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

Chapter 43

9-10 September 1876

Not long after the last echoes of gunfire faded from the nearby bluffs, a pair of sore-footed troopers from the Fifth Cavalry limped out of the darkness, hailing the pickets surrounding infantry camp. They had been some of the first forced to abandon their played-out horses that morning when the entire column followed in the wake of Crook’s rescue, which placed the pair as the last stragglers on the trail.

As they approached the northern end of Slim Buttes, the weariness of the muddy trail overwhelmed them, and they decided to lie down and nap among the shelter of some rocks they found in a ravine. At the moment the Sioux chose to launch their attack, the two hapless soldiers were awakened rudely. It didn’t take them long to figure out they would be a lot safer staying right where they were than attempting to thread their way through the hostile horsemen in hopes of reaching the army’s lines. They hadn’t dared to raise their heads from their ravine until long after dark.

The steady, eerie throb of death chants and wails of mourning women floated down from the shelter half where the surgeons had done what they could to make American Horse comfortable. Out there in the night, evil spirits lurked, ruling that dominion just beyond the fire’s light.

Seamus shuddered and crossed himself superstitiously, sitting at a fire with John Finerty, Lieutenant Bourke, and others, staring mesmerized at the sputtering flames—then turned suddenly, tearing his revolver from its holster as a dark figure crouched from a gash in a nearby lodge.

With the audible double click of so many pistol hammers, the ghostly form stopped immediately, one leg in, one leg out of that slash in the buffalo hides, slowly standing erect in his long calf-length blanket coat of many colors, staring at the three barrels glinting with a dull light beneath the fire’s dancing aura.

A pair of black eyes twinkled as the dark-skinned Indian tried out a lame smile, lifting his hands into the air and stammering, “T-there ain’t a thing w-worth having in the hull damned outfit.”

“Who in the thunder are you?” Donegan demanded.

“Ute John,” he answered sheepishly as he inched into the light, his hands shaking as the Irishman advanced on him. “Some call me Cap’n Jack.”

“Bejesus—you gave me a start!” Finerty exclaimed.

Donegan got close enough to press the revolver’s muzzle against the tracker’s head. With his empty hand he grabbed the Indian’s chin and turned the brown face from side to side in the firelight. “Damn—it is you. The squaw scalper. Should’ve killed you right off.” In disgust he turned away, stuffing his pistol into the holster on his hip.

“What are you doing there?” Bourke asked.

The Indian replied, “Looking for plunder.”

“You’re lucky to have a few lodges still standing, you sick bastard,” Seamus added. “Cap’n Powell’s gonna finish putting ’em all to the torch come morning.”

Ute John’s head bobbed, and he said, “I see what I find before the fires.”

“G’won!” Bourke demanded. “Get out of here before I have you put under guard myself.”

Early that rainy evening the general ordered that the four corpses Ute John had scalped and mutilated be given to the captives so they could perform a proper burial. With Grouard and Pourier, Crook then wrung what information he could from his reticent prisoners. From them the general learned that not only was Crazy Horse in the neighborhood, but Sitting Bull was as well—with plans to take his Hunkpapa north to the Antelope Buttes to trade. What came as the most discouraging news, however, was hearing that the bands had indeed split and scattered, most making for the reservations, and already far ahead of his column.

“Charging Bear keeps saying this bunch wasn’t on the Greasy Grass, General,” Big Bat reported. “Says they didn’t fight the soldiers on the Little Bighorn.”

“Then ask him why we found in their lodges the gloves of one of Custer’s men, why we found their horses among these ponies, why we recaptured the pony soldiers’ flag in this camp,” Crook snarled.

To Three Stars, Charging Bear repeated the assertion that visiting Oglalla of the Crazy Horse Hunkpatila band brought those spoils from the Greasy Grass fight into camp.

In the end Crook used his interpreters to drive home his point that the army intended to punish all who remained off their agencies, then concluded by telling the prisoners he would release them the following morning. They would be allowed to remain there in the midst of their destroyed village, where they could bury their dead in the manner of their people.

Late that night six more stragglers showed up. The soldiers had left Crook’s bivouac to hunt early that morning, before word had arrived of Mills’s attack and everyone had set out on the rescue. They had returned later that day to find nothing but the column’s tracks. Now the six greedily chewed on the dried meat offered them at the cheery fires as sheets of mist hissed around them, and told of being attacked by a dozen or more warriors who had held them under siege for some four hours before withdrawing. Nonetheless, they had waited until dark before pushing on in hopes of finding what had become of Crook’s command.

During the night the surgeons kept their stewards busy constructing additional litters from lodgepoles, to which they lashed shelter halves or pieces of captured blankets for the morning’s journey, when Crook would lead them south once more. Only three days before, the general had ordered Mills and Bubb to secure rations among the Black Hills settlements. But at that moment the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition was no closer to relief as the rain and gloom settled down on Slim Buttes.

With their amputations on Von Leuttwitz and Kennedy complete, Doctors Clements and McGillycuddy turned their attention to American Horse. As the surgeons knelt beside their patient, some of the friends of Private Wenzel nearby grumbled profanely.

“Why don’t you just put a knife through that son of a bitch, Doc?” suggested one of the dead private’s comrades.

“Yeah,” agreed a second bitter friend. “I’ll be happy to finish off that red bastard my own self.”

“You bastards!” another old file shouted. “Why, I ain’t got no use for a doctor that’d do anything for a goddamn Injun!”

Valentine McGillycuddy whirled on the troopers clustered nearby. “The next one of you who says a damned thing will answer personally to me! Are you men no better than animals? As for myself, I’ve taken an oath to relieve suffering—and I won’t see a man in pain without giving aid. No matter the color of his skin!”

Despite his great pain and the many appeals from the half-breed interpreters, the chief steadfastly refused any of the white man’s “powerful medicine” when the surgeons offered a hypodermic of morphine or an inhalation of chloroform. Instead American Horse had one of his wives cut a new bullberry branch to clamp between his teeth as he suffered his new agony in silence. While the doctors inspected and cleaned the terrible wound, removing part of the ruptured bowel, then closing the site with crude sutures, American Horse clenched both his eyes and teeth shut, nearly chewing through the stick before he passed out. Finally McGillycuddy had some soldiers hold the chief down so that he could administer an injection of morphine that would allow the chief to rest peacefully while death approached.

Fever’s sweat beaded the patient’s brow when he awoke later, as the painkiller seeping through his veins began to wear off. Through interpreters Clements explained that there was little else they could do in what time the chief had left. At his side remained his two wives and three of his children throughout that night, all of them chanting a mournful death dirge as a soaking rain steadily drummed on the canvas tent fly stretched above the dying warrior. Into each face he gazed as the hours passed his last night, each tear-tracked cheek he touched with trembling fingertips, removing the battered stick from his bloody lips to murmur soft words of endearment to those loved ones. Perhaps to tell them that with his death he had secured their freedom come the morrow.

In the cold darkness beyond that pitiful scene flickered the hundreds of tiny watch fires where huddled the weary soldiers who had eaten in one evening enough rations to feed them for three days. They curled up on the muddy ground beneath their sole blanket and gum poncho to reap the slumber of the victorious, their bellies stuffed with buffalo tongue and dried pony meat, along with the fruit of buffalo berries, wild plum, and chokecherry. Above them on the hilltops and chalky buttes the pines soughed a mournful song beneath the rush of a plaintive wind that from time to time drove the rain before it in sheets.

To the north along the army’s backtrail Seamus heard the call of the song-dogs as coyotes discovered another of the bony horse carcasses and called in the prairie wolves. There is no other sound on earth quite like that, Donegan decided as he tossed another limb on that fire long after midnight, unable to sleep, and thinking on loved ones far away.

It was long after the last shots had faded from the hills when Sergeant Von Moll’s men from A Troop finished their graves. By that time Von Moll found Lieutenant Joseph Lawson fast asleep, unable to read from his Common Book of Prayer over the departed. In the light of burning brands taken from the nearby fires and held high overhead, the spades had scraped the last bit of earth from the graves. With Private Wenzel’s body wrapped in his ragged blue overcoat, and Charlie White tied within a funeral shroud of thick gray army blanket, the soldiers slowly lowered each into their last resting places. In the absence of that devout lieutenant’s Irish Presbyterian reading of the burial service, Von Moll improvised and repeated what verse he could remember from childhood over those dark holes.

Beside White’s grave Seamus had crossed himself and murmured a prayer remembered from his early catechism, thinking of the young man’s friend, Bill Cody. And of the last time the friends had been together.

Nearby John Finerty repeated lines from an old poem.

No useless coffin enclosed his breast,

Not in sheet or in shroud they wound him;

But he lay like a warrior taking his rest;

With his martial cloak around him.

Later when the burial detail sat huddled around a fire listening to the rain hiss as it fell into the flames, their damp blankets steaming in the chilled air, a figure approached out of the darkness.

“We’ll need another grave, Sergeant.”

Von Moll and the rest turned to find a somber Surgeon Clements halt inside the warm corona of firelight.

Anxiously, Finerty asked, “Von Leuttwitz, Doctor?”

“No. Private Kennedy. He didn’t survive the amputation,” Clements answered, gesturing into the darkness. “I waited to tell you until you were finished with the others.”

Into a third grave Von Moll’s men consigned the soldier’s body along with his severed limb, then scooped out a shallow hole in which to bury Von Leuttwitz’s leg. The soldiers were just beginning to turn spades of the damp soil into the graves when the eerie darkness erupted with wails.

A cold dash of ice water spilled down Donegan’s spine as he turned to gaze up the hill, looking through the sheets of rain at the dim, flickering firelight near the tent fly, where the women who were gathered at the side of American Horse keened and screeched and tore at their hair in bitter remorse. Nearby the children began their own high-pitched cry.

“What do you suppose that’s all about?” Finerty asked.

“The chief just died,” Donegan replied, quickly crossing himself again. “His spirit is free at last.”

The newsman shuddered, wagging his head. “Damn— I wish I had some whiskey right about now.”

With a nod Seamus said, “First Wenzel and White, then Kennedy. And now American Horse. All of ’em killed at the ravine. Fitting it is that their souls take flight together.”

At first light the Sioux had Crook’s men up and out of their frosty, wet blankets. The warriors pressed in on the outlying pickets as soon as there was enough light to pick out targets in the roiling fog that clung to the low places that Sunday morning.

“Roll out! Roll out!” came the order as the third fight of Slim Buttes got under way.

Every man who bellied up to the picket lines peered into the shifting mists for the enemy’s charge as the fog began to burn off, but there was no concerted assault made against those four companies of infantry who were ordered up to hold the line. Nonetheless, here and there the warriors made it a warm skirmish in trying to break through the soldier positions while Major Upham’s battalion of the Fifth Cavalry continued to carry out Merritt’s order to destroy any remaining enemy property: guns were shattered, then tossed into the flames of what lodges Captain Powell hadn’t put to the torch the previous afternoon. In a matter of minutes, with the echo of gunfire rattling all about that camp in the chill gray light, leaping bonfires illuminated the dark underbellies of the clouds suspended right over their heads. Meanwhile, the men destroyed iron kettles and tinware by chopping them into fragments, or crushing them under the hooves of their horses.

Shivering in the cold drizzle, Charles King fought the fevered stiffness in that old Apache wound as he rolled up his blanket. He brooded on the way the cold from a night on the ground had seeped right into that shoulder, then stomped over to the mess fire, where he chewed on the enemy’s dried meat and gulped at a cup of hot coffee made from beans found in the captured lodges. He didn’t have a chance to finish his breakfast before K Company was ordered out to replace the infantry Crook had taken off the line and put into column, forming up for their day’s march.

At the same time, the general ordered Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Carr to bring the prisoners to him.

Through Grouard he told the Sioux, “We are not making war on women and children such as you. Those of you who so desire are free to stay and rejoin your people—but you must caution all your friends that the American government will continue to peck away at all hostiles until the last one is killed or made a prisoner. The red man will be wise to surrender and return to his agency instead of pursuing this hopeless war. It’s shameful of any man to expose his wife and children to the very great possibility of death.”

“General,” Frank Grouard said after Crook’s interview had reached its conclusion, “Charging Bear wants to go with us.”

“Go with us?”

“To stay with you. Says he wants to scout with me.”

Crook’s eyes narrowed. “To scout against his own people?”

Nodding, the half-breed said, “Figures it’s better that his people make peace, he says.”

Then with some random fire coming from warriors sniping on the bluffs and hills to the southwest, the general and Merritt assigned both Mason’s and Upham’s battalions of the Fifth Cavalry to act as the rear guard while the rest of the column pulled out.

Just past eight o’clock the first units of infantry pushed south in a column of twos, crossing a rain-swollen Rabbit Lip Creek with orders to protect both flanks of the twelve two-horse litters and travois drags loaded with the wounded, who were commencing their jolting march of agony, placed in the immediate care of Dr. Albert Hartsuff for the journey. During the long, damp night, a handful of troopers had been employed in constructing and strengthening those three litters and nine travois. Crook made it clear to Dr. Clements he did not intend to be hampered by his wounded for long. Besides the amputee lieutenant and seven wounded soldiers, as well as Lieutenant Alfred B. Bache’s severe case of debilitating rheumatism that left him unable to move, Surgeon Hartsuff transported a lone civilian, packer James B. Glover, who, like Von Leuttwitz and Kennedy, was also shot in the leg.

As soon as Crook and the main command began to disappear beyond the nearby hills, the Sioux swept down on the Fighting Fifth, pressing in from all sides as the troopers completed their final destruction of the village. King realized there was nothing like the sight of retreating soldiers to give warriors courage and make them bold. In the stinging stench of that smok ․․lled air some of the prisoners bolted into the brushy ravines to rejoin their people as the troopers knelt by platoon and attempted to hold the enemy at bay while the horse-holders moved up with their mounts.

The Sioux, laying down a harassing fire, turned their attention to the end of that long file of infantry. As a consequence, Merritt directed Carr to bring up on the right Mason’s entire battalion, consisting of Captain Samuel S.Sumner’s and Captain Robert H. Montgomery’s men, to drive off those warriors who were making things hot for the infantry skirmishers as they retired behind Surgeon Hartsuffs wounded. At the same time, Carr ordered Upham’s battalion to take up positions along the ridge directly south of camp and there hold back the growing pressure from the Sioux.

“Stand to horse!” came the order above Mason’s battalion, every man eager to pull out. “Mount!”

Scarcely had that long-awaited word echoed off the bluffs than the enemy began a determined attack. On all sides rose screaming, screeching warriors who had sneaked into every one of the hundreds of ravines under cover of darkness in the predawn hours.

“Dismount!”

Sending his mount with the rest of their horses and holders south to catch up with the rear of the retreating column, King watched his beloved Donnybrook retreat beyond the hills. No matter all his efforts to save Van, his other blooded thoroughbred. Days ago the animal had finally collapsed, unable to rise and move on. Now as he watched his last hardy mount disappear, the lieutenant prayed he would not have to leave a second horse behind, knowing how troopers who came along after him would butcher his beloved animal.

“Form them up by platoons, Mr. King!” bellowed Major Upham.

The cavalry commanders were now putting their dismounted troopers to the test. Up one hillside and down the next they made a gradual and orderly retreat, covering Crook’s rear flank while the Sioux turned up the heat. As the cavalrymen reached a new-hilltop, the order rang out.

“Halt!” the lieutenants who had remained on horseback bellowed above the footmen. “Face about! And—fire!”

With each new crest gained, brown-skinned horsemen swarmed over the hill the soldiers had just abandoned: screaming, charging, shooting—keeping up every bit of pressure they possibly could as the troopers attempted to hold them off, if not scatter them like chaff.

“Make your shots count, boys!” a stalwart, bearded sergeant hollered above his platoon as the rattle of gunfire reverberated from the buttes like hail off a snare drum. He was outlined against the sky by the black smudges of smoke drifting up from what was left of American Horse’s village. “Don’t throw your lead away without making them red bastards pay!”

It was one thing for a soldier to stand and hold off the enemy. Altogether different was it for a soldier to be asked to do the same while falling back.

Atop a grassy rise a lieutenant abruptly reined up his horse beside that old Irish sergeant conspicuously moving up and down his line of kneeling men, exhorting his platoon as they held off the screaming onslaught, gun smoke thick as thunderclouds about their heads. “Sergeant!”

“Yessirlieutenant!”

“How many goddamned times have I got to tell you to keep down?”

“Sir, I—”

“Now, by God!” the lieutenant interrupted. “I want you to keep your head down. So do it—now!”

“B-but, sir—”

“Sarge,” the officer said, his tone a bit softer as he leaned forward to confide, “if I lose you—I just might lose this whole damned outfit. Now, just do as I ask and keep your blessed head down.”

By and large the cavalrymen on that last line remained quiet in that cold morning’s fight, perhaps only speaking low to the bunkie beside them, sharing a handshake and a quick, guttural cheer when one of their number spilled a warrior from his pony, maybe even issuing a yelp of pain or a call for aid when a Sioux bullet found its mark and the soldier crumpled into the mud and grass, clutching a leg or arm or belly while his fellows rushed to carry him along in their ordered retreat.

“What … what day is it, sir?” a wounded man asked of the officer bending over him.

“Sunday,” Charles King answered as two soldiers came up to lift their wounded comrade between them.

“Sunday,” the soldier repeated with a pained grimace as he was raised. “I imagine back home it’s about time Ma is leaving for church.”

For a moment King just stared at the wounded trooper’s back, forced to think on Sunday and church and home. Forced to recall what had happened to Custer and his men on a bloody Sunday not long ago.

Had it not been for Carr’s skillful batdefield maneuvers and his ability to hold his men under what might have otherwise been overwhelming pressure during one attempt to outflank his command, the troopers of the Fifth Cavalry might have suffered a rout. But the lieutenant colonel spun Kellogg’s I Company on the right so they were there waiting when the galloping horsemen came over the rise— straight into the teeth of more than fifty Springfield carbines.

What really took most of the starch out of the warrior charges, however, was Carr’s order for each unit to leave a half dozen of its best shots lying concealed just behind the brow of the next hill while the rest of the companies continued in retreat, acting as bait to pull the Sioux into a headlong rush. On the horsemen charged; then with a single word from the lieutenant colonel, two dozen marksmen rose from the mud and onto their knees, slamming rifles into their shoulders and aiming point-blank at the mounted, painted, feathered, and screaming enemy within spitting distance. Ponies reared in the face of those exploding muzzles, men cried out in pain, others dashed in to pull bodies from the no-man’s-land as soldiers flipped up the trapdoors and slammed in another copper case while the angry screams haunted that thin line and the eagle wing-bone whisdes keened like a banshee’s wail off the pale buttes above them.

When the Sioux retreated, the fight was all but over.

In this hot, grimy, hour-long skirmish—that fourth of the Battle of Slim Buttes—Carr’s dismounted Fifth cavalrymen turned back every one of the Sioux charges, knocking down five of the enemy while the soldiers themselves suffered three wounded before the warriors were eventually turned back into the pine-covered hillsides. From the flanks of the troopers’ slow, foot-by-foot withdrawal, the hostiles had kept up a withering fire for the better part of an hour as the troops retreated up and down for more than two miles.

It was proof enough for even the hardiest veteran that they had failed to dampen the Sioux’s fighting spirit.

It was only then that Sitting Bull’s warriors drifted away and let off their attack. At long last Mason’s battalion was freed to step out in a lively effort to catch up to the retreating column and their led horses, now long out of sight.

But if the Sioux had shown they were still full of fight, so had Carr’s Fifth Cavalry.

Yet now it appeared Crook was hardly interested in consolidating his minor victory, not the least bit in bringing the enemy to a full-scale fight.

The general may have believed he was marching his expedition south.

To the Sioux, Three Stars was retreating.