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

Chapter 39

9 September 1876

“Mills has his back to the wall,” Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Carr told the officers of the Fifth Cavalry in the hearing of his troopers, who pressed close when he returned from the head of the column. “And Crook’s ordered us to save him.”

He then went on to inform his men that a third courier had reached headquarters with a second dispatch for the general. “At the time the rider left, Mills already had one dead, and six wounded. He’s called for more surgeons, as well as reinforcements and ammunition.”

Ordering his company commanders to break out all those men incapable of making the race, leaving behind every horse unable to carry its rider at a trot, the officers were told to stand what was left by companies and prepare for inspection. As the word spread through them like Sioux prairie fire, those once dejected, disgusted, and demoralized men within moments became alert and eager, rejuvenated and ready for whatever toil might be asked of them.

Even the lieutenant, whose old Arizona arrow wound was daily growing more aggravated by the continuing cold and dampness.

After their long and fruitless chase Charles King could understand that radical change of spirit overcoming every man as the lieutenant began working down the line of what troopers still had horses. It was going to be damned disappointing for a man to learn he was being left behind, King brooded. Hell, it hurt him when he ended up having to tell the lightest man in the whole regiment that he wasn’t going to make that ride.

“But, Lieutenant King—”

“No more complaints, Lieutenant London,” King snapped, moving down the line.

The next trooper and horse were no better a pair, except that soldier weighed twice what wiry Second Lieutenant Robert London weighed.

“Sorry, Mullins. You’re staying back. Fall out.”

“Lieutenant!” cried London, leaping to King’s side. “Lemme ride Mullins’s horse.”

King shook his head, saying, “I just said he wasn’t going.”

“Look,” London pleaded, “I can’t make my own horse carry me any ten miles, sir. But I can ride Mullins’s horse: he’ll carry my weight there, every inch of the way.”

“Take him, Lieutenant London,” Mullins said, handing the small man his reins.

The wiry trooper asked, “It’s all right, Lieutenant?”

“If Mullins doesn’t mind—you can ride in with us.”

“Hurrah!” London cheered as King stepped away, on down that pitiful front of scarecrow soldiers and their bone-rack horses.

One by one the officer inspected the readiness of Carr’s men and horses, ordering more than a third to fall out and come along with the infantry. By the time he was done, King turned and looked over those who would be making the dash, what men and mounts Carr would lead in that race south to rescue Mills. For a moment doubt gripped his heart. Maybe it was the sight of those bony horses. Perhaps it was those scarecrowlike soldiers. King wasn’t sure … but then, all around the lieutenant, up and down the entire column, men began to cheer and spirits rose higher than they had been in many a week.

“We’ll get in our licks now!”

“Hope Mills saves some action for us!”

“I’ll take a scalp of my own!”

“I’ll take Crazy Horse’s hair myself!”

In less than fifteen minutes Merritt had 17 officers and 250 men selected from the three regimental battalions, in addition to a pair of doctors—Medical Director Bennett Clements and Assistant Surgeon Valentine McGillycuddy— who would accompany the relief column with their trio of pack-mules laden with medical supplies.

Just past seven o’clock that dreary, cheerless morning, the rescue began.

“Column of twos!” rang the command that bounced back from the nearby hills. “At a trot! Forward!”

Into the teeth of a cold rain they set out on that desperate charge at double time, loping across the gumbo-laced landscape, those starving troopers clinging to the McClellan saddles cinched around the ribs of pitiful, played-out horses. But for the moment, for the next few hours, for the rest of this glorious day—these men had something other to think about than their aching bellies.

It wasn’t long before those cavalry officers who were left behind organized their remaining men and animals, then marched out on foot with Major Chambers’s infantry, dogging the backtrail of Merritt’s rescue command. How little it mattered that earlier that morning they all had awakened hungry, wet and cold, utterly weary, discouraged, and disheartened.

All that was suddenly forgotten now that their privations had served a purpose. The enemy was but a few miles ahead.

At long last they would get in their licks.

“Here, Irishman—take part of what I found,” one of M Company’s troopers said as he handed a chunk of the agency tobacco to the civilian.

Seamus answered, “Thanks. I’ll keep it for later.” He slipped it down into a pocket of his rain-soaked mackinaw.

Besides some meat, in those first few minutes that the soldiers claimed possession of the village, they also found a good supply of reservation tobacco—the worst grade of the product there ever could be—but it was tobacco nonetheless, and the soldiers had been without for far too long. Most of the men stuffed a chunk inside their cheek before the officers got them hurrying off to the skirmish lines Mills was establishing around the captured lodges.

Grouard said, “One of the soldiers rooting through the lodges come up with some money.”

“Money?”

“Army scrip—pay bills,” Grouard replied.

“A lot?”

The half-breed grinned. “Fella told me he counted more’n eleven thousand.”

“Dollars?” Seamus exclaimed. “Sweet Mither of Heaven!”

“Custer’s money.”

Donegan nodded, remembering. “Took off all them dead we run onto.”

“And another bunch of soldiers just come across a little girl,” Grouard went on to explain. “They was digging through the lodges looking for army ammunition, and when they pulled back a big stack of robes and blankets, up jumps this little girl—no more’n eight or nine winters old—crying and screaming so hard she flushed all them soldiers right out of the lodge!”

“Why the hell did the troopers get scared off by a little girl?”

“I suppose they figured she was screaming so hard there had to be bigger Injuns in the lodge—so she could warn others she was found.”

“What’d the sojurs do with her?”

Grouard answered, “Mills come over and took her back by the hospital tent, where he gave her something to eat, make friendly with her. Says he’s gonna adopt her.”

At the moment Lieutenant Von Leuttwitz had fallen beside Mills, scout Jack Crawford had rushed up and torn off his colorful bandanna, quickly tying it above the right knee to act as a tourniquet. Then the biggest man in the village, Sergeant John A. Kirkwood, gamely looped the semiconscious Von Leuttwitz’s arms around his own shoulders, and righted himself with the lieutenant on his back for a clumsy, lumbering ride into camp to find Dr. Clements.

For a precious few minutes the firing died off. And the men felt cocky enough to believe they had control of the village, believing they had driven off the Sioux they hadn’t been able to capture. The quiet wasn’t to last very long.

It didn’t take the warriors more than a few minutes to get their families out of danger before they turned back to snipe at the soldiers, harassing the white men not only from the rocky walls west of the village, but from just about any point of ground high enough where they could take a shot or two at the white men busy among the lodges. It wasn’t long before the Sioux marksmen were even walking bullets in close to the surgeons’ hospital. Mills wasted no time before he called off the looting of the lodges, deciding it could wait until the rest of the command came up.

For now they had only to keep the warriors back, to hold on to the village. For a day and a half at least.

Maybe by tomorrow morning at the earliest, help would arrive.

Crook was at least twenty-five miles behind them. It would take the rest of that day for Bubb’s courier to reach the general—if the trooper wasn’t picked off by a hunting party wandering out of the other camps in the area. By the time Crook could get a relief force saddled up and ready on what second-class horses they had left, then punished those animals to hurry here to the village—why, it would be morning at the earliest. If all went well.

Hell, Seamus brooded gloomily—if all went well, there might even be some of them still here to rescue when Crook’s relief rolled in.

A few minutes after the Sioux warriors began to heat things up once again, Mills ordered both Bubb and Crawford to take platoons of men to the south and west of camp, with instructions to prepare rifle pits where pickets could keep some of the pressure off the village itself. Just before he took his detail to the skirmish line, Bubb ordered one of his hardy veterans to a high and rocky butte less than a mile away to the north of the hostile camp, where the soldier was to watch for Crook’s relief party and signal when the reinforcements came in sight.

From his pack-mules Bubb handed out a dozen folding spades, really nothing more than collapsible entrenchment tools, to his fatigue detail. Across the creek to the southeast they found four or five shallow buffalo wallows the men immediately went to work on deepening. One wallow in particular faced the brush-covered mouth of a narrow ravine southwest of the village. There the soldiers could see glimpses of a hole the camp’s children had dug in the bank of the coulee, enough to excavate a shallow cave of sorts. To that cave burrowed back in the ravine, a group of warriors, women, and children had fled in the first minutes of the attack and were now beginning to take shots at Bubb’s riflemen as they dug themselves in.

“We can flush ’em, Sergeant!” declared Private John Wenzel, A Troop, Third Cavalry. “All we gotta do is make things a little hot on ’em with some lead flying in there, and they’ll come running out, begging for their lives.”

“We’ve got ’em trapped like rats,” agreed M Troop’s blacksmith, Albert Glavinski, “with nowhere to run.”

“Are you game, Sergeant Kirkwood?” asked E Troop’s sergeant, Edward Glass.

“I suppose we can’t go wrong if we rush ’em together,” replied M Troop’s John A. Kirkwood.

Yet as soon as the four crawled over the lip of their rifle pit, Private Wenzel was driven backward against Kirkwood with a sickening crunch of bone as a bullet from the ravine smashed into his head. Before they could react from the surprise, more lead whined among the soldiers.

A bullet entered Sergeant Glass’s right wrist, tearing out his elbow, shattering the arm and making it useless.

Nearby Kirkwood whirled, sensing the heat of a bullet’s path along his back. He spilled down the side of the pit and lay gasping at the bottom. Bringing his bloody hand away from the wound, he asked Glavinski, “How … how is it?”

The blacksmith shook his head in disbelief and replied, “Just a flesh wound, Sarge. Only grazed you. But another inch, and it’d cut your backbone in two.”

“Damn,” Kirkwood growled, peering at the pulpy mass at the back of Private Wenzel’s head. “Shame about him. He knew more about a horse than any other man of us.”

Within heartbeats Anson Mills dashed up to the pit as other soldiers pulled the casualties back among the lodges toward the surgeon’s hospital. “How many are in there?”

No one seemed to have an answer.

It was then and there the captain determined to send that third courier to press his point, to tell Crook that he was already taking casualties and running low on ammunition. Praying that Bubb’s couriers or that third rider—one of them—would get through and bring on their rescue.

“Forget the ravine for now,” Mills wisely told his men. “We’ll wait until the column gets here to smoke them out.”

At nearly the same time, Crawford’s detail began having a hot session of it driving a fiery knot of warriors from some of the lowest rungs of the nearby bluffs. For those few minutes while the Sioux moved higher up the ridges, Crawford’s soldiers began to dig in for the long haul. From those and Bubb’s improvised pits, the cavalrymen could now hold the sniping warriors a bit more at bay, pushed back from the camp itself where the Sioux had been making things tough on the wounded and the horse-holders. Each time the warriors made an abortive attempt to charge the two hundred ponies that soldiers were guarding, Crawford’s men turned them back with cool and deliberate fire.

Most of the rest of his men Mills positioned on the low bluffs directly to the north and east of the camp, where they could command a good view of those warriors who had secured themselves on the rocky shelves that ascended the buttes from the prairie floor.

Not long after Mills had secured the village and drove the Sioux fleeing from the perimeter, Dr. Clements had requested that a lodge at the center of camp be saved for the hospital. In it he and Assistant Surgeon Stephens already had Von Leuttwitz and another seriously wounded soldier, Private Orlando H. Duren of E Troop, Third Cavalry, stretched out on the buffalo-hide bedding as the minor skirmishing continued unabated.

As soon as Sioux marksmen set up shop on the rocky terraces above the village and began to rain rifle fire down on the lodges, Clements asked Mills to help with moving his hospital. Dragging the agonized Von Leuttwitz, Duren, Kirkwood, and Glass from the lodge into the open on buffalo robes, a half-dozen soldiers then quickly dismantled the lodge and moved the poles to the gentle slope of a hillside north of the Indian camp. There the troopers did their best to rewrap the poles with the heavy, sodden buffalo-hide cover before Clements and Stephens helped their stewards drag the wounded back inside.

Before long the coming day’s light was brightly reflected from the chalk-colored buttes north and west of camp, helping to dissipate the wispy fog from all but the lowest places in that first half hour of fighting. Behind gaps in those castle-rampart-like ridges, Mills and the others had watched mounted warriors parading back and forth for some time.

“They’ve sent runners to the other villages,” was the rumor that too quickly became anxiety as morning began to grow around them with the sun’s rising. “They’re coming back with more warriors’n you can shake a stick at.”

Nothing Donegan could think of would counter the truth in that. Fact was, they knew there were other villages in the area. They had failed to surround the camp and seal up its occupants before nearly all the Sioux escaped.Chances were damned good that warriors from this camp were already speeding to other hostile bands in the area, spreading the alarm.

“Shoot only when you’ve got yourself a clear target!” À sergeant nearby passed on the order that was rapidly becoming general throughout the skirmish lines.

“Murph’s right,” another veteran sergeant agreed. “We gotta save every bullet and make it count.”

This was perhaps the greatest danger: Mills’s attack force being put under siege while they slowly, ran out of ammunition, and in the end were overrun by reinforcements coming in from other camps because they simply had no more bullets left and Crook was still miles away.

Maybe they were all fools to believe the column could get there in time. Perhaps it would be better, Seamus considered, for them to take care of themselves here and now.

“If we found the guidon, Colonel,” Donegan explained, “that means this bunch fought at the Little Bighorn.”

“We know that,” Mills replied, worry in his voice.

“And if this bunch fought the soldiers there, they likely picked up some of the weapons and some of the ammunition off Custer’s dead, stole out of the saddle pockets of the Seventh’s horses.”

“What are you driving at?” Mills growled. “Trying to cheer me up, Irishman?”

Seamus wagged his head. “No. Don’t you understand? That means we might find some cartridges—”

“Among the plunder from the lodges!” Mills exclaimed. “Brilliant!”

The captain immediately sent a dozen men to quickly scour through the lodges again—but not for food this time. For ammunition.

Nearby a soldier came out of a lodge jingling a small leather pouch filled with copper cartridges. With his other hand he greedily ate some cold meat. Not far off three women prisoners and an old man began to laugh, pointing at the soldier.

Seamus said, “Frank—ask them why they’re laughing at that soldier.”

After a few moments of talk back and forth, Grouard turned and said, “They asked me if I knew what kind of meat they had in their lodges. Said I figured it was buffalo, maybe antelope. So they laughed at me and said the soldiers ain’t give ’em enough time to be hunting buffalo, and the antelope hunting has been poor.”

His eyes narrowing, Donegan asked, “So what kind of meat is it?”

“Nothing we ain’t been used to lately,” Grouard answered with a wry grin. “Seems everybody in this country took to eating horse and pony.”

“What the hell you think Captain Jack’s up to?” Grouard asked a minute later.

Not far away the white scout Crawford hurried down the slope of a hill standing to the north of the village, pulling one of the packers’ mules behind him. At Crawford’s shoulder ran newsman Robert Strahorn. They stopped at the first crude rack of poles erected outside a lodge and began to tear the strips of drying meat from the rack, stuffing them into the canvas panniers lashed to either side of the mule’s sawbuck. In a momentary lull of fighting a shot suddenly echoed in that creek bottom. The mule sank on its forelegs, rolling onto its side as Crawford and Strahorn dived for cover behind a lodge.

“Hey, Lieutenant!” the poet scout hollered out.

On a nearby hill Frederick Schwatka answered, “What can I do for you, Crawford?”

“We got us a sniper out there.”

“Shit, we have us a whole passel of snipers!” the lieutenant bellowed.

“How ’bout seeing if you can catch sight of any smoke over yonder that will tell us where that sniper’s laying in.”

“Can’t see any gun smoke, Crawford!”

“You just watch with them glasses of yours now,” Crawford hollered. “He’ll be sure to make a try for me when I come out!”

Up bolted the white guide, jumping from cover and sprinting to the far edge of the creekbed some fifty feet away, where he turned in the slippery mud, then raced back as another shot rang out just as he reached his hiding place.

“The sniper ought to be over there,” Crawford instructed, huffing and breathless. “Try your glasses over by that big tree.”

Sure enough, Schwatka wasn’t long in declaring, “I got him in sight, Jack.”

Crawford asked, “Send some of your boys over to root him out, will you?”

After a squad of the lieutenant’s men made short work of the sniper, Strahorn and the scout went back to the dead mule and succeeded in pulling free one of the canvas panniers, filling it with the stringy pony meat they took to share between the hospital and those officers overseeing the fight from the nearby hilltop north of the village.

“What they yelling about now, Frank?” Donegan asked minutes later when some warriors among the rocky ledges across the creek began to holler again.

“They say Crazy Horse is coming.”

“Crazy Horse,” Seamus repeated. “His own self, eh?”

“They say there’s a lot of camps in the area—just what I told Mills before he got us in this fix.”

“So Crazy Horse is gonna come rescue the Sioux before Crook can come rescue us—that it?”

Grouard nodded. “Something like that, yeah.”

“Hey, cheer up, you damned half-breed,” Donegan said. “Just remember that Crazy Horse doesn’t know what we know.”

“What do we know he don’t?”

“That Crook’s coming.”

Frank wagged his head. “Yeah. He’s coming. But he might just get here too late to help us.”

Donegan looked around at the village, letting Grouard wallow in his despair. They had flushed the enemy from their homes and driven them into the hills, driven them up the bluffs that commanded a view of the camp. True, Mills did control the village and half of the hostiles’ pony herd— but the captain hadn’t been able to capitalize on his victory. A fierce and determined counterattack by the Sioux had forced the soldiers to dig in and establish a defensive perimeter, fighting with what they had left of their meager and dwindling ammunition.

“No matter what,” Seamus finally remarked as he watched the movement of warriors on the distant shelves along the face of the bluffs, “at least Crook’s got him his first victory of this goddamned Sioux war.”

“Forty lodges,” Grouard replied. “It ain’t much, is it?”

“After months of frustration, trailing the hostiles all over the territory—I’ll bet the army will take what victory they can get after disappointments at the Powder River and the Rosebud, after Custer was butchered at the Little Bighorn.”

Grouard grinned. “Any little win better than nothing, eh?”

“I guess we’ll just have to wait till Crook gets here,” Seamus said morosely a while later.

“Yes, Irishman. Crook or Crazy Horse,” Grouard replied. “We just have to see who gets to us first.”