Trumpet on the Land: The Aftermath of Custer's Massacre, 1876

Chapter 6

26 June 1876

“What do you figure that is?” Seamus asked the half-breed scout, who was stretched on his belly beside the Irishman atop a hill a few miles north of Crook’s Goose Creek base camp early that Monday afternoon.

Frank Grouard squinted, rubbed his eyes, blinked them repeatedly, and stared into the sunlit distance marred only by a few high, thin clouds. “Could be dust from that village we was about to bump into a week back.”

“There, along the horizon,” Donegan said, pointing north by east, “looks to be it’s darker than dust raised by a pony herd—even a big one.”

“They’ll have lots of drags,” Grouard said. “Bound to stir up a lot of dust moving a village that big.”

With a shake of his head Donegan replied, “That’s smoke.”

The half-breed appeared to weigh the heft of that a moment. “You figure they’re firing the grass behind them, eh? Maybe so, Irishman.”

“Crook will want to know.”

“He’s got hunting on his mind,” Grouard replied. “Thinking of heading into the Big Horns in a week or so.”

“With that enemy camp escaping, moving north?”

Grouard looked at Donegan. “How you so sure they’re moving north?”

His gray eyes danced impishly. “I just figured they would be skedaddling in the opposite direction from us.”

“How far you make it to be?”

This time Seamus calculated, slowly chewing a cracked lower lip that oozed from sunburn. “Less than a hundred miles from here.”

“Naw. Closer to sixty, maybe seventy at the most, I’d make it. That’s how far it would be to the Greasy Grass.”

“Greasy Grass?”

“What the Injins call the Little Bighorn River. A favorite camping place as they wander every summer toward the Big Horn Mountains to cut lodgepoles.”

Seamus slapped Grouard on the back. “See? I told you! Those Injins ain’t headed south, they’re going west toward the mountains.”

Frank stared into the distance again, then said, “Could be they’re moving this way—to keep away from that army north of ’em.”

“Gibbon and Terry’s bunch?”

“And Long Hair Custer’s Seventh Cavalry too,” the half-breed said. “C’mon, Irishman. Let’s go see if Crook figures now is the time for you and me to go sniff around to the north.”

As the fates would have it, George Crook was off hunting in the foothills for the day, and Lieutenant Bourke did not think the general would return with his party until late in the afternoon. Seamus waited nearby as Frank told his story to Crook’s aide, as well as to some of the other officers and newsmen who quickly gathered to hear the half-breed’s report of telltale smoke along the northern horizon.

“Indian signals?” sniffed Reuben Davenport, reporter for the New York Herald. “What of them?”

“No such a thing,” declared Captain Henry E. Noyes of the Second Cavalry. “Balderdash.”

“Where are you going, Grouard?” Bourke asked the moment the rest of the group began laughing at the scout’s assertions, causing Frank to turn on his heel and stomp off in Donegan’s direction.

All the half-breed did was whirl about and point.

Seamus said, “We’re riding north, Johnny.”

Bourke asked, “So you’re in on this cold-hatched scheme too?”

“I saw the smoke with me own eyes.”

Grouard turned away again, prodding Donegan off. “Let’s go, Irishman.”

“Tell the general we’ll have a report for him when we get back,” Seamus said over his shoulder as he moved off with Grouard, each of them pulling his horse behind him.

“Get back? From where?”

“North!” Grouard growled.

Donegan added, “Where the wild Injins play, Johnny. Where the Montana and Dakota columns are having all the fun … up on the Greasy Grass where the wild Injins play!”

“You’ll watch yourself, Seamus?”

“Indeed I will, Lieutenant!”

The pair had their mounts quickly grained while they rolled up blankets inside gum ponchos, packed a little coffee, salt pork, and hardtack into the saddlebags already heavy with ammunition for their rifles, plus a pair of belt weapons apiece—those .45-caliber 1873 long-barreled single-action Army Colt’s revolvers. While Grouard favored the .45/70-caliber Springfield carbine, that shorter cavalry model, Donegan had grown quite attached to the eleven-pound Sharps single-shot cartridge rifle sold him by teamster Dick Closter immediately following their fight with Crazy Horse on the Rosebud. Seamus had given the ten-year-old Henry repeater a fitting burial after dark that night before Crook began his retreat south: burning the battered stock in his coffee fire to finish the destruction begun in the furious hand-to-hand fighting. A redeeming end for the weapon that had seen the Irishman through a decade of Indian fighting.

With each of them tying a small sack of oats to the back of his saddle, the two scouts mounted up and moved north by east along Goose Creek, striking the Tongue River itself by late afternoon. With every mile they put behind them, Donegan became more acutely aware that they were drawing another mile closer to what all evidence was showing had to be the biggest gathering of hostiles ever assembled on the plains. They hugged the timber where they could. But when their route lay across open ground, they left horses tied in sheltered coulees as they bellied up to the crest of hilltops to examine the country they were about to traverse. And never did they take their eyes off that cloud of smoke and dust thickening to the north. Occasionally Seamus would test the caliber of the wind, sniffing to see if he could smell grass smoke. Figuring that when he got his first good whiff of it, he and Grouard would be nearing the thick of things.

Leaving the Tongue, they had struck out overland, almost due north for the Wolf Mountains far in the distance, by and large following the expedition’s line of march toward Rosebud Creek better than eight days before. The sun was in its final quadrant of the western sky by the time they reached the army’s creekside camp the morning of 17 June, to discover that the bodies of those soldiers killed in the battle had been dug up.

“Looks like predators,” Donegan said as they looked down on the shallow graves, the whole scene carpeted with paw prints.

“The Wolf Mountains up ahead,” Grouard replied as he knelt to have himself a closer look at the ground. “What else would you expect in this country?”

“Damn them! Can’t even give a sojur-boy a decent resting place but the carrion eaters won’t dig a body up and drag it off from its final sleep.”

“Maybe not all wolves,” Frank added sourly as he leaned back on his haunches.

“Injins?”

“Might be.”

“Sonsabitches!” he swore with quiet force, slapping a glove across his pommel. “Godless savage h’athens—”

“Don’t you remember what Crook’s soldiers done to ever’ scaffold we come across so far?”

Donegan pursed his lips. Yes, he could remember how the soldiers had desecrated the Lakota burial platforms, searching for souvenirs, taking what they wanted before gleefully dumping the bones in nearby creeks or perhaps leaving the rotting remains to whatever four-legged or winged predator might be attracted by the wind-borne odor of death.

His gray eyes narrowed, bright with an anger he could not direct at any one enemy for the moment. “You made your point, Frank.”

“We best be getting.”

Seamus nodded and urged his horse away with a tap of his heels. Then glanced once more at the torn earth clawed up and sniffed over. “Wolf Mountains, you say?”

Grouard nodded. “Chetish. Injun name for them.”

“Ain’t no Injins gonna camp in the mountains.”

“You’re right, Irishman. But by moving down the Rosebud to keep out of sight of any wandering scouts they may have out—it means we’ll eventually have to cross over them low mountains.”

“Then that big camp is west, ain’t it?” Donegan replied. “Like you said: in the valley of that Greasy Grass.”

“See the sun on them clouds?”

Donegan peered west, gazing at the distant haze laced with the first tendrils of a sunset’s delicate light painted a golden rose but underlaid with an angry belly of bloodhued crimson. “That’s smoke, Grouard.”

“Your turn to be right, Irishman.”

Seamus said, “Covering their tracks, ain’t they?”

“Burning the grass because something’s for sure driving them south.”

“Terry’s army, by God,” Seamus replied. “Crook’ll wanna know.”

“Yes, Terry—maybe even Custer’s Seventh,” Grouard said all too quietly, “herding Crazy Horse and my old friend Sitting Bull right down into Crook’s lap.”

“I suppose we ought to go see for ourselves, Frank.” Seamus nudged the big horse toward the timber bordering the hillside once more. “Go see if Sitting Bull’s coming for Crook.”

What a glorious day it had been!

Here in the final days of Wicokannanji, the Lakotas’ middle moon, Wakan Tanka had showered his people with honor, blessing all Lakota for all time!

For all time to come, the white man would cease to trouble American Horse’s people.

Indeed, the soldiers had come. Soldiers had fallen into camp! Exactly as Sitting Bull’s vision had disclosed. It was almost more than an aging warrior could ever hope would happen—yet American Horse had seen it with his own eyes. In his ears had echoed the screams and wails of dying soldiers, the war cries of the Lakota and Shahiyena so driven in fury that their bodies still trembled volcanically for hours after the battle. Yes, and he had seen the first of the white men fall there near the river, then more along the southern end of the ridge. And with his own eyes he had watched as Wakan Tanka touched some of the soldiers with the moon, for there was no other reason that could explain why the white men turned their guns on themselves all along the length of that terribly hot ridge.

No other explanation for a simple man like him to understand how or why the soldiers would take their own lives. It was something American Horse finally turned over to the Great Mystery, only because there was no other way for his heart and mind to deal with the overwhelming power of it.

Wakan Tanka had promised those soldiers to the Lakota. In no more time than it took for the sun to move from one lodgepole to the next, the Great Mystery had kept His promise to His people. This was not for man to wonder, but to accept.

American Horse would accept.

For days the nomadic camps had known about the soldiers to the north camped along the Elk River.^* Scouts rode out from the villages daily to shoot at the soldiers, and to steal ponies from the Sparrowhawk People,^† the scouts working for the Limping Soldier.^‡ Some of the Lakota scouts even brought back word that white men traveled in smoking houses that walked on water!^**

Then in those first days following their great fight on the Rosebud, when the camps were ever watchful of the soldiers to the north, Crow King arrived with his many lodges. The following day the mighty Gall rode in with his people, welcomed by the shouts of the thousands. Yes! Every warrior, from the youngest and untried, to the oldest scarred veteran of Harney’s fight on the Blue Water—they vowed they would all be ready when the Great Mystery delivered them the soldiers of Sitting Bull’s vision.

Then came that sleepy morning after so much singing and dancing, courting and feasting—that warm sunny morning when the first reports came that soldiers had been spotted far away near the crest of the Chetish Mountains. Sitting Bull, Gall, and the rest promptly doubled their akicitay the camp police, in a fierce attempt to keep all the eager, fire-blooded young men from racing out for glory.

“No man must make contact with the white man away from this camp,” demanded Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa mystic.

Gall spoke even more fiercely. “The coming fight must not be started anywhere but here among this great gathering!”

How important it was to all Wakan Tanka’s people that the prophecy be ordained on this day!

What glory the fight had been for them all, American Horse thought now as he moved south with the great cavalcade, astride his pony moving slowly down the west side of the immense procession that stretched for miles, spread up to a mile in width, as they plodded toward the White Mountains^* to harvest lodgepoles. He, like most of the other warriors, rode the flanks of the colorful parade, ever watchful for signs of the enemy—whether that proved to be those soldiers said to be hurrying down from the north, or perhaps some of the Sparrowhawk People or more Corn Indians,^† like those who had scouted for the soldiers who fell into their camp the day before. American Horse wanted to believe—really believe—that there would no longer be any danger from soldiers hunting for Lakota and Shahiyena villages. How he wanted to believe they would live and hunt, laugh and love in peace from now on.

The way his father, Smoke, had said it was for a long time before the white man began pushing west along the Holy Road that took him to the land where the sun went to bed each night. The way it was before then … the way it could be again now.

How American Horse prayed it to be so.

*The Yellowstone River.

†The Crow Indians.

‡Colonel John Gibbon, commanding, Montana column.

**Paddle-wheel steamboats supplying the army’s river depots.

*The Big Horn Mountains.

†The Arikara or Ree Indians.