieutenant called out, bowing graciously low at the waist and motioning the two civilian scouts inside. “We just got word over at Townsend’s that your wife is about to deliver.” He saluted some soldiers as the men shuffled past him into the warm, bright, lamplit interior of Sutler Collins’s watering hole. “From the look on your face, I figure you could use another drink. Can I buy you one, Seamus?” He pounded the Irishman on the back as the three snaked through the tables toward the bar in the low-roofed saloon that sat beside the sutler’s trading room.
“I oughtta be doing something other’n drinking,” Donegan grumped as Bourke motioned the barkeep to bring them all a mug of apple beer.
“Can’t say as any of us ever get good at this, Irishman,” announced Andrew Burt as he moved toward the trio at the bar. “Lord knows I’ve had enough of this waiting myself. But Elizabeth’s there with your woman, and there’s three others besides, Seamus. Things’ll be fine now. Only a matter of nature taking its own sweet time.”
“See there, Irishman,” Frank replied as cheerfully as he could, not knowing a damned thing about this birthing matter. “The good cap’n here speaks from experience. No need to worry. Time like this, what a woman needs is other women to help out what was always meant to be a natural thing anyway.”
“Grouard’s right,” Bourke said. “Just look at you, man—those hands of yours, the way they’re shaking. That lip of yours, how it’s trembling. Why, if you poked your nose in there, you’d do nothing but flux things up real good!”
“Wouldn’t he now?” Grouard cheered, grabbing the Irishman by the nape of the neck and shaking him affectionately. “Seamus is a good man to have along on a scout, or creeping past a Lakota camp—but he’d be a goddamned bull in the parlor around a birthin’ woman!”