Chapter 19

I have to admit it was a great relief to me to see the reinforcements streaming in on the train from the east to help us fight off the increasing violence of renegade war-chiefs preying on fear-riddled settlers.

I tried my best to clear my memory to pin down the exact dates of the battle of Little Big Horn but all I could confirm from my hazy memory was that it was somewhere around 1875 and could be a year earlier or a year later. I was able to remember rather many important dates of history but that was one that I skimmed over in my research due to a lack of interest in the overly popular reckless General with luck on his side more often than not.

There was no doubt that Custer’s Post Civil War period was a mixed bag of recriminations and downright hostility. He got caught up in a few money-making schemes that bordered almost on the edge of dishonesty, but managed to stay ahead of his enemies and received welcome orders to the western frontier. His inner circle of friends and supporters gave him good lines of communication with the influential media of the time and there was even talk of him being a Presidential candidate due mostly to his Civil War fame.

I hadn’t seen him as yet because his movement west was slow and tedious.

We were at the close of 1874 and I was fairly certain it would be at least a year or a year and a half before Custer had his final showdown with the plains Indians. I was equally as certain that he would use the time to engage the enemy on his own terms in situations that had him with a superior force and much better armed than the hostiles still using old firearms and often just bows and arrows and hatchets to defeat their enemies. I did remember that at the Little Big Horn that lack of balance was in favor of the Indian tribes with a superiority of forces almost 2 to 1 against the bluecoats and rumored to be armed with hundreds of new “repeating” rifles that had been of notable service in the battles of the Civil War. It stood to reason because it was now almost a full decade later and the Indians were quick to trade furs and even stolen gold and cash money for modern weapons. It was a lucrative market for the outlaw gangs willing to risk losing their hair for the opportunity to build their fortune.

My Indian scouts were quick to report that the Yellow-haired devil from the east was chosen to be the officer to pay in blood for all the broken promises and the piles of Indian bones bleaching white on the “Trail of Tears” into Indian Territory. Even those promises were broken and they were forced to retreat to the lands of the northern territories still under the rule of the Queen mother on the other side of the sea.

I knew from my textbooks that they would return to the plains and teach a lesson to the over-confidant Cavalry right at a time when it seemed nothing could derail the move to the Pacific Coast and the realization of “Manifest Destiny”.

My unit was not assigned directly to the Seventh Cavalry but to another troop that was meant to act as a rear guard to the field units under his command. Of course, his command was reality and not technically on paper because of his popularity and general feeling of high morale under his command. There was a sense that the safest place to be was riding behind the “General” when a shooting scrape was about to begin. I knew that was a false sense of security, but was unable to make my knowledge verbal, because it would be construed as a spirit of disloyalty at a time when “orders are orders” and to refuse was tantamount to betrayal.

As time went on during that spring and summer, the so-called Indian Uprising was dealt with harshly and the captured Indians were sent to dismal reservations that were more prisons, than places to live and be pacified.

The field troopers came into the fort with a long line of exhausted prisoners, mostly women and children, and went promptly into a celebrating mood spending their accumulated pay on booze and the Mexican girls furnished by the same bastards that were selling those repeating rifles to the hostiles.

My scouts were disgusted by the entire affair because those captives were left out in the open to sleep on the ground and given limited rations to keep their stomachs from growling. I appropriated some sacks of corn-meal from the trading post and distributed it to the women tending the cooking fires in the center of the defeated mass of humanity. Latrines were dug next to a rocky ravine that was already recipient of trash and junk from generations past. I hoped that their stay would be quick because I saw the danger of a fast-moving virus wiping out most of the survivors like the stroke of a genocidal brush. I wondered if that was not the original intent and that the entire affair was part of a plot to eliminate the Native Americans from the very area they had been sent by official decree.

My commanding officer gave me a stamped order that instructed me to move the Indians to the reservation in the foothills some thirty kilometers to the north. I was aghast at the order, because I suspected most of the prisoners would not finish the journey alive.

We made a desperate sight to behold as our long line of women, children and blue uniformed guards headed out into the merciless desert to find the barren strip of land given the designation of “Reservation”. It was a reservation in name only, with no facilities or logistics to make it a reality on the ground.

One of my new scouts claimed to be a Sioux. It was a claim which I seriously doubted because of his dark skin that betrayed him as a mixed blood. He was most likely a former captive of the vicious tribe infamous for their horse-stealing ways and refinements in the art of torture. Escaped slaves made good workers and good fighters for the plains Indians. Strangely, they prospered more in the status of captive than in their former status of slave with little or no rights at all. His name was Running Eagle and he couldn’t run for shit, even being chased by the devil himself.

He was, however, the best tracker I had ever seen and often he would read signs that none of the other scouts could make out on the rocky terrain. We were well on our way to our designated destination, when he reported to me with his characteristic sparseness of speech,

“Big war party, maybe twenty horses.”

That was a concern to me because I had taken only a dozen troopers and a pair of scouts with me for the journey to the reservation. These surrendered survivors of the engagement with the half-starving tribe of Canada-bound Cherokee were not truly hostile in nature, since most of their fighting men were either already killed in action, or had joined up with some more dangerous group ready to pounce on helpless settlers.