Small heed we gave to this history-making, it is true, as we pressed silently onward through those dreary late winter days. It was a soldier's task we had accepted, and we were following the flag. And in spite of the sins committed in its name, of the evil deeds protected by its power, wherever it unfurls its radiant waves of light "the breath of heaven smells wooingly"; gentle peace, and rich prosperity, and holy love abide ever more under its caressing shadow.
We were prepared with rations for a five days' expedition only. But weary, ragged, barefoot, hungry, sleepless, we pressed on through twenty-five days, following a trail sometimes dim, sometimes clearly written, through a region the Indians never dreamed we could cross and live. The nights chilled our famishing bodies. The short hours of broken rest led only to another day of moving on. There were no breakfasts to hinder our early starting. The meagre bit of mule meat doled out sparingly when there was enough of this luxury to be given out, eaten now without salt, was our only food. Our clothing tattered with wear and tear, hung on our gaunt frames. Our lips did not close over our teeth; our eyes above hollow cheeks stared out like the eyes of dead men. The bloom of health had turned to a sickly yellow hue; but we were all alike, and nobody noted the change.
As we passed from one deserted camp to another, it began to seem a will-o'-the-wisp business, an elusive dream, a long fruitless chasing after what would escape and leave us to perish at last in this desert. But the slender yellow-haired man at the head of the column had an indomitable spirit, and an endurance equalled only by his courage and his military cunning. Under him was the equally indomitable Kansas Colonel, Horace L. Moore, tried and trained in Plains warfare. Behind them straggled a thousand soldiers. And still the March days dragged on.
Then the trails began to tell us that the Indians were gathering in larger groups and the command was urged forward with more persistent purpose. We slept at night without covering under the open sky. We hardly dared to light fires. We had nothing to cook, and a fire would reveal our whereabouts to the Indians we were pursuing. A thousand soldiers is a large number; but even a thousand men, starving day after day, taxing nerve and muscle, with all the reserve force of the body feeding on its own unfed store of energy; a thousand men destitute of supplies, cut off by leagues of desert sands from any base of reinforcement, might put up only a weak defence against the hundreds of savages in their own habitat. It was to prevent another Arickaree that Custer's forces kept step in straggling lines when rations had become only a taunting mockery of the memory.
The map of that campaign is kept in the archives of war and its official tale is all told there, told as the commander saw it. I can tell it here only as a private down in the ranks.
In the middle of a March afternoon, as we were silently swinging forward over the level Plains, a low range of hills loomed up. Beyond them lay the valley of the Sweetwater, a tributary of the Canadian River. Here, secure in its tepees, was the Cheyenne village, its inhabitants never dreaming of the white man's patience and endurance. Fifteen hundred strong it numbered, arrogant, cunning, murderous. The sudden appearance of our army of skeleton men was not without its effect on the savage mind. Men who had crossed the Staked Plains in this winter time, men who looked like death already, such men might be hard to kill. But lying and trickery still availed.
There was only one mind in the file that day. We had come so far, we had suffered such horrors on the way, these men had been guilty of such atrocious crimes, we longed fiercely now to annihilate this band of wretches in punishment due for all it had cost the nation. I thought of the young mother and her baby boy on the frozen earth between the drifts of snow about Satanta's tepee on the banks of the Washita, as Bud and I found her on the December day when we searched over Custer's battle field. I pictured the still forms lying on their blankets, and the long line of soldiers passing reverently by, to see if by chance she might be known to any of us—this woman, murdered in the very hour of her release; and I gripped my arms in a frenzy. Oh, Satan takes fast hold on the heart of a man in such a time, and the Christ dying on the cross up on Calvary, praying "Father forgive them for they know not what they do," seems only a fireside story of unreal things.
In the midst of this opportunity for vengeance just, and long overdue, comes Custer's lieutenant with military courtesy to Colonel Moore, and delivers the message, "The General sends his compliments, with the instructions not to fire on the Indians."
Courtesy! Compliments! Refrain from any rudeness to the wards of the Government! I was nearly twenty-two and I knew more than Custer and Sheridan and even President Grant himself just then. I had a sense of obedience. John Baronet put that into me back in Springvale years ago. Also I had extravagant notions of military discipline and honor. But for one brief moment I was the most lawless mutineer, the rankest anarchist that ever thirsted for human gore to satisfy a wrong. Nor was I alone. Beside me were those stanch fellows, Pete and John Mac, and Hadley. And beyond was the whole line of Kansas men with a cause of their own here. Before my fury left me, however, we were all about face, and getting up the valley to a camping-place.
I might have saved the strength the passion of fury costs. Custer knew his business and mine also. Down in that Cheyenne village, closely guarded, were two captive women, the women of my boyhood dream, maybe. The same two women who had been carried from their homes up in the Solomon River country in the early Fall. What they had endured in these months of captivity even the war records that set down plain things do not deem fit to enter. One shot from our rifles that day on the Sweetwater would have meant for them the same fate that befell the sacrifice on the Washita, the dead woman on the deserted battle field. It was to save these two, then, that we had kept step heavily across the cold starved Plains. For two women we had marched and suffered on day after day. Who shall say, at the last analysis, that this young queen of nations, ruling a beautiful land under the Stars and Stripes, sets no value on the homes of its people, nor holds as priceless the life and safety even of two unknown women.