The deep raven

The brass of the regimental band was entirely too loud for a Tuesday morning. The heavy, syncopated thump of "Garryowen" bounced off the white-painted barracks of Fort Abraham Lincoln, rattling the small windowpanes in the laundresses' quarters and vibrating right through the soles of our riding boots.

It was May 17, 1876, and the sun hadn't yet burned the damp skin of winter frost off the Missouri River. A long, undulating column of twelve cavalry companies—over six hundred men in fresh-dyed blue wool and yellow-piped trousers—was snaking its way through the main gates of the post. On the wooden boardwalks, the wives, sisters, and mothers stood in tight, shivering clusters. Their white linen handkerchiefs fluttered like nesting prairie birds in the gray fog as they wept openly, their faces buried in their shawls to muffle the sound of their crying over the brass horns.

"Eyes front, Torrey," I growled, my right hand tightening on the heavy leather reins to keep my stallion steady. "The ladies aren't going to keep your stirrup from tangling with the file. Watch your spacing."

"Yes, Corporal," a weak voice muttered from behind my shoulder.

That was Private William A. Torrey. He was a green recruit out of Ohio, barely nineteen years old, with skin that still looked soft from farm life and a blue uniform shirt that smelled strong of factory starch and storage crates. He was gripping his reins so tight his knuckles were white, his eyes darting toward the boardwalk as if he were trying to memorize every single building before they slipped out of sight.

I was Corporal George C. Lell, and my station was right at the teeth of Company E's front column, just a few horse-lengths behind First Lieutenant Algernon Smith. Beneath my McClellan saddle was a big, five-year-old iron-gray stallion, his sleek coat the dark, uniform color of river slate after a hard rain. Behind me stretched thirty-seven more of them—every single horse in the company a hand-picked gray, their manes brushed out straight and their flank-irons polished until the whole unit looked like a solid wave of mountain smoke moving across the grass.

We were the "Gray Horse Company," the pride and showpiece of the 7th Cavalry. Back at the fort, whenever General Custer wanted to impress a traveling politician or a newspaper reporter from Chicago, he’d call out Company E to parade on the green. A wall of thirty-eight matched grays looked magnificent under a clear sky; it looked like a king’s guard.

But as I turned my head slightly, checking the alignment of the horses behind me, I didn't see a parade feature. I saw thirty-eight chalk marks drawn across a blacksmith's apron. Out here in the open Dakota territory, against the dull, brownish-green of the sagebrush and the pale white clay of the badlands, these grays didn't blend. They didn't hide. They stood out like lanterns at midnight. Every Sioux and Cheyenne scout between the Missouri and the Yellowstone would be able to spot our dust column and our color from five miles away. We weren't a scouting party; we were a traveling bullseye.

"Corporal," Torrey whispered again, his horse shifting its footing on the gravel trail. "My mother... she told me this march felt wrong before we even saddled up. She said the river fog looked like a funeral shroud sitting over the horse lines this morning."

"Your mother doesn't know ordnance, kid," I said, my teeth bared against the cold river wind as the column finally cleared the high timber gates of the post and hit the raw prairie sod. "You’ve got a hundred rounds of copper carbine lead in your travel boxes, twenty-four pistol balls in your belt, and thirty-eight of the best mounts in the United States Army under us. Stop listening to the laundry tents and keep your heels out of your stallion's flanks."

Further down the line, the brass music began to fade into the distance, replaced by the real sounds of the regiment on the move. The heavy, metallic clink-clink-clink of twenty-four hundred iron-shod hooves striking the damp earth rose up from the trail, accompanied by the low, collective creaking of hundreds of wet leather saddles and the sharp rattle of iron bit-chains.

Way back at the tail end of our company, I could hear the rough, gravelly voice of Corporal Henry S. Mason already cursing at the horse-holders. He was sorting out a private whose pack mule had started to balk before we'd even cleared the reservation line. Mason had the rear files—the thankless, filthy business of managing the horses and the grain bags. While my eyes were fixed on the clean air ahead and the path the Lieutenant chose, Mason was already swallowing the dust of thirty-six horses, his uniform caked in the grime of the rear.

Behind the cavalry columns, the heavy supply wagons were lining up in a dual track, their massive white canvas tops looking like a string of hearses stretching back toward the fort.

The band finally cut its horns altogether as the tail of the column cleared the bottoms, and the sudden, immense silence of the Great Plains rushed in to fill the void. The music was gone. The weeping of the women was gone. There was nothing left but the rhythmic, heavy thudding of the mounts and the cold wind whistling through the tall prairie grass.

We were marching west into the unmapped clay, thirty-eight gray targets in an unbroken line, with the Fort Lincoln brass still ringing faintly in our ears and the heavy, damp fog of the river sitting flat on our shoulders.