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

Chapter 46

12 September 1876

The worst was yet to come.

When the men rose stiffly that Tuesday morning, no one had any idea what awaited them as they morosely stood around the smoky fires in that darkness before dawn and tried to warm themselves in what soul-robbing fog and mist clung to the banks of Owl Creek.

This was to be the day strong men reached the end of their ropes and lay down to die in the mud beside that endless trail crossing an unforgiving wilderness.

No sooner had Crook given his command for the column to form up than the rain moved in, starting gently at first but within an hour falling in such solid sheets that a man had to hunch his shoulders up and turn sideways against the force of the storm, just the way horses and mules would turn their rumps against a howling norther. Lumbering into the gales, the infantry led out at four A.M., Clements’s train of wounded in their midst, each one grumbling in his own private misery beneath the onslaught of Mother Nature’s worst. An hour behind them the cavalry set out. Nearly two of every three troopers were already afoot, stumbling along through the thickening quagmire beside those in their company still mounted on the bony horses.

Under Crook’s orders Major John J. Upham selected 150 men from the Fifth Cavalry, all mounted on the best of the captured ponies, to follow up that lodgepole trail they had crossed the day before. Given the limited rations the commissary could provide from its dwindling supplies— two ounces of dried buffalo meat per man, a few coffee beans, and what pony meat each soldier had managed to save from last night’s supper—Upham’s troopers disappeared into the mist, heading south by east down Avol Creek toward Bear Butte.

With the old arrow wound stiffening his shoulder in a hot pain, Charles King watched his friends leave, gratified that his horse, Donnybrook, wasn’t deemed strong enough to go with Upham’s patrol. Nonetheless, he was still very much perplexed and confused by Crook’s decision to send out that scouting party.

When the general had been confronted with a force of attacking Sioux the morning of the tenth, Crook had marched the column away. Then, upon finding a fresh but small trail, the general had waited more than twelve hours before deciding to send some of his cavalry in pursuit. Those very inconsistencies had begun to cause cracks in the confidence King held for the general. What Charles feared most was that the tenacious bulldog Crook wasn’t all that sure himself of just what he should do anymore.

So the lieutenant took his hat off and waved at some of those Fifth Cavalry friends who turned and bid a halfhearted farewell to those they were leaving behind that cold and gloomy morning. In minutes Upham’s patrol was swallowed by the land and the incessant rain.

Because Major Mason’s battalion was that day assigned to bring up the rear of the march, ordered to sweep along with them any and all stragglers, Charles King did not leave Owl Creek until just past seven A.M. The wind came up, inching down the temperature, seeping into the marrow of every one of those once-hardy fighting men until all a man could think of was just taking the next step. Wondering when he would lose the willpower, the guts just to keep moving. Already the neuralgia in that old Apache war wound made King grit his teeth with each flush of sudden, hot pain.

It wasn’t much past nine when the first horses started to play out. Along the left and right flanks rang the pistol shots as more and more of the troopers went afoot, caching their saddles and bridles in growing piles left upon the barren prairie. Heaving their soggy saddle blankets to their shoulders, the unhorsed soldiers set off on foot. At the rear the dismounted horse soldiers began to straggle farther and farther behind in a weaving, wobbly, unsteady column snaking south by southwest toward the prominence of Inyan Kara.

Twice that morning when Clements’s own stock failed and gave out, the surgeon had to beg ponies off those officers who rode the Sioux horses. One time he went from man to man, pleading, until he reached Charles King, who reluctantly slid from his saddle and handed over the reins, barely able to rotate that shoulder wounded years before in Arizona.

“God bless you, Lieutenant,” Clements said before turning away into the spinning curtains of rain, dragging the pony behind him through the deepening gumbo.

Men stumbled past King as he stood there, settling up to his ankles in the pasty mud, and swiped his glove across his face. It did not help. With the swirling sheets of rain, his face was wet a moment later. He looked south, finding he could not see the head of the column where Crook rode. Too far away in the roiling mist.

King turned and squinted into the north, holding down his hat’s flapping brim against the rising gusts of wind, wondering just how far back they were strung out. One by one the men of his own Fifth Cavalry trudged past, planting one boot on the slippery, adhesive prairie, leaning forward to yank the other foot out of the gumbo, then drag it forward, a most conscious act by men whose will to live diminished perceptibly with every single one of those tortured steps.

“Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn,” one of them muttered quietly as he heaved himself past, issuing his oath with each lunging step.

Others plodded past without raising their heads to look at King, murmuring only to themselves, their lungs heaving with weary fatigue, vowing death at the end of a rope to Crook and all his officers, cursing the Sioux and their army as a whole.

Charles felt the sob begin to flutter in his own chest and fought it down, swallowing hard. Turning, blinking into the dancing swirl of sheeting rain, King found an infantryman collapsing to his knees into the mud some yards off to the right.

Slowly the soldier crumpled forward, crying out to God. “Take mercy on us, Lord! Deliver us from hell!”

“C’mon,” King said quietly as he bent over the soldier. Helping the man struggle to his feet, the lieutenant found he was able to stifle his own growing despair and hopelessness. “Let’s walk together awhile, you and me.”

With an arm around one another they lumbered forward unevenly, the ground sucking at their feet so that they careened first this way, then that.

And the rain continued to fall.

More and more horses gave out.

One by one the men collapsed by the side of the trail among the cactus and the stunted grass throughout that long, terrible day in the history of the Army of the West.

Yet they somehow struggled on.

At the crossing of the next swollen stream the mules carrying Von Leuttwitz’s litter floundered, stumbled, and pitched their sputtering passenger into the muddy, foaming water. The lieutenant struggled to keep his head above the surging current as three of Captain Andrews’s men reached him and pulled him out, lifting the man gently into their arms and carrying him up the slippery bank on the far side. While they wiped what they could of the mud from the lieutenant’s face, others hurried to repair the loosened surcingle. Then as Von Leuttwitz continued cursing the troopers as if they were his torturers, the soldiers gently laid him into his litter once more and moved on.

Into the rain.

Through the mud.

Past the men who crumpled to their knees and beat the soggy ground with their fists in utter despair. Whimpering like children.

This hunger. This utter bone-weary fatigue. This cold with no hope of warmth. This twelfth day of nonstop rain, without prayer of deliverance.

These were enemies even the strongest among them simply could not defeat.

Give them a band of warriors. Show them an enemy village. Ask them to stand and face charge after charge after charge of screeching, wild-eyed red horsemen. They could do that. After all, they were soldiers.

But this! No man, no matter how strong of body, no matter how unshakable of will, no … no man was prepared for something like this. If endurance, if life itself, were a candle that glowed inside each and every one of those soldiers—then the wick was all but gone, and the weakened flame flickered, sputtering, just short of snuffing itself out.

A few of those who would somehow be strong enough this day would eventually pay in the years to come from the deprivation. A few became crazed even that day, were bound and tied by their friends, carried along by their bunkies—raving, wild-eyed, foaming, lunatic men whose crippled minds were never to recover.

Not long after noon King trudged up to a pair of men hunkered in the sticky mud among the cactus. One of them proved to be the surgeon McGillycuddy, who more than two hours before had stopped at that spot to help a young soldier.

“Huntington, Henry Dustan, sir,” the officer identified himself to the lieutenant as King squatted to his side. “Second Lieutenant, sir.”

Dr. Valentine McGillycuddy explained, “I came upon Mr. Huntington here some time back. Found him doubled up with cramps.”

In sympathy King looked down at the officer hunched in a fetal position, his legs crimped against his belly. “Have you given him anything for the pain?”

“Very first thing,” McGillycuddy replied, “I administered some quinine to relieve the severe cramping. But his pain only worsened as time wore on. I’ve now resorted to an injection of morphine, afraid it might be a bowel obstruction of some sort.”

For a moment King glanced up at the two horses standing nearby, then asked, “Is he ready to mount up?”

“Oh, God … dear God, no!” Huntington groaned, his eyes clenched with a rising spasm of pain, his legs trembling.

“Hundreds of men have passed by me,” the doctor declared, “but no one has been able to help.”

“We’re the last,” King explained. “You’ve got to come in with me.”

Huntington bellowed, “I can’t ride!”

“I simply can’t make the man suffer,” McGillycuddy explained. “Even the two of us won’t be able to get him into the saddle.”

“We’ve got to move out,” Charles told the two. “See? There goes the last of the file. And there’s a damned good chance a war party could be along anytime to sweep down on defenseless stragglers just like you.”

“If you’ve got an idea,” McGillycuddy said, “now’s the time to tell us.”

“Both of you,” Huntington gasped in the middle of a wave of pain, “both … just go. Leave me. Don’t sacrifice your own … own lives.”

“Be quiet,” the doctor ordered. “I won’t be able to sleep tonight knowing I left you out here.”

“Me neither,” King agreed.

The ill soldier grumbled, “No sense the red bastards getting all of us. G’won and leave me.”

“No.” Rising from the gummy mud, King stared southwest, south, then southeast across the grassland dotted with spiny cactus. “Maybe there.”

“What? Where?” the surgeon asked.

“We can make him a travois. Stay with him, Doctor. I’ll be back soon.”

Lumbering off toward a wide vee in the low, rolling hills, King made for the dark vegetation that promised what he needed most. With his belt knife the lieutenant cut down some thick saplings, then turned and dragged them back to McGillycuddy. Next he slogged north on their backtrail more than half a mile until he found several of the abandoned saddles and gathered four of the lariats the troopers had left behind. With the ropes King and the surgeon quickly fashioned a crude travois after knocking the branches from the young saplings. With more of the rope they wove a bed, and across that net of ropes the two men laid their blankets.

At first Huntington’s thoroughbred objected to having the travois lashed to its saddle. McGillycuddy had to steady the animal while King completed the harnessing, then together they gently lifted Huntington into place. With the young second lieutenant’s own gum poncho thrown over him, McGillycuddy held out his hand to Charles.

“Thank you, Lieutenant. I don’t believe I caught your name.”

“King. Charles King.” He glanced into the roiling gray of the western sky. “Now, it’s best you get that horse moving with your patient, Doctor. Night’s gonna come all too quick.”

Twilight was advancing, far faster than any of them cared to realize.

All day long the infantry at the head of the march had been on the alert for one of two things: either the Belle Fourche River, or some game for their supper fires. As the hours crawled by, it seemed neither would come to pass.No river, and not one wild animal had been seen. Late in the afternoon one of the men on the left flank suddenly yelled.

“Antelope!”

Soldiers along that side of the ragged column turned dully, their reaction time retarded, and stared off into the low hills as if it might be nothing more than a delusion brought on by their hunger, their weakness, and the cold. But no, there in the rain stood four of the white-rumped animals. A buck and his small harem.

They did not wait for permission to fire. Instead the whole left flank began to pop at the quartet of targets, and quickly all four lay in the short, muddy grass. Over the cactus and through the gumbo the ecstatic soldiers bounded with sudden rejuvenation, pouncing on the warm animals, a dozen or more men working their slashing knives on each small carcass, slicing warm strips from the hindquarters, claiming parts of the liver or heart, chewing on sections of the rich, fatty gut while stuffing choice morsels inside the pockets of their mud-crusted tunics and blouses, tender portions saved for a distant supper to be cooked at some unknown, distant bivouac.

Throughout the long, desperate afternoon and into that momentary brilliant flare of sunset the officers were forced to call brief halts with growing frequency. But as Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka said to King during one, “A halt like this is nothing more than suffering at a standstill.”

Finally just past dusk Crook and the head of the command spotted a fringe of cottonwood rising among some willow and alder. There they went into bivouac on Willow Creek after thirty-five grueling miles of wilderness. They had been struggling long past the point on their maps where they believed they should have reached the Bell Fourche, which wrapped itself closely along the northern edge of the Black Hüls. But their maps were wrong. What they had expected that morning, upon leaving Owl Creek, to be a march of only twenty miles to reach the foothills was instead twice that far.

As darkness settled over the land, the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition was still six miles from the Belle Fourche. And Crook’s pitiful column was at that moment strung out for more than ten miles to the rear.

Stragglers limped and crawled in throughout the evening. It was nine-thirty before Captain Andrews’s men stumbled to the bank of Willow Creek, escorting the surgeons and their train of wounded. After their exhausting ordeal dragging the litters and travois across every ravine, creek, stream, and piece of broken ground, most of Andrews’s troopers could not be induced to help with the wounded by unloading the litters or erecting the captured buffalo-hide lodge. At last a few foot soldiers trudged over to volunteer their help. Eventually the wounded were out of the rain and served a steaming cup from the last of Clements’s secret cache of coffee.

Some of those stronger men cheered up their wounded, sick, and worn-out fellows, saying, “We’re only five or six miles from the Belle Fourche, the scouts tell us. And that means we can’t be far from civilization!”

Smoky, muddy, raucous, and profane mining camps—to these ragged men clinging to hope and life itself, the Black Hills settlements had suddenly, somehow, become “civilization.”

So it was that the last of the exhausted infantry showed up at half-past ten o’clock while the first of the dismounted cavalry did not begin to limp in until long after midnight. Worse yet, it would not be until the first light of false dawn etched the eastern horizon in gray that the last of those troopers who were put afoot the day before finally stumbled in.

Through the night the hardiest of those skeletal, despairing soldiers realized the rest would rely on someone else to keep them alive. So the few trudged off to scare up enough wood along the banks of the Willow to start their roaring bonfires at the foot of a low ridge in hopes that the lights dancing through the sheets of never-ending rain might serve as beacons to those still lost in the jaws of that terrifying wilderness. Beckoning them onward. Giving the faintest of them hope.

Throughout that long, terrible night many of those men straggling in had plainly used up the last shred of their strength, collapsing within sight of the bivouac’s bonfires, unable to make another step, and fell into an exhausted sleep right there in the mud, not even taking the trouble to unroll their wet and crusted blankets before they closed their eyes and began to snore.

Those who still had the strength were asked to report to the commissary, where they helped butcher what few ponies they had left to cook for the rest who kept straggling in all night long.

Additionally Crook had his commanders ask for volunteers, men who would willingly return to the dark and the mud, to venture back into the maze of prairie, where they called out and searched the backtrail for anyone who no longer had the will to keep coming on his own.

That black day had been nothing more than raw survival—grown uglier as each succeeding hour continued to strip Crook’s men of their last vestige of humanity.

As Dr. Clements said that night, “These men have reached the limit of human endurance.”

It was long past midnight when King himself saw the first flickers of that long line of bonfires shimmering and dancing behind the curtains of hard rain. His shoulder hurt so much, he could think of little else. It helped when the arm did not swing, so some time ago he had stuffed his left hand inside his belt as a crude sling. And on he marched, stumbling forward, faster and faster now with the line of beacon fires drawing him nearer and nearer. Ahead there were voices, and he heard the snorts of horses.

Dear God! he prayed. Let it be camp!

As he plunged onward through the sheets of swirling mist, he made out not that far ahead the form of a half-dozen soldiers and a single horse they surrounded, moving in the same direction—toward the beacon fires. All five or six of the men clung to the animal that occasionally heaved to one side or the other. And then Charles made out the travois lashed to the animal, the crude poles bumping over the stubby cactus that with each jolt caused its passenger to groan.

“Dr. McGillycuddy?”

The horse careened to a stop, and the human forms turned slowly. One of them came back a few steps and stopped, wearily weaving, almost dead on his feet.

“I’m … Surgeon McGillycuddy.”

“Lieutenant King.”

“Lieutenant,” the surgeon exclaimed, beckoning the officer on. “Join us—we’re almost there.” He turned, his arm expressive. “See? The fires.”

“Who goes there?” came the demand from out of the darkness, and a dozen to fifteen men appeared a heartbeat later, backlit with the distant bonfires.

King tried to find his voice, but all that came up was the sob he had struggled to hold down throughout that long, terrible day in hell. It was McGillycuddy who finally replied, the only one among them not so weary that he could not speak.

The doctor’s voice audibly cracked as he hollered out to the darkness. “The w-wounded t-train.”

“Good God, Doctor!” an officer exclaimed as his wet, shiny face came close, looking over them all.

“Lieutenant Rawolle?” King asked, his voice harsh as it emerged from a raw throat.

“Charles King?” Rawolle lunged closer, his teeth bright in the dark shagginess of his mustache and beard. “It is you! Why, we’d all but given up every last one of you for dead.”