“I have had a vision,” Bouyer acknowledged.
Then go. Leave me to my mourning in peace.”
“General, what if we find more Indians than we can handle?”
The object of the question spit into the snow. “All I’m afraid of is we won’t find half enough. By God, there aren’t enough Indians in the entire country to defeat the Seventh Cavalry.”
Mitch Bouyer’s expression of disbelief was masked by the scarf wrapped around his face, leaving only his dark eyes visible. He stared hard at George Armstrong Custer, the commander of the newly formed Seventh Cavalry. One of Custer’s officers had asked the question. And Bouyer thought it a valid one.
The cluster of officers, scouts and Bouyer were standing on the near side of a bluff overlooking the Washita River in the Indian Territory. It was night, but there was good visibility due to star and moonlight reflecting off the foot of newly fallen snow. They were here because a day ago one of the scouts bad discovered the trail of a war party running across the Canadian River and beading southeast toward the Washita. They were in the Indian Territory, south of Kansas and north of Texas. It was a bleak land. Scoured by wind, with few trees, usually only along the riverbeds, which were few and far between.
Custer had pounced on the report and ordered his command in pursuit. A winter campaign was something new for the Army in the west, but it was a sign of the pressure being put on the War Department by outraged civilians throughout the western territories. Particularly Kansas. Which had been hard hit by Indian raids the past couple years. There was also l report that one of the tribes in the area had white captives — women and children-which added to the urgency.
Bouyer had arrived just two days ago, after a week of hard riding from Colorado. On the second day he’d sensed Crazy Horse’s presence behind him like a trailing storm, never closing, but not falling very far behind, either. Where before the sense of his “brother’s” aura bad always been red, of anger, there was a blackness now about Crazy Horse that worried Bouyer.
He’d booked up with Custer and the Seventh at Camp Supply, an outpost on the Canadian River. He’d hired on in his usual position as hunter, something the outfit had desperately needed as it moved through the bare wintry terrain. His time with Bridger, who bad often scouted for the Army, held him in good stead with the few Army people who had some time on the frontier and remembered the old mountain man and knew anyone that bad ridden with him was an asset.
As soon as he had seen Custer, Bouyer had known not only that he was the man in his vision. But that he was also part of Bouyer’s future. It worried Bouyer greatly that such an apparently ignorant person was wrapped up in his fate, even though the exact nature of that fate still eluded him. Worse, the timing was also uncertain. Could it be today? Bouyer sensed Crazy Horse was not far away, but not close by, either. He definitely was not in the village that was Custer’s target. Bouyer knew his ‘’brother’’ was an integral part of whatever would Ultimately happen.
The crystal skull he’d been given by Earhart was in a bag tied off to his saddle, hidden by his bedroll. Despite knowing Crazy Horse wasn’t in the immediate area, Bouyer didn’t have a good feeling about what was going to happen.
The village that slept on the other side of the bluff, along the banks of the Washita, was Cheyenne, led by Chief Black Kettle. Bouyer’s brief look at it in the dark during the reconnaissance made him tend to agree with the officer who had questioned Custer-there were many lodges in the village, indicating at least a hundred warriors, along with perhaps three times that number of women and children. Also, he’d listened on the way here, to both whites and Indians he met, and Black Kettle had just gone to Fort Kearny on a peace mission. Why Was Custer so anxious to attack his camp then?
Custer was issuing orders, dividing his command into four columns, directing his subordinate officers to maneuver in such a way as to surround the village and attack at dawn. Having no official position in this matter, Bouyer decided to shadow Custer. He didn’t think much of the Colonel’s tactical plan. It presumed there would be no coordinated resistance. Also, it ignored the fact that there were several other Indian camps farther upriver. Custer seemed more concerned with the Cheyenne running than fighting.
Then Custer did something that struck Bouyer as coldhearted. He had all the dogs-a common thing for a cavalry unit was to have an assortment of strays follow along on the march-killed. They were muzzled with ropes and strangled. He knew Custer was afraid the dogs might bark and give away the advance, but he could have easily leashed them out of earshot. Custer even had his own two prized dogs killed, indicating how anxious he was for a victory.
Bouyer had heard stories of the yellow-haired regimental commander. How he had his own men who deserted shot down, much like he was killing the dogs. How he’d been court-martialed for leaving his command to go to his wife two years ago at Fort Hays. How he’d shot his own horse in the head while hunting buffalo.
However, Bouyer did have to give Custer credit for one thing-leading the blue-coat cavalry out in this weather. He knew the Cheyenne would not suspect the white soldiers of doing that. Balancing that advantage was that Bouyer had seen the trails for several different tribes in the area-not just Cheyenne, but Kiowas, Comanche’s, Apaches, and Arapaho. Winter was a time when tribes had to put aside animosities and share the best places for camps. In this desolate country, the riverbed was the only option.
Crazy Horse stood, throwing off the snow-covered blanket. He walked over to his pony and untethered it. Shaking the snow off the blanket, he threw it over the pony’s back and then slid on top. He headed east along the top of the bluff.
As he rode he thought of his daughter, nursing the black feeling it brought. Dead because of the white man. Not by bullet or knife, but the bad air the whites brought with them. In just one generation, the Lakota had been halved in numbers due to the bad air. The same was true everywhere he traveled. The medicine men were powerless against the diseases the white men brought with them.
Crazy Horse did not understand why the white men weren’t satisfied with the land they already had. Why did they always want more? And was there no end to their numbers?
How could his mother have talked of glory and a greater good in the midst of the destruction of her people? A greater good for whom? It could only be for the whites if his people were destroyed.
The only good Crazy Horse could see was to kill as many of them as possible.
Bouyer watched as the columns separated to surround the village. Bouyer followed Custer’s column, moving on foot, leading their horses along the river bluff, keeping their, horses between them and the village, hands over their muzzles to keep them quiet.
A first sergeant next to Bouyer leaned close. “Stay by the general. You’ll see how he did in the Rebs during the war.”
Bouyer knew the first sergeant was a Custer man. The “general” reference for Custer indicated that Custer had been a brevet major general during the Civil War. By the time of the surrender at Appomattox, Custer had been leading the Third Cavalry Division at only twenty-five years of age. But Bouyer had listened to others in the past couple days enough to know things that the first sergeant didn’t or chose not to believe. That Custer’s division had had the highest casualty numbers of all Union divisions during the war. That despite a dozen horses shot out from underneath him, Custer had never been scratched. That Custer had risen so fast in rank and had so much success that perhaps he had lost touch with soldiers he commanded and with whose blood he had won his glory.