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

Chapter 45

11 September 1876

Crook Heard From.

CHEYENNE, September 11—General Crook has been heard from under date of the 2nd. He has followed- the trail to the Little Missouri without finding any Indians. The trail was found to split in several directions. Crook thinks the southern band may have moved backward toward the mountains, and he is somewhat apprehensive for his wagon train. It is expected that he will move in that direction.

When Baptiste Pourier led Crook and the rest of the column away from that miserable bivouac on the morning of the eleventh, John Finerty climbed stiffly into the saddle and shivered almost uncontrollably, not knowing if he could ever again count on being warm and dry.

In the early light of dawn Lieutenant Von Leuttwitz had awakened from a feverish nightmare that convinced him his leg had been exhumed from its grave by the hostiles, who desecrated it. Crook dispatched Captain Julius Mason with a small battalion of Carr’s Fifth Cavalry to take their backtrail to the destroyed village.

As the rest of the command began to climb south by west up the muddy slopes, the cavalrymen mounted on their horses began fo press at the rear of the infantry, where a good-natured banter began to fly back and forth between the men.

Upon passing some of the foot soldiers, a trooper turned and leaned down from his saddle, asking one of the infantrymen, “Casey, old man! How are your corns this fine morning? Tell me, now—is it fine walking? Wouldn’t you rather be riding a fine horse like this one?”

With a snort of derision the old soldier answered in his peatiest brogue, “To hell wid your harse, I say! And g’won wid you too, you weak-brained idjit! Why, we’re gonna walk your harse off his four legs and then we’ll eat him!”

Above them that dawn the very heights of the chalk-colored buttes blocking their path remained shrouded in a thick fog that rained a cold and constant drizzle down on the men and animals. Up, up they climbed, most of the cavalry forced to dismount and drag their horses behind them, inching back and forth to switchback their way upward into the numbing mist, strung out in a long single column snaking its way into the clouds across the face of the pine-dotted escarpment.

Finally at midmorning they stood on the southern edge of the jagged cliffs and looked down upon the great endless prairie as barren as the surface of the moon. Finerty could see nothing on the foggy horizon that would inspire hope. Nothing like the dark and jagged outline of the Black Hills. Down, down Big Bat led them, Crook’s men dropping once more into the muddy wilderness. Their only choice was to push on, or lie down and die right there.

By noon the drizzle had ballooned into sheets of rain as the head of the column reached a formation called Clay Ridge. Again there was no way to detour east or west. As they climbed into the badlands and skirted what they could of the narrow ravines and coulees cut by centuries of erosion, the horses and mules slipped and stumbled crossing the naked, muddy slopes with men on their backs. And when the soldiers climbed down from the saddles, they found their boots sinking in the sticky gumbo that refused to release them, tiring out the weary men as they continued to plod forward lugging up more than a pound of prairie with every step—climbing and descending, climbing and descending all the more, marching ever southward, following what had to be an old Indian trail, if nothing more than a game trail.

Just when Finerty felt his lungs could take no more, just when he was certain the burning muscles in his legs would not last another step, those foot soldiers marching in the vanguard of the cavalry reached a sheer ledge. By the time the newsman got to the ledge, he looked out and feared for the worst—unable to see a thing. Peering into the mists and dancing sheets of rain that obscured the prairie below them, it appeared the whole world had been swallowed up by the sky. Then John caught a glimpse of the faint blue column a hundred yards below and to the left. The infantry at the head of the column was descending slowly, disappearing into the maw of a gray cloud bank.

All around them on those bluffs rose rocky spires that resembled the sharp pinnacles on houses of worship as they scraped the underbellies of the gray clouds that continued to rain down on them, a geographical formation that prompted Finerty to propose they should rechristen the place Church Spire Range. But such sacred thoughts did not last, pushed aside by the temporal, earthly necessity of putting one foot in front of the other.

Throughout that day more of the army’s mounts gave out, pushed just about as far as they could go without forage. While some of the horses and mules were abandoned, most were shot. At one difficult ravine Finerty watched a trooper ahead of him pull and drag his horse as far as it would go. It shuddered at last and sank to its knees, head lolling to the side as it rolled, its ribby sides heaving.The grim-faced soldier removed the saddle, then knelt beside his mount, yanking up the mule ear on his holster as he patted the horse’s foam-flecked muzzle. After a few moments he finally worked up the courage to fire a single bullet into his old companion’s brain.

Rising from the mud, the trooper gathered kindling and struck a fire before returning to his horse, this time to kneel beside the rear flank, where he cut out a tender steak he then began to roast over the yellow flames in that cold and dreary mist. In the space of a half hour the soldier got to his feet once more, shouldering his carbine to march on, joining the other stragglers at the rear of the column.

It wasn’t long before Crook ordered a short halt, telling Tom Moore to lighten the loads on his pack-mules by burying hundreds of pounds of heavy ammunition. After that they struggled on in desperation across that rugged ground, the wounded in their litters and travois suffering more than any others. All through the day Von Leuttwitz had grumbled in pain, begging his stewards to stop, again pleading with those men from Captain Williams H. Andrews’s I Troop of the Third Cavalry for a pistol he could use to shoot himself. And at every crossing of a tiny stream, at every jolting descent over a narrow ravine, the lieutenant cursed the mules, cursed the nearby troops, cursed the skies and all of creation in two languages.

At midafternoon Baptiste Pourier crossed a fresh and sizable trail of lodgepoles and unshod pony hooves pointing south for the agencies.

“They might be some of them what come back to help American Horse’s people by attacking us,” Bat declared. “Looks like we’re moving them and other camps in for the winter. You wanna follow, General?”

Crook wagged his head, as weary and worn down as any one of his soldiers. “No. We’re going where I can feed these men, where I can recruit more horses—and only then can I continue this campaign.”

As the day wore on, the watchfulness of the rear guard and the flankers on both sides of the column waned, and these weary, starving men lost all fear of attack. It was nothing more than an ordeal, a crucible of survival.

Major Alexander Chambers’s infantry continued to set the pace, and it wasn’t long before they were again outdoing the cavalry that struggled to keep up with their failing mounts. Farther and farther behind, the stragglers strung out in the rear. More and more often one would hear the pop of pistols as the troopers put their horses out of their misery. Then in the midst of all the grumbling and the complaints, Finerty heard a bit of rousing belly laughter erupt among the last of the foot soldiers slogging just ahead of him. He lumbered up to find out what could be so amusing.

“Oh, and for sure,” replied one of the Irish among those infantrymen to Finerty’s inquiry, “we were just laughing at a new joke making its way back along the column.”

John sighed. “Good. I’d be willing to hear anything that could give me a smile right about now.”

The soldier grinned and replied, “This evening we’re going to tell all those big, strong cav’rymen with their big, strong mounts that if Gen’ral Crook marches this expedition long enough and far enough, why—the infantry will eat all their damned harses!”

Farther and farther the column stretched itself out as more and more animals gave out and weary men collapsed by the side of the trail, gasping and begging for a chance to rest. Ahead of them lay a seemingly limitless stretch of wasteland that made the strongest man among them groan with despair. In his mind Finerty fought to describe the scene, to arrange his adjectives just so for his eastern readers. “A ghastly compound of spongy ashes, yielding sand, and soilless, soulless earth, on which even greasewood cannot grow, and sagebrush sickens and dies,” he composed. “The meanest country under the sun.”

But, he laughed to himself—there simply wasn’t any sun.

Late in the afternoon the fog thinned as they reached the southern edge of the buttes, and as the mist lifted, there lay the dark-blue wall far to their front. Through the mud and the fog and the mist and the misery, they had struggled another twenty-one miles that day.

“Bear Butte,” Pourier said, pointing to the singular prominence off to the southeast. “Where the Lakota and Shahiyena go to seek their visions and pray.”

As the half-breed described it, Finerty stood hunched over his small tablet, shielding it from the drops spilling from the brim of his hat as he scribbled down notes with a lead pencil.

“And there,” Bat said, indicating the lofty peak rising to the southwest, “that is the peak the Lakota call Inyan Kara.”

At long last. The Black Hills. Relief. Food. Four walls and a roof, a place where Finerty could get out of the rain and the cold. Many times had he enjoyed the best nightlife Chicago had to offer—all the whiskey and willing women a young man about town could ever desire.

But as they went into bivouac that night, John wasn’t sure he had seen anything that looked any better, anything that had stirred his heart more than the sight of those blessed blue-tinged hills rising right out of the wilderness.

Beckoning him home.

With General George Crook in the lead, continuing to push his men painfully that day of the eleventh. Slower and slower the column plodded south by southwest, moving past the east slope of Deer’s Ears Buttes, those twin conical heights rising abruptly from the prairie floor. Because they could be seen for many miles in all directions, they had long been known to frontiersman and Indian alike.

Near Owl Creek, the Heecha Wakpa of the Sioux, along the South Fork of the Moreau, itself a tributary of the Missouri River, John Bourke rode back with the order to halt and go into camp. At least here they had plenty of wood.

After building huge bonfires the men gathered in the great circle of warmth to dry their steamy wool clothing, turning first one side, then the other to the flames where they roasted their horse-meat steaks. Washing his supper down with water from the nearby creek, the lieutenant was beginning to doubt he had ever really eaten such delicacies as ham and eggs, even a rare porterhouse steak. Perhaps it was only a dream. It had been so long ago.

Mason’s battalion of the Fifth Cavalry reached the bivouac that evening after dark, picking up and dragging with them most of the stragglers along the way. Grimly the major reported that upon returning to the village site, they had found that the Sioux had indeed dug up the graves and desecrated the bodies. And Von Leuttwitz’s greatest fear and worst nightmare was realized—the hostiles had butchered his severed leg.

For Surgeon Clements’s train of litters and travois, it was travel fast, or travel gently through the rugged badlands. Hampered by the frequent stream crossings and the coulees, hampered by the rains and by so many stops to tighten surcingles, the hospital limped into camp well after dark as the wind picked up and brought with it an icy, pelting rain. For the wounded there was no longer any hard bread nor bacon, no longer even any salt to season the pony meat and that one haunch of antelope an officer had donated to the surgeon’s mess. Rummaging through their haversacks, other officers found a little salt, a half pound of sugar, and two quarts of flour they were able to shake loose from the bottom of their packs. And in the end Valentine McGillycuddy’s thick and nourishing antelope stew was augmented by a dessert of a few tins of preserves an infantry officer had guarded with his life for weeks.

Out of the rain and the wind, once more beneath the buffalo hides of that captured lodge, with warm and delicious food in their bellies, Bourke found flagging spirits begin to brighten among Clements’s wounded. Even in grumpy Lieutenant Von Leuttwitz himself.

That afternoon John had begged himself some of the liver from an antelope killed along the trail. The meat would not stretch far; nonetheless, the lieutenant carried his treasure into camp in his nose bag as if it were a kingly ransom. For long and glorious minutes he suspended it on a green limb, broiling the liver over some pulsating coals, preparing supper for himself and the general. They had no more than halved their modest portion when a loud ruckus erupted at the commissary headquarters nearby.

In Lieutenant Bubb’s absence the chief butcher and his men had to answer the demands of almost two thousand ravenous soldiers and civilians, expertly dividing what they were given each night in the way of ponies to be slaughtered for supper. This night the butcher stood there in his blood-crusted woolens, shaking his gleaming knife at a dark-skinned Mexican prospector up from the southern border of Texas, one of Major Stanton’s Montana Volunteers. In a spicy blend of two languages the Mexican threatened the butcher for killing a Sioux pony the volunteer had had his eye on and was anxious to save for his very own use once the expedition broke up back at Fort Laramie.

Back and forth they argued, the chief butcher brandishing his big and very lethal knife, the Mexican pounding his chest with one hand and provocatively wagging his gun in the other until Lieutenant Colonel Carr stepped in and broke it up. Scattering the curious spectators, Carr turned on the volunteer.

“Go on now. Get back to your camp and cause no more problems tonight, or I’ll see you put under arrest and thrown in irons at the first military reservation we come to!”

With menace in his dark eyes, the sullen Mexican turned about, intending to take up the reins to the Indian pony he had ridden up to the commissary, the same Sioux pony he had been riding since the capture of the enemy’s herd.

“Dios!” he exclaimed, shoving his shapeless hat back on his brow. “Dónde … where is my horse?”

Up stepped four of the butcher’s assistants. The first flung down a frayed bridle at the civilian’s feet. The second dropped an old and tattered saddle blanket into the mud. Then the grinning third dropped a scarred and much-used saddle atop the filthy blanket. And the final butcher’s assistant stopped in front of the Mexican to hold out a long, thick strip of fed meat on the end of his huge butcher knife.

“Your pony?” the assistant asked. “Why, mister—General Merritt told us we needed just one more horse to make enough provisions for tonight’s mess. Saw yours standing right there. Closest to commissary … so we knew you wouldn’t mind.”

The volunteer began to sputter in that heated blend of English and Mexican, mad enough to spit nails when Carr once more stepped between him and the butchers.

The lieutenant colonel tore the lean meat off the butcher’s knife and slapped it into the Mexican’s hands. “Looks like this is your ration for the night. I’d suggest you go cook that steak before it goes bad on you.”