General Custer did not delay. He never did. Within less than a week,
on the last morning of September who should come racing into the post,
accompanying the ambulance from the railroad station at Hays City, but
Maida and Blucher and Flirt the stag hounds, and Rover the old fox
hound, and Fanny the little fox-terrier, and all the other Custer dogs;
and who should spring out of the ambulance, before it had stopped at
headquarters, but the general himself! There he was, with his yellow
hair and his shining eyes and his quick voice and his lithe, trim
figure, ready for business again.
Behind the ambulance followed, led by an orderly, the horses Phil
Sheridan and Custis Lee.
From beyond the headquarters office seeing this, Ned’s heart leaped
into his throat.
“Custer’s come! Custer’s come!” seemed to run through the post a glad
hum. To Ned it was like a bugle-call; and he instantly resolved that
where the general went, he was going too. No more clerkship duties for
him; no! Suddenly he felt strong and well, ready for anything. That
was how the general made everybody around him feel; he was so full of
energy and enthusiasm.
Now was it positively known that General Sheridan planned a winter’s
march against the Indians, to catch them in their villages while there
was no grass for their ponies and they could not travel at will. Many
heads were shaken, over this scheme, as being a fool-hardy one; and
clear from St. Louis came out to Hays a tall, lean, leathery-faced,
squint-eyed man—“old Jim Bridger” the celebrated trapper and
mountaineer—expressly to tell General Sheridan that the whole command
would be snowed in and lost.
But five hundred freighting wagons were busy taking supplies from Fort
Harker and Fort Leavenworth to the posts south in the Arkansas River
country; and with these supplies on hand, for the soldiers and the
horses, and with the men well clothed, General Sheridan reasoned that
the white men would do better in the winter than the red men.
“The only way to bring those Indians to terms is to give them a good
thrashing. I rely on you for this, Custer,” Ned heard him say. “We’ll
carry the war into the enemy’s country, when he isn’t expecting it.”
Nothing loth was General Custer; no, not “Old Curly.” He acted as
happy as if he were starting out on a buffalo hunt or a ride with Mrs.
Custer and the dogs. He stayed only a couple of days at Hays, for
instructions and final preparations; and when out he rode, southward
bound, eager to resume command of the Seventh, Ned rode with him, as
his orderly again.
Fort Hays was well stripped of its scouts whom Ned knew: California
Joe, Jack Stillwell, Jack Corbin, Trudell, Romeo—they were south on the
Arkansas; Buffalo Bill was out with some of the Fifth Cavalry; Wild
Bill was carrying dispatches on the trail: and with them gone, and with
the Seventh gone, Ned had been feeling lonesome and neglected. Now all
was changed: he was riding again with Custer. Hurrah!
The rendezvous of the Seventh Cavalry was on Bluff Creek, about thirty
miles southeast of Fort Dodge. Fort Dodge was up the Arkansas from Fort
Larned, and was of stone like Larned and Riley. General Custer paused
here only to report to General Sully, commanding the district. The next
day he proceeded on; and in the afternoon were sighted the familiar
white army tents of the Seventh Cavalry.
What a welcome there was, as the troops turned out to receive him, and
the dogs barked, and as soon as they might the officers flocked to
shake his hand.
There were some new officers and many new men, for recruits had been
rushed to fill the ranks to war strength. However, there were enough
old friendly faces to make the camp of the Seventh feel like home to
Ned; and he was almost as busy shaking hands as was the general.
“Back again, are ye?” greeted Odell, heartily.
“Yes,” grinned Ned.
“Wance more orderly, then, I take it.”
“Guess I am, for a while.”
“Well, the gen’ral sticks to those he likes, an’ to those he doesn’t
like, the same. He’s got a big heart. What’s the news from Hays? Is
Gen’ral Sheridan comin’, too?”
“Yes. He says the Indians are to be found and threshed.”
“B’gorry, with Phil Sheridan an’ ‘Old Curly’ workin’ together, this’ll
be no paper campaign, I reckon.”
“Right you are,” agreed Sergeant Walter Kennedy—who, Ned noted, wore
the chevrons of a sergeant-major. “Because they turned Sully and the
rest of us back into Dodge the Injuns think they’re the bosses. But
when once Sheridan and Custer get after ’em in earnest, they’ll change
their minds.”
California Joe was here, in all his glory.
“Is Shuridan comin’, young feller?” he asked. “Wall, he can’t do wuss’n
those other high-up gen’rals have done. But I sorter bet on Shuridan.”
“Do you know him, Joe?” queried Ned, politely.
“Do I know him, young feller? Know Shuridan? Why, bless my soul, I
knowed Shuridan ’way up in Oregon more’n fifteen years ago, an’ he was
only a second lootenint of infantry. Quartermaster of the foot, or
somethin’ of that sort. I had a sneakin’ notion if ever they turned
him loose he’d hurt somebody. Say, warn’t he old lightnin’, in the war!
I tell ye!” And Joe wiped his hairy face with a piece of gunnysack that
he used as a handkerchief. “I jest been app’inted by Gen’ral Custer
chief o’ scouts down here; but I told him I wouldn’t serve if this was
to be ary ambulance campaignin’. He said no; him an’ Shuridan was goin’
to chase the Injuns horseback, so as to ketch ’em. That hit the nail
squar on the head. A column on wheels, with the wagons piled full o’
soldiers like as if they was goin’ to a town fun’ral in the States,
stands ’bout as many chances of ketchin’ Injuns as a six-mule team
would of ketchin’ a pack of coyotes. Why, that sort o’ thing is only
fun for the Injuns.”
While waiting for instructions from General Sheridan, the Seventh
Cavalry worked hard to arrive at what Odell called their “fighting
weight.” Five hundred fresh horses arrived by trail from Leavenworth.
The general chose for himself a lively bay which he named Dandy. The
others were apportioned out, and then the troops or companies were
“colored.” That is, the horses were divided by colors; so that one
troop was composed of the grays, another of the blacks, another of the
bays, and so forth. The junior company commander must be content with
the brindles—the mixed colors left over.
Target practice was made an order of the day, for some of the recruits
never had fired a gun. Forty of the best shots at all distances were
formed into a company of sharpshooters, under Lieutenant “Queen’s Own”
William Cook, he with the long English side-whiskers.
There were scouting expeditions, and plenty of hunting. The camp fairly
lived on wild turkey and deer and elk and buffalo and rabbit and
grouse. The general’s dogs chased wolves and antelope.
October wore away. Soon the Indians of the plains would be retiring
into their villages, for the winter. They would eat dried buffalo meat
and their horses would eat cottonwood bark and willows; and they would
not expect to be interfered with. Then in the spring they would issue
forth again, to ride hither-thither, three miles to the cavalry’s one.
By the reports which Scout Buffalo Bill had brought up to Fort
Hays from Fort Larned, the families of the Indians had been moving
southward. Therefore General Sheridan believed that the main winter
villages would be found down in the Indian Territory, toward Texas.
This was a wild rugged country, where white men rarely penetrated. But
the Cheyennes and the Kiowas and the Comanches knew it well.
General Sully and Uncle John Smith, an old trader who had married into
the Cheyennes, had located a good rendezvous place for the expedition,
where, forming the North Canadian River, Wolf Creek and Beaver Creek
joined, about one hundred miles south of Fort Dodge. With a huge
supply train of four hundred wagons and with five companies of the
Third Regular Infantry under Major John H. Page, the eleven companies
of the Seventh arrived there, to wait for the Nineteenth Kansas
Volunteer Cavalry. Governor Crawford of Kansas had resigned to be its
colonel in the field; and General Sherman’s last dispatch had said that
the regiment was on its way.
The camp was named Camp Supply, because the supplies were to be stored
here. It is in present Woodward County, northwestern Oklahoma.