“You see,” Sternberg said, “most places the professor goes, he encounters trouble from Marsh. Their rivalry has been going on for years now, and they are both able to spot it readily.”
“I want all of you out of town,” the sheriff shouted. “Do you hear me, out of town!”
“With pleasure,” Sternberg said.
They left on the next stage.
From Franklin, they faced a six-hundred-mile journey on Concord stagecoach to Fort Benton, Montana Territory. Johnson, who had thus far experienced nothing more arduous than a railway carriage, was looking forward to the romance of a coach ride. Sternberg and the others knew better.
It was a horrible journey: ten miles an hour, day and night, with no stops except for meals, outrageously expensive at one dollar each, and awful. And at every coach stop, everyone would talk of the Indian troubles, and the prospect of scalping, so that if Johnson had had any desire for the coach stops’ moldy army-surplus bacon, the rancid butter, and the week-old bread, he lost his appetite.
The landscape was uniformly dreary, the dust harshly alkaline; they had to walk up all the steep ascents, day or night; in the rattling, bouncing coach, sleep was impossible; and their chemical supplies leaked, so that at one point, “we were subjected to a gentle rain of hydrochloric acid, which drops etched a smoking pattern on the hats of the gentlemen, and elicited elaborate curses from all involved. The coach was stopped, and the driver accorded our left-over curses; the offending bottle stopped, and we were on our way once more.”
Besides their group, the only other passenger was a Mrs. Peterson, a young woman married to an army captain stationed in Helena, Montana Territory. Mrs. Peterson seemed none too enthusiastic to be rejoining her husband; indeed, she cried frequently. Often she opened a letter, read it, wiped tears from her eyes, and tucked it away again. At the last coach stop before Helena, she burned the letter, dropping it to the ground to dissolve into ash. When the stage reached Helena, she was formally met by four army captains, their demeanor grave. They escorted her away; she walked erectly in their midst.
The others stared after her.
“He must be dead,” Toad said. “That’s what it’s about. He’s dead.”
At the coach station, they were told that Captain Peterson had been killed by Indians. And there were rumors of a recent major cavalry defeat at Indian hands. Some said General Terry had been killed along the Powder River; others that General Crook had narrowly escaped death on the banks of the Yellowstone, and that he had suffered blood poisoning from the arrows removed from his side.
In Helena they were urged to turn back, but Cope never considered it. “Idle talk,” he said, “foolish talk. We will go on.” And they climbed back aboard the coach for the long trip to Fort Benton.
Located on the banks of the Missouri River, Fort Benton had been a trappers’ refuge in the early days of the Montana Territory, back when John Jacob Astor was lobbying in Congress to prevent any legislation to protect the buffalo, and thus interfere with his lucrative trade in hides. Northern Montana was the source of other hides as well, including beaver and wolf. But now the fur trade was declining in importance, and the fastest-growing towns were located farther south, in the mining regions of Butte and Helena, where there was gold and copper. Fort Benton had seen better days, and looked it.
As their stagecoach arrived on July 4, 1876, they saw that the army stockade gates were closed, and there was a general air of tension. The soldiers were gloomy and distressed. The American flag flapped at half-mast. Cope went to see the commanding officer, Captain Charles Ransom.
“What’s the trouble?” Cope asked. “Why is your flag lowered?”
“Seventh Cavalry, sir.”
“What about it?” Cope asked.
“The whole of the Seventh Cavalry under General Custer was massacred at the Little Bighorn last week. More than three hundred army dead. And no survivors.”
Fort Benton
George Armstrong Custer remained as controversial in death as he had been in life. Ol’ Curly had always been the focus of strong feelings. He had graduated last in his class at West Point, accumulating ninety-seven demerits in his last half year, just three short of dismissal. Even as a cadet, he was making enemies who would dog him all his life.
But the insubordinate cadet proved a brilliant military leader, the Boy Wonder of Appomattox. Handsome, dashing, and reckless, he went on to earn a reputation as a great Indian fighter in the West, but his reputation was debated widely. A dedicated hunter, he traveled with greyhounds wherever he went, and it was said that he took better care of his dogs than he did his men. In 1867, he ordered his troops to shoot deserters from his company. Five men were wounded, and Custer refused them medical aid. One subsequently died.
Even for the army, this was too much. In July 1867, he was arrested, court-martialed, and suspended for a year. But he was a favorite of the generals, and he was back ten months later at Phil Sheridan’s insistence, this time fighting the Indians along the Washita, in the Oklahoma Territory.
Custer led the 7th Cavalry against Black Kettle. His instructions were clear: to kill as many Indians as possible. General Sherman himself had said: “The more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next year for the more I see of these Indians the more I am convinced they will all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers.”
It was a particularly vicious war. The Indians had been taking white women and children as hostages, whom they ransomed back to the settlers; whenever soldiers attacked an Indian village, the white hostages were summarily executed. This circumstance excused the kind of dashing bravado that was, in any case, Custer’s trademark.
Forcing his troops on extended marches, forgoing food and rest, he ran down Black Kettle, killed the chief, and destroyed his village. Only then did he realize that Indians from surrounding villages were gathering for a massive counterattack, and that he had overextended himself and endangered all his troops. He managed to pull out, but left behind a company of fifteen men, presuming them to be already dead.