Stamping Ground Read Online Free

about their ears. Outnumbered two to one, they made a stand, aptly enough, at the Sheyenne River and were all but annihilated at the cost of one hundred andtwenty-six troopers. Ghost Shirt was wounded in the leg and taken prisoner along with three warriors. The rest fell in battle. The survivors were incarcerated at Fort Ransom and tried within the week for the Black Hills massacres. The verdict was guilty. At the age of twenty-two, the nephew of the last chief of the Cheyenne nation was sentenced to hang.
    He and his trio of condemned followers were kept in the guardhouse under close watch while work progressed on a special gallows designed to accommodate four men at once. Shortly after the changing of the guard on a starless night in March, an argument broke out among the prisoners, blows were exchanged, and Ghost Shirt collapsed. The guards thrust bayoneted rifles between the bars and held the others at bay while the door was unlocked and a delegation entered to examine the stricken man. Suddenly a strangled cry rang out. A sergeant who had been stooping over Ghost Shirt reeled back, clawing at a bloody shard of wood protruding from the socket where his right eye had been. In the confusion that followed, one of the Indians snatched the rifle out of the hands of a guard and placed the bayonet point against a paralyzed trooper’s throat. Then Ghost Shirt, who had sprung to his feet after attacking the sergeant, relieved the private of his side arm and got the drop on the remaining trooper in the guardhouse. It was all over within seconds.
    With one of their comrades in his death agonies and two more in the hands of the prisoners, the troopers outside the cell were forced to stand and watch while Ghost Shirt and his companions prodded their hostages before them through the opening and backed across the compound into the shadows along the east wall with them in tow. Not until they were out of sight did the soldiers act. They ran for the wall, raising the alarm as they went, and snapped off shots at gray figures spotted scaling the ladder to the battlements. One brave, Standing Calf, fell at the foot of the ladder when a bullet crashed through his brain. Another, identified later as Ghost Shirt’s cousin Bad Antelope, was struck twice inthe back as he teetered atop the wall, and toppled into the Sheyenne River on the other side. A third, a Crow called Silent Dog because his tongue had been cut out when as a youth he had been captured by the Iroquois, was taken prisoner before he could reach the ladder but was killed later under mysterious circumstances which the army was still investigating. Ghost Shirt was nowhere in sight.
    The bodies of the two troopers who had been taken hostage were found lying in pools of blood at the bottom of the ladder, their throats slashed by the captured bayonet.
    The next day, a search party discovered Bad Antelope’s corpse bobbing against a rock at a bend in the river a mile south of the fort. When a week of searching failed to turn up either Ghost Shirt or his tracks, it was decided that he had perished while trying to swim the rapid waters of the Sheyenne at spring thaw, and that his body was already halfway to Minnesota, if it hadn’t snaggled on a fallen limb in some uninhabited part of the territory. The search was called off after ten days, and Washington began processing new orders for the now unnecessary reinforcement troops in Dakota.
    Then, two weeks after the escape, a Swedish farmer was found murdered in his cabin two miles east of Fort Ransom. A neighbor who called on him from time to time became alarmed when the immigrant, an aged widower, failed to answer his knock, and entered through the unlocked front door. The house was a shambles. Someone had gone through the cupboards, scattered their contents over the floor, overturned flour barrels, dumped out the woodbox, torn out drawers, and pawed through the linens and clothing inside. Amid this confusion lay the elderly