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

Afterword

What began with such bright hope and almost cocky optimism in the winter campaign quickly deteriorated into a disappointing spring after the Powder River debacle, then nearly fell completely apart in the first days of what would turn out to be a disastrous summer.

Back in the fall of seventy-five Sherman and Sheridan had hatched a brilliant plan to take President Grant off the horns of his thorny dilemma: in order to wrest the Black Hills from the Sioux and Cheyenne, the government had to find a way that would compel the tribes to break the law. Then Washington City could send in the army to settle the matter quickly, efficiently. All those who would not obediently return to their agencies would be deemed hostile and subject to annihilation.

That plan was succeeding beautifully in all respects, except one. Instead of convincing the winter roamers— those true, free-roaming warrior bands—to give up their old way of life and return to the reservations, the warrior bands had gone and whipped the army. Yet despite losing so many of its battles, the army was eventually to win the war.

For the better part of seven years following the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, Congress had steadfastly refused to entertain any idea of taking back the territory it had granted the tribes in that historic agreement—despite the growing clamor from various and powerful economic and political constituencies back east who were coming to agree that the Black Hills, rich in gold that could be found at the grass roots, should be settled and mined. In a turn of the biblical phrase: it was the duty of white Christians to subdue that portion of the earth and make it fruitful.

It simply would not do to leave so fruitful a region in the hands of savages who were doing nothing to reap the harvest from that land.

But now that Reynolds had been driven off the Powder, now that Crook had been forced back to Goose Creek to lick his wounds, now that half of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry had been rubbed out, forcing General Alfred Terry back to tend to his own psychic wounds on the Yellowstone—now that the army had suffered so many setbacks, Congress was suddenly of a new mind. Washington’s conscience was a’changing.

Yet it wasn’t just the nation’s representatives who clamored for results. Reeling from the startling banner headlines that second week of July in their very own Centennial summer, the body politic, the public itself, raised a strident demand for action. Raised their own call to arms!

As John S. Gray puts it:

The Secretary [of War J. D. Cameron] solemnly proclaimed that the terms of the Sioux treaty had been “literally performed on the part of the United States.” (By sending thousands to invade the reservation?) Even most of the Sioux had likewise honored the treaty, but some “have always treated it with contempt,” by continuing “to rove at pleasure.” (A practice legalized by the treaty!) They had even gone so far as to “attack settlements, steal horses, and murder peaceful inhabitants.” (These victims were white violators of the treaty who dealt the Indians worse than they received!)

Cameron’s report went on to read like nothing more than perfect bureaucratic doublespeak:

No part of these operations is on or near the Sioux reservation. The accidental discovery of gold on the western border of the Sioux reservation, and the intrusion of our people thereon, have not caused this war …

Citizens back east knew their government had been feeding, clothing, educating the Sioux and Cheyenne at their agencies. And now those ungrateful Indians had bitten the hand that fed them! Shocked and dismayed, the public cried out that simple justice required stern punishment.

So Sherman and Sheridan wouldn’t find it at all hard to get what they wanted by midsummer, within days of the disastrous news from the Little Bighorn reaching the East. Suddenly after three years of balking at General Sheridan’s request for money to build two forts in the heart of Sioux country, Congress promptly appropriated the funds to begin construction at a pair of sites on the Yellowstone: one at the mouth of the Big Horn and the other at the mouth of the Tongue.

A few weeks later—after a delay caused only by some heated, vitriolic debate over the relative merits of Volunteers versus Regulars—Congress additionally raised the ceiling on army strength, a move that allowed recruiting another twenty-five hundred privates for a sorely tried U.S. cavalry. By railcar and riverboat steamer, these new privates were uniformed and outfitted and were being rushed to the land of the Sioux by late summer.

On the last day of July, Congress authorized the President to take all necessary steps to prevent metallic cartridges from reaching Sioux country. Two weeks later Grant signed into law a bill that raised the strength of Enlisted Indian Scouts to one thousand. And only three days later he put his name on a bill raising the manpower strength of all cavalry companies to one hundred men for each company.

Sherman and Sheridan now had their “total war,” just the same sort of scorched-earth warfare they had waged so successfully through Georgia and the Shenandoah. In their minds there were no noncombatants. Any woman or child, any Indian sick or old, was deemed the enemy by virtue of not huddling close to the agencies. As far as General Sheridan was concerned, it wasn’t just a matter of using his troops to drive the roamers back to their reservations. This was a war of vengeance against an enemy who had embarrassed, even humiliated, his army.

The last, but by no means the least, of the pieces to their plan, was that Sheridan was finally to get what he had wanted ever since he had come west at the end of the Civil War.

With war fever infecting Washington by the end of that July, Secretary of the Interior Chandler turned over to the army “control over all the agencies in the Sioux country.” Both the agents at Red Cloud and Spotted Tail were to be removed without cause and their duties assumed by the commanders of the nearby Camp Robinson (at Red Cloud) and Camp Sheridan (at Spotted Tail). The army would soon begin to demand the “unconditional surrender” of every Indian who returned to the reservations in the wake of the army’s big push. No matter that they might be coming in from a hunt, all Indians on the agencies had to surrender their weapons and ponies. They were considered prisoners of war.

So what of those who had remained on the reservations?

It made no difference to the army now in control of the agencies. Not a single penny of their appropriations, not one mouthful of flour or rancid ounce of bacon would be given out until the Sioux had first relinquished all claim to their unceded lands.

“Give back the Black Hills or starve!”

Only 40 of the 2,267 adult males required by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 to sell their Paha Sapa eventually signed the agreement the government commissioners foisted upon them.

But by then the Battle of Slim Buttes had already taken place. And Slim Buttes was clearly the beginning of the end.

The Sioux and Cheyenne had already ridden the meteor’s tail to the zenith of their success at Rosebud Creek and the Greasy Grass. Yet within eleven weeks of their stunning victories, their demise and ultimate defeat were already sealed at what was an otherwise inconsequential fight at Slim Buttes. In a matter of months Crazy Horse would surrender in the south, and Sitting Bull would limp across the Medicine Line into the Land of the Grandmother with the last of his holdouts.

Both of them giving up the good fight.

To learn more about what took place during that dramatic summer among both the warrior villages and the army camps in the territory surrounding the Little Bighorn River country, I offer the following suggested titles I have used to write my story of this Summer of the Sioux:

Across the Continent with the Fifth Cavalry, by George F. Price

Battles and Skirmishes of the Great Sioux War, 1876-1877, the Military View, edited by Jerome A. Greene

Blood on the Moon: Valentine McGillycuddy and the Sioux, by Julia B. McGillycuddy

Campaigning with Crook, by Captain Charles King, U.S.A.

Campaigning with King: Charles King, Chronicler of the Old Army, edited by Paul L. Hedren

Centennial Campaign: The Sioux War of 1876, by John S. Gray

The Chronicles of the Yellowstone, by E. S. Topping

Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors, by Stephen E. Ambrose

Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas, by Mari Sandoz

Death on the Prairie: The Thirty Years’ Struggle for the Western Plains, by Paul I. Wellman

First Scalp for Custer: The Skirmish at Warbonnet Creek, by Paul L. Hedren

Following the Indian Wars: The Story of Newspaper Correspondents among the Indian Campaigners, by Oliver Knight

Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay: The Enlisted Soldier Fighting the Indian Wars, by Don Rickey, Jr.

Frank Grouard, Army Scout, edited by Margaret Brock Hanson

Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1891, by Robert M. Utley

General George Crook: His Autobiography, edited by Martin F. Schmitt

The Great Sioux War, 1876-77, edited by Paul L. Hedren

“I Am Looking to the North for My Life”: Sitting Bull, 18761881, by Joseph Manzione

Indian Fights and Fighters, by Cyrus Townsend Brady

Indian Fights: New Facts on Seven Encounters, by J. W. Vaughn

Indians, Infants and Infantry: Andrew and Elizabeth Burt on the Frontier, by Merrill J. Mattes

The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull, by Robert M. Utley

Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, by Joe DeBarthe

The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill, by Don Russell

My Sixty Years on the Plains, by W. T. Hamilton

My Story, by Anson Mills

Nelson A. Miles: A Documentary Biography of His Military Career, 1861-1903, edited by Brian C. Pohanka

On the Border with Crook, by John G. Bourke

Paper Medicine Man: John Gregory Bourke and His American West, by Joseph C. Porter

Personal Recollections and Observations, by General Nelson A. Miles

The Plainsmen of the Yellowstone, by Mark H. Brown

Rekindling Campfires, edited by Lewis F. Crawford

The Shoshonis: Sentinels of the Rockies, by Virginia Cole Trenholm and Maurine Carley

Sitting Bull: Champion of the Sioux, by Stanley Vestal

The Slim Buttes Battle: September 9 and 10, 1876, by Fred H. Werner

Slim Buttes, 1876: An Episode of the Great Sioux War, by Jerome A. Greene

War Cries on Horseback: The Story of the Indian Wars of the Great Plains, by Stephen Longstreet

War Eagle: A Life of General Eugene A. Carr, by James T. King

Warpath: A True Story of the Fighting Sioux, by Stanley Vestal

War-Path and Bivouac: The Bighorn and Yellowstone Expedition, by John F. Finerty

Warpath and Council Fire: The Plains Indians’ Struggle for Survival in War and in Diplomacy, 1851-1891, by Stanley Vestal

Washakie: An Account of Indian Resistance, by Grace Raymond Hebard

Wooden Leg: A Warrior Who Fought Custer, interpreted by Thomas B. Marquis

Yellowstone Command: Colonel Nelson A. Miles and the Great Sioux War, 1876-1877, by Jerome A. Greene

There are some who place no confidence whatsoever in Frank Grouard’s recollections when he told Joe DeBarthe years later that he scouted north from Crook’s camp and ran across that piece of ground just east of the Little Bighorn that would come to be known as Massacre Ridge. But by carefully studying the maps of the terrain between Goose Creek and the Greasy Grass, by considering how fast (or how slow) a man on horseback might travel in hostile country after dark, and finally, by adjusting what the half-breed scout recounted by as little as one day—I was able to see just how feasible it would have been for Grouard and his skittish horse to have found themselves among those naked, mutilated, bloated bodies of the Custer dead.

So it seems to me more than reasonable to expect that Grouard could get his facts skewed by a day or so—seeing as how he dictated his Ufe story decades after the fact.

Yet when I’m given an opportunity to read an account fresher than Grouard’s, something written closer to the event—I’ll go with it every time.

For example, there isn’t all that much written on the harrowing adventures of those men who went for that scout with Lieutenant Frederick Sibley. And what is available often varies in the details. Here I have relied on four sources: Sibley’s own account, Frank Grouard’s recollections, those of John Finerty, and the dictated recollections of Baptiste “Big Bat” Pourier. Since Grouard, Pourier, and Sibley all related their stories many years later, for this novel I have primarily embraced the Chicago newsman’s version (with few, minor exceptions)—since I could draw what I believed was a fresher tale from the reporter’s dispatches written immediately after his return to Camp Cloud Peak.

I would imagine that for most readers of western history the Sibley scout comes as something new, perhaps just as new as the skirmish on the Warbonnet. While that military success was small (only one Indian killed), the impact of what Merritt’s Fifth Cavalry did would long reverberate across the northern plains. Perhaps as many as eight hundred Cheyenne were turned back to their agency, unable to bolster the numbers of those warrior bands recently victorious over Crook and Custer. Yet it was something far more intangible that made the Warbonnet significant that summer of Sheridan’s trumpet on the land.

No matter how small it was—it was the army’s first victory.

Except for a few tandem-wired telephone poles, that peaceful, rolling prairie grassland near present-day Montrose, Nebraska, seems unchanged in the last hundred-plus years. The place where Cody had his celebrated duel with a Cheyenne war chief was at the time called Indian Creek in regimental returns of the day, then War Bonnet Creek in later military records, but is today called Hat Creek.

There might well be a lot of confusion for those of you who go looking in the northwest corner of Nebraska for the site of that famous skirmish, simply because all three of those names appear for three separate creeks in that immediate area. While “Hat” and “War Bonnet” are two differing translations for the same Lakota term, the name of a tributary of the Cheyenne River (Mini Pusa to the Sioux), the creek called the War Bonnet on today’s maps is some forty miles south of what is today called Hat Creek, where the Fifth Cavalry successfully ambushed Little Wolfs Cheyenne.

The creek still rises with spring runoff and falls with autumnal drought, just as it has every year as white homesteaders and cattlemen moved in and pacified the land. For more than half a century no one knew for sure where the site was, nor did anyone seem to care.

By the mid-1880s the nearby town of Montrose had grown to boast a population of sixty-five! When the Sioux began to dance back the ghosts in the summer of 1890, the frightened citizenry constructed a stockade on the highest hill in the event the ghost dancers spilled off their reservation and came looking for white scalps—the very same hill used as a lookout post by King that morning of July 17, 1876.

It would take another thirty years before anyone got interested in marking the spot, and it was a group of Wyoming citizens who ended up doing it.

In 1929, while marking Wyoming’s historic sites, the Wyoming Landmark Commission discovered that the Warbonnet skirmish might well have taken place in their state. Four men promptly formed “The Amalgamated Association of Hunters of the Spot Where Buffalo Bill Killed Yellow Hand.” Attempting to use Charles King’s book, Campaigning with Crook, the association found itself empty-handed that first summer, having been sidetracked mostly by confusing geographical names. No success, until they finally followed still-visible wagon tracks of Lieutenant Hall’s supply train. Only then did the searchers discover that the site rested less than a quarter of a mile from the buildings of Montrose.

Still the commissioners felt they needed complete verification. In October of that year the four succeeded in convincing an aging Charles King to visit the site. Eighty-four at the time and in failing health, the retired general was unable to identify the battle site.

The “trees were too big,” King said.

In July of the following year King returned west to visit the four Wyoming residents, this time joined by Chris Madsen, the Fifth Cavalry signalman who had been near the site of Cody’s duel, an emigrant soldier who would later became a famous lawman in Oklahoma Territory and charge to the top of San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders.” Madsen had none of King’s doubts. Here and there the old cavalryman led the researchers across the site, relating who did what and where. King concurred.

This event led to the efforts made by Mrs. Johnny Baker, wife of Bill Cody’s foster son, to erect a monument on the site to commemorate Buffalo Bill’s defeat of Yellow Hair. At the same time Madsen led his own subscription effort to erect a second monument, this one to the Fifth Cavalry. Both were dedicated in September 1934. While King and Baker had passed on by that time, an erect and attentive Chris Madsen listened to the glowing speeches given that warm, early-autumn day—then rose to the rostrum in that dry prairie breeze, took off his hat, and wiped a dark bandanna across his forehead, then told that crowd in the simple language of a plainsman what the Fighting Fifth Cavalry had accomplished that morning fifty-eight years before.

Both those monuments can still be seen by the rare visitor who crosses that ground today. On a towering stone and cement spire, a plaque reads:

SITE

Where

Seven Troops of the Fifth U.S. Cavalry

Under

Col. WESLEY MERRITT

Intercepted 800 Cheyenne

and Sioux, Enroute to Join

The Hostiles in the North. July 17, 1876

The Indians Were Driven Back to the

Red Cloud and Spotted Tail Reservations.

Nearby, a short, squat stone-and-cement monument stands just about where Madsen stated the war chief fell. It reads:

On This Spot

W. F. Cody BUFFALO BILL

Killed

YELLOW HAIR (OR HAND)

The Cheyenne Leader Who, With

A Party of Warriors, Dashed

Down This Ravine To Waylay

Two Soldier Couriers Coming

From the West

July 17, 1876

For many years Cody’s participation in that dramatic “duel” was doubted in many circles, just as Frank and Luther North had done all they could to cast doubt on Buffalo Bill’s being the one who had actually killed Dog Soldier Chief Tall Bull at Summit Springs on July 11, 1869. But none of the assertions from others who claimed to have killed Yellow Hair have withstood close scrutiny. All those boasts are, as are the claims of the North brothers regarding Summit Springs, dispelled by Don Russell in his compelling book on Cody.

Still, a sergeant with the Fifth Cavalry can take credit for providing the best confirmation that it was indeed Cody who met and killed the Cheyenne. John Powers, stationed that summer at Fort Hays in Kansas, was what we now call a “stringer,” paid to send back reports on the campaign trail to his hometown newspaper, the Ellis County Star.

Powers’s account, composed in the days immediately following the dramatic skirmish, confirms the account of Charles King, written four years later in Campaigning with Crook: the approach of Hall’s wagon train, its guard of infantry companies, Cody’s leading the soldiers to ambush the ambushers intent on butchering the two couriers, Cody’s firing of the first shot (which killed the Cheyenne’s war pony), his firing a second shot that felled the war chief himself, and the charge of the Fifth Cavalry past the scout who stood over Yellow Hair’s body.

That scene brings to mind a minor controversy in the three accounts used to write the one you have just read. While one of those contemporary reports (each of them written by witnesses of the skirmish) states that Cody shot Yellow Hair in the chest, two of them state unequivocally that Buffalo Bill shot the Cheyenne in the head. When one studies Cody’s abilities with firearms exhibited throughout his life, it isn’t at all hard to believe he was in fact capable of shooting Yellow Hair in the head. Nonetheless, I’m still uncertain that a hardened plainsman like Cody would chance taking a shot at his enemy’s head, when he had a far bigger target in the Cheyenne’s broad chest.

While no testimony specifically reports that Yellow Hair wore his prize scalp around his neck, I have taken that poetic license with the tale, making the trophy torn from the head of a white enemy just the target Bill uses when he takes deadly aim at the war chief.

And that brings up another interesting question I haven’t been able to answer to my own satisfaction: how the name Yellow Hair, over time, eventually became Yellow Hand. Was it primarily Cody’s mistake when he sent the scalp and warbonnet on to his friend in Rochester, New York? Or was it Baptiste “Little Bat” Garnier who made the error when he translated the war chiefs name for those right there at the Warbonnet skirmish that hot July morning? Or was it some unnamed historian’s attempt to distinguish between this minor Cheyenne war chief and the term the Southern Cheyenne used when referring to George Armstrong Custer (Hiestzi, or “Yellow Hair”)?

All we know for certain is that the warrior’s name was indeed Yellow Hair because, it is believed, he proudly wore the blond scalp of a white man (or woman—accounts differ on the sex of the person who once wore that yellow hair). Despite the fact that the sign reads “Yellow Hand,” any visitor to the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, Wyoming, will see for himself not only this most famous scalp of the Sioux War, but Yellow Hair’s feathered bonnet and trailer,his pistol and shield, his knife and blanket, along with the dead Cheyenne’s bridle and quirt.

It is beyond me how anyone can claim Cody ended up with these spoils if he wasn’t the one who stood over the war chiefs body, and if he himself didn’t remove them from Yellow Hair as the Fifth Cavalry began its chase of Little Wolfs band!

By that time, exactly a month after Crook’s stalemate on the Rosebud, the press had already begun its assault on the general and his handling of the campaign to that point. It was the contention of editors both east and west that Terry and Crook would never find the hostiles, that there was little hope of success. While most of the nation’s papers clamored for results in the Sioux War, the New York Tribune went so far as to blame the government’s policy in the Black Hills for the army’s lack of success, also claiming that Sitting Bull had made it clear his Sioux would not return to their reservations until the army drove the white men out of their sacred Paha Sapa.

By early August several Montana newspapers were reporting that the hostile Sioux had offered Canadian tribes an alliance against the whites on both sides of the Medicine Line. While the Canadian Cree, Blackfoot, and Assiniboine refused, the citizens of Montana Territory nonetheless fretted. Reminding his Montana readers that across the border lived more than twelve thousand warriors, the editor of the Deer Lodge New North-West wrote, “If they were to join the tribes now fighting the United States, nothing on this side of the line could prevent them.”

At the same time, the Fort Benton Record received a report from Fort Walsh just across the border in Canada that Yankton Sioux were camped close by and “making mischief.” Clearly the cry was going out: the public wanted something done, and now.

Fearing most that Sitting Bull would cross the Yellowstone and reach Canada, General Alfred Terry had eventually given up all thought of working in concert with the loner Crook. For a week he worked Bill Cody and his forces north but found nothing of the wild bands. On September 3 Terry received word from Crook, then on Beaver Creek, an affluent of the Little Missouri, that the Indian trail he had been following had petered out. To Terry there was little more his men could accomplish without using up the supplies Colonel Nelson Miles’s men would need for the coming winter as they manned the Tongue River Cantonment from which they were to patrol the lower Yellowstone.

On September 5 Terry disbanded his expedition, sent Gibbon’s infantry and Brisbin’s Second Cavalry back west to Fort Ellis and Fort Shaw, then went with the Seventh Cavalry itself as it limped home to a somber Fort Abraham Lincoln draped in mourning.

If anything was to be done now, it would be up to George Crook and his Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition to do it. But first they had to find the Sioux.

As the soldiers came trudging along through the mud, weeks behind them, the warrior bands had already reached the traditional camping grounds they had been visiting for generations. Here beside the Mashtincha Putin (what they called Rabbit Lip Creek), they raised their lodges at the foot of those long gray bluffs dappled with jackpine. The Sioux term for the geographic feature, Paha Zizipela, translates to “thin (or “horizontal”) butte”—as a snake is thin and moves horizontally, in the sense of the buttes running north-south. These buttes are indeed long (fifty miles) and very thin (less than four miles in width).

The exact number of Miniconjou in that village has long remained a source of controversy. At the time of the battles Frank Grouard told Mills and Crook the village contained two hundred occupants. Anson Mills later stated that he learned from the captives that the village comprised “two hundred souls, one hundred of whom were warriors.” Yet this ratio of warriors to other occupants seems unusually high.

However, when we apply the 1855 Thomas Twiss method of counting (whereby it was determined there were two men of fighting age for every lodge—“fighting age” determined as men from their midteens to their late thirties), we find a much more likely figure of seventy-four warriors in that camp that Mills attacked at dawn.

Still, that figure might seem a little high to those knowledgeable in the Plains Indian culture. By applying Harry H. Anderson’s computations (7 Indians per normal-sized lodge, of which 1.29 are warriors), we come up with a village population of some 260 Miniconjou and 48 warriors. When you add to those 48 any boys eager to defend their families, as well as older men and a few women who would stay behind to fight—one can see how Captain Mills just might arrive at an estimate of 100 combatants he faced on the morning of September 9.

While we can verify that Crook’s combined forces numbered just shy of 2,000 men, historians have disagreed as to the number of warriors Sitting Bull led against what the Sioux believed would be only 150 pony soldiers—those who attacked at dawn with Anson Mills. Estimates range anywhere between 600 to 800, although a few winters later Sitting Bull himself would say that he had led a thousand warriors back to attack Three Stars. No matter if he did have that many—the Sioux were still up against two-to-one odds when they tried to make it tough on Crook’s retreating army.

Rumors had long existed that the soldiers had killed their warrior captives before pulling away from the village. Four years after the battle Charles King himself made note of those rumors in his Campaigning with Crook, as did Don Rickey, Jr., in Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay. But National Park Service research historian Jerome A. Greene maintains that, “There is no substantiating evidence for the charge made fifty-nine years later by a deserter from Crook’s expedition that the captured warriors were shot to death by the troops before the command left the battlefield.”

After interviewing Sioux participants in the Battle of Slim Buttes, as well as some of their relatives, author Stanley Vestal reported that the Miniconjou losses were ten killed and two wounded. According to the Ricker Papers, Red Horse claimed seven were killed and four wounded, while a third Sioux reported the dead as three men, four women, and one infant—eight total.

What we can be even more certain of is the fact that the Sioux were fired up, furious beyond words when they returned to the site of their decimated, burned-out village after driving off the stragglers at the tail end of Crook’s column retreating to the south. Aware that the warriors in the hills—as well as Crook’s prisoners later to be released— had watched the soldiers bury their dead, we can have little doubt that the Sioux did in fact dig up the graves of White, Wenzel, and Kennedy, and so too the hole where the surgeons had buried Von Leuttwitz’s leg. The warriors and squaws in mourning would almost certainly have taken out their rage and grief not only on those dead bodies, but on that amputated limb.

Of great interest to me was the discovery of all that money and those articles taken from Custer’s dead at the Little Bighorn fight. In his reminiscences Frank Grouard declared that soldiers combing through the lodges prior to their destruction found more than eleven thousand dollars. This, most would agree, is simply too grand a figure. John Finerty reported to his readers that Crook’s troops recovered nine hundred dollars. The real amount is likely to be somewhere in between, a figure closer to that given by the Chicago newsman. Allowing for a bit of pilfering here and there, one might believe there was easily twelve hundred dollars or more to be recovered in that village.

But more so even than that cash, what piqued my interest was the discovery of those ghostly relics. Just as one writer of that time stated, to come across the letters written to and by the Custer dead must have been like hearing faint, eerie voices whispering from their shallow graves beside the Greasy Grass. A matter of weeks later Sergeant Jefferson Spooner recalled that when he had been going through the lodges, he came across several noteworthy articíes:a locket, a small cabinet photo of Captain Myles Keogh, two gold-mounted ivory-handled revolvers, and a Spencer sporting rifle. The cavalry sergeant went on to state, “The picture and locket I gave to an officer of the 3rd Cav., who claimed them as a relative of the officer killed with Custer, and a revolver I gave to Capt. Rodgers of ‘A’ Co. 5th Cav. The rifle I sold some days later for two loaves of bread.”

The emphasis there is all mine! Only to remind you that in less than a week of that victory over a village filled with dried meat, Crook’s troops were on the Belle Fourche and then the Whitewood, trading what little they had with the greedy merchants who came out from the Black Hills towns to charge the soldiers five, six, even seven times the going rate (already inflated due to transportation costs to the mining settlements) for the most basic of foodstuffs!

It seems from the discovery of the Keogh photograph and that locket, from the captain’s leather gauntlets, and especially from the “Wild I” company guidon, that whoever secured those souvenirs was among those who overwhelmed that tough band of cavalrymen who attempted to hold the east side of Massacre Ridge. One report states that the swallowtail flag was tied outside the lodge of American Horse, likely attached to the smoke-flap ropes. But Anson Mills states that it was discovered “in good condition, folded up in an Indian reticule with a pair of Colonel Keogh’s gauntlets marked with his name.”

Yet Mills wasn’t the one who discovered that guidon. Charging the Sioux village, Private W. J. McClinton sprinted in with his C Troop from the Third Cavalry, and that very day presented the flag to Captain Mills. Years later when McClinton received his discharge papers from the army, he found the face of the document emblazoned in bold red ink with a testament to the fact that he had captured the guidon. Upon his discharge McClinton remained in the West, soon to become a resident of Sheridan, Wyoming, where he enjoyed a long and successful business career. More than a decade later John Bourke wrote,“[McClinton] never tires of singing the praises of General Crook and the brave men who opened up the rich valleys of the Tongue and Goose Creek [near present-day Sheridan] to settlement.”

But while that guidon went to Mills’s care, the story is yet incomplete. Not long after the arduous campaigns of the great Sioux War, Anson Mills loaned the relic, among other “trophies,” to the Museum of the Military Service Institution on Governor’s Island, New York. Years later upon its return he was dismayed at how the museum curators had allowed moths to have their way with the flag. He promptly had it encased in glass, and after the old soldier’s death, the Mills family donated it to the Custer Battlefield National Monument (now renamed the Little Bighorn Battlefield). There visitors can see that very same guidon that flew over the heads of Myles W. Keogh’s I Company as they stood their ground along Massacre Ridge, then fell into the dust when the standard-bearer died on that hillside, and finally traveled with the victorious Sioux to Dakota Territory—there to be recaptured by the U.S. Cavalry.

There is still something of a controversy regarding these relics. Are they, in fact, a “smoking gun” proving that this band of Miniconjou were indeed at the Little Bighorn battle? Years afterward Indians on the Standing Rock Reservation claimed that Iron Plume (as American Horse was better known among his people) had not been at the Greasy Grass fight at all. They testified that the Seventh Cavalry relics were instead brought into American Horse’s camp by visiting Oglalla in those eleven weeks after the soldiers were wiped out.

Nonetheless, Jerome Greene has stated there is sufficient evidence to believe that some of the warriors who were in that camp on the morning of 9 September had also been camped beside the Little Bighorn on the afternoon of 25 June. Perhaps most compelling are the words of Miniconjou Red Horse given to Judge Eli Ricker in his statement testifying that he was at both fights.

It seems conceivable to me that both sides in this controversy are correct. It is not hard at all to believe that in American Horse’s village that September morning there were both those who had fought the Seventh Cavalry on that hot summer day eleven weeks before, and those who had joined up with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse only in the days immediately following their great victory. The Indian populations of various warrior bands and clan groupings underwent growth and shrinkage throughout that spring, summer, and into the fall, with much coming and going as the seven great circles finally merged in the days before crushing Custer, then almost immediately began to slowly disperse and mosey off to the four winds as Crook and Terry sat on their thumbs—not knowing what to do.

Despite their hunger for a victory of some kind over the Sioux who had defeated the Seventh Cavalry, there was considerable disagreement, and outright argument, over Captain Mills’s attacking a village of unknown strength without first alerting Crook. The general himself criticized Mills for not having sent a courier back during the long night of the eighth, upon Grouard’s discovering the enemy camp. This, Crook attested, would have given him time to bring up the whole column, surrounding the camp and preventing the escape of all those “two hundred” Sioux into the nearby hills and bluffs.

Another source of heated discussion among Crook’s officers was the fact that Mills had opened up the battle with a dangerously limited supply of ammunition. All this criticism quickly made its way into the press of the day. Robert Strahorn wrote in his dispatches to the Rocky Mountain News:

Crook was very much disappointed because Mills didn’t report his discovery last night, and there was plenty of time to have got the entire command there and so effectually surrounded the village that nothing would have escaped; but the General is also pleased, all things considered.

Reuben Davenport of the New York Herald, never a fan of Crook, nonetheless took this opportunity to rebuke Mills:

All the circumstances lead to the inevitable conclusion that had Col. [Mills] reported the discovery to headquarters, instead of attempting to steal a march on the camp himself, the whole column could easily have reached and effectually surrounded the entire village before daylight … instead of this village of over 250 to 300 hostile savages getting off with whole skins, they could easily have been swooped down upon and annihilated.

How unfortunate that none of those contemporaries of Captain Anson Mills appear to have asked one simple question: what was the best information Mills operated with at the time of his discovery of the village? When he departed from the main column, pushing on with Lieutenant Bubb to secure provisions from the Black Hills settlements, Crook informed Mills and his lieutenants that he would be remaining in bivouac that next day and not moving south on Mills’s trail until the morning of the ninth.

So when Grouard discovered the hunters, then the pony herd, and finally the village late on that rainy afternoon of the eighth—Anson Mills had nothing to indicate that George Crook and the rest of the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition were anywhere but a minimum of thirty-five miles or more to their rear, right back where his battalion had left them. To send a courier on that backtrail wouldn’t have made much sense, at least to me—because given the condition of Crook’s men and animals, no courier could have conceivably crossed thirty-five miles of that treacherous, muddy country to reach Crook, and no column could have then marched another thirty-five miles across the same gumbo prairie, in time to launch a concerted attack at dawn!

Everything considered—the distant position of reinforcements from Crook’s column, and Mills’s dangerously low supply of ammunition—I believe the captain made the only decision he could, and all arguments then and now are nothing more than niggling, meaningless carping.

Still, it isn’t hard for me to understand the conditions that would make such heated debates arise: great, passionate welling of sentiment from those who continued to suffer the terrible privations of that campaign, two harrowing days of battle, and the additional horrors of their horse-meat march between Owl and Willow creeks. Simply put, we must remember that those soldiers had been in the wilderness for four and a half months without leave or relief.

In the Huntington Library collections we find the papers of Lieutenant Walter S. Schuyler, who wrote to his father upon Crook’s return to Fort Laramie:

It has been a march through the heart of the enemy’s country, almost wholly unexplored by white men, and thoroughly misunderstood by them, a march which has tried men’s souls as well as their constitutions, a march which will live in our history as the hardest ever undertaken by our army, and on which the privation and hardship were equaled only by the astonishing health of the command while accomplishing it.

Years after that grueling march of survival and sheer willpower, Lieutenant John Bourke found his own health failing. In writing his book, On the Border With Crook, he asked his public to study the roster of those soldiers who had suffered terribly through twenty-two days of constant hunger, cold, and rain.

If any of my readers imagines that the march from the head of Heart River down to the Belle Fourche was a picnic, let him examine the roster of the command and tell of the scores and scores of men, then hearty and rugged, who now fill premature graves or drag out an existence with constitutions wrecked and enfeebled by such privations and vicissitudes.

Fourteen years later in his short story about the campaign, which he titled “Van,” Charles King wrote:

We set out with ten days’ rations on a chase that lasted ten weeks … We wore out some Indians, a good many soldiers, and a great many horses. We sometimes caught the Indians, and sometimes they caught us. It was hot, dry summer weather when we left our wagons, tents, and extra clothing; it was sharp and freezing before we saw them again.

In an attempt to capture some of that grueling privation, as depicted in a closing scene of this novel, a photographer rode out from Deadwood with his cameras and his portable, wagon-borne darkroom to record for history through staged photographs some of what Crook’s troops managed to live through. For this alone we are indebted to photographer Stanley J. Morrow. With the assistance of Bantam Books and through the courtesy of folks at the Little Bighorn National Battlefield who searched through their photographic archives, we have in this book reproduced a few of Morrow’s momentous photos.

Perhaps the most evocative picture for me is the one showing the famous hide lodge salvaged from the captured village and used as Dr. Clements’s “hospital” for the next several days. The photo, taken after the column had reached the Black Hills, also shows the captured I Troop guidon on display. Standing left to right are scout Frank Grouard, Private W. J. McClinton (who captured the flag), and Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka. Seated left to right are Lieutenant Colonel William B. Royall (who commanded a battalion at the Battle of the Rosebud), Captain William H. Andrews (prominent for his gallantry on Royall’s flank during the Rosebud fight), Captain Anson Mills, and Lieutenant Joseph Lawson.

This last officer was generally known as a “character” among his comrades in the Third Cavalry. A native of Seamus Donegan’s Ireland, Lawson emigrated to the Ohio River country of Kentucky, where he ran a grocery store, married, and fathered five children before joining the Union Army with the outbreak of the Civil War—at the age of forty! In his remarkable career during the Indian wars, this unassuming soldier never asked any handicap of troopers half his age, being able to stay in the saddle and outride all but a handful of younger men in the Third Cavalry. Six feet tall and thin as a rail, with tobacco juice perpetually staining his scraggly red beard, Lawson had remained behind with Crook and the pack-train at the time of Reynolds’s Powder River fight, March 17, 1876. Three months later, after having displayed conspicuous courage during the Rosebud battle, the lieutenant was finally promoted to captain while Crook’s column was still recouping in the Black Hills, September 25, 1876. He would go on to distinguish himself at the Thornburg fight against Ute warriors on Colorado’s Milk River in 1879 … but there will be more on that to come in a future volume of this long-running series.

This buffalo-hide lodge was to remain the personal property of Captain Mills. Knowing that the captain did not return to the Belle Fourche with Lieutenant Bubb and the wagons loaded with supplies, choosing instead to remain behind for a day or so to recoup his strength, we can therefore determine with some accuracy that Morrow took this photo sometime after Mills rejoined the column at one of its Whitewood Creek camps.

By that time Crook and his entourage of officers and reporters were speeding back to Fort Laramie. Yet correspondent Reuben Davenport had already offered five hundred dollars to scout Jack Crawford to break away from Frank Grouard and Captain Anson Mills—and race to the dosest telegraph key. At the same time, Grouard carried dispatches for the three other reporters. In our next volume, A Cold Day in Hell you will be treated to the amusing adventures of that cross-country race between the two army scouts.

After reaching Laramie, correspondent Davenport limped on to Cheyenne, where he finally collapsed as a result of his exertions following the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition. On his sickbed the newsman completed a fifteen-thousand-word story that was promptly printed in its entirety by the New York Herald—an article in which Davenport declared that Crook should be court-martialed for his conduct on the trail. He believed the campaign from thereon out would be remembered with the same historical disgust as was Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow during a cruel Russian winter, despite the fact that “a freak of fortune” had allowed the discovery of a small village and its “inglorious” capture.

About a week after reaching Fort Laramie, John Finerty returned to Chicago, reporting to his editor, Clint Snowden, and the paper’s owner, Wilbur Storey. After a series of in-depth articles on Crook’s campaign, Finerty’s final article appeared on October 6 in the Chicago Times:

Since my return I have had to endure the usual boredom shoved upon an ephemeral human curiosity … The constitutional, inevitable, universal “damphool” has asked me a dozen times: “You weren’t in earnest when you said you lived on horse meat? Didn’t you make that up?” This species of biped jackass flourishes in every community, and can hardly be expected to be absent from Chicago.

On the second of December, 1876, the U.S. Army awarded the medal of honor to those three couriers who courageously carried General Terry’s letter south through territory believed to be teeming with hostiles, destined for Crook at his Camp Cloud Peak: Privates William Evans, Benjamin F. Stewart, and James Bell—all of E Company, Seventh U.S. Infantry.

Anson Mills would eventually secure another brevet rank of colonel for his meritorious service in launching the charge on the village at Slim Buttes. Then forty-five years later in 1921, some twenty-four years after he had retired from the army with the rank of brigadier general, and thirty-one years after Crook died, Mills applied through former commanding general of the army General Nelson A. Miles for a Medal of Honor. Those fellow officers who joined Miles in supporting the award read like a Who’s Who of officers who served with Crook’s Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition in that terrible march: Major General Samuel S. Sumner, Brigadier General Charles King, Brigadier General William P. Hall, Brigadier General Peter D. Vroom.

But, sadly, Mills had applied too long after the fact, according to the army’s regulations. Some historians believe he waited so long because his application would have been denied by Crook, who might still voice his criticism of Mills’s “precipitous” attack. If this appraisal is correct, then why did Mills wait a full thirty-one years after his old antagonist’s death?

Most confusing are two minor inconsistencies found in otherwise scholarly books. Jerome Greene puts Finerty with Davenport as the two reporters who departed with Mills on the night of 7 September. But one has only to read John Finerty’s book to learn that he stayed behind and was with Crook when George Herman, Mills’s courier, showed up to announce the taking of the village. We know there were two reporters along from their subsequent accounts of the morning battle. So from my own research poring over the microfilm copies of old issues of the Rocky Mountain News, in which “Alter Ego’s” stories of Captain Mills’s morning “fight” would later appear, I believe I can trust John S. Gray’s account that it was indeed Robert Strahorn who was there at dawn.

In yet a second discrepancy Greene appears to be the correct party. Whereas Oliver Knight gives “Alfred Milner” as the name of the soldier killed by Sioux along the Belle Fourche during the return of Major Upham’s battalion from its fruitless patrol, Greene accurately reports the name from duty rosters in the military archives as Cyrus B. Milner of Company A.

Still, it is the confusion surrounding the identity of “Buffalo Chips” White that most befuddles me. Charles King states that the scout’s name was James White. John Finerty records him as “Charley, alias Frank White.” Then we find his gravestone at the Slim Buttes battle site is inscribed with the name Jonathan White. James and Jonathan, maybe—a discrepancy caused by the slightest error in someone’s memory—but where did Finerty ever come up with Frank?

It was likely easier for historians to locate and identify the Slim Buttes site than it was to determine the scout’s real first name!

Like so many other dramatic chapters of the Indian wars, the fight at Slim Buttes quickly faded from memory, thrust back into the shadows behind the more startling but no more consequential Little Bighorn battle. Thirty-one years would pass before amateur Indian wars’ historian Walter M. Camp, then editor for the “Railway Review,” would interview old Miniconjou warriors on the Standing Rock Reservation, thus learning of Crook’s attack on their village.

It took another seven years, in 1914, for Camp to convince two veterans of Crook’s campaign, Anson Mills and Charles Morton, to accompany him to South Dakota. In Belle Fourche they rented a car and drove north, but after spending several days searching along the eastern face of the buttes, neither could confirm the site of the Miniconjou village. The three returned east empty-handed.

But Camp would not be deterred. Undaunted, he pursued his quest for another three years, and finally, in June of 1917, with the help of a map drawn by Charles King as well as hours of research by Bill Rumbaugh, a ranch hand working for a local cattleman in South Dakota, Camp finally determined the battlefield site.

While working cattle across that ground year after year, Rumbaugh had discovered pieces of shattered iron cookware destroyed by Crook’s troops, spent .45/70 cases in the still-visible rifle pits, along with burned lodgepoles and the presence of human skeletal remains. Accompanied by Rumbaugh, in addition to six other local ranchers, an overjoyed Camp finally walked over that hallowed ground and verified the battle site located in the extreme northwestern corner of South Dakota. In his subsequent searches he found a variety of artifacts, including iron tea kettles, galvanized water buckets, broken butcher knives, iron hooks and handles, tin pans, basins, cups and cans, broken and melted glass bottles, broken earthware dishes, coffeepots, clothes buttons, and a stone pestle.

Still, it was the discovery of human skeletal remains that caused Camp the most excitement and speculation. One of the local ranchers took the researcher to the top of a little knoll less than a quarter of a mile from the south side of the creek. There Camp was shown a skeleton, complete but for the skull. Beneath the remains lay a burned and bent carbine barrel, as well as three spent cartridge cases.

On a knoll directly west of this first site, Camp later discovered a second skeleton in much the same condition. Not knowing at the time that Sitting Bull’s warriors had boasted of digging up the white man’s graves near the village, Camp nevertheless came to that exact conclusion years ahead of the publication of Stanley Vestal’s book.

In his own words Camp tells what he discovered:

I proposed that we look for evidence of opened graves, and this we soon found near the west edge of the village site on a low bench from the creek bottom, under a clump of buck brush that had grown up on the two mounds of earth that had been thrown out with the excavations. These two holes in the ground were three feet apart … The dirt thrown out had been weather-beaten down into flattened heaps, and enough of it had been washed back into the two trench-like openings to fill them within two feet of the general ground surface.

From subsequent inquiries of survivors of the battle I have learned that the location of these excavations is about at the place where were buried the bodies of the two soldiers (John Wenzel and Edward Kennedy) and of the scout (Charles White) killed in the fight … I am, from the evidence, led to inquire whether the Indians, who returned to the village to look for their own dead, might not have dug up these bodies, dragged them up to the two little hills, and had dances around them … Can it be, therefore, that the bones of the killed on the victorious side have been bleaching in the sunlight all these years?

Today a visitor can drive east from the small town of Buffalo for twenty-one miles, crossing over the Slim Buttes themselves. Approximately two miles west of the hamlet of Reva on the south side of the highway you will find a bronze-plaque roadside marker and the eight-foot-tall shaft of a stone monument erected on a small patch of state ground a half mile from the actual site of the village. Beyond the nearby fence the rest of the site is land owned by the family of George Lermeny, whom I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with on the phone but whom I have not had the honor of meeting in person. Lermeny’s grandfather came from Canada to settle on that ground in late 1886.

Former Sergeant John A. Kirkwood helped place the stone pylon monument that was financed by Anson Mills after Walter M. Camp confirmed the site. But, despite Camp’s protests, Mills elected to place the tall spire a half mile from the village site and close beside the highway, where the old general wanted it to be seen by the cars that passed by on that narrow east-west route. In August of 1920, three years after the ground had been identified, the markers were dedicated, complete with three separate headstones commemorating those white men who fell at Slim Buttes, all enclosed inside a tall wrought-iron fence.

Those two markers are as close as you will get to the battlefield. The passerby, tourist, amateur historian, and researcher are not allowed onto Lermeny’s property, where a third marker stands at the mouth of the ravine, indicating where Wenzel and White were killed. Erected in 1956 by the South Dakota State Historical Society, it reads:

Siege of the Ravine

American Horse, family

and six warriors ran here

at dawn attack. By noon

four warriors were dead.

American Horse, fatally

wounded, surrendered with

those left. Here Jonathan

White, “Chips,” civilian

scout, was killed.

In my phone conversations with George Lermeny, the rancher remained adamant that he wanted no further attention given to the site. “It’s been too much trouble for us already,” he said to me, then went on to tell how in recent years several researchers had come to him seeking permission to go over the village site and the surrounding hillsides with their metal detectors, and to complete analytical terrain surveys. Because those researchers subsequently wrote books on the Slim Buttes battle, Lermeny feels there’s been too much of a rising tide of publicity surrounding his family’s home.

The Reva, South Dakota, rancher told me, “We’ve had too much attention given us. I’m hoping things’ll eventually quiet down and we can go back to making a living here. This is our family business. Six generations have worked this ground. We just want to be left alone now.”

In fact, the home George Lermeny shares with his wife rests in the draw where on that rainy night of September 8, 1876, Anson Mills waited for the gray light of dawn with 150 troopers, located to the northeast (and across the present highway) from the Sioux village.

As much as I was personally disappointed in not getting a chance to meet George Lermeny and to walk that creek bottom, climb those knolls and hills south and west of the village site, look myself for the rifle pits used by Chambers’s infantry on the afternoon of September 9, then follow the path of the Fifth Cavalry’s retreat on the morning of the tenth—I can nonetheless understand his possessiveness of that beautiful piece of ground.

I can sympathize with it entirely in light of what I see done by visitors at Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, visitors to the battlefields that dot the western plains.

Shamefully, all too few American citizens are truly respectful of our past or do they truly honor the historical and spiritual significance of that sacred ground. As much as I am sorry that this is one piece of hallowed soil I did not get to walk across, much less have the opportunity to sit and listen to the ghosts whisper through the branches of the buffalo-berry bushes heavy with their bright-red fruit— I find myself in total sympathy with George Lermeny.

At the time of Crook’s Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition, Lieutenant Charles Morton served as regimental adjutant to Lieutenant Colonel William B. Royall, Third Cavalry. By 1914, when he was frequently corresponding with researcher Walter M. Camp, Morton had risen to the rank of brigadier general. In a letter the old soldier wrote to Camp on August 19, 1914, Morton included a poem composed shortly after the Battle of Slim Buttes which he credited to an unidentified officer of the Fifth Cavalry, a bit of rhyme that shows how some of Crook’s soldiers steadfastly despised their general, no matter the march of time.

At Slim Buttes, neath the noonday sun,

After the “Third” the fight had won,

Came Crook and pack-train on the run,

To jump the captured property.

Then rose a wild and piercing yell

That rent the air like sounds from hell.

And shots mid herds and pickets fell,

Stampeding Crook’s sagacity.

The skirmish thickens, “Fight, men, fight!”

One buck has fallen on the right.

Wave, George, thy flag in wild delight,

And snort with mule stupidity.

Tis done. The ration fight is o’er.

Two hundred purps lie sick and sore.

And ponies’ flanks are gushing gore

To stimulate humidity.

Too few are left who care to tell

How starved men fought and ponies fell;

But “Crook was right,” the papers yell,

To George’s great felicity.

On the twenty-fourth of October, 1876, upon officially disbanding the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition, General George Crook—the target of so much derision and outright hatred from his soldiers, the object of so much admiration among those he led into battle and forced to keep going until the end of their “horse-meat march”—addressed himself to his officers and men in General Orders No. 8:

In the campaign now closed [I have] been obliged to call upon you for much hard service and many sacrifices of personal comfort. At times you have been out of reach of your base of supplies in most inclement weather, and have marched without food and sleep—without shelter. In your engagements you have evinced a high order of discipline and courage; in your marches wonderful powers of endurance; and in your deprivations and hardships patience and fortitude.

Indian warfare is of all warfare the most dangerous, the most trying, and the most thankless. Not recognized by the high authority of the United States Congress as war, it still possesses for you the disadvantages of civilized warfare with all the horrible accompaniments that barbarism can invent and savages can execute. In it you are required to serve without the incentive to promotion or recognition—in truth, without favor or hope of reward.

The people of our sparsely-settled frontier, in whose defense this war is waged, have but little influence with the powerful communities in the East; their representatives have little voice in our national councils; while your savage foes are not only the wards of the nation, supported in idleness, but objects of sympathy with large numbers of people otherwise well informed and discerning.

You may, therefore, congratulate yourselves that in the performance of your military duty you have been on the side of the weak against the strong, and that the few people on the frontier will remember your efforts with gratitude.

All too few in this country, in this day and time, stop in their seventy-mile an hour, sixteen-hour workdays to give thought to those of that dramatic but bygone time … those who sacrificed so much.

Both red and white.

TERRY C. JOHNSTON

Slim Buttes, S.D.

September 9, 1994