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

Chapter 38

9 September 1876

His nose felt like it was as big as his boot. Dribbling, Seamus wiped it on the sleeve of his canvas mackinaw.

God, did that hurt!

Raw and angry, sore beyond belief. His nose itself was as red as these buffalo berries clinging to the nearby bushes.

But at least he wasn’t so sick that he couldn’t climb into the saddle. Not so immobilized with pain that the only way he could move was to lie on a travois pulled along by one of Tom Moore’s mules.

“Ready, boys!” whispered Lieutenant Schwatka as he rode along their front.

Atop a sloping ridge formed by two shallow coulees that eventually united at the north edge of the village, the cavalry horses pawed the earth. Weary, all but done in—the animals wanted to move, or get the damned weight off their backs. One or the other. The animals had waited out most of the night grazing. They should have enough bottom in them to make this short charge through the village.

“Coming light, Lieutenant!” some trooper said down to Donegan’s right.

“Steady now! Steady!”

He watched Schwatka look to the east. Von Leuttwitz was in position somewhere over there, somewhere still out of sight in the murky light. Over where the dawn was just beginning to balloon around them. Then the lieutenant glanced to the west, as if he expected to catch a glimpse of Crawford’s men.

Minutes ago all three units of Mills’s attack had come to a halt after using up more than an hour to grope their way out of the deep ravine and quietly inch forward together across the sticky, muddy prairie beginning at the foot of Slim Buttes, a long, craggy ridge that dominated and towered over the entire landscape. Frank Grouard led them through the frosty darkness toward the village he had scouted, where he had stolen two ponies. When the half-breed had Lieutenant Schwatka halt his twenty-five, the scout disappeared for a few minutes before he reappeared with another half-dozen Sioux ponies.

“More of ’em up there,” Frank said in a low hush as he drove the six ponies to the rear right through the midst of Schwatka’s mounted troopers. “You go on, Lieutenant. I’ll be back soon as I hide these away in a coulee for safekeeping.”

With the coming light Seamus recognized the outlines of more ponies grazing here and there in their front. Still some distance off, the bulk of the herd cropped the wet grass, completely indifferent to the soldiers. Raising his face into the cold breeze that tortured his nose, he found the wind was still in their favor.

They moved up a bit more, halted again, nearing the fringe of the herd now. Beyond, farther still, rose the tops of the first lodges. Silent. Hulking. Only the barest wisps of firesmoke stealing from the upper swirl of lodgepoles. Schwatka deployed his twenty-five about the time Grouard reappeared. He rode up and stopped somewhere on the far left flank. From where Donegan sat atop his horse at the right end of the formation, he wasn’t sure he could pick out the half-breed in the dim light.

Up ahead, no more than a matter of yards, really, a horse snorted. One of the Sioux ponies.

Then another one whickered, and one of the cavalry horses answered with a whinny of its own.

“Dear Mither of God,” Seamus swore under his breath, “get your hands on his nostrils.” He prayed the other outfits were in position.

Of a sudden the grassy rise before them erupted in a swirling movement and deafening noise: the cries of ponies, the surprising hammer of more than fifteen hundred hooves. Just as they would if a bolt of lightning had cracked its fiery tongue into their midst, the pony herd exploded into action.

“Stampede!”

At Donegan’s shrill warning, Schwatka yanked his horse about and stood in the stirrups.

Another soldier hollered, “G’won, Lieutenant! Give the order!”

“Charge!” Schwatka yelled, his mouth a black hole within his neatly trimmed mustache and pointed goatee, waving the pistol in his hand as he kicked heels into his horse, which bolted off beneath him with a shocking burst of energy.

Raggedly the twenty-five tore themselves from motionlessness to a furious gallop in the space of two heartbeats, strung out as they were across some sixty yards. Over the unknown ground they raced, sweeping the frantic herd before them across the brow of the hill and down into the narrow, three-fingered depression.

Out of the gray light of false dawn loomed the hide lodges.

With a shudder Donegan remembered their attack on Powder River. Many of these men had been there. He wondered if they remembered, as he remembered it.

He saw the first lodge as he shot past it—the door flap securely lashed down against the wind and rain. At the rear a long gash suddenly erupted in the wet hide. From it bubbled three children, then a woman with a babe in her arms. She stopped, looked at him as he rode past.

Then Seamus was among the rest of the village.

All around him the Sioux were hacking their way out of their lodges. Warriors fell to one knee, firing rifles and pistols, then rose to run again, stopping after a few yards to fire another round. On either side of the Irishman the troopers’ pistols popped in a steady rattle. All about him the bullets slapped against the taut, wet buffalo hides, sounding like the arrhythmic fall of icy hailstones. The air stung his cold cheeks, and he knew his nose must be dribbling in his mustache again. Swiping at it with his left arm as he sighted a warrior, Seamus immediately wished he hadn’t touched the nose. The tender tissues screamed in pain.

Angry at himself, he brought the pistol out at the end of his arm and snapped off the shot by instinct, without really aiming. The warrior pitched backward, arms and legs akimbo, falling behind a lodge.

Within seconds the Sioux were streaming from the village, the first of them beginning to reach the pony herd. Children screeched and women cried out, hurrying the little ones along. At the rear tottered the old and the lame, the sick and the wounded lumbering behind in their midst. On the far side of the village stood a line of low bluffs. Racing across the creek to the southwest, most of the Sioux were escaping around the end of those bluffs, fleeing onto the rolling prairie. The rest of those in the village splashed across the narrow creek, up the south bank, and turned right at the ridgeline, scurrying like quail into the darkness and brush.

He knew there would be coulees and ravines up there, scars upon the face of this land where rain and snow had scratched their fingers of erosion over the millennia as the waters tumbled off the prairie to the creek. Creek flowing on to the stream. And stream into the river. Just the way the Indians flowed right and left at the base of the low bluff. Like a boulder parting the waters.

Suddenly he was alone. Reining up, Seamus watched another handful of the Sioux flit past him in the gray light, disappearing upstream in the brush along the creek pouring out of those chalk-colored buttes that stood immediately above them in the coming light of day.

With all the echo reverberating from those heights, it seemed the whole prairie was alive with a steady rattle of gunfire.

Seamus wheeled his horse about, and the animal fought the bit for a moment as he patted its wet hide along the big neck, straining his eyes into the dim gray light of dawn to find something familiar—anything—out there through the fog and mist dancing among the lodges. Schwatka had his mounted troopers turning just then, there at the end of that bluff across the creek from the village. They had done what Mills had ordered, but they hadn’t stopped the escape. The pony stampede had seen to that, flushing the quarry ahead of the charging soldiers. Now instead of closing the door on the south end of the village, Schwatka’s men could only watch in frustration as the Sioux scampered across the hills, scattering like hulls of grain flung across a hardwood floor.

Where was Crawford’s detachment? They should have been down to the creek by now—

Then Donegan saw them. Clear across the village on the far hillside, already united with Von Leuttwitz’s men. Instead of pushing east from their right flank to prevent most of the escape toward the buttes, Crawford had led his men right into the northern end of the village to quickly join the other dismounted skirmishers fighting under Von Leuttwitz’s command. Together those hundred-plus men worked in concert, pushing west into the village.

As Donegan rode slowly along the edge of the low bluff, his pistol sweeping over the brush in the event he scared up anything on two legs, he noticed Schwatka’s men corralling more than two hundred ponies at the bottom of a wide, grassy swale. Most of the animals quieted and went back to a restless grazing, while a few continued to leap and dart along the circumference of the circle.

Now he peered north into the growing light, wondering why Lieutenant Bubb’s men hadn’t shown up on schedule either.

As Donegan rode up and halted near Mills, the dismounted captain snagged a soldier’s bridle, yelled something up at the man above the din of gunfire, then quickly stepped back to slap the horse on the flank. The private shot away, lying low in the saddle, racing north.

The captain whirled, seeing Donegan. “I was looking for you, Irishman! Could have used you as a courier. I’ve just sent orders to Bubb to get his ass up here, and now! I don’t have any idea what’s keeping him,” Mills snapped angrily. “I want him to send a courier to Crook—tell him what we’ve pitched into—send us reinforcements. Grouard says there’s other villages within a few miles of us.”

Seamus felt uneasy about it, saying, “We can expect company real soon.”

“We’ll need Crook here fast.”

Seamus said, “He’s two days behind us—”

“Don’t tell me the obvious, Mr. Donegan! Tell me something that will help us hold on until Crook gets here!”

“What happened to Von Leuttwitz’s men? Wasn’t he supposed to get his sojurs in position southeast of the village to shut the village’s escape hatch?”

“I was up there with Von Leuttwitz—and from what I can figure out, the ponies stampeded before anyone could get into position.” Mills’s eyes narrowed on Donegan. “A soldier like me will take what he can get, Mr. Donegan— and do the best he can with it!”

His harsh words fell like Gatling-gun fire; then the captain suddenly turned left, and right, dashing off into the melee without taking his leave.

The rifle fire began to dwindle, weak pockets of sound rising against that hollow to the southwest of the village only when some of the warriors attempted to make a dash at the captured ponies. Soldiers swarmed among the lodges, kicking their way through the door flaps, cutting long slashes in the wet hides. Here and there the ravenous troopers emerged from the lodges with a pistol in one hand, booty in the other.

Just seeing them eating, hollering at one another, laughing and stuffing more food into their already full mouths was enough to make Donegan’s own mouth water and his stomach grumble in complaint.

“There more in there?” he asked a soldier squatting outside a lodge, his carbine laid across the tops of his thighs as he used both hands to tear loose, bite-sized chunks from a thin strip of dried meat.

“All you can eat, my friend!”

Inside he took a moment to let his eyes grow accustomed to the dim light, all that was given off by the embers of the occupants’ night fire, and what little of sunrise could penetrate the thick hide walls. He sniffed, not so much to snort the dribble hung pendant at the end of his raw nose as to see if he could smell anything remotely like food. Down to his knees he went beside the fire pit, where lay an assortment of kettles and a frying pan. In a kettle some cold soup. He ripped off his glove and tested the thick, cold liquid with a finger. Licking it, Seamus smiled. Fishing out a chunk of cold meat, he thought of warming it over the warm coals—then stuffed it into his mouth and tore off a hunk. Suddenly he stopped chewing, his eyes locked on the large ornament hung from the dew-cloth rope at the back of the lodge, suspended over the Indian bed, a thick pad of blankets and buffalo robes.

Half-red, half-white. Company I. Seventh U.S. Cavalry.

A goddamn guidon from one of the outfits destroyed with Custer!

Outside he heard a loud voice hollering for a surgeon. The way things had happened, Donegan hadn’t expected there to be any casualties. Plunging his bare hand down into the cold stew, he fished out several large portions be fore he ducked out of the slash hacked in the side of the lodge, his hand dripping on his canvas britches and boots.

A soldier dashed up to Crawford, strain present in his voice. “Von Leuttwitz is hurt bad, Lieutenant!”

Crawford asked, “Von Leuttwitz? Where’s Mills?”

“The colonel’s with Von Leuttwitz—he was right beside him when he was shot. Lieutenant was just standing there: giving orders, rallying the boys when he got hit.”

Turning, Crawford hollered out above the withering gunfire. “Get me Surgeon Stephens!”

All about them officers and sergeants were barking their orders, passing down commands from Mills, who remained on the east side of the village, orders to establish a skirmish line at the southern and western edges of the village. It was there the warriors had re-formed and were just then beginning to snipe at the soldiers who now had full possession of their lodges.

Assistant Surgeon Charles R. Stephens trotted past, swinging an overstuffed haversack in each hand, right behind a pair of soldiers who were hurrying him to a hillside on the east side of camp.

“—in the leg,” one of the troopers said in a fragment Seamus overhead. “The knee.”

“Dammit,” Mills growled as he emerged from the fog. He turned to a knot of soldiers down on their knees, carbines at the ready. The captain tapped one of them on the shoulder. “Trooper, I want you to carry my orders to the officers you can find—tell them we don’t have time now to commence the destruction of the village. They must forget it for now. Instead I’m ordering every unit to set up a defensive perimeter. Skirmishers out—and hold, by God! You understand my orders?”

The soldier’s head bobbed, almost as hard as his Adam’s apple did. “Yessircolonel.”

“Just hold the line! Got that?” He nudged the soldier away. “Now, go!”

Mills turned around, finding Donegan. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered with a shake of his head. “We need reinforcements. We need more ammunition. We need to hold the line until Crook can get up here with the rest. Jesus,” he sighed, ripping his hat from his head and shaking the rain from it before he planted it back atop his greasy hair.

“We got our hands full—that’s for sure,” Donegan replied. “Holding that herd Schwatka captured. Keeping the warriors out of this village.”

Mills nodded, his grim face creased with a look of determination. “Just holding on … like Powder River, isn’t it, Mr. Donegan?”

“Yes,” Seamus replied. “And we will hold on—just like we done at the Powder.”

“Colonel Mills!”

They both turned to find a soldier hurrying up, a guidon flapping in his hand.

“What you have there?” Mills demanded.

“Private William J. McClinton, C Troop, sir,” the soldier huffed. “Found this in a lodge while I was … was—”

“Finding yourself something to eat, Private?” Seamus asked in interruption.

McClinton eyed the Irishman sheepishly. “Some meat, yeah. Then this caught my eye.”

“Mine too,” Donegan said, taking hold of the edge of the guidon, turning to Mills. “From Custer’s bunch at the Little Bighorn.”

Grabbing the guidon, Mills said, “Bloody damn! It confirms this bunch helped destroy the Seventh.”

“I’d be proud to give you it, Colonel,” McClinton said effusively.

“You’re sure, Private?”

“Absolutely, sir.”

“Thank you! Thank you, soldier,” Mills responded. “Go finish getting yourself something to eat, then get back on the skirmish line. That’s where I need every last man.”

“I’ll do just that,” the private said. “We’re having a hot time of it, ain’t we, Colonel?”

“What do you make of that, Mr. Bourke?”

“Don’t know, General.”

John squinted into the misty distance while he reached back for his saddlebag and pulled out the field glasses. Training them on the distant objects that bobbed and swam like dark insects behind sheets of hard rain, he slowly spun the adjustment wheel.

Crook waited patiently beside him as the others came to a halt behind them. “More hunters?”

“I can’t be sure,” Bourke began. “But—it doesn’t appear to be warriors. No feathers.”

“Let me have a look,” George Crook said.

That morning at breakfast there wasn’t enough grease to fry their ration of horse meat, so the lieutenant had broiled both his and the general’s at the end of a stick held over the fire. No coffee left them to wash it down. Only gritty water the color of buttermilk.

In a cold downpour that began at dawn, the company commanders had inspected their men, cavalry captains counting what half-dead horses still remained in service. These were formed up, and what troopers had been put afoot fell in behind their scarecrow comrades mounted on the bony animals. It didn’t take long for the column to string itself across the hills. Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Carr’s Fifth Cavalry was assigned that day to close the file and bring up the stragglers. Because of the plodding pace of the rest of the command, the Fifth hadn’t yet been given orders to mount up, much less to move out. They were still in camp almost an hour after Crook and his headquarters staff had set off.

After making no more than five miles Crook and Bourke had halted briefly at a creek they were attempting to identify from their obscure maps.

Perhaps the South Fork of the Grand, suggested one of the staff.

No, said another. Must be the North Fork of the Owl or Moreau River.

That’s when Bourke and the rest caught sight of the two riders.

“They’ve seen us!” Walter Schuyler shouted.

“And they’re coming in,” John added, watching the pair through the field glasses as the two horsemen put their animals into an uneven, labored gallop. “They’re white men, General.”

Crook mused, “Couriers from Mills?”

“Could he have run across something, General?” Wesley Merritt asked.

“Let’s go find out,” George Crook said, putting heels to his horse’s flanks.

For the better part of the next ten minutes they moved ahead, watching the approach of the pair, one a packer, the other a ragged soldier.

“General Crook! General Crook!” the civilian hollered, repeating it several times as he drew close enough for the soldiers to hear his words.

“George Herman, General!” he rasped when he came to a halt.

Crook asked, “You’re one of Tom Moore’s men, aren’t you?”

“Served you since Arizona, sir.” And he took a big gulp of air.

Bourke watched the soldier at Herman’s side, tight-lipped, his eyes filled with dread. “Are you coming from Mills?”

The packer nodded. “Lieutenant Bubb asked that scout Jack Crawford to carry this, but he refused to come. So Bubb give us the best two horses he had,” and Herman stuffed a hand inside both his coat and shirt to pull out a crumpled piece of folded paper he presented to the general. “But we was both ready to come on foot if these here horses give out, General.”

“This is from Mills?”

“Bubb, General.” As Crook tore the paper open and read, the civilian continued, explaining to the other officers, “Colonel’s gone and captured a village of Sioux. He ordered Lieutenant Bubb to send you the word that he’s took the village but he ain’t sure he can hold on to it.”

“Can’t hold on to it?” Crook snarled as his head snapped up. “What’s he gotten himself into, Mr. Herman?”

“Forty-one lodges they counted,” Herman answered. “Got a pony herd surrounded, and they’re holding off the warriors best they can, General. Red devils acting like they want the village back real bad, and they got our boys surrounded pretty good. But we’re putting up a hot fight of it.”

“Where exactly?”

Twisting atop the bare back of his played-out horse, the packer pointed. “South of here along the buttes. Maybe eighteen, no more’n twenty miles.”

Now for the first time the soldier spoke up, his eyes animated. “Damn, but we figured we’d have to ride all day before we come on you, General. Lieutenant Bubb reminded us you said you was keeping the whole column in bivouac.”

“Thank God I didn’t!” Crook grumped as he raised his eyes from the hurriedly written dispatch in his hands. “Says here that Grouard states it’s a village commanded by Roman Nose—a Brule. Says the place is filled with supplies.”

“That’s damned good news, sir!” Merritt cheered. “These men could use a change of diet.”

The soldier courier pressed, “Colonel requests you hurry reinforcements, General.”

Schuyler asked, “Has Mills taken any casualties?”

Nodding, the trooper responded, “Lieutenant Von Leuttwitz, and another, I think a corporal.”

Royall shrieked, “Von Leuttwitz—killed?”

“Wounded, sir,” the courier answered. “Pretty bad, though. But the corporal’s dead.”

“Damn,” Crook muttered, folding the paper up and stuffing it inside his wool coat. “Mills doesn’t have near the ammunition he’ll need to hold on to that village if the enemy makes it hard on his men.”

“I pray we can get there in time with these played-out horses,” Merritt complained.

Crook stared into the distance a moment longer, then turned to his officers. “We won’t get there in a hurry like this, gentlemen. We must send only our best—push ahead as fast as they can march.”

“Our best?” Royall inquired.

“I want each of your battalions to strip itself for a forced march,” Crook ordered. “Only those horses and men capable of making the race to save Mills.”

“General! Looks as if there’s another rider coming in!” Schuyler called out.

They all twisted in their saddles, watching the distant speck galloping their way.

“Let’s just pray this isn’t news that Mills has been overrun,” Merritt murmured almost under his breath.

“Yes, General,” Crook agreed. “Let’s pray your reinforcements can get there in time to save those men.”