Dragons Teeth Crichton 2017 (WWT)

Fort Laramie
Fort Laramie was an army outpost that had grown into a frontier town, but the army garrison still set
the mood, and its mood was now bitter. The army had fought the Indians for more than eight months,
and had suffered serious losses, most especially the massacre of Custer’s column at the Little
Bighorn. There had been other bloody engagements as well, at Powder River and Slim Buttes, and
even when they were not fighting, the campaign had been harsh and arduous. But all the news from the
East told them that Washington and the rest of the country did not support their efforts; numerous
articles criticized the military conduct of the campaign against “the noble and defenseless red man.”
For young men who had seen their comrades fall, who had returned to a battle scene to bury the
scalped and mutilated bodies of friends, who had seen corpses with their genitals cut off and stuffed
in their mouths—for these soldiers, the Eastern commentary made for difficult reading.
As far as the army was concerned, they had been ordered to undertake this war, without being
asked their opinion of either its feasibility or its morality; they had followed orders as best they
could, and with considerable success, and they were angry now to be unsupported, and to be fighting
an unpopular war.
The fact that the politicians in Washington had underestimated both the difficulty of a campaign
against “mere savages” and the outrage that it would cause among the liberal establishment of the
Eastern cities—uninformed writers who had never set eyes on a real Indian, and who had only
fantasies of what the Indians were like—was no fault of the army.
As one captain put it, “They want the Indians eliminated, and the lands opened up to white settlers,
but they don’t want anybody to get hurt in the process. That just ain’t possible.”
Added to this was the ugly fact that the war had now entered a new phase. The army was engaged
in a war of attrition with the Indians, in which they planned to kill all the buffalo and thus starve the
Indians into submission. Even so, most military men expected the war to drag on for at least three
more years, and to cost another $15 million—although nobody in Washington wanted to hear that.
The arguments, back and forth, raged in the coach station on the outskirts of town. Johnson had an
unappetizing lunch of bacon and biscuits, then sat in the sun outside the station. From where he sat, he
could see the iron bridge crossing the Platte.
For more than a decade, the Platte River valley had been trumpeted by Union Pacific brochures as
“a flowery meadow of great fertility clothed in nutritious grasses, and watered by numerous streams.”
In fact, it was harsh, god-awful country. Yet the settlers were coming.
From the earliest pioneer days, the Platte River itself was known as especially treacherous and
difficult to cross, and this new iron bridge represented one small improvement in a series of changes