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

Chapter 9

First Days of July 1876

There was no way John Bourke would have stayed in camp and not gone to the mountains with the general. Only a team of Tom Moore’s most ornery, stubborn mules could have held him back.

Besides the four reporters, Crook had invited Lieutenant Colonel William B. Royall, commanding officer of the Third Cavalry; Royall’s adjutant, Lieutenant Henry R. Lemly; Captain Andrew S. Burt of the Ninth Infantry; Captain Anson Mills of the Third Cavalry; Lieutenant William L. Carpenter of the Ninth Infantry; and Lieutenant Walter S. Schuyler, on detached service from the Fifth Cavalry and serving as one of Crook’s aides. To handle the packing chores, Tom Moore had selected a man named Young, one of his assistant packers, to ramrod a half-dozen civilians who accompanied the general’s party out of camp that Saturday, the first of July. Mounted entirely on mules, each man in the group carried provisions for four days.

After a two-hour ride that morning through forests bristling with pine and fir, following the trail the Shoshone Indians had taken upon departing for their Wind River Reservation back on the nineteenth of June, the hunting party reached a grassy plateau watered by several icy streams that ran right out of the glaciers poised above them, a meadow delightfully carpeted with countless species of mountain wildflowers. After a short stop to rest the mules, the group pushed on, finding the narrow trail growing increasingly difficult.

“I thought an Indian always picked the easiest route,” complained Joe Wasson as they lumbered ever upward in single file.

“Not when those Indians figure the Sioux might follow them,” instructed Captain Mills. “The Snakes took the hardest trail they could because they know the enemy might soon be in these hills to cut lodgepoles and run across their trail.”

“Will you look at that, gentlemen?” Crook said a few minutes later, stopping his mule and turning in the saddle to take in the entire panorama that lay before them.

“Utterly beautiful,” John Finerty offered.

Bourke himself was struck speechless for the moment, looking down upon the view fanned out below their feet. From the headwaters of the Little Bighorn River far to their left, all the way to the ocher mounds of Pumpkin Buttes out on the broken plains, on south to the land of the Crazy Woman and Clear creeks, the lieutenant could not remember seeing anything more beautiful than what he beheld at that moment.

Crook took his time surveying the country to the north of their base camp with his field glasses before he sighed disgustedly and snapped them shut in the leather case he had strapped over his shoulder.

Royall inquired, “You see anything at all of the enemy, General?”

“Not a damned thing.”

“No smoke, not even some telltale dust, sir?” asked Mills.

Shaking his head, Crook replied, “I must admit I’m more than disappointed. I’m damn well depressed. Here I was hoping that by coming up here on this hunt, I’d discover more than just a few days of relaxation. By damned— I was figuring on seeing some clue as to Terry’s whereabouts.”

“Maybe he’s got the hostiles cornered on the Yellowstone, General,” suggested Burt.

Finerty chuckled, saying, “Better that we don’t see a damned thing, General Crook, than find that huge village headed our way.”

“Always the optimist you are, Mr. Finerty,” Crook said with a wry grin. “Damn, but aren’t you Irishmen always the optimists!”

With every mile’s climb growing tougher on the mules, by midafternoon Crook called it quits in a beautiful meadow on the headwaters of a branch of Goose Creek itself. All about them lay trees long ago uprooted by the force of winter gales, and in every direction ran spiderythin game trails, although not one man among them had seen anything to shoot for their supper kettle. With trout breaking the surface of a nearby stream, a few attempted some fishing but could not lure a single cutthroat or brown to what they used for bait. Not until the shadows had lengthened did Crook return to camp with a black-tailed deer.

“From up on top,” the general said, pointing upslope with his rifle after he had pulled the carcass from his mule’s back, “the whole range is dotted with tiny lakes just like those we passed in the last hour or so of our climb.”

Against appetites whetted by the strenuous work, the fresh meat from that one deer, along with strips of bacon and fresh-baked pan bread, all quickly disappeared before the men leaned back onto their beds of pine boughs cut for fragrant mattresses and lit their pipes. As the sun went down on the far side of the snowy granite peaks just above them, the men began to huddle ever closer to the fires, pulling their blankets more snugly about their shoulders. It startled Bourke just how cold it could get in the mountains here in the heart of summer.

Setting off the next morning, the hunters climbed ever upward on a trail of their own making, every few yards crossing tiny rivulets of freezing runoff that spilled from snowbanks still found here and there back in the deepest shadows of thick timber. Wild flax grew in abundance, as well as a profusion of harebells, forget-me-nots, sunflowers, and the wild rose they already discovered on the plains below, along the creek that bore its name. It would be a case of their finding the beauty before the unbearable.

By midmorning their climb had become a torturous exercise in endurance. The stands of fir and pine thinned as they neared timberline, making for a growing number of alpine meadows crisscrossed by so many icy streams that they were forced to slog through virtual bogs. Man and mule struggled onward with the greatest exertion, stumbling across what first looked like solid ground but was quickly discovered as being nothing more than a thick layer of decaying pine needles crusted over an icy pond. Time and again they all fell, climbing back out of the cold, muddy bogs to shiver as they planted another sucking foot or hoof in front of the last still buried up to the ankle, or deeper yet, in the pasty ooze. Everywhere deadfall and huge outcrops of smooth-faced granite the size of railroad cars impeded their path. Above their struggles loomed the immensity of Cloud Peak itself, dwarfing everything below it, especially a dozen puny men and their pack-train.

At long last they struggled out of the final vestiges of dwarf pine and juniper to stand above timberline itself, struggling those last few hundred years in the thin air to reach the shore of a narrow, crystalline mountain lake that fed both the Tongue River on the east, as well as the Big Horn and Grey Bull to the west. Huge bobbing cakes of thick ice marred its wind-furred surface. At the edges of the slowly retreating banks of crusty snow along the lake’s shore raised the tiny blue heads of the dainty forget-me-nots. Off to the west and northwest they could make out still higher ranges likewise covered with a mantle of white even at this late season.

“I must admit,” Mills said, huffing slightly with the rest, “I have traveled some in Europe and have seen many a gorgeous landscape in my years—but I will tell you here and now that I have never laid my eyes on anything quite as beautiful as this.”

His heart pounding with its cry as his lungs drank deep with every breath, Bourke could not believe he had actually made it there, where it seemed they stood on top of the world. Below lay the last great hunting ground the hostiles were mightily set upon defending to the death. Far to the east came that rush of civilization ever westward, with the army as their spear point. But for these ageless forests and these huge granite spires towering against this sky since time immemorial, for the earth where the lieutenant stood at this very moment, such events of war and the clash of cultures meant little.

As tired as his legs were, Bourke stood gazing slackjawed at it all for the longest time before he sat upon an icy snowbank and made notes in his journal. Before he put the journal away in his wool coat, the lieutenant thought to pick some of the tiny flowers, pressing them carefully between the blank pages of his book.

After halting atop that windy crest for half an hour, Crook pushed on west, across another divide, where they one and all marveled at the distant Wind River Range before beginning a slow, arduous descent to timberline, on through another forest thick with pine and spruce, noisy with foamy cascades and beautified with glass-topped pools and bubbling springs, until the sun began to fall toward its western bed. While the rest went into bivouac, Crook and Schuyler went off in search of game and returned an hour later with a pair of bighorn mountain sheep. No more than a few minutes from camp, Bourke found a snowfield the side of which had been slowly eroded by the wind, exposing the unmelted icy strata to a depth of some sixty feet— snow that he supposed in all likelihood would never melt to flow down to the Bighorn River. Snows that might well have rested there for hundreds of years.

While the sun’s light remained in the sky, deerflies, titlarks, and butterflies flitted about through the trees, as well as the ever-present and troublesome mosquitoes. But once the sun disappeared and the air cooled at an amazing pace, no more was man nor beast bothered by buzz or sting.

“I want to return to camp by Tuesday afternoon,” Crook announced that night after their supper of mountain mutton and boiled elk heart. “So you may hunt until noon tomorrow—when we’ll depart for camp.”

“Tuesday—that would be the fourth,” Davenport said in sudden realization.

“Yes!” Mills cheered. “The Fourth of July!”

“Bloody good, General!” Royall agreed. “The Centennial Fourth.”

“I wouldn’t miss that celebration in camp for a go at all the Kid’s girls at the Hog Ranch!” Finerty exclaimed.

“Well said, my young correspondent,” Crook replied. “There will only be one Centennial Fourth—and we should all spend it with the men of the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition.”

“Hurrah!” Bourke shouted.

Wasson raised his coffee tin and cried, “Hurrah for the birthday of our Grand Republic!”

True to his word the following day, Crook packed up and departed camp at noon, even though Finerty and Mills had not returned from their morning’s hunt.

“Should I stay behind, General?” Bourke asked.

“What purpose would that serve, John?”

Bourke shrugged.

“Exactly,” Crook answered. “They’ll make it back when they make it back. And when they do, they’ll find us gone. They, like any of us would do, will just have to follow our trail back over the crest.”

“You’re certain, sir? I was just hoping you’d—”

“All right, John. I’ll leave one of the packers here to wait for our two tardy boys—if that’ll make you feel any better.”

By six o’clock the trio of laggards caught up with Crook’s party, and the general ordered them all to bivouac in a grassy mountain glen, where, over their cheery supper fires, Finerty and Mills recounted their tale of making it all the way to the western reaches of the Big Horns until they looked down upon the great open expanse of the undulating desert basin.

Throwing back his blankets the next morning, Bourke discovered it had snowed through the night. The bracing cold and surprising return of winter at this altitude seemed to invigorate the men, who had a snowball fight as their breakfast coffee boiled and bacon sizzled in the skillets resting over dancing flames. With a stern reminder from Crook that they needed to be making for Camp Cloud Peak, the party packed up to continue their downhill trek, reaching Goose Creek just past noon that Centennial Fourth.

Come evening as the camp reveled as best it could on coffee, hardtack, beans, and bacon, John Bourke strode over to the Irishman’s fire and joined in the salutes and toasts the men were offering one another. “You’re as American as any man now, Seamus Donegan!”

“You really think so, do you?”

“Aye,” John Finerty agreed. “My blood and yours may come from that blessed Isle of Eire, Seamus—but it’s our hearts that make us Americans. Now and forevermore.”

“To America—the last great hope of all democracies!” Robert Strahorn cried, raising his cup of steaming coffee as twilight fell.

“To our blessed country,” old Dick Closter added his voice.

“And to that beautiful wife of yours, Seamus,” Bourke said, suddenly remembering Samantha left safely back at Fort Laramie.

“To the Irishman, our new American!” Wasson said. “And all those little Americans yet to be born in this land of freedom!”

Hoisting his own cup of black coffee, Bourke added, “Long may our beloved Star-Spangled Banner wave!”

* * *

He stared out the window of his spacious office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, at the massive flagpole planted in the center of the parade. How those Stars and Stripes tossed in the midsummer breeze.

This, the greatest nation on earth.

With her powerful cavalry just been wiped out on the Little Bighorn.

Nelson A. Miles, colonel and commander of the Fifth Infantry, stared at the banner snapping high in the air of the central plains, and thought on Custer.

“Damn, but you were a shooting star, weren’t you, Armstrong?”

Turning from the window, Miles settled back against the horsehair-stuffed cushion on his well-used chair. How he wished George Crook had given him the chance Alfred Terry had given Custer. It was too early, far too early, to know just what the hell had happened that made Armstrong get his unit swallowed up by those primitive savages—surely, it must have been some grave tactical error: dividing his forces when confronting an overwhelming enemy; perhaps running out of ammunition at a critical time in the battle only to discover he was too far from his lines of supply; or … something, by damned! There had to be a reason why Custer finally went and did it.

“Hell, you were a tragedy waiting to happen,” Miles murmured to himself. “It could have happened on the Washita—we both knew that—but you pulled your fat from the fire just in time down there, didn’t you?”

For a few minutes more he stared at the yellow telegraph flimsy in his hand, struggling to have the disaster in Montana Territory make sense to him. For so long he and Custer had been, by and large, the friendliest of rivals. Armstrong the darling of the army’s cavalry, Miles the finest infantry officer ever to set a marching boot down on the plains. And, Nelson had to admit time and again, both of them exhibited about the same high opinion of himself.

That was, after all, what drove the few, the chosen, the fated to greatness, wasn’t it?

“Was it just your moment come, Armstrong? Was it … your turn at immortality, goddammit?”

Laying a flat hand over the flimsy, Miles pushed himself up and away from the desk, stepping over to the window again. Outside, the shocking news was already spreading like prairie fire. He could see the knots of officers and enlisted gathering. You didn’t keep this sort of thing quiet when it came in on the wire from department headquarters in Omaha, transferred in from Division HQ in Chicago. For the moment Sheridan was off making a nuisance of himself at Fort Laramie, out there somewhere.

The dark and dashingly handsome Miles wondered how the little Irish general was taking it. For so long Custer had been his darling. His protégé. He and Sherman were grooming the dashing cavalry officer for greatness—then Armstrong went and did one foolish, impetuous thing after another. And in the past few months even Sheridan had given up protecting Custer, on ever seeing Custer rise to command his own regiment.

So how was Sheridan taking it? Was he stunned? Was he angry beyond belief? Was he at this very moment throwing everything he had against the hostiles who had killed his very own Wunderkind?

When would Sheridan ever learn where he should put his trust?

Miles shook his head. Hell, when would his wife’s own uncle, William Tecumseh Sherman, learn?

Just days ago word came that Nelson’s most bitter rival, George Crook, had battled Crazy Horse to a standstill before retreating to Goose Creek.

“Son of a bitch is licking his wounds, by God!” Miles grumbled. “And I bet that’s where he’ll sit until Sheridan sends him enough troops to surround the Black Hills!”

Shit, he thought, curling up the end of his long mustache. Sherman and Sheridan had better give him a chance at Sitting Bull and all those savages that went and chewed up Terry’s finest cavalry. At long last they better give Nelson Miles and the Fifth Infantry a chance at closing that bloody chapter on the northern plains.

That is, if Sherman and Sheridan were really serious about ending the Indian problem once and for all.

If the army brass thought they were going to keep Nelson Miles sitting on his thumbs here at Leavenworth while sending Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Whistler to lead Miles’s own Fifth Infantry north to whip the Sioux—those fat-bottoms in Washington City had another thing to think over!

In a flurry he whirled from the window and plopped himself back into his chair, taking up a lead pencil. On a single sheet of long paper he began composing the telegram he would send to Sherman. Starting here and now he would badger the brass in the War Department until he secured his field command. By damn, he sure as hell wouldn’t let Whistler go marching off with Nelson Miles’s Fifth Infantry! Not when there were glories to be won whipping Sitting Bull out there on the Yellowstone and the Tongue and the Powder!

Once they gave Colonel Nelson A. Miles his orders for field command—they’d have this Sioux War all but ended!

Nelson knew there wasn’t a thing he could not do: from defeating the hostile Sioux and Cheyenne, to getting himself elected President of the Republic. He had been careful, damned careful, charting every move, every step along the way throughout his career. His education at the Academy, even his marriage to just the right niece—it all laid the foundation for what should have made Nelson Miles the greatest commander in the history of the Army of the West. Right up there in the military texts with Washington, Taylor, and Grant.

“But now you’ve gone and done this to me, Armstrong,” he groaned softly as he flung down the pencil, then rose to stare out the window. Gently laying his forehead against the mullioned windowpane, Miles stared out at the sun-splashed parade where the buzz of tragedy continued unabated.

“Dammit—how am I ever going to compete with the memory of a dead man? How can I, a mere mortal, Armstrong—ever hope to compete with you again—now that you’ve become a legend on that bloody hillside somewhere in Montana? Now that you’ve become a symbol of our national honor that must be avenged? Now that you’ve become a myth? Bigger than you ever were until that day you fell, bigger than you’d ever been in life?”