Dragons Teeth Crichton 2017 (WWT)

Moving Camp
In early August, they were visited by a party of soldiers passing through the badlands on their way to
the Missouri River. Steamboats came as far upriver as Cow Island, where the army maintained a
small camp. The soldiers were on their way to reinforce the garrison there.
They were young Irish and German boys, no older than the students, and they seemed amazed to
find white men alive in the region. “I surely would pull out of here,” one said.
They brought news of the war, and it was not good: Custer’s defeat was still unavenged; General
Crook had fought an inconclusive battle at the Powder River in Wyoming but had seen no Indians
since; General Terry had not engaged any large parties of Sioux at all. The war, which the Eastern
newspapers had confidently predicted would be over in a matter of weeks, appeared now to be
dragging on indefinitely. Some generals were predicting that it would not be resolved for at least a
year, and perhaps not even by the end of the decade.
“Trouble with Indians,” one soldier explained, “is when they want to find you they find you—and
when they don’t want you to find them, you’d never know they were there.” He paused. “It is their
country, after all, but I didn’t say it.”
Another soldier looked at their stacked crates. “You mining here?”
“No,” Johnson said. “These’re bones. We’re digging fossil bones.”
“Sure you are,” the soldier said, grinning broadly. He offered Johnson a drink from his canteen,
which was filled with bourbon. Johnson gasped; the soldier laughed. “Makes the miles shorter, I can
tell you,” he explained.
The soldiers grazed their horses for an hour with Cope’s party and then went on.
“I surely wouldn’t dawdle here much longer,” their Captain Lawson said. “Best we know, Sitting
Bull, Crazy Horse, and his Sioux’ll make for Canada before winter, which means they’ll be here any
day now. They find you here, they’ll kill you for sure.”
And with that final advice, he rode off.
(Much later, Johnson heard that when Sitting Bull went north, he killed all the white men he came
across, among them the troops stationed at Cow Island, including Captain Lawson.)
“I think we ought to be going,” Isaac said, scratching his chin.
“Not yet,” Cope said.
“We’ve found plenty of bones.”
“That’s so,” Cookie said. “Plenty so far. More’n enough.”
“Not yet,” Cope said, in an icy tone that ended all discussion. As Sternberg noted in his account of
the expedition, “We had long since learned there was no purpose served in arguing with him when his