CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
After the meeting, Bellefontaine asked
Sam Davis and Lee Regret to come to his office.
“This isn’t working out the way it was
supposed to,” Bellefontaine said. “If the soldiers don’t drive the
Crow out of their village, we haven’t accomplished
anything.”
“Seemed to me like none of the folks in
town was all that happy about the way things is turnin’ out
either,” Regret said.
“No, they weren’t very happy about it,
were they?” Bellefontaine said. He drummed his fingers on his desk
for a moment. “Davis, those men who were with you when you attacked
the Indians a couple of weeks ago. Do you think you could get them
to go with you to attack the village?”
Davis held out his hand. “Whoa now, Mr.
Bellefontaine, there was only six of us done that. That ain’t near
enough to attack a whole village.”
“You wouldn’t need too many, if you
attacked in the middle of the night, when they were all
asleep.”
“Even then, we would need more than
six.”
“What about twenty? Would that be
enough if you attacked the village in the middle of the night, when
nobody was expecting it?”
Davis nodded. “Twenty might do it,” he
said. “But I’m not sure I can come up with twenty
men.”
“If I paid them one hundred dollars
apiece?” Bellefontaine said. “And two hundred dollars to each of
you?”
Davis smiled broadly, and nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “For a hundred dollars apiece, I can get twenty
men for sure.”
Confluence of the Stinking Water and South Fork
Rivers
Falcon and Coletrain’s platoon had come
twenty miles up the Stinking Water River when they reached South
Fork. Here, the water widened considerably to accommodate the two
streams, and the men dismounted with the intention of having their
lunch. The horses were watered, then ground-tethered in the grass
so they could feed as well.
Just as they were settling down to
their meal, someone shouted “Indians!” There were no more than half
a dozen Indians, but their yelling, whooping and firing guns
frightened the cavalry horses, causing them to pull away from their
ground tethers and run away. Sergeant Major Coletrain and the
others fired at the Indians, and the Indians
retreated.
The soldiers stood there, holding
smoking weapons in their hands, watching as the Indians rode
away.
“What’ll we do now, Sarge? All our
horses is gone,” one of the soldiers said.
“We’re goin’ to go get ’em,” Coletrain
replied.
Within fifteen minutes, half the horses
were retrieved, and the men were about to get mounted to go after
the remaining horses when the Indians returned. This time there
were at least two hundred of them, against Falcon, Coletrain, and
no more than twenty soldiers. The cavalrymen had no choice but to
retreat onto an island in the middle of the river. There they
formed a defensive circle, the soldiers lying bellydown on the
ground while Falcon and Coletrain were on their knees inside the
circle.
Within the first five minutes all of
the recovered horses were killed, along with one of the soldiers.
Sergeant Major Coletrain had been hit twice, once in the right
thigh and once in the left leg.
Mean to His Horses, who was easily
identified by the red and white painted face, led his Indians in a
second charge toward the cavalry. The Indians fired volley after
volley, but the soldiers returned fire and, because they were in
the prone position and the Indians were exposed, the soldiers got
the better of it. When Mean to His Horses pulled his Indians back
he left almost fifty of them behind, dead in the water or along the
banks of the river.
“They’re gone!” one of the soldiers
said.
“Not for long,” Coletrain replied, his
voice strained with pain.
“How bad is it?” Falcon asked. “Your
wounds, I mean.”
“I can’t rightly tell,” Coletrain said.
“I guess you are going to have to take a look and let me
know.”
Falcon used his knife to cut open
Coletrain’s trousers so he could look at the wounds.
“Well, the one on your thigh isn’t that
bad,” Falcon said. “Looks like it just caught the edge of it, left
a crease, but there’s no bullet.”
“The other one?”
“It didn’t hit a bone, and it didn’t
sever an artery that would cause you to lose a lot of blood, but
the bullet is still inside, so it is going to need to come
out.”
“Think you can get it
out?”
“I can try, but it’s going to be hard
with just a knife,” Falcon said.
“I got me some tweezers,” one of the
other soldiers said.
“Tweezers? Yes, let me have
those.”
The soldier reached into his knapsack
and pulled them out. Falcon was pleased to see that there were at
least six inches long.
“Good, I can use this. Get fire going,
boil some water, and drop this in the water.”
“Colonel, you ain’t plannin’ on boilin’
that, then stickin’ it in Sarge while it’s still hot, are
you?”
“Yes. I’ve read that if you boil the
instruments a doctor uses it helps keep the wound from festering,”
Falcon said.
“I don’t know, I ain’t never heard of
such a thing,” the soldier said. “I know I wouldn’t want it stuck
down in me if it was boilin’ hot.”
“Bates, do what the colonel says,”
Coletrain said.
“All right, Sarge, you the one he’s
goin’ to use it on, not me.”
Half an hour later, Falcon held up the
bullet to show it. Then, tossing it aside, he found the cleanest
piece of cloth he could find, and bound up Coletrain’s
wounds.
He had no sooner finished with
Coletrain than the Indians attacked again, and again the casualties
among the Indians were very high. The cavalry suffered casualties
as well, and because their numbers were so small, each loss was
multiplied in its effect. Three more soldiers were killed and one
more wounded.
Somewhat later the Indians made another
charge, but were again repulsed, though not without cost, as two
more soldiers were killed and two more wounded. After that, it
turned into a waiting game. Now, there were only fifteen soldiers
left alive, four of whom were wounded. The nature of the wounds
ranged from slight to serious.
Mean to His Horses changed his tactics.
Realizing that he had the soldiers trapped on the island, he
decided he could wait them out, so he put his men on both sides of
the island to deny the soldiers any opportunity to
escape.
“Sergeant, they’s Injuns all around
us,” one of the troopers said. “We are trapped here!”
“Look out there, Schuler,” Coletrain
said, pointing to the river and the riverbank. The river and the
bank were strewn with bodies. “What do you see?”
“I see Injuns,” Schuler
said.
“Dead Injuns,” Coletrain said. “We’ve
killed nearly a hundred of them now.”
“Yeah,” Schuler said. He smiled. “Yeah,
we have, ain’t we?”
“Ol’ Mean to His Horses has already
decided that he can’t run us off this island, so he plans to try
and wait us out. Only, he can’t do that, either.”
“How come he can’t?”
“We have plenty of ammunition, we have
water, and we have fifteen days of rations. And if we had to, we
can cut up one of the dead horses and cook it. But we aren’t goin’
to have to wait here fifteen days, because by then Lieutenant Bond
will connect with us.”
“Yeah,” Schuler said. “Yeah, that’s
right, ain’t it?”
Coletrain came back over to Falcon,
then sat down, painfully, beside him.
“How is Jackson?” Coletrain asked,
inquiring about the most seriously wounded of the
soldiers.
Falcon shook his head. “I don’t think
he’s going to make it,” he said.
“Jackson is a good soldier,” Coletrain
said.
“Sergeant, from what I have observed,
they are all good soldiers,” Falcon replied.
“Thank you, Colonel,” Coletrain said.
“Comin’ from you, that means a lot.”
That night, two of the men volunteered
to try and sneak through the Indians to go for help, but they were
seen by the Indians and had to return to the island.
Near
the Crow village on the Meeteetsee
Bellefontaine personally led the group
he called the Wyoming Citizens Militia to the Crow village on the
Meeteetsee River. It was two o’clock in the morning as the men rode
across the Meeteetsee River, the hooves of their horses churning up
the water and sending up a froth of bubbles as they did. As
Bellefontaine had said, no one in the village expected
anything.
High Hawk, perhaps to show the loyalty
of the Crow, was flying an American flag over his
tipi.
“Look at that,” Regret said. “That
Injun bastard is flyin’ an American flag. Where do you reckon he
got that?”
“More than likely he stole it from some
soldiers he kilt somewhere,” Davis said.
“That son of a bitch has some nerve,”
one of the others in the Citizen’s Militia said.
“What are we goin’ to do?” Regret
asked.
“We’re goin’ to kill as many as we
can,” Bellefontaine replied. “That’s what we are going to
do.”
A horse of one of the militiamen,
perhaps nervous from the darkness and the tension, whinnied, then
turned around. As he did so, one of his hooves struck a metal
bucket that was lying on the bank of the river.
Inside
the village
In her tipi, Quiet Stream heard the
sound and she opened her eyes, not sure if it was something she
actually heard, or whether it was something she dreamed. She lay
there in the dark for a moment longer, drifting comfortably in that
zone between sleep and wake, when she heard another sound. This
time it was the sound of shod horses’ hooves striking
rocks.
None of the villagers’ horses were
shod.
“Father,” she said. “There are white
men in the camp.”
Big Hand sat up and listened. Like
Quiet Stream, he heard the sound of shod hooves on stone. He
grabbed his rifle, then stepped through the opening of the
tipi.
“Village awake! Village awake!” he
called loudly. “White men are in camp!”
“Kill that screaming son of a bitch!”
Bellefontaine shouted, and several fired at the same time. Big Hand
fell, even as other warriors, heeding his call, were beginning to
appear outside.
Bellefontaine’s men began shooting at
everyone they saw, men, women, and children. When they didn’t have
a specific target, they fired into the tipis. They also began
setting fire to the tipis. They continued their indiscriminate
assault for the next half hour, keeping up such a rate of fire that
it was impossible for the Crow to marshal any type of organized
resistance.
Davis and Regret, in a personal killing
frenzy, killed and scalped three women and five children who had
surrendered and were screaming for mercy. Following their example,
the other members of the militia went on a bloodlust rampage of
their own, killing all the wounded they could find before
mutilating and scalping the dead, including pregnant women,
children and babies. They also started plundering the tipis that
had not yet been burned, dividing up the spoils.
As soon as the shooting started,
Running Elk ran outside the tipi, and seeing quickly what was
happening, he called out in English.
“Wait! Wait! You are making a mistake!
These people are innocent! I am the one you want! I was with Mean
to His Horses!”
Despite the fact that he was calling
attention to himself, Running Elk was not hit, even though the
bullets were whistling all around him. But though he was spared, he
saw his mother, father, and young sister killed, along with dozens
of other villagers.
Running Elk had come out without a
weapon, hoping that by doing so he could surrender, and spare the
other villagers. Now he realized that his plan would not work, and
he started back into the tipi to get his rifle when he saw Quiet
Stream go down.
“No!” he shouted, and, forgetting about
his weapon, he ran to her.
“Quiet Stream!” he shouted, kneeling
beside her. She had been hit by at least three bullets, and there
was blood from her shoulders to her waist. “Quiet Stream!” he said
again, softer this time, but his voice racked by the agony and
anger he was feeling.
“I will never have your children,”
Quiet Stream said. She gasped a couple of times, then she quit
breathing.
Running Elk looked around him, and
seeing a war club in the hands of a nearby dead warrior, he grabbed
the club then turned to look toward the white men who had come into
the village on their killing spree.
“Ahheee!” he yelled as he ran toward
one of the invaders. Reaching up, he pulled the white man from his
saddle, and crushed his skull with one blow of the heavy war
club.
Running Elk leaped into the empty
saddle then, and with his war club held high, urged the horse in
pursuit of another of the invaders. One blow brought down another
invader, and another as well. So far Running Elk had managed to
kill three men, and was sending panic through the
others.
“Kill that Indian!” Bellefontaine
shouted, pointing toward Running Elk. “One hundred dollars to the
man who kills him!”
At least five men turned their guns
toward Running Elk, and all five fired as one. Though Bellefontaine
didn’t know if all five rounds struck Running Elk, it didn’t
matter, because he saw blood, bone, and brain detritus erupt from
the Indian’s head, and he knew that the wild warrior was
dead.
With Running Elk lying dead on the
ground, the shooting stopped. For a long moment the mounted white
men fought to control their nervous prancing and whinnying horses
as they looked around the village, now fairly well lit by the
burning tipis. Everywhere they looked they saw dead bodies, bodies
of the warriors, bodies of the old men, including High Hawk whom
many recognized, as well as bodies of women and children. High Hawk
was wrapped in the American flag, perhaps believing that would save
him.
Now, with their last resistance
eliminated, Bellefontaine’s men began to systematically scalp and
mutilate the dead.
“Hey!” Lee Regret shouted, holding a
small, black tuft of hair over his head. “Ha! Look what I
got!”
“Damn, Regret, what the hell are you
screamin’ about? That’s the scrawniest scalp I’ve ever seen,” Davis
said.
“That’s ’cause it ain’t a scalp,”
Regret said, a broad, evil smile spreading across his
face.
“Well, if it ain’t a scalp, what is
it?”
Regret pointed toward Quiet Stream’s
now-naked body. There was nothing but blood at the junction of her
legs.
“It come from the other end,” Regret
said, with a high-pitched laugh.
Examining Quiet Stream’s body, Davis
saw what Regret was talking about. He had made a scalp of her pubic
hair.
When the attack was over, as many as
150 Indians lay dead, most of whom were old men, women and
children. In the meantime, Bellefontaine lost only four men, three
of whom had been killed by Running Elk.