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

Chapter 44

10-11 September 1876

Camp Owl River, Dakota

September 10, 1876

General Sheridan, Chicago.

Marched from Heart River passing a great many trails of Indians going down all of the different streams we crossed between Heart River and this point … Although some of the trails seemed fresh our animals were not in condition to pursue them.

From the North Fork of the Grand River, I sent Captain Mills of the Third Cavalry, with 150 men mounted on our strongest horses, to go in advance to Deadwood and procure supplies of provisions.

On the evening of the 8th he discovered near the Slim Buttes a village of thirty odd lodges and lay there that night and attacked them by surprise yesterday morning, capturing the village, some prisoners and a number of ponies and killing some Indians. Among the Indians was chief American Horse, who died of his wounds after surrendering to us …

In the village were found, besides great quantities of dried meat and ammunition, an army guidon, portions of officers uniforms and other indications that the Indians of the village had participated in the Custer massacre.

Our main column got up about noon that day and was shortly after attacked by a considerable body of Indians, who, the prisoners said belonged to the village of Crazy Horse … The attack was undoubtedly made under the supposition that Captain Mills’s command had received no reinforcements.

The prisoners further stated that most of the hostile Indians were now going into the agencies, with the exception of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull with their immediate followers. Crazy Horse intended to remain near the headwaters of the Little Missouri and about one half of Sitting Bull’s band … had gone north of the Yellowstone … with some Sans Arcs, Minneconjous and Incappas had gone to the vicinity of Antelope Buttes, there to fatten their ponies and trade with the Rees and others …

We had a very severe march here from Heart River. For eighty consecutive miles we did not have a particle of wood; nothing but a little dried grass … During the greater portion of the time were drenched by cold rains which made traveling very heavy. A great many of the animals gave out and had to be abandoned. The others are now in such a weak condition that the greater number of them will not be able to resume the campaign until after a reasonable rest.

I should like to have about five hundred horses, preferably the half breed horses raised on the Laramie plains or in the vicinity of Denver and already acclimated to this country.

I intend to carry out the programme mentioned in my last dispatch … and shall remain in the vicinity of Deadwood until the arrival of my wagon train.

George Crook

Brigadier General

W ith every painful southbound step of that Sunday’s march John Finerty wished with all his soul that he was back among the prostitutes and whiskey mills of old Chicago.

It mattered little to any of them anymore that the hostiles’ trails all appeared to be headed south, gradually inching off to the east in order to skirt around the Black Hills settlements, still seventy miles or more to the south, making for the agencies now that the weather had turned colder, gloomier, wetter. Crook’s infantry staggered along both flanks, and the horses plodded in loose formation all morning, pairs of men talking over the fight and dreaming back to that feast they had enjoyed. None of them sure just where they would find their next meal. Knowing only that what dried meat was left after the troops had gorged themselves had been packed on Tom Moore’s mules and ruled off limits.

“They’re keeping it safe for the wounded,” Bourke explained once the Fifty Cavalry caught up with the rear end of the march.

“And the rest of us?” Finerty asked.

“Why, Johnny,” Donegan cheered, his face grimed with gunpowder from that morning’s rear guard clash, “we’ll be dining on horse again tonight!”

The prospect failed to make the newsman’s mouth water.

For the better part of the forenoon more than fifty warriors dogged the retreat of the Fifth Cavalry, then harassed the rear of the column’s line of march, hoping to pick off stragglers and capture any horses the white men might abandon. But in the end even they turned back, and the hillsides eventually grew quiet.

Crook had his prize: a village captured and destroyed, as well as driving off repeated counterattacks. He had as spoils some two hundred ponies, representing half of the hostiles’ herd. What animals he hadn’t put into service for his cavalry he had his men kill. Of the seven captives three chose to march with the soldiers, saying they would remain with Three Stars until the soldier chief reached the agencies. With very little left of what was originally estimated as more than three tons of dried meat Mills had discovered in the enemy camp, the general had no other choice but to push on for the settlements. That, and brood on what he might do now to make his slim victory count for something.

It mattered nothing that Crook had his men build fires over the graves they left behind, then marched a thousand horses across that hallowed ground in an attempt to obliterate all trace of the burials. An empty effort, because the prisoners he set free and those warriors watching from the hills knew where the enemies’ bodies had been buried. Once the soldiers were gone from sight, the digging began.

In the continuing rain American Horse’s women cut down saplings with which to build their burial scaffold.

Shortly after noon the head of the army’s column discovered that the high, chalky ridge at the foot of which they’d been marching made a sharp angle to the east. About two P.M. Crook called a halt after making only fifteen miles. For much of the morning the surgeons repeatedly protested to the general how the march was taking a terrible toll on the wounded. Neither blanket nor gum poncho could turn the wind-driven rain that pelted those least able to protect themselves.

While most of the casualties were carried on travois pulled behind a single horse, the most seriously wounded were placed on litters. Constructed from a pair of lodgepoles lashed fore and aft by surcingles between a pair of Moore’s mules, the amputees were laid upon a piece of canvas or blanket tied around the poles to form a crude stretcher. For a man who had lost the greater portion of one of his legs, it was no cushioned ride in a royal coach.

“Goddamighty—goddamighty!” cried Adolphus Von Leuttwitz repeatedly in his excruciating pain. “Gimme a pistol, please, somebotty gimme a pistol!”

For most of the morning he had been begging, cajoling, even ordering soldiers to hand over their service revolvers to him so he could put himself out of his misery.

“Jus’ shtop and leaf me right here!” he would order in his thick accent once he realized no one had turned over their revolver to him. “Leaf me und go on so I can die on dis spot!”

As the column went into camp that afternoon, the surgeons tied an awning between some trees so they could begin to devote their attentions to changing dressings and checking for infection. As the canvas was going up, four packers volunteered to help unhitch the mule-borne litters and lower the patients to the ground. When one of the civilians walked past Von Leuttwitz’s stretcher, the lieutenant lunged for the packer’s pistol, managing to wrench it from the holster and get the muzzle pressed against his head before the civilian gripped the officer’s hand and wrist. The struggle was on. Only by jamming the meat of his thumb beneath the hammer did the packer keep the gun from going off before two other men rushed over to wrestle the pistol away from the distraught officer.

Whimpering in his defeat, Von Leuttwitz flung an arm over his face and groaned, “V’at diffrence it make to you, dommit! I no longer vant to live if I cannot be a fighting man. Not a soldier—life is not vorth living!”

It wasn’t only the condition of Crook’s wounded that caused the general to halt early in the day. Perhaps every bit as much was not knowing what lay on the other side of the ridge standing immediately in front of him. This seemed like a good place to make bivouac, so the battalions put out a strong guard, expecting the Sioux to put in another show.

Carr’s Fifth Cavalry rear guard straggled in as camp was being made beside a narrow, clear-running stream flowing northward out of the towering bluffs. Here at least there were good water and ample grass for their horses. Still, many of the men could think only that twenty-four hours before they had been dining on buffalo and wild fruits, while here they sat beneath a driving rain, once again supping on broiled pony steaks and their private miseries.

“It’s better than a broken-down cavalry nag,” Donegan observed as he chewed another mouthful of the tender and juicy red meat. “Far, far better than the best cut a man can butcher from one of Tom Moore’s wormy mules.”

“Horse,” John Finerty said with a shudder. “I don’t think I’ll ever climb into a hack, take myself a winter’s sleigh ride, much less sit on a saddle quite the same again.” Before his eyes he held a chunk of the roasted meat on the end of his knife blade and considered it. “Ah, such equestrian delight.” Then plopped it into his mouth with the relish of a starving man.

As the sun fell out of midsky, inching for the western horizon, a dozen men from Captain William H. Andrews’s I Troop of the Third Cavalry finished raising the sole buffalo-hide lodge Crook had not destroyed. In it Medical Director Clements and his surgeons could retreat from the rain with their wounded.

Here and there troopers moved through camp carrying on their shoulders great quarters of the butchered ponies like beef loins. It was a grim feast they had that night as every man filled his belly, not really caring so much what the morning would bring.

“You figure we can keep going much longer eating such meat?” Finerty asked a while later.

“Pray we don’t have to find out, Johnny.” Donegan wiped a sleeve across his mouth and beard, then held his hands over the fire, warming them as he said, “Not enough fat on a dozen of those Sioux ponies to season the gruel for a sick grasshopper.”

With their midday meal out of the way and enough wood laid in for the coming night, many of the soldiers used the rest of the afternoon to fashion crude leggings and moccasins from the tanned hides they had discovered in the Sioux village and saved from Powell’s destruction. Seamus cut thin slices from a piece of brain-tanned buckskin he had rescued and stuffed inside his shirt during Mills’s attack. Then he used his knife to hack off the stiff, hardened pieces of raw horsehide he had knotted around his boots many days back, when they had begun to fall apart with wear and the constant rain. Wrapping new strips of flexible buckskin around and around his lower foot and instep before knotting the ends, he could crudely hold the flapping sole to the upper part of his boot.

At their fire the Chicago newsman asked, “You hear that Jack Crawford ended up with the rifle American Horse handed Crook?”

“The one the chief surrendered to the general?” Seamus asked.

“Yeah.”

“How’d the poet end up with it?”

“Don’t really know for sure,” Finerty replied. “But I figure he talked Crook out of it with one of his silver-tongued rhymes, eh?”

“It would have to be a mighty pretty poem to be worth the value of that rifle, Johnny.”

“Seems Crawford’s got him an eye for collectibles too,” Finerty went on. “From the camp’s spoils the poet ended up with another rifle—a Spencer repeater—and a Colt revolver.”

“Likely one what belonged to Custer’s dead,” Donegan replied sourly.

Meanwhile Crook composed his dispatch to Lieutenant General Philip Sheridan back at Chicago headquarters.There wasn’t much to gloat about—but it was a victory. After Powder River, Rosebud Creek, and the disaster at the Little Bighorn … after traipsing around for more than a month looking for a fresh trail, any trail … why, surely Sheridan would have reason to celebrate now.

Surely Little Phil’s trumpet had been heard upon the land.

Slim Buttes was the first victory of what had turned out to be a very long and costly Sioux war.

WYOMING

From the Black Hills.

CHEYENNE, September 11—Advices from the telegraph camp near Hat creek, this morning, say that the Indians drove back a government courier who left Fort Laramie with dispatches for General Crook. He was to make another start from Hat creek this morning.

From Red Cloud.

RED CLOUD AGENCY, NEB., September 11—This morning a supply train of about thirty wagons left this agency escorted by three companies of the Fourth ․․trtillery, equipped as infantry, for Custer City. The supplies are for Crook’s command which it is reported is to be there the 14th.

The night before, when General Crook had asked Frank Grouard to carry his report on to Fort Laramie or to the nearest point where a telegraph key might be found, the half-breed had refused—then refused again, even when Lieutenant Bubb volunteered to go with him through that unknown and dangerous country to the south.

But when Crook asked him to guide a second relief column under Captain Anson Mills, Grouard agreed. This time the general’s order was not only more specific, it was explicit.

“You have one mission and one mission only,” Crook explained. “To return from the Black Hills settlements with provisions.”

It would mean no less than saving the Uves of the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition.

“And if you can,” the general added, “find out what threat the hostiles have presented to Deadwood and the other mining communities.”

This time the general was hurrying forward a special detail that would not be big enough to strike the enemy. Instead Mills’s force—comprising the best of his very own M Company, Third Cavalry, as well as fifty handpicked troopers from Carr’s Fifth Cavalry—was half the size of that detail he had led away from Crook’s column on the seventh. And again the general chose Lieutenant John W. Bubb as commissary officer charged with the purchase of the needed supplies. Along with Second Lieutenant George F. Chase acting as subaltern, Mills would be joined by reporters Reuben Davenport and Robert Strahorn. Frank Grouard, bearing Crook’s report for General Sheridan, would accompany the detail at least as far as the Black Hills on the first leg of his journey to Fort Laramie. Upon reaching the mining settlements, Jack Crawford, who was the one scout most familiar with the Black Hills and was carrying reporters’ dispatches, and Seamus Donegan would both serve as guides to bring the wagons back to the general’s desperate men.

None of Tom Moore’s mules were taken south when those seventy-five men pulled out just before dawn that Monday morning, the eleventh of September. Instead of the broken-down army horses, each man rode one of the captive Sioux ponies.

After so many days of rain without letup, no one much noticed that the sun did not put in an appearance that morning as the men and ponies snorted frostily in their climb up the slopes of the terraced buttes. Again the clouds hovered close, fog shrouded the land for as far as a man could see with field glasses, and it began to rain.

Seamus pulled the big collar on his canvas mackinaw up around his neck and prayed the little grass-fed Indian pony beneath him had the bottom to carry him all the way to Deadwood.