Fort Riley was a hot, dusty assembly of stark buildings and scant fortifications in the summer of 1865. Tom had not seen a great deal of the surrounding countryside since his arrival three weeks before, but his fellow officers assured him that what he had seen on the two patrols he had accompanied was representative of the whole damn territory. He had at least seen enough to know that it was in stark contrast to the green, damp river bottoms of Mississippi or the rolling hills of Tennessee. It didn’t really matter that much to him anyway. He could make do just about anyplace. There was no one at home waiting for his return to St. Louis. That city might have been the place of his birth but home was wherever he could count on a cot and three meals a day. It was fortunate for him that he was of that disposition because life was pretty dull for most of the officers at Fort Riley. It was miserable, monotonous duty for those who had families back East, a fact that turned out to be a piece of good fortune for Tom because otherwise he might have been assigned as mess officer. That was what the regimental commander, Colonel Watt Thompson, had in mind for him, since Tom had no experience on the Western frontier. Before orders were signed, however, B-Troop commander Captain Wesley Rogers Bluefield had requested that Tom be assigned to his troop as executive officer. Captain Bluefield’s former exec was one of those who succumbed to the terrible monotony of garrison life at Riley and had deserted two days after Tom arrived. The general consensus was that he had said to hell with it and gone back to Ohio where his wife and parents lived.
Tom had made no protest when first told he was to be in charge of the post mess tent but he certainly felt no enthusiasm for the job. So it was with a great deal of relief that he learned he had been plucked from the kitchen to be a frontline cavalry officer again. He had ridden on one short patrol with Wes Bluefield and the man seemed to be a levelheaded officer. He didn’t waste a lot of words on idle conversation. When he spoke at all, it was usually to give an order. This was all right by Tom. He didn’t cotton much to a lot of jawing anyway. He was to find out later on that the only reason he had been ordered out on that first patrol was so Bluefield could look him over.
B-Troop had a scout assigned named Andy Coulter. Andy didn’t look like much but he was reputed to be one of the best scouts in the territory. He was a short man with a barrel chest and arms that looked too short for his body, making him appear froglike when he wasn’t seated on a horse. Andy took an almost immediate liking to Tom. Tom was green, that was obvious. But Andy saw a determination in the young lieutenant and he liked the way he used his eyes and ears on that first patrol, like he was memorizing everything he saw and heard that day. Andy offered his opinion to Bluefield even though it had not been solicited.
“Reckon he’s a mite green but he shows backbone enough.” He punctuated his observation with a long stream of tobacco juice that raised a tiny cloud of dust at his feet. “Cain’t say fer shore but you might could do worse.”
Bluefield glanced at his scout briefly. Without changing his blank expression, he replied, “Maybe.” He turned his attention back toward the young lieutenant, seated on a rock, eating his ration of salt pork. “Fact is, the old man is sending us to Laramie and I need an officer. I reckon young Allred there would’ve had to fall off his horse before I rejected him.”
This caught Andy’s attention. “Laramie,” he repeated. “I reckon we’re really going then.” It was a statement but it was offered in a questioning tone. He had suspected that Colonel Thompson was going to have to dispatch at least one company to Fort Laramie. Ever since he had heard that the army was sending Colonel Henry Carrington’s Eighteenth Infantry out from Laramie to build three forts and protect the immigrants trying to get to the Montana goldfields, he’d known there was going to be big trouble. And he knew that sooner or later he would be in it with the rest of them.
“Yeah,” Bluefield confirmed, his tone that of a regular army man who was accustomed to getting nasty details. “We’re going. That damn Oglala Sioux is hell-bent on stopping the road.” He didn’t have to say Red Cloud. Andy knew who he meant.
Andy spat, then thought a minute before he spoke again. “Now, I’m gonna tell you, Cap’n, there’s gonna be some trouble on this one. I hear tell Red Cloud’s got so dang many of them red sons stirred up till it’s gonna take more than two or three cavalry troops to whip him. That ole son of a bitch ain’t no fool. He ain’t gon’ stand for the army to keep kicking him around. These damn fool immigrants have been stomping through his hunting ground like they don’t give spit about no treaties. Get shot up and scalped, don’t make no difference, they just keep on coming. Now that trail that Bozeman and Jacobs marked, it’s a shortcut all right. But it’s a shortcut right through the heart of the Injuns’ best hunting ground. I wouldn’t stand for it if I was him. Hell, we gon’ be a while on this one.”
Andy’s gut feelings were to be proven accurate if not naively conservative. The Sioux chief Mahpiua Luta, known more commonly as Red Cloud, had gathered some sixteen thousand warriors to his cause. Most of these were Sioux but there were also many Cheyenne and Arapaho, all determined to stop the government from building a road through the heart of their most sacred hunting ground.
Captain Bluefield made no reply to his scout’s comment, but in his own gut he experienced a gnawing suspicion that once again the higher brass back East had underestimated the fighting capabilities of the Indian. According to reports received by Colonel Thompson, Red Cloud captured the first contingent of army engineers dispatched to work on the road and held them for more than two weeks before releasing them. The mystery of it was why he let them go. Bluefield speculated that the chief was hoping to save a lot of bloodshed with a simple warning. Well, if it was a warning, it didn’t work. The army pushed right along with the Bozeman Trail, as it was now called, and Red Cloud was raiding work parties and any immigrant trains that were brave enough to take the new shortcut to Montana. Like Andy, Bluefield figured they would be a while on this one.
* * *
What was scheduled to be a twenty-one-day march turned into a month in the saddle, what with the pace slowed down considerably by the fifteen supply wagons the troop was ordered to escort to Fort Laramie. It was a long, hard trip even for seasoned veterans. It seemed endlessly monotonous to Lieutenant Tom Allred, who was unaccustomed to such vast tedium. As each day passed, the boundless prairie stretched out before them, the distant horizon never changing from day to day, until Tom began to think the whole world had turned into prairie. They encountered no hostiles along the entire route. The only Indian activity they saw was an occasional band of half a dozen or so passing far off on the horizon. Andy said these were Pawnee hunting parties. They were supposed to be on the reservation but Captain Bluefield was unconcerned with police action along the way. His orders were to get the troop to Fort Laramie.
To break the monotony, Tom accompanied Andy on scouts away from the column anytime he could. Bluefield approved, even encouraged the practice. He figured time spent with the scout was as good as sending the young lieutenant to school. Andy liked to talk and he was more than willing to share his knowledge and experience with anyone who was willing to listen. Tom proved a good audience and quietly absorbed all the stories of Andy’s campaigns against the red sons, as he called them, never blinking when some of the scout’s escapades bordered on the heroic. In the process, Andy developed a fondness for Tom and Tom picked up a great deal of information about Indians that would do him in good stead later on.
By the time the column reached Fort Laramie, all the men were thoroughly trail-weary and starved for something to eat besides salt pork and boiled corn. On the march, Captain Bluefield had allowed Andy to hunt very little, not wishing to waste any more time than necessary. The march had already stretched into too many days and his men were looking pretty ragged and far from battle-ready. When at last Andy galloped back to the column and reported that he had sighted the lookout towers of the fort, Bluefield relaxed a bit in the saddle. He had hoped his luck would hold out and they would not run into any hostiles before he had a chance to rest his men. Fort Laramie was a welcome sight.
“All right, men,” he ordered, “let’s look alive.” He turned to Tom. “Lieutenant Allred!”
“Sir!” Tom reined up beside him.
“Let’s see if this bunch of ragtags can shake some of the dust off and look like soldiers. I don’t intend to go dragging our behinds into the garrison.”
“Yessir!” Tom wheeled his horse and galloped toward the rear.
* * *
Fort Laramie turned out to be a brief respite for the travel-weary troopers for there was hostile activity to the north, along the Powder River. Bluefield’s company was allowed two days to rest and get supplies before joining some other units that had been waiting for his arrival. Combined, they formed a full regiment under Colonel Henry Lockley, and set out at dawn of the third day for Fort Phil Kearney, a small outpost near the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains. The march took them up the Platte River to Deer Creek Crossing, where a small train of twelve civilian freight wagons were waiting to combine with a larger train before being allowed to proceed into Indian territory. The freighters were mighty glad to see soldiers because they were getting weary from sitting there stranded at Deer Creek. They tagged along behind as Lockley headed north, along Sage Creek, toward the Powder. Patrols were sent out left and right of the column, as well as ahead. Lockley took no chances on being surprised by Red Cloud even though he felt it unlikely the hostiles would hazard an attack on a full regiment. It would be near impossible to hide the presence of a body of soldiers that size passing through Indian territory so there was no attempt at secrecy. To the contrary, part of the reason the soldiers were being sent was to impress the hostiles with the military might of the army. Lockley and the brass back East in Washington were to find that Red Cloud was not a man easily impressed.
From the time they left the North Platte and turned northward, they saw plenty of hostiles, usually in small bands far in the distance. Andy said they were just keeping an eye on the soldiers. They would parallel the column for a while then disappear. Before long another band would turn up on the horizon and follow their progress for several miles before disappearing like the band before them. And so it went. It seemed to Tom that they always had hostile observers with them. At first, there was excitement in the ranks when the first Indians were spotted. After several days, they were hardly noticed.
Plodding along beside Andy Coulter, Tom wondered aloud, “If we’re supposed to be going out here to fight the Sioux, why don’t we send out a patrol after that bunch?”
Andy glanced over his shoulder at the band of maybe a dozen or more hostiles who had been following the column since midday. “Lockley ain’t gonna start splitting off parts of his men to go chasing after a few Injuns. He figures they ain’t likely to tangle with a bunch this size. But let them get us split up in small bunches and then see how many of them red sons pop up. They’d make short work out of this regiment then.”
By noon of the following day, the column reached Fort Reno. The fort consisted of little more than a log stockade around some warehouses and stables. The soldiers’ quarters and the powder magazine were out in the open plain, high above the river. The men of the garrison were mighty glad to see the long column of blue coats and greeted them with loud shouts, discharging their pistols in the air. Tom learned that the engineers had been constantly harassed by Sioux and Cheyenne raiding parties, so much so that there had been little time to work on the road they were there to build. It was all they could do to stay alive. This was to be his station for some time for, after the main body had paused to rest for a day, they moved on north, leaving Captain Bluefield’s men there to reinforce the garrison. And so began Tom’s indoctrination into Indian fighting.