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

Chapter 34

3-7 September 1876

News From the Front—Crook and Terry Together and Advancing.

ST. PAUL, August 18—Captain Collins, of the Seventeenth infantry, arrived at Bismarck from Fort Buford last night. He fails to confirm the squaw reports of a recent battle between the Indians and Terry’s force. Scouts from Terry’s column, two days out, arrived at Buford on Monday evening. A courier who arrived at the supply depot at the mouth of the Rosebud on the 11th inst., report that Terry’s command met the head of General Crook’s command early on the 10th.

Crook’s men were following a large Indian trail in the direction of the Powder river. On a short consultation of Generals Terry and Crook, the commands were united and proceeded on the trail Crook was following. The Fifth Infantry was detached from Terry’s column and ordered back to the stockade … In the meantime Terry will come down upon them with the combined commands,and force a battle. It is not positively known whether the Indians are on Tongue river or Powder river.

True to his word, Crook swung the column directly to the east on the third of September after spending the night in bivouac directly opposite Sentinel Buttes.

Some of the Ree had come in at dusk the night before to report finding a sizable trail heading south from the Yellowstone, which showed the hostiles angling off to the east, all the more proof to convince Crook that his quarry wasn’t running north for Canada. But what was most important was the trackers’ news that the big trail was splitting again. This time the freshest sign in the country showed that the enemy was heading east.

On that very trail Grouard kept the column marching throughout the third, a Sunday. Later that morning the soldiers passed two burning coal ledges, in all probability ignited by the recent lightning storms. Officers kept their commands moving along quickly through those rugged uplands as Crook grew anxious to reach the Little Missouri, where he was certain the hostiles were heading. Late in the afternoon the general ordered a halt along the clear and narrow Andrews Creek.

Near dusk a handful of the Ree scouts who had been perusing the next day’s trail halted two miles from the column to have their supper. They had no sooner started to eat when a dozen horsemen appeared on a nearby ridge and hailed them—asking if they were Sioux. The Ree answered with their army-issue rifles, driving off the war party.

Later that evening, long after moonset, the pickets on the east side of camp fired at a handful of warriors spying on the soldiers, but there was no general alarm. The Sioux had not attempted to run off the hobbled and sidelined stock. Instead of rolling out at the first shots, most of the men stayed huddled beneath their wool coats and thin blankets on the cold ground right on through the rest of that miserable night.

In the morning they awoke to find a thick layer of frost covering those blankets, the sage, and the ground.

At two o’clock on that afternoon of the fourth the column entered a region where the hills continued to rise higher on either side of them until the men eventually emerged from a long and tortuous canyon to reach the Little Missouri, a sullen and muddy river like its larger namesake, near the point Terry and Custer had encamped in May on their way west to the Yellowstone. The grain Terry’s soldiers spilled while feeding their horses had already taken volunteer root in the damp soil and, nourished by the constant rains, the cornstalks had grown some ten to twelve feet high, each with four or five ears still in the milk. Since Crook already had the men on half rations, the crop was quickly harvested, the off-yellow ears distributed among the men as far as it would stretch, adding a brief taste of something different to their dwindling food supply.

On that riverbank the infantry once again stripped off everything below their belts, lashing it up in their blankets, which they carried over their shoulders, and marched by units across the ford Grouard’s scouts had located for a crossing. On the far side Chambers’s shivering foot soldiers needed no urging to fall out and scamper back into their warm clothing.

Once everyone was across and into the timber on the east side, Crook called a halt, allowing the men a chance to pick some of the profusion of bright-red buffalo berries, ripening plums, and crimson-tinged wild cherries that grew up and down both sides of the river. Even the fruit of the ever-present cactus was tried, requiring a man to burn off the spines before peeling back the thick skin so that he could roast the inner pulp. Compared to the berries and half-ripe plums, the men found the cactus fruit tasted like a slimy glue. In the midst of all that eating and celebration,simple joys for a soldier, it began to rain again just before the column resumed its march.

Later that afternoon Donegan heard sporadic gunfire coming from the south of east. It lasted for less than ten minutes. A half hour later the Ree rode in to inform Crook they had themselves a long-range duel with a Sioux war party, claiming they had wounded one warrior and unhorsed another by killing his pony before the enemy scattered.

“The next time I come with Crook,” John Finerty complained that evening in camp as he held his cracked brogans near the flames dancing in a chill north wind, “I’ll know better to bring along more soap and a couple extra pair of stockings. The general would do well to allow the same for his men.”

That night the wind brought on its back another spate of sleet to pelt Crook’s encampment. The men sat beneath what brush they could find along the banks of the Little Missouri, huddled out of the storm doing its best to rip their blankets from them. Despite the discovery of the corn and the wild fruit earlier in the afternoon, gloom once more descended over the command. They found themselves with less than two days’ rations in the middle of a virtual desert. No one, not even the officers, knew for certain just where they were heading, because Crook kept to his own counsel.

On the following frosty, drizzly morning of the fifth, to the maddening confusion and utter bewilderment of his men, Crook had the scouts take them east from the Little Missouri along Terry’s road, away from the Indian trail that pointed south. Out of the canyon they climbed along Davis Creek to reach the divide that led them toward the headwaters of the Heart River, where, after passing between Rosebud Butte and the Camel’s Hump, they went into bivouac for the night.

It was dusk when Baptiste Pourier and some of Major Thaddeus Stanton’s Ree came in from a day of riding along the column’s right flank with a report that they had bumped into a southbound war party and had had themselves a short running fight of it. When Big Bat’s horse had given out during their retreat, he’d dismounted and prepared to sell his life dearly. Discovering that Pourier was not among their retreat, Baptiste Garnier had wheeled around with a white scout, “Buckskin Jack” Russell, and both had galloped back to make a stand with Pourier. In a brief but hot skirmish Big Bat spilled one of the Sioux, whose body was plucked from the prairie by his companions before they all disappeared into the thickening fog as the sun fell.

About that same time the fleeing Stanton had decided to turn about and find out for himself where the three scouts had disappeared. Upon reaching the trio, he ordered that the whole group pursue the retreating war party.

“If you wanna go,” Big Bat had snarled, “go ahead. I’m not.”

When his scouts eventually reached camp that evening, a sour-faced Stanton reported the incident to Crook, ridiculing Pourier for what he claimed was cowardice.

Crook asked, “What have you got to say about it, Bat?”

“That son of a bitch over there deserted me,” Big Bat snarled, pointing at Stanton. “My horse was down and done for. And I was all but done for. I rode in here this evening on the back of Russell’s horse. So if anyone’s the coward—it’s that lying bastard there!”

The general turned to the officer, asking, “Major—did you leave Big Bat behind?”

“I didn’t know he was in trouble,” Stanton replied with a shrug.

“You knew he was soon as I did, because I told you myself,” Garnier protested. “You knew when I told you me and Russell was heading back to help him.”

Crook glared at Stanton. “Major?”

Stanton could only say, “Yes, sir. I’ll grant you that it looks that way—”

“Very well, then,” Crook interrupted. “We’ll hear no more about Bat’s cowardice, Major—unless we want to have fingers pointed all around. What I’m most angry about is that I wasn’t immediately informed of the presence of a body of hostiles.”

“They slipped off in the fog,” Stanton explained.

“Yes, well,” Crook said, stroking one tail of his braided beard, “from now on I want to know immediately when any of my command makes any contact with the enemy.”

Twilight came, and without the cheery warmth of fires the men gathered in angry knots to argue their wretched lot. Only those officers and enlisted alike who hadn’t served very long with Crook expressed some self-satisfied wagering that come morning the command would be turning about and making for the Missouri River posts.

“No,” with conviction said those who had fought under Crook in Arizona or Sioux country. “The general won’t cash it in until he’s made a fight out of this. Not yet he won’t turn tail.”

Even those old veterans who were the sort to grumble and complain in times of peace and boredom, were now the ones who remained steadfast in the worst of times.

“We oughtn’t to give up yet,” they reminded those younger, those weaker, those whose mettle had not yet been thrust into the crucible. “None of us can give up on account of a little roughing it, boys. After all, the general’s sure as hell not the man to give up himself.”

That night at a brief officers’ meeting Crook finally did admit that the great enemy gathering had in all likelihood already broken up. And—as if expressing his greatest suspicion and long-held fear—he was certain the Sioux were already making for the Black Hills. Because of that, he told them, they would not be heading for Fort Abraham Lincoln, no more than a hundred miles away and his closest source of supply—a march that would take four days, five at the most.

Nor would he be pointing them north to the Glendive depot Terry had promised to provision on the Yellowstone, a little over a hundred miles off.

“We would lose two weeks’ time in both maneuvers,” he explained. “A week getting there, and a week getting back to where we are standing right here. Between getting there and coming back, I fear we would lose half our horses.”

Instead Crook informed that silent throng they would be turning south for Deadwood—nothing less than seven days and 180 miles away across a piece of ground totally unknown to any of the scouts still with the expedition.

After all, he told them, the fact remained that the freshest Indian trails pointed south.

As Seamus stood at the fringe of those sullen, hungry, and cold men gathered in a steady downpour, he couldn’t help but wonder if Crook would get his Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition out of the wilderness this time. And if he did, at what cost?

If Crook had intended all along to march so far, why had he begun with only fifteen days’ rations? Why had he allowed his column to move so slowly? And why had Crook allowed his men so many long halts, which did nothing but whittle away at what dwindling supplies they did have left?

And then it came down to asking the most painful questions of all for a man who had served George Crook since the bloody Sioux campaign begun back in the March snows of the sore-eye moon: Did the general know what he was doing? Did he have a plan? Or was he only floundering, thrashing about—hoping Lady Luck would smile on him?

That Tuesday night Crook wrote Sheridan his first report in a full month, summarizing the expedition’s movements to date. Once again the general wrote things as he saw them, or at least as he wanted Sheridan to see them— claiming he had been hot on the trail of the hostile village that had remained intact until very recently:

Camp at head of Heart River, Dak., Ty., September 5, 1876

Lieutenant General Sheridan, Chicago, Ill. … My Column followed the trail down Beaver Creek … where the Indians scattered … the separation taking place apparently about twelve days ago.

I have every reason to believe that all the hostile Indians left the Big Horn, Tongue, and Powder River country in the village, the trail of which we followed … With the exception of a few lodges that had stolen off toward the agencies, there was no change in the size or arrangement of the village until it disintegrated. All indications show that the hostile Indians were much straitened for food and that they are now traveling in small bands, scouring the country for small game.

In concluding his message Crook asked Sheridan to speed to Custer City twenty days’ rations for his men and two hundred thousand pounds of grain for his stock, stating he intended to use the settlement as the seat of his winter operations.

After midnight early on the sixth the Ree scouts rode out under cover of darkness from that miserable, muddy bivouac, heading east for Fort Lincoln with their dispatches. Once again Crook was left without Indian guides. He would have to rely on half-breeds Grouard, Pourier, and Garnier, along with the white scouts still among them.

Just past six A.M. the infantry sergeants had their men formed up and shambling off, marching due south for the nearby Heart River after a breakfast at half rations. No sugar and salt were left—every last vestige of them had been washed from the packsaddles by the relendess rains. Only two days of the sodden hard bread and bacon was left them. Four days remained of their coffee supply. And that morning the surgeons put in their plea with the scouts to shoot what game they could for the sake of the sick being hauled along on the bouncing travois in the midst of Moore’s mule train. Just as Moore was about to move out his packers, Lieutenant Bubb led some of his men over to Dr. Bennett A. Clements with the last of the quartermaster’s luxuries.

“What have you here?” the surgeon asked.

“The last of what I have to offer for your casualties,” Bubb explained heroically. “Two cans of jelly, seventy pounds of these white beans, and a half-dozen tins of vegetables.”

First thing that morning the men had to cross the rain-swollen Heart River, forced to construct a bridge using the wooden boxes of their ammunition taken from the back of their pack-animals. A torrent of thunderstorm runoff rushed down every wide coulee and narrow ravine as the prairie soil, already soaked from recent days of nonstop rain, flooded beneath them. Even the bright, cheering orb of the sun itself was soon lost behind a thick bank of clouds gathering in that gray, overcast sky. Yet there was enough light that many of the weary men noticed the flashes of. signal mirrors from nearby ridges and hilltops. However slow the column moved, however painful their progress, the enemy was watching the soldiers.

Horses plodded, some weaving out of column, refusing or unable to obey their riders any longer. Infantry soldiers dropped out constantly as the screws that attached the soles of their brogans wore into the mushy inner layers and gashed the bottoms of their miserably cold feet. Throughout that long, terrible day the men began to straggle farther and farther out on both flanks, some lagging far to the rear in despair and exhaustion. More than a few horses gave out that Wednesday, and most of the laggards butchered strips of lean red meat from the flanks of the bony animals that had fallen and could not be made to get back onto their legs. For the first time at the rear of that march, men began to chew on the tough, stringy, raw meat,sucking out what nourishment they could. Occasionally a man might dig up a wild onion or an Indian turnip, perhaps even find a few miserable berries clinging to the patchy brush that hugged the narrow water courses. But it made little difference now. The horse-meat march had begun.

After trudging thirty miles over that sodden country in a cold, rainy fog so thick it was difficult to maintain the column’s bearing, after crossing both branches of the Cannonball River and stumbling across a cactus-infested desert terrain, the men limped into bivouac at a cluster of small alkaline water holes some six miles south of Rainy Buttes, where they could find no wood to boil their coffee. Those who could get some of the damp grass ignited held twists of it under their tun cups, though most of the soldiers choked down their miserable ration, of bacon and hardtack that night with only the milky water in their canteens.

Any man who had been lucky enough to shoot one of the prairie dogs in the many villages the column marched through that day ravenously tore the raw flesh from the tiny bones. Two of Tom Moore’s packers had brought down a hawk that afternoon and attempted to cook the meat they hacked from its breast in a tin cup, but the damp grass only smoldered and smoked and turned the water so black they abandoned the soggy meat altogether. Whenever an unlucky jackrabbit wandered close to the bivouac, the soldiers descended on it with lariats, nose bags, and saddle blankets, chasing the creature from all sides until it was run to death.

In the end as twilight fell, every man huddled beneath his thin blanket and turned to cutting the thick gumbo from his boots or shoes with his folding knife, helplessly shuddering in the rain as the wind came up.

As the sun fell out of the low-hanging clouds, creating those few intoxicating moments of light before the orb was lost behind the western horizon, the scouts returned to report having a short skirmish with the Sioux, who apparendy were still moving south just ahead of the soldiers.

Near dark Quartermaster Bubb’s men issued rations for the next day. With no bacon left, it was a quarter ration of coffee and bread. Barely enough to cover the palm of a soldier’s hand, much less fill his belly.

“I just hope we overtake the hostiles in the next day or so,” John Bourke opined in the darkness and misery of that night. “Have ourselves a fight that would partially compensate us for our privations and sufferings.”

“It’s the poor creatures of burden that I’m worried most about, Johnny,” Donegan replied. “Gone weeks without good feed, forced to scrounge for grass where the Sioux haven’t burned it off—these animals are starving to death. One by one, by one.”

For the past few days Seamus had remained committed to his horse, although more and more of the men knew they would likely all be reduced to eating horse meat just to survive. Like Tom Moore’s packers, the Irishman religiously rubbed bacon grease on the horse’s open sores and wounds, situating the saddle blanket just so in hopes it would not aggravate the oozy wounds suffered by the bone-bare creature.

At reveille the next morning word came down from command headquarters: abandoned horses were to be shot and butchered for food.

This was nothing short of unthinkable for a horse soldier!

Beneath clearing skies the column stumbled out that seventh day of September, and in less than an hour all but a dozen of the cavalrymen had dismounted and were pulling their reluctant horses along, cajoling, begging, pleading with the animals to keep moving—just so the troopers would not find themselves forced to shoot their animals, the companions they had relied upon for many months.

By afternoon many of the men were collapsing with the animals beside the trail as rain clouds rumbled back over the land and released their torrent. At one point the expedition was stretched out for more than twenty miles. Every now and then Seamus heard the sodden report of some soldier’s weapon.

He flinched with every gunshot, turning every time to look over his shoulder at the horse plodding on his heels, its hooves caked with gumbo plastered clear to its hocks. On and on Seamus trudged, every fifth step forced to yank on the reins to keep his horse stumbling behind him. Each one of those echoing gunshots killed a little piece of the horse soldier that was Donegan, each bullet ripping through the heart of a horseman.

Along both sides of that march the skeletal soldiers jumped on the animals just shot, skinning back the hide and carving away the warm, juicy meat even before the heart of horse or mule had ceased its beating.

Here and there every few yards sat another man, trooper or foot soldier, his rifle lying in the mud beside him, his head slung disconsolately between his hunched soldiers as the heavens rained down upon them all. Some of the men openly cried as they rolled over onto their sides and curled up into fetal balls, giving in until others, those a bit stronger, came along and hauled their weaker comrades out of the mud. Once pulled up, the most weary and desperate among them dragged their feet through the endless mud, often supported between a pair of comrades, unable to go on without help.

Late that afternoon an Arikara courier rode in to give Crook a dispatch from Terry, reporting that supplies awaited the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition at the Glendive cantonment.

The news was too late to do them any good. They had long ago passed the point of no return.

As the head of the column went into camp that afternoon of the seventh, Crook stood guard over a half-dozen wild rosebushes, the hips of which he would allow only Surgeon Clements’s sick to use. Lieutenant Bubb had several of the hard-bread boxes broken up and the thin wood distributed through the command to start their pitiful fires.

Yet by some miracle, or by the grace of God Himself, they had slogged through another thirty miles that day. Still, with the coming of dark that Thursday night, the disembodied whispers and grumbling swelled to epidemic proportions. More and more of the men voiced their undeniable despair in the anonymity of that dark night. No longer were they merely questioning their commander. Now they were demanding his head.

“Crook ought to be hanged!” was the call raised in the rainy gloom.

Seamus knew these men were the sort who could stare adversity in the eye, even smile in the face of sudden death if told the reason why. No, it was not the hardship, starvation, and endless toil that brought the expedition to the brink of mutiny—it was the general’s tight-lipped silence. Surely, his soldiers told one another, Crook has no idea what he is doing, no idea what to do to save them.

They had reached the bitter end … and the general’s only choice was to provision his men from the Black Hills settlements.

As night squeezed down on the land and the stragglers continued to lumber in from the miles upon miles of barren landscape littered with the carcasses of dead horses and mules, George Crook sent John Bourke to fetch Captain Anson Mills.

Seamus had a good idea what was afoot.

He prayed he would be allowed to go.