CHAPTER XIV.
THE BLACK HILLS.
It was on Wednesday evening that our good friends, the pioneers of Deadwood and Crook City, reached us with their wagons, plethoric with all manner of provender, and the next day, as though in congratulation, the bright sunshine streamed in upon us, and so did rations. The only hard-worked men were the cooks, and from before dawn to late at evening not an hour's respite did they enjoy. Towards sundown we caught sight of Upham's battalion, coming in from its weary scout down stream. They had not seen an Indian, yet one poor fellow, Milner of Company "A," riding half a mile ahead of them in eager pursuit of an antelope, was found ten minutes after, stripped, scalped, and frightfully gashed and mutilated with knives, stone dead, of course, though still warm. Pony tracks were fresh in the springy sod all around him, but ponies and riders had vanished. Pursuit was impossible. Upham had not a horse that could more than stagger a few yards at a time. The maddest man about it was our Sergeant-Major, Humme, an admirable shot and a man of superhuman nerve and courage; yet only a few months ago you read how he, with Lieutenant Weir, met a similar fate at the hands of the Utes. He fought a half-score of them single-handed, and sent one of them to his final account before he himself succumbed to the missiles they poured upon him from their shelter in the rocks. A better soldier never lived, and there was grim humor in the statement of the eleven surviving Ute warriors, that they didn't want to fight Weir and Humme, but were obliged to kill them in self-defence. Weir was shot dead before he really saw the adversary, and those twelve unfortunate warriors, armed with their repeaters, would undoubtedly have suffered severely at the hands of Humme and his single shooter if they hadn't killed him too.
This is digressing, but it is so exquisitely characteristic of the Indian Bureau's way of doing things that, now that the peace commissioners have triumphantly announced that the attack on Thornburg's command was all an accident, and have allowed the Indians to bully, temporize, and hoodwink them into weeks of fruitless delay (the rascals never meant to surrender the Meeker murderers so long as they had only peace commissioners to deal with), and now that, after all, the army has probably got to do over again what it started to do last October, and could readily have accomplished long ere this had they not been hauled off by the Bureau, the question naturally suggests itself, how often is this sort of thing to be repeated? Year after year it has been done. A small force of soldiers sent to punish a large band of Indian murderers or marauders. The small band has been well-nigh annihilated in many instances. Then the country wakes up, a large force concentrates at vast expense, and the day of retribution has come, when, sure as shooting, the Bureau has stepped in with restraining hand. No end of silk-hatted functionaries have hurried out from Washington, shaken hands and smoked a pipe with a score of big Indians; there has been a vast amount of cheap oratory and buncombe talk about the Great Father and guileless red men, at the end of which we are told to go back to camp and bury our dead, and our late antagonists, laughing in their sleeves, link arms with their aldermanic friends, are "dead-headed" off to Washington, where they are lionized at the White House, and sent the rounds of the great cities, and finally return to their reservations laden down with new and improved rifles and ammunition, stove-pipe hats, and Saratoga trunks, more than ever convinced that the one way to get what they want out of Uncle Sam is to slap his face every spring and shake hands in the fall. The apparent theory of the Bureau is that the soldier is made to be killed, the Indian to be coddled.
However, deeply as my comrades and myself may feel on this subject, it does not properly enter into a narrative article. Let us get back to Upham's battalion, who reached us late on the afternoon of the fourteenth, desperately tired and hungry. We lost no time in ministering to their wants, though we still had no grain for our horses, but the men made merry over abundant coffee, bacon and beans, and bread and molasses, and were unspeakably happy.
That evening the general decided to send back to the crossings of the swollen streams that had impeded our march on the 12th, and in which many horses and mules and boxes of rifle ammunition had been lost. Indians prowling along our trail would come upon that ammunition as the stream subsided, and reap a rich harvest.
The detail fell upon the Fifth Cavalry. One officer and thirty men to take the back track, dig up the boxes thirty miles away, and bring them in. With every prospect of meeting hundreds of the Sioux following our trail for abandoned horses, the duty promised to be trying and perilous, and when the colonel received the orders from headquarters, and, turning to me, said, "Detail a lieutenant," I looked at the roster with no little interest. Of ten companies of the Fifth Cavalry present, each was commanded by its captain, but subalterns were scarce, and with us such duties were assigned in turn, and the officer "longest in" from scout or detachment service was Lieutenant Keyes. So that young gentleman, being hunted up and notified of his selection, girded up his loins and was about ready to start alone on his perilous trip, when there came swinging up to me an officer of infantry—an old West Point comrade who had obtained permission to make the campaign with the Fifth Cavalry and had been assigned to Company "I" for duty, but who was not detailable, strictly speaking, for such service as Keyes's, from our roster. "Look here, King, you haven't given me half a chance this last month, and if I'm not to have this detail, I want to go with Keyes, as subordinate, or anything; I don't care, only I want to go." The result was that he did go, and when a few days since we read in the Sentinel that Satterlee Plummer, a native of Wisconsin and a graduate of West Point, had been reinstated in the army on the special recommendation of General Crook, for gallantry in Indian campaign, I remembered this instance of the Sioux war of 1876, and, looking back to my note-book, there I found the record and result of their experience on the back track—they brought in fourteen horses and all the ammunition without losing a man.
