Wheels on the Bozeman Trail

• Chapter 1: The Yoke and the Whip
• Chapter 2: Out of Fort Laramie
• Chapter 3: Dust of the Powder River
• Chapter 4: Whispers on the Wind
• Chapter 5: The First Crossing
• Chapter 6: Shadows at Crazy Woman Creek
• Chapter 7: A Freight Ringed by Willow
• Chapter 8: Smoke Over the Grass
• Chapter 9: Iron Tires and Rattling Chains
• Chapter 10: The Scout’s Warning
• Chapter 11: Siege Mentality
• Chapter 12: Red Cloud’s Country
• Chapter 13: The Muddy Defile
• Chapter 14: Stand at the Cut-Off
• Chapter 15: Broken Axles
• Chapter 16: Blood on the Spokes
• Chapter 17: The Haul to Fort Reno
• Chapter 18: Night Signals
• Chapter 19: Among the Fallen Pines
• Chapter 20: The Bullwhacker's Creed
• Chapter 21: Fire in the Valley
• Chapter 22: The Relief Column
• Chapter 23: Fort Phil Kearny
• Chapter 24: The Trap Closes
• Chapter 25: Running the Gauntlet
• Chapter 26: The Last Wagon Home

The dry air of the Nebraska Territory smelled of crushed sage, baked earth, and the unmistakable, sour tang of sweat-soaked ox leather. Caleb Finch spat a dark stream of tobacco juice into the gray dust by his boots and leaned his weight against the heavy wooden stock of his bullwhip. Ahead of him, stretching out in a long, sun-baked line across the flats outside Nebraska City, eighty head of heavy Texas cattle stood sweltering in their double yokes.

They were slow, stubborn, half-wild beasts, but Caleb did not hate them. A man who hated his oxen did not last two weeks on the trail; he either wore his heart out raging at three thousand pounds of uncooperative beef, or he got his ribs caved in by a flying hoof when he lost his temper. Caleb knew the math of the freighting business down to the penny and the pound. Twelve oxen to a wagon, six pairs to the chain. Four tons of white pine flour barrels, salt pork, and army rifle crates resting over iron-tired axles. And one man with a eighteen-foot lash of braided rawhide to keep the whole precarious engine moving west toward Indian country.

"Gettup, Dan! Step up, Bright!" Caleb barked. His voice was not a shout, but a low, raspy bark, seasoned by years of alkali dust and trail smoke.

He didn't hit the lead pair. He didn't need to. He simply flicked his wrist, sending a sharp, rhythmic crack across the ears of the lead oxen. The noise sounded like a rifle shot in the still morning air. The huge, red-haired steer on the off-side flared its nostrils, leaned its thick neck into the ash wood yoke, and the heavy iron chain between the pairs snapped taut with a ringing clank. Behind them, twelve thousand pounds of timber, canvas, and military rations shuddered, groaned on dry hubs, and began to roll.

Around Caleb, the staging grounds were a scene of organized, loud chaos. The freighting firm of Russell, Majors, and Waddell might have lost its shirt years ago, but the outfit Caleb drove for—run by a hard-eyed Scotsman named MacCullum—operated on the same brutal efficiency. Wagon bosses shouted profanities in three languages, mules hitched to smaller scout wagons brayed in high-pitched distress, and greenhorn drivers wrestled with leather hames and iron pins they didn't yet understand.

It was late spring of 1866. The Civil War was over, but down south and out west, the country was still bleeding from its edges. Thousands of demobilized soldiers, displaced farm boys, and men who simply had nowhere left to go were spilling out onto the plains. Some wanted gold in Montana. Some wanted land in Oregon. The United States Army wanted to feed and arm the garrisons it was dropping into the heart of the Powder River country to protect those gold-seekers. And men like Caleb Finch were paid forty dollars a month and rations to haul the grub that kept those soldiers alive.

Caleb walked beside the wheel team—the heaviest, calmest pair of oxen hitched closest to the front tongue of the lead wagon. The trail outfit was a "Murphy train," named for the massive wooden wagons built in St. Louis. Caleb was driving a double-wagon rig: a heavy lead wagon pulling a smaller "trail wagon" hooked directly to its rear axle. It took a skilled bullwhacker to handle twelve oxen and two wagons through a dry ditch or down a riverbank without jackknifing the tongue or snapping an axle tree. Caleb had been doing it since he was sixteen, and at twenty-eight, his shoulders were broad, his face was leathery from sun, and his left wrist carried a thick, rope-like scar from an improperly thrown whip lash five years back on the Santa Fe Cut-off.

"Hey, Finch!"

Caleb glanced over his shoulder. Walking alongside the next wagon rig in the line was young Silas Vance. Silas was nineteen, hailing from southern Illinois, with a face full of freckles and eyes that were still far too bright for a man heading toward Lakota country. He was trying to look tough, holding a short hickory goad stick like a infantry musket, but his oxen were leaning apart, drifting off the rutted trail like a pair of drunk steers leaving a saloon.

"Hold that off-ox up, Silas!" Caleb called out without breaking his rhythmic stride. "You let Old Blue drift like that and he'll take your trail wagon right into the ditch before we hit the main road."

"He won't listen!" Silas yelled back, wiping sweat from his forehead with a sleeve that was already stiff with dirt. "Bastard tried to kick me when I set the bow pin!"

"Don't talk to him, use the lash," Caleb said calmly. "An ox don't care about your feelings, Silas. He cares about work and he cares about grass. Show him the lash near his eye—don't cut him, just pop it. He'll straighten up."

Silas swung his wrist awkwardly. The rawhide lash snaked out, tangled itself in the grass, and landed with a limp thud across the back of the off-steer. The ox didn't even blink; it merely tossed its broad, horned head and kept drifting right.

Caleb shook his head, stepped across the rut, and reached out with his left hand to grab Silas's whip stock. "Watch," he muttered.

With a slight drop of his elbow and a snap of his wrist that looked entirely effortless, Caleb sent the popper flying. It whistled through the air and popped two inches from the off-steer's wet snout. The steer jumped, snorted, and instantly swung its massive shoulders back into line with its mate.

"It ain't arm work," Caleb said, handing the whip back to the kid. "It's wrist work. Like snapping a wet towel at a boy's backside in a swimming hole. You use your whole arm, you'll tire out by noon and tear your shoulder out by Friday."

"Thanks, Caleb," Silas said, looking humbled. He adjusted the broad brim of his wool hat. "You think the stories are true?"

"Which ones?"

"About the Powder River. About Red Cloud."

Caleb pulled his hat down lower to block the mounting heat of the mid-morning sun. "Stories are usually half-lies told by men who were scared, and half-facts forgotten by men who died. What stories you hearing?"

"Up at the saloon last night," Silas said, his voice dropping slightly so the wagon boss behind them wouldn't hear, "a scout from Fort Laramie said the Sioux are burning the grass. Said they ain't letting no wagons through up past the Bozeman Cut-off. Said the Army's building forts right in the middle of their hunting grounds, and the Indians are fixin' to wipe out every bullwhacker between Laramie and the Bighorns."

"Army's got rifles," Caleb said dryly. "And we got flour. Indians can't eat gunpowder, but they can eat beef, and if we keep our stock close and our eyes open, we'll make our haul. Mr. MacCullum ain't paying us to worry about redskins. He's paying us to roll twenty miles a day."

"I got me a Spencer carbine," Silas said, patting the grease-stained canvas cover of his wagon seat where the repeating rifle rested in a scabbard. "Bought it off an artillery sergeant in Leavenworth. Seven shots as fast as you can work the lever."

"That's fine," Caleb said, his eyes scanning the horizon ahead where the trail faded into a shimmering heat-mirage of prairie grass. "Just make sure you know how to clear a jammed shell when your hands are shaking so hard you can't find your pocket. A seven-shot gun is just a heavy club if the second shell swells up in the chamber."

The wagon train was moving now, setting up its steady, agonizingly slow cadence. The sound of a freight outfit on the move was a strange kind of music. It wasn't silent, and it wasn't fast. It was a heavy, rhythmic wall of noise: the deep thrum of iron rims grinding over gravel, the sharp clack-clack of oak tongue-keys knocking against the hames, the dry creak of hickory ribs under heavy canvas tarpaulins, and the ceaseless, low murmur of twenty men cursing sixty pairs of animals in accents that spanned from Ireland to Missouri.

At the head of the column rode Donald MacCullum, the wagon master. He was a broad-chested man with a thick, iron-gray beard that covered his neck, riding a short-legged, muscular buckskin horse that looked as tough as its owner. MacCullum didn't carry a whip; he carried a heavy double-barrel shotgun across his saddle bow and a brass spyglass tucked into his coat pocket. He was a veteran of the Santa Fe trade, the Oregon trail, and two years of hauling freight for the quartermaster at Fort Leavenworth.

MacCullum raised his hat, signaling for the lead wagons to stretch out into single file as the trail narrowed toward the low hills to the west.

"Keep 'em close! Keep 'em close!" the night herd boss, a grizzled old Virginian named Hoke, shouted as he rode down the flank of the train. "No gaping between wagons! You leave fifty yards for your oxen to dawdle, and MacCullum will have your hide for a saddle blanket!"

Caleb adjusted his pace. Walking alongside twelve thousand pounds of rolling freight required a man to find a stride that was neither too fast nor too slow. It was a rhythmic, rolling walk, planting the heel first, absorbing the shock of the uneven ground in the knees. A bullwhacker who tried to walk stiff-legged would be crippled by nightfall.

By noon, the sun was directly overhead, beating down on the white canvas tops of the twenty-five wagons until they glowed like lanterns. Sweat soaked through Caleb’s cotton shirt, sticking it to his shoulder blades. The dust raised by the front wagons hung in the air, a thick, yellow curtain that coated Caleb’s lips, filled his nostrils, and made his eyes sting.

They made no sign of stopping for a hot meal. Noon halt—"nooning"—was strictly for the animals.

MacCullum raised his hand, and the train swung off the main trace into a wide, open meadow near a sluggish, muddy creek. The wagon master raised his voice, his Scottish burr cutting through the dust. "Form the corral! Wings out!"

This was the test of a freight crew. Under MacCullum’s directions, the lead wagon swung in a wide, graceful circle to the left. The second wagon followed, pulling up so its right front wheel almost touched the left rear wheel of the wagon ahead. One by one, the heavy Murphy rigs locked together, forming a great, oval-shaped fortress of wood and iron—a "bullpen"—with an opening left at one end.

Caleb stepped in front of his lead pair, pulling up his team with a sharp whistle. "Whoa! Stand, Dan. Stand, Bright."

The giant red steer stopped, its flanks heaving, drool stringing out from its lower jaw to catch the dust on the ground. Caleb immediately unhooked the heavy iron draft chain from the axle tongue, then stepped between the animals to knock out the wooden bow pins.

"Watch your legs," he called out to Silas, who was struggling to unhitched his own trail wagon fifty feet away. "Don't get pinned between the wheel and the tongue when they turn."

With the pins removed, Caleb lifted the heavy ash yokes off the oxen's necks one by one. The animals shook their great heads, reveling in the sudden relief from the weight, their thick horns knocking together with hollow clacks. The horse-wranglers and stock-herders immediately stepped in, driving the unyoked cattle through the gap into the center of the wagon corral, where they could be counted and driven down to the muddy creek to drink under the watchful eyes of armed night-guards.

Caleb dropped his yoke into the grass, retrieved his tin canteen from the side-rack of his lead wagon, and took a long, warm swallow. The water tasted of iron and oak, but it wet his throat.

"Good form on the corral today, Finch," MacCullum said, dropping the reins of his buckskin as he walked past. The wagon master was inspecting the iron tires on Caleb’s lead rig, tapping the thick iron rims with the heel of his boot to check for loose spokes.

"Wood's dry," Caleb said, setting the canteen down. "If we don't get some rain or soak these wheels in a creek bed soon, we're gonna start throwing tires before we hit the Platte."

"We won't get rain," MacCullum said plainly. "It's a dry year. The grass up North is already short, according to the mail riders coming down from Laramie. We'll wedge the rims with green hide if we have to. How's the young fellow handling his team?" MacCullum jerked his chin toward Silas, who was currently sitting in the shade of a tongue, nursing a bloodied thumb where an iron pin had pinched him.

"He's green," Caleb said. "Hands are too soft. He thinks his carbine makes him a freighter."

"He'll harden up or he'll quit," MacCullum said. "Either way, he's got to haul his load. The quartermaster at Fort Reno expects four hundred sacks of oats and twenty crates of bacon by the end of July. If we're late, the Army dock our pay five percent for every week we drag our tails."

"Reno?" Caleb picked up a handful of dry grass and began wiping down the sweat-caked leather of his favorite yoke. "I thought we were unloading at Fort Laramie."

MacCullum gave Caleb a cool, measured look. "The contract changed three days ago, Caleb. The War Department's reinforcing the upper forts. We're going straight up the Powder River road. All the way to Reno, maybe clear to Phil Kearny if Colonel Carrington's boys haven't got their sawmill running yet."

Caleb stopped wiping the leather. He looked at MacCullum, his gray eyes narrowing slightly. "The Bozeman."

"Aye. The Bozeman."

"The treaty ain't signed, Mac. Red Cloud told the commissioners at Laramie that if the Army puts soldiers along the Powder River, his young men will fight for every foot of grass."

"Red Cloud doesn't own the grass," MacCullum said flatly. "The United States Government bought the right of way, or so the paper-pushers in Washington think. Regardless, the pay for driving north of Laramie is sixty dollars a month, not forty. Ten extra dollars for every wagon that reaches the Bighorns intact."

"Ten extra dollars don't do a man much good if he's buried under a pile of burned flour sacks with three iron arrowheads in his ribs," Caleb remarked. He wasn't yelling; he was just stating a fact.

"You scard, Finch?"

"I'm practical," Caleb replied, tossing the ball of dry grass aside. "I've hauled freight through Comanche country and I've hauled freight through the Kansas mud. A Comanche will steal your stock and run. A Lakota who's fighting for his home will burn your wagons, take your scalps, and leave your oxen to starve with their tongues cut out. If we're going up the Bozeman, we need more than twenty-five wagons and a handful of boys with cheap rifles."

MacCullum leaned in slightly, his tone lowering. "We'll have an Army escort out of Laramie. A company of the XVIII Infantry. Now get your boots checked and grab your mess kit. We roll again in an hour."

The wagon master turned on his heel and strode off toward the center of the corral where the cook, an old, half-deaf Mexican named Mateo, was kindling a small fire out of dry buffalo chips and willow twigs.

Caleb stood by his lead wagon for a long moment, watching the blue smoke from Mateo's fire rise into the clear, cloudless sky. He walked around to the rear of his trail wagon, unhooked his grease bucket, and checked the wooden axle spindles. The thick black lard mixed with pine tar was holding, but the heat was turning it runny. Everything out here was drying up, tightening down, getting ready to burn.

Silas strolled over, holding a tin plate loaded with boiled salt pork and a stone-hard biscuit. "What'd the boss say?" the boy asked, his mouth already half-full of bread. "We making good time?"

"We're making time," Caleb said, drawing his pocket knife and shaving a small slice off his plug of tobacco. "Enjoy Nebraska, Silas."

Silas blinked, wiping grease off his chin with his sleeve. "Why? What's wrong with Nebraska?"

"Nothing," Caleb said, slipping the tobacco into his cheek. "It's just the last place on this road where nobody's trying to kill you for doing your job."

The boy tried to laugh, but the sound died in his throat when he looked at Caleb’s face. Caleb wasn't smiling. He wasn't trying to be funny, and he wasn't trying to scare the kid. He was just looking west, toward the long, yellow ribbon of the trail that stretched out past the horizon, where the earth met the sky and the grass grew taller, wilder, and far more dangerous.

An hour later, the call went up.

"Yoke up! Yoke up!"

The peaceful quiet of the noon halt shattered instantly. The corral became a swirling dust storm of bellowing cattle, shouting men, and swinging leather. Caleb moved through the mess with quiet, practiced ease. He caught his lead pair by their long horns, led them to the heavy ash yoke, and pinned them in before they had time to realize they were going back to work.

He swung his eighteen-foot whip over his shoulder, settled his wool hat deep over his brow, and stepped out into the dust beside the heavy wooden tongue.

"Gettup, Dan! Step up, Bright!"

The chains popped. The iron tires groaned against the earth. And the long column of wood, beef, and iron turned its face toward the setting sun, rolling slowly, steadily, into the vast, open silence of the West.

The white adobe walls of Fort Laramie appeared out of the heat shimmer like a salt deposit dried up on the banks of the Laramie River. To a man who had spent three weeks behind the hind ends of twelve Texas oxen, sucking down the alkali dust of the Platte Valley, the post looked big enough to be a city. But as the MacCullum freight train pulled its heavy double-rigs up to the flats outside the parade grounds, the illusion vanished. Laramie was not a city. It was a sprawling, overcrowded anthill of soldiers, draft dodgers, traders, quartermaster clerks, and desperate emigrants, all jammed together at the doorway to the northern plains.

Caleb Finch swung his bullwhip over his shoulder, brought his lead pair to a halt with a long, drawn-out whistle, and leaned back against the tongue of his lead wagon. He unslung his canteen, shook it, and found only a tablespoon of lukewarm, metallic water sloshing in the bottom. He swallowed it anyway, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and looked around.

The parade ground was a sea of blue wool uniforms and canvas wall tents. Hundreds of men were moving with the peculiar, chaotic energy of an army preparing to throw itself into the wilderness. Off to the north, across the river, lay the North Platte, and beyond that stretched the rolling, dry hills that led to the Powder River. The air was thick with the smell of horse manure, roasting coffee, woodsmoke, and the sharp, piney scent of green lumber being sawn to build supply crates.

"Look at all them blue-bellies," Silas Vance said, hauling his own team to a stop a few paces behind Caleb. The boy’s face was dark with sun-bake and trail grease, his red hair sticking out in sweaty tufts from under his wool hat. He pointed with his whip stock toward a group of men standing in formation outside the officer’s quarters. "Must be a whole regiment of 'em."

"XVIII Infantry," Caleb said, glancing at the crisp white numerals sewn onto the dark blue forage caps of the pass-by soldiers. "Carrington’s outfit. Most of 'em green recruits raised out of Ohio and Pennsylvania