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

Chapter 40

Moon When Leaves Turn Brown

American Horse thought they would be safe camped beside Rabbit Lip Creek at the foot of the cliffs that nearly enclosed their village on three sides. These bluffs had been carved over time by rain and melting snow, cut by smaller ravines and larger canyons running jaggedly to the valley floor, sculpted by the ever-present wind that blew along their heights to form every terrace, every one of the shelves that made climbing easy for the children who came here to play.

As protected as this place was, still the soldiers had found them.

Long time back scouts said the soldiers divided. Some staying on the Yellowstone while another army marched east, then turned south on the trail of American Horse’s own Miniconjou and the other villages camped in the area. But, those scouts reported, the soldiers were running out of time: their horses were failing them, and more than half of the white men were already afoot.

Most of the old men agreed that the soldiers were not a threat. The army could not travel fast enough to catch up to American Horse’s people before the Miniconjou reached Bear Butte.

But now he peered through the leafy bullberry and other brush at the mouth of the ravine where he and some of his people had fled with the opening shots—as the ponies thundered through camp and the soldier bullets fell on the taut lodge skins soaked by days of rain like the falling of hailstones.

Out there on the muddy side of the creek bottom lay Little Eagle’s granddaughter, only minutes old when the soldiers attacked. The young mother had no husband, for he was one of those killed in their great victory over the soldiers on the Greasy Grass. A glorious death!

But now Little Eagle’s daughter was alone. Without a husband she lived again with her parents while her time drew close. She carried a warrior’s child in her belly.

With the first hoofbeats, warning shouts, and gunfire, she had stumbled from her birthing bed with the newborn infant wrapped beneath her blanket, frightened and screaming while Little Eagle slashed a hole in the side of the lodge and her mother shoved her into the cold wind and rain. Around them madness swirled as ponies and people stampeded out of camp, away from the hairy-mouths and their angry guns.

Running for the creek bottom, the woman had been struck by a bullet. As the mother fell, the newborn pitched from her arms into the brush. The soldier’s bullet had passed through the mother’s shoulder and smashed into the infant’s head the instant before the woman stumbled and fell.

Forced to leave everything behind but what they had on their backs, American Horse and his woman came across the young mother moments later in their own escape, finding her blood seeping into the puddle of mud below her. They bent to lift her, raising her between them, and quickly hurried on, dragging the young mother into the ravine with them. Already there were some hiding back in the shallow cave. No matter that there was little room in that cave—the tangled brush and a few short trees hid them all, and the soldiers could not see into the ravine.

At the same time, American Horse and the others could watch everything happening on this west side of the village without being discovered. At least not until the soldiers dug a rifle pit and one soldier started to approach the ravine.

Moments ago he and the other warriors had decided they would give up their lives at a terrible price—killing as many of the white men as they could until they were rushed. Still, American Horse kept praying to the Great Mystery that help would come from the other villages.

Sitting Bull and his warriors. Crazy Horse’s fighting men.

Maybe they would not have to wait long until someone came to rescue them. But until rescue came, American Horse and the other men would guard the ravine the way a sow grizzly defended her cubs.

If necessary, they would give up their lives to save their families.

Knowing that Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull would soon be here to avenge their deaths.

Fifteen more horses gave out in Crook’s push to rescue Mills. Fifteen more troopers put afoot to follow along the best they could.

After punishing their mounts through the mud and the mist, through the gumbo and sheets of driving rain at a trot for some four and a half hours, the cavalry came into earshot of the village. Charles King could hear sporadic gunfire echo from the chalky bluffs that hulked beneath the low-hung clouds.

Some two dozen warriors surprised some of the rescuers when they swept over the brow of a hill at the rear of the column’s march, waving blankets and snapping pieces of rawhide, shouting and blowing on whistles to frighten off what they could of the trail-hammered horses stumbling along on the tail end of things. As soon as some of Captain Henry E. Noyes’s battalion of the Second Cavalry halted and fired a volley in their direction, the hostiles withdrew out of carbine range.

“This is part of the bunch that butchered Custer!” hollered one of Mills’s men who rushed up on foot, waving some object as the men of King’s K Troop drew up.

“Dismount!”

More than two hundred dropped to the ground raggedly, their worn-out horses shuddering, troopers flinging rain off their coats and gum ponchos.

King called out to the Third Cavalry soldier, “Let me see what you have there!”

He trotted over, shaking a cream-colored, blood-splattered glove for all to see. “Just take yourself a lookee here, Lieutenant. These here was Captain Keogh’s gauntlets— read for yerself. Got his own name right inside!”

“And the red devils got their goods off them goddamned agencies!” attested another soldier trotting up to the crowd knotted around King, holding up a half-filled flour sack emblazoned with the stamp of the Indian Bureau.

Glancing around at the dead ponies sprawled in the mud, the lieutenant quickly assessed the scene and handed the gauntlet back, saying, “Looks like you fellas have hung on by the skin of your teeth.”

“Yes, sir,” the trooper with the bloody gauntlets replied. “Colonel Mills was never a man to let go once he’s sunk in his teeth.”

“Yup. Just like a bulldog,” the second soldier responded. “Once he’s got a village in his jaws, Mills won’t let go.”

“Good for him!” King cheered, then turned to give his squads their skirmish orders, sensing the hot flare of pain shoot through that old Apache arrow wound. The continued cold did this, every time. He swallowed down the bile that threatened to come up. No matter. There wasn’t much of anything in his stomach to begin with.

“General Carr!” Anson Mills shouted, jogging up. “Good to see you!”

“What’s your situation?” Carr inquired as he swung down from the saddle of his weary horse.

“We’re holding,” Mills replied, recapturing his breath. “We’ve got possession of the village, but the hostiles have the heights above us. Lieutenants Bubb and Crawford have skirmishers dug in and holding the perimeter from lunettes and rifle pits. There is one troublesome bunch of holdouts. Down there, sir.”

“In the creek bottom?” Carr inquired.

“Against the south bank,” Mills explained. “We’ve got some of them trapped in there. They’re socked in there real good. So good they’ve already killed one of my men and wounded at least three others.”

“Perhaps we should avoid that ravine for now, Colonel.”

“As you wish, General.”

“We’ll let Crook decide what he wants to do with that bunch when he comes in.”

Mills asked, “Is the general coming with the rest of the column?”

“No, he came with us,” Carr answered, looking behind them. “Should be here any minute.”

“Grouard informs me that he fears some of the escapees have gone to alert the other villages in the area.”

Carr appeared grave. “Other villages, eh?”

“Yes, sir,” Mills said, his eyes alive with something more than worry now. “So I’ve got most of my men holding a picket line to the south. Watchful for any hostile reinforcements.”

Carr turned to some of his officers and sent them off with orders to bolster Mills’s skimpy defenses.

“Damn, sir—but it’s good to see your men show up so quickly,” Mills said effusively. “With as much ground as the couriers had to cover, I was fearful it wouldn’t be until tomorrow morning at the earliest until—”

“Crook was lucky this time, Colonel,” Carr interrupted.“Instead of laying over in camp as he had planned, we pushed on. It likely saved us a day in getting to you.”

“And in all probability it saved my command, General.”

“But you’ve held on, Colonel Mills. Job well-done!”

“Thank you, General! I’m damned proud of my men: called on to move through the darkness and pitch into a village of unknown strength raised here in the heart of an unknown wilderness on the heels of the Custer disaster. You can bet I’m proud of these soldiers!”

Crook came into camp near the tail end of the rescue column, hearing the warnings of Mills and the rest concerning snipers. Instead of taking cover where he could direct the fight from a position of safety, he chose to wade right into the action himself. The general had Bourke and Schuyler plant his personal flag on the highest knoll northeast of the village proper. At the same time, Carr established his regiment’s headquarters a little to the west of the village. And when Merritt rolled in, he chose to raise his flag a ways to the north of Carr, on the hillside where Schwatka had begun his charge.

There was little need to picket or sideline the horses. Most of the outfits decided there simply wasn’t enough strength left in any of the animals that would allow the warriors to run them off. Instead the companies sent their horse-holders back a few hundred yards to the north and well behind the skirmish lines, taking the horses to the narrow feeder creeks, where they could be watered and allowed to graze after their punishing race.

Taking K Troop to the picket line, Lieutenant King glanced over the village, counting thirty-seven lodges, along with four more sets of lodgepoles standing on the periphery without any hide covers.

As King squatted down in a muddy buffalo wallow, joining the weary troopers already there, an old sergeant in the Third Cavalry growled, “These sonsabitches been sucking at the government teat, they have, Lieutenant.”

“Sort of like the rest of us, eh?” the officer replied.

“I’m serious, Lieutenant,” the soldier said with a sharp wag of his head, his bushy eyebrows narrowing so that it appeared the two had become one. Tobacco juice dribbled from his lower lip, darkening the crease that ran from the corner of his mouth into the yellow-stained bristle of white chin whiskers. “In them lodges back there we found us some reservation tobacco, ’long with agency cloth and corn. A goodly bunch of flour sacks too.”

King shuddered. “Hell—if you’re half-right, Sergeant—sounds like the government’s been feeding these Indians better than it has us!”

With the way Crook’s rescue column got itself strung out in that four-and-a-half-hour trot, the head of Chambers’s infantry was right on the heels of Merritt’s straggling cavalry riding to the rescue by the time those last horse soldiers came in sight of the village.

Except for that time back in seventy-two when he had expected Captain Jack’s Modoc to kill him in the Oregon Lava Beds,* Seamus couldn’t remember when he had been so glad to see the homely faces of so many soldiers. God, was it good to have the company!

As soon as Crook assessed the scene and put plenty of men out on the picket lines, he gave Mills’s attack force first crack at any and all souvenirs they could pull from the lodges before he ordered details to go in search of everything edible in the camp. Only then, he said, would he get serious about the destruction of the Sioux village.

“I’ll wager he remembers how stupid Reynolds was on the Powder,” Donegan told Grouard.

“Damn right,” Frank replied. “All that food and them buffalo robes Reynolds had his soldiers burn. Could’ve filled our bellies and kept us warm, they would.”

What a horn of plenty the Sioux lodges proved to be: besides flour, corn, beans, and tins of jellied fruit, the men found haunches of freshly killed game as well as over two tons of dried meat. Little matter that it might be pony meat. No one with a hungry belly complained.

In addition to the food, soldiers dragged out all sorts of saddles and harness, bolts of calico, cloth dresses and shirts, iron cookware and kettles, along with some tinware—including plates, knives, and spoons. As well, they counted more than two thousand raw buffalo, elk, deer, and antelope hides the women had yet to flesh and tan. And the soldiers found more than a hundred blankets inked with the stenciled letters: USID.*

Still, one pile drew the greatest attention as more and more plunder was laid atop the growing mound where Crook himself stood in silence, watching as cases of ammunition, cartons of percussion caps, revolvers, old muzzle-loading fusils, and modern repeating carbines were all thrown into the heap. And a man had only to watch the general’s face to read the simmering anger written there as soldiers discovered more and more souvenirs taken from the Little Bighorn in those lodges destined for destruction.

Besides the I Company guidon and Captain Myles Keogh’s buckskin gauntlets, the troopers found more than a dozen McClellan saddles. Among the pony herd Lieutenant Schwatka’s men reported counting at least three bearing the Seventh Cavalry brand. From here and there soldiers brought up a handful of orderly books in which some of the Indians had begun to draw their pictographs; more cash and army scrip; an officer’s blouse; a great many letters written to and by members of Custer’s ill-fated five companies, some sealed and ready for posting home to families and loved ones at the time those companies marched down into the valley of the Little Bighorn.

“Give them all to Lieutenant Schuyler,” a stoic Crook instructed as the process continued. “We’ll see they are posted as soon as we reach Camp Robinson.”

For Donegan, just looking at those letters was like catching glimpses of anonymous ghosts.

Seamus put his hand inside his own wet coat, his fingers brushing the small bundle of letters he kept tied with one of Samantha’s hair ribbons, stuffed deep in an inside pocket next to his heart. Here remembering the one who awaited his return, he found his heart heavy as a stone, saddened to think how these letters written by Custer’s fallen troopers would one day soon arrive at their destinations back east, reaching fathers and mothers, wives and children and young sweethearts—seeming so much like haunting voices from the dead.

As much as he thought those grim souvenirs might blacken the angry hearts of Crook’s fighting men, what angered some the most was the discovery of several “good conduct” certificates among the plunder pulled from the lodges. One had been issued the previous January just before the deadline when Sherman and Sheridan had given Crook a free hand to march after the winter roamers.

Spotted Tail Agency, Jan. 14, 1876 The bearer of this, Stabber, belonging to this agency, will travel north to visit his people. He will return to this agency within 90 days, without disturbing any white man. If he needs any little thing you will not lose by giving it to him. This is true.

F. C. Boucher

And another, written a month later, read:

Whitestone Agency, D.T., Feb., 1876 To any United States Indian Agent: This is to certify that Charging Crow, an Indian belonging to Santee’s band, is a true man to terms of the treaty, and uses all his influence with his people to do right. I cheerfully recommend him to favorable considerations of all.

Yours, respectfully,

E. A. Howard, United States Indian Agent

The more plunder the soldiers pulled from the lodges, the more rage there must have been among the warriors on the nearby hillsides who were forced to watch this looting of their camp. From time to time they were able to walk some of their bullets in among the troops at the skirmish line.

Nonetheless it was still an unknown number of Sioux who had taken refuge in that brushy ravine who were proving to be the most bothersome to Crook’s men working among the lodges. Near the outskirts of camp, the concealed snipers kept the soldiers ducking and diving for cover until Crook decided he had no choice but to clean out the ravine.

The winding coulee meandered back from the creekbank for more than two hundred yards into the side of a jagged spur of ridge jutting off the face of the chalky butte itself. Eroded to a depth of nearly twenty feet along its steep sides, its bottom extended in width from some fifteen feet to as narrow as six feet, all of it a tangle of brush. None of the soldiers could get a clear shot at the hostiles who had taken refuge in the ravine because of that matted snarl of thorns and buffalo berry—unless a man dared to get right up on the opening of the ravine.

One soldier lay dead already for trying.

With Crook’s arrival some of Tom Moore’s packers had chided the soldiers for their slowness to rush the enemy trapped in the ravine. But when the mule skinners and a few foolhardy troopers made their own rush, they were immediately repelled by an onslaught of rifle fire from the hidden marksmen.

In the face of such stubborn resistance, the general had no choice but to deploy troops to advance on the mouth of the ravine. They set up a constant, withering fire, shooting into the brush in an attempt to drive the occupants out while more and more soldiers gathered on the slopes of the hills north of the action to watch the show. Hidden in the brushy ravine, unseen women wailed and children cried out pitifully. Above the curious soldiers,warriors gathering along the ridge shelves shouted encouragement to those who were trapped. On the hillsides across the creek bottom from the ravine’s mouth stood several hundred troopers and foot soldiers, all soundly cursing the Indians cowering in their cave, venting their spleens at their cornered quarry.

Crook, Bourke, Schuyler, and the rest of the general’s staff took up position west of the ravine. Just to the east of them and closest to the mouth hunkered some of Crook’s scouts: Big Bat and Little Bat, with Buffalo Chips Charlie stretched out between the half-breeds, given the general’s orders to talk to the Indians in their own tongue and convince them to surrender.

As Seamus and Grouard watched, they could hear only bits of the scouts’ talk to those in the ravine, what with the clamor and gunfire and hellish din of soldiers and warriors all yelling themselves insensible, as well as the screaming and wails of those squaws and children snared in what surely must be a death trap.

“General,” scout White called out to Crook, “Big Bat tells me these Sioux are saying there’s more hostiles coming to jump us. Says Crazy Horse is camped nearby.”

“I couldn’t ask for a better birthday present,” Crook replied. “No matter that he’s a day late!”

Turning back to the half-breed scouts, White grumbled loudly as he crawled closer to the edge of the ravine, saying, “If you boys don’t have the nerve—I’ll show you a good shot myself!”

Once, then twice, the two half-breeds pulled at White’s legs, yanking him back from the exposed lip right below some thick brush.

“Leave me be, boys!” White hollered, trying to kick his legs free of the two scouts lying farther down the steep slope. “I can see one of the redskins in there, and I can put a bead on him in a heartbeat.”

One last time Big Bat reached out to get a new purchase on his fellow scout, but that third time White snapped his legs out of reach and rose slightly on his knees to quickly bring his carbine to his shoulder.

A bullet slammed him backward at the very instant that single gunshot thundered out of the ravine and rolled across the narrow creek bottom.

“Oh, God!” White groaned as he was flung down the embankment, his rifle tumbling out of his hand. “My God! I’m done for this time, boys!”

Garnier and Pourier scrambled down the muddy slope and were at his side in an instant. But it was plain to see by the bright, glistening stain on White’s chest that he was shot right through the heart. With his eyes fluttering, Charlie’s legs twitched convulsively for a moment more; then he went limp as his bowels voided.

“Lieutenant Clark!” Crook bellowed.

“Yes, General?” answered William Philo Clark, detached from the Second Cavalry to serve as one of Crook’s staff. Having come upriver by steamboat to join the expedition on the Yellowstone, he came bounding up to the general in a pair of fringed buckskin britches and a buckskin jacket, buttoned clear up to his throat, all of his clothes properly baptized with Dakota mud.

“Get those bastards!” Crook yelled as Clark loped up. “Call for volunteers, Mr. Clark! Twenty men—take them down there and clean out that nest of vipers!”

Clark saluted. “Very good, sir!”

Following the lieutenant, those men who had volunteered to flush the hostiles crouched forward more in a flurry of bravery and energy than in any good sense. Another barrage of shots from the ravine tore through the soldiers’ ranks. Private Edward Kennedy of C Troop, Fifth Cavalry, bellowed like a gutted hog as he went down, hit in both legs, most of one calf blown away and spurting blood in gouts. Nearby Private John M. Stevenson of Company I, Second Cavalry, dropped his carbine and wrapped both hands around his left ankle, blood oozing between his fingers as he pitched to the stream bottom, groaning in pain.

Along the side of the ridge at the top of the ravine some of the spectators pitched some burning brands into the brushy depths, but the torches had no effect on the hostiles, landing instead on damp ground where they were soon to snuff themselves out with no dry tinder to catch and hold the flames.

When more of the curious and angry onlookers edged forward, Crook ordered them back while Lieutenant Clark re-formed his men and prepared for a second rush of the ravine. From a protected lip near the mouth of the coulee, Clark had his volunteers fire three point-blank volleys into the brush. Each round of shots was followed by a renewed wail from the women and even more pitiful screams from the children.

“Call your men back, Lieutenant!” Crook finally ordered, his face showing the strain of frustration.

Clark’s volunteers gladly withdrew from their suicidal mission.

As the soldiers backed away from harm’s way, the general hollered at Grouard. “Frank—how many women and children do you suppose are in there?”

“No way I can say, General.”

At that moment close to a hundred soldiers swarmed off the slopes and into the creek bottom, rushing the mouth of the ravine, seething with their own anger. Lieutenant Clark was forced to stand, exposing himself to a bullet in the back from the hostiles in the coulee as he railed at the enraged soldiers, attempting to physically restrain some of those at the head of the mob.

On the nearby hillside Crook cried out like a scalded cat, ordering every last one of his officers to regain control of their men.

Lieutenant John Bourke and Captain Samuel Munson of the Ninth Infantry joined in, putting their bodies between the soldiers and the enemy. For fevered minutes it became a free-for-all there on the edge of the coulee, as much a wrestling match as a shouting and cursing fest. For all their stouthearted courage Bourke and Munson were overwhelmed and knocked off their feet, sent sailing into the depths of the ravine, where they landed among some women and children splattered with plenty of mud and blood, all of them screaming like banshees rising right out of the maw of hell at the sudden appearance of the soldiers in their midst.

Surprised and caught off guard, the warriors didn’t have time to turn from where they had been intently watching the mouth of the ravine in time to see the two white men before the pair of officers scrambled up the soft, giving side of the ravine, shrieking for help and hands to pull them to safety.

“Bejaysus, Johnny!” Donegan grumbled as he hauled back, yanking Bourke up the muddy, sodden side of the ravine.

The lieutenant landed squarely on Seamus as the screams of the women and children died behind them.

“Thanks, Irishman,” Bourke huffed breathlessly, his face smeared with mud as he crawled off Donegan. “I owe you for that.”

“Aye, Johnny—you do owe me,” Seamus said, grinning. “Once we ride back to Fetterman, I’ll expect your gratitude in a whiskey glass.”

^*The Plainsmen Series, Vol. 5, Devil’s Backbone.

^* United States Indian Department