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

Chapter 11

First Week of July 1876

THE LITTLE HORN MASSACRE

THE CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES

Fruits of the ill-advised Black Hills

Expedition of two years ago—

Ability of the army to renew

operations effectively discussed—

the personnel of the charging

party still undefined.

Special Dispatch to the New York Times

WASHINGTON, July 6—The news of the fatal charge of Gen. Custer and his command against the Sioux Indians has caused great excitement in Washington, particularly among Army people and about the Capitol. The first impulse was to doubt the report, or set it down as some heartless hoax or at least a greatly exaggerated story by some frightened fugitive.

VIEWS AT THE WAR DEPARTMENT

The confirmatory dispatches from

Sheridan’s headquarters in Chicago—

feeling among Custer’s friends.

WASHINGTON, July 6—Not until late this afternoon did the War Department receive confirmatory reports of the news published this morning of the terrible disaster in Indian country.

MISCELLANEOUS DISPATCHES

A list of officers killed—feeling over the disaster—a regiment of frontiersmen offered from Utah.

SALT LAKE, July 6—The citizens here are very much excited over the Custer Massacre, and several offers have been made to the Secretary of War to raise a regiment of frontiersmen in ten days for Indian service.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 6—A dispatch from Virginia City reports great excitement at Custer’s death. Ameeting has been called to organize a company.

TOLEDO, July 6—A special to the Blade from Monroe, Mich., the home of Gen. Custer, says the startling news of the massacre of the General and his party by Indians created the most intense feeling of sorrow among all classes … The town is draped in mourning, and a meeting of the Common Council and citizens was held this evening to take measures for an appropriate tribute to the gallant dead.

Escorted by Captain James Egan’s hard-bitten K Company of the Second Cavalry, Bill Cody had accompanied the youthful, baby-faced Colonel Wesley Merritt on that ride north to take over field command of the Fifth Cavalry on the first day of July. Besides being an act of utter humiliation to Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Carr, Bill figured Merritt had no business taking over what had long been regarded as “Carr’s regiment” in the field.

Why, the “Old War Eagle” had led the Fighting Fifth since sixty-eight, for God’s sake!

No two ways about it—Merritt had been in the right place at the right time: already out west as lieutenant colonel of the Ninth Cavalry, and perhaps even more important, in the field acting as inspecting cavalry quartermaster for Sheridan’s Division of the Missouri when the lieutenant general decided to use the Fifth to block reinforcements to Sitting Bull’s hostiles.

Upon graduation from the U.S. Military Academy in 1860, Merritt was first assigned to the Second Dragoons. But as soon as Fort Sumter was fired upon less than a year later, his career began to parallel Custer’s closely: both had become brigadier generals at the same time, just prior to the Battle of Gettysburg, and both had commanded victorious cavalry divisions under Sheridan during the Shenandoah campaign in the final weeks of the Civil War.

Everybody wanted to have a crack at the Indians who had defeated the Seventh Cavalry, Cody figured. Even Wesley Merritt.

When the terrible news from Montana Territory caught up with Sheridan, he was visiting Camp Robinson, planning to do what his department could to stop the flow of warriors off the reservations at Red Cloud and Spotted Tail. Almost immediately the lieutenant general hurried back to Fort Laramie—where for days on end he remained angry, hurt, confused, and stunned as all get-out by the Custer disaster.

Still, Bill had learned one thing was certain about that little Irish general: he wasn’t going to sit around licking his wounds. Sheridan was the sort who would strike back— and strike back with everything he had.

“By God—those red sons of bitches will hear a trumpet’s clarion call on the land!” Sheridan vowed, slamming a fist down on Major E. F. Townsend’s desk at Laramie hard enough to stun every other officer into utter silence. “If it takes every man in my department, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse will pay dearly—and I’ll make sure they keep on paying until I think they’ve been brought to utter ruin!”

Cody had no doubt that Sheridan would make good on his word.

Accompanying Merritt from Laramie was another correspondent hurried into the field by an editor eager to beat the competition, another reporter chomping at the bit to snatch some new angle on the Sioux War suddenly exploding across the nation’s papers with banner headlines: Cuthbert Mills, who was sending copy back east to the New York Times.

Cody recognized Mills as a tenderfoot from way off, but he did not join in “laying for” the reporters the way the rest of the entourage did, both soldiers and civilians. Nevertheless, Bill did have himself a few laughs at Mills’s expense, what with the way the others “stuffed the greenhorn.” What a caution that slicker from the East had turned out to be!

But it was not the prose of those tenderfooted reporters Bill figured he would long remember. Instead, the most lasting impression was made by the verse composed by his friend, the amiable John Wallace Crawford, widely known as the “poet scout” of the prairies. More of a nimble rhymester than a poet in the truest sense of the word, Crawford nonetheless entertained one and all every evening with his offhand recitations and impromptu circumlocutions involving the day’s march and the personalities along for the campaign.

Born in 1847 in County Donegal, Ireland, Crawford’s parents emigrated to America while Jack was still a boy. Almost immediately the youth went to work in the Pennsylvania coal mines. Bereft of any learning, totally illiterate, Jack was only fifteen when he enlisted in the Forty-eighth Pennsylvania Volunteers with his father. After young Crawford was wounded at the Battle of Spotsylvania, he convalesced at the Saterlee Hospital in West Philadelphia, where he was taught to read and write by a Sister of Charity.

A few years after the end of the war, both his parents died—causing Jack to decide he would start life anew out west. With the discovery of gold by Custer’s expedition in 1874, Crawford headed for the Black Hills, then the following year worked a mail contract between Red Cloud and the rail depot at Sidney, Nebraska. As one of the founders of Custer City in the Hills, he was selected to serve as chief of scouts for their volunteers with the outbreak of the Sioux War—a group called the Black Hills Rangers. It was at this time that Crawford acquired the title of “Captain Jack,” as well serving as the region’s correspondent for the Omaha Bee.

Time had come for the Fifth to get over its outward suspicion of its new colonel commanding and get back to business. On the second of July, Merritt marched his troops four miles to the east, so they could bivouac on better grass that much closer to the well-beaten Indian trail Little Bat had discovered. The men remained confident and their mounts well fed—not only on the grasses of those Central Plains, but on seventy-five thousand pounds of grain that had arrived from Laramie nine days earlier.

Then on the morning of 3 July a small war party was sighted by outlying pickets no more than a mile from the regiment’s South Cheyenne base camp. Captain Julius W. Mason’s veteran K Company was ordered in pursuit as they were beginning their breakfast.

“Saddle up, men! Lively, now!” was the shout from the company’s lieutenant, Charles King, as Cody leaped into the saddle with Jack Crawford at his side.

“Lead into line!” King ordered. “Count off by fours!”

“By fours, right!” Mason gave the command while Cody and Crawford galloped away, hoping to eat away at what lead the warriors already had.

The day before, Mason had been informed that he’d been promoted to the rank of major, with a transfer to the Third Cavalry, which was presently serving with Crook’s Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition. Yet Mason had told Colonel Merritt that he intended to stay with the Fifth until such a time as the present campaign was brought to a completion.

Down into the trees at creekside the two scouts led K Troop, through the deep sand, then finally a climb back up onto the grassy hillsides where the race could begin in earnest.

“Here comes Kellogg’s I Company, fellers!”

Cody heard a soldier from K make the announcement behind him as they tore after the distant horsemen. Merritt had ordered out a second troop for what was hoped would be the first action of the campaign.

But after a frustrating and circuitous chase of some thirty miles lasting several hours, all of it spent following nothing more tangible than a trail of unshod ponies, and then finding the war party splitting off onto diverse trails, all leading in the general direction of the Powder River country, Mason ordered Lieutenant King to take their company and return to camp at four o’clock, empty-handed. However, because Bill and Jack Crawford, riding far in advance of K Company, had managed to fire some shots at the fleeing horsemen in the early stages of the chase, the affair went down in the official record of the Fifth Cavalry as “the fight near the south branch of the Cheyenne River, Wyo.”

If the soldiers hadn’t killed any of the enemy or taken any prisoners, at least the Fifth was credited with forcing those fleeing Cheyenne warriors to abandon their slower pack-animals burdened beneath agency supplies plainly being carried to the hostiles in the north.

Still, by the time the troopers returned to Merritt’s camp, there were casualties to be tallied from the thirty-mile chase. A dozen horses were so badly used up that Carr decided it best to have them returned to Laramie. Worse yet, the mounts carrying two heavy troopers did not even make it back to camp, having dropped dead under their weighty burdens during the Fifth Cavalry’s first pursuit of the enemy that season.

Those two horses would not be the last animals to drop in their tracks before the summer’s Sioux campaign was out.

On the following cloudy, dismal morning, that of the Centennial Fourth, Merritt ordered the regiment to strike camp, begin a countermarch, and scout back to the south, in the direction of Fort Laramie. The colonel realized that the Indians now knew of the presence of his troops and that further patrolling along the Mini Pusa would prove fruitless. Two companies with worn-out horses accompanied Merritt and the supply wagons due south along the valley of the Old Woman’s Fork, with the colonel’s intentions to rendezvous all battalions forty-eight hours later at the army’s stockade erected at the head of Sage Creek. Meanwhile the regiment’s commander dispatched Major John J. Upham with three companies to march to the northwest, up the Mini Pusa for one last scout of the Cheyennes’ possible crossing. At the same time, Carr was sent off east to the Black Hills with another three companies, again to look for recent signs of activity.

By the sixth of July, the Fifth Cavalry had reassembled, establishing their camp no more than seventy-five miles north of Fort Laramie on Sage Creek at the stockade guarded by a single company of infantry who were assigned to watch over a section of the Cheyenne-Black Hills stage road. Merritt promptly sent a courier south with reports for Sheridan. The rider was back by ten o’clock the next morning while most were having a leisurely breakfast and some officers were enjoying a cool bath in one of the creek’s shallow pools.

Cody himself escorted Major Townsend’s courier to Merritt’s tent, then watched the colonel open the flap on the thin leather dispatch envelope as the scout poured himself another cup of coffee … about the time he heard the colonel quietly exclaim, “Good Lord!”

He looked at Merritt’s hands shaking, how the officer’s youthful face suddenly went gray with age and utter shock, carved with deep concern. It frightened Bill. “Colonel?”

“They … the Seventh … Custer too …”

“What about Custer and the Seventh?”

Merritt wagged his head, choking as if on something sour, unable to speak. All he could manage to do was hand the dispatches over to Cody.

We have partial confirmation of

Custer’s disaster, which, from

the papers, appears to have been

complete. Custer and five

companies entirely wiped out.

Once he had read them, and reread them a second time, Bill gave the pages back and turned away, pushing himself through a cadre of officers all hurrying like ants atop an anthill to hear for themselves the unbelievable news.

Bill had known Custer. Why, he had even ridden stirrup to stirrup with the golden-haired cavalry officer, hunting buffalo together on the plains of Kansas. Custer was the sort so vital, so alive! Hero in war. Conqueror of Black Kettle’s Cheyenne. Custer the Invincible!

Charles King came bounding up, his hair still wet from his morning swim. He stopped Cody. “Bill! Bill—is what I hear true? Dear God—say it isn’t true!”

Cody could only nod as more anxious men gathered around them in a knot of fierce disbelief.

Silence fell over that camp beside Sage Creek like a suffocating blanket of doom. This was a gallant, romantic era when the officers of one cavalry unit had friends among other regiments. Most of those men serving with the Fifth lost comrades or classmates, soldiers who fell with the Seventh at the Little Bighorn.

So in the awful stillness of that summer morning, Bill quietly confirmed the worst for those who pressed in close, “Custer and five companies of the Seventh are wiped out of existence. It’s no rumor—General Merritt’s got the official dispatch.”

“Where?”

“North of here—Little Bighorn.”

“Official?”

“Sheridan himself.”

“Custer? Dead?”

“Confirmed. Twelve days ago. On the twenty-fifth of June.”

King grabbed Cody by the arm. “You’ll be all right, Bill?”

“Yes,” the scout eventually answered, throwing his shoulders back somewhat, his long hair brushing his collar. “There can be no doubt now, Lieutenant, that before a fortnight has passed, we’ll march north to reinforce Crook.”

“This is going to be bigger than any of us could have imagined,” King said. “Sheridan will throw everything he has at them after losing Custer.”

“But, you know, Lieutenant—if we are just now finding out about the battle, one thing’s for damn sure: the Indians down at Red Cloud and Spotted Tail already know.”

King snapped his fingers, saying grimly, “Which means if they weren’t preparing to jump the reservation and head north—they’ll be doing it damned soon.”

With a nod Cody replied, “Hotter’n ever to join up with the war camps that wiped out Custer and half the Seventh Cavalry.”

Sheridan himself would have even hotter plans for the Fighting Fifth.

Later that evening Lieutenant William Hall, acting regimental quartermaster for the Fifth Cavalry, rode in from Laramie with fresh dispatches. A gravely disappointed Merritt learned that he was not to take his eight troops of cavalry and push toward the Powder River country to unite with Crook. Instead Sheridan told him he should either march on to the Red Cloud Agency to bolster the army’s force at Camp Robinson, or march back to Fort Laramie to await further orders.

Whichever the colonel should decide was best.

* * *

That hour’s halt for coffee and hardtack proved itself a deadly delay for Sibley’s patrol.

As the soldiers relaxed around their tiny fires there in that grassy glade, Seamus heard more and more of them boast that the Indians would not dare follow them into the mountains. Despite how the scouts appealed, there was simply no convincing the lieutenant’s men that danger lay ahead.

Grouard had long ago given up in disgust and joined the soldiers on the ground, dropping on the grass painfully to curl an arm under his head and close his eyes.

“You gonna be all right, Frank?” Seamus asked.

The half-breed whispered low, his eyes flicking down to his belly, “Just this damned woman’s weeping sickness.”

“It’s gotta hurt.”

He lay on his side, breathing shallow as he made himself more comfortable, knees drawn up. “Worse’n anything I ever had.”

It was early afternoon when Pourier and Donegan decided the soldiers had enjoyed a long enough halt.

Bat went over and nudged Grouard. “Time to go,” he told the other half-breed.

Clearly in pain, Grouard moved stiffly to rise, struggling to climb back onto his horse as the soldiers resaddled. He walked his horse over by Sibley to say, “You just keep your men close together behind me,” as he rose in the stirrups to rub his groin with a grimace. “Tell ’em to ride fast and keep up with me. They gotta keep up and—be ready to fight.”

The patrol moved out behind their scouts in single file, following Pourier, Donegan, and an ailing Grouard, pushing up through the forests thick with lodgepole, dotted with open parks carpeted in tall grass and wildflowers, winding their way through a tumble of boulders as big as railroad cars.

They hadn’t gone all that far when Pourier signaled a halt and slid from his horse. In the middle of the trail lay a pair of crossed coup-sticks.

“Bad medicine,” Big Bat grumbled, picking one up and cracking it over a knee.

As Pourier tossed the pieces aside, Grouard and Donegan twisted this way and that, the hair on the back of their necks fuzzing like a fighting dog’s.

“Heap bad medicine,” Bat repeated as he snapped the second coup-stick over his thigh and tossed it to the side of the trail.

“Let’s get off this road,” Donegan suggested. “They know we’re coming.”

Grouard agreed. “Damn betcha, Irishman.”

Seamus wagged his head, eyes searching the shadow and light of the timber ahead. “Now we know for sure they’re up there—somewhere.”

Grouard led off this time, passing Pourier as Big Bat swung into the saddle. For the next half hour Frank did the best he could to keep them to the right of the well-used trail, hanging as much to the trees as possible. With thickening timber standing to the left and in front, and a jumble of high boulders and trees off to the right, a tangle of deadfall lay directly in their path.

With a jerk Donegan turned in the saddle at the hammer of hooves and the snapping of tree branches on their backtrail.

“The Indians! The Indians!” squawked the packer, “Trailer Jack.”

Both Becker and one of the soldiers who had been lagging behind came whipping their mounts into those who formed the end of the file. At that moment the boulders to their right erupted in gunfire. Warriors appeared behind the rocks, beginning to shout while they fired their weapons, closing the trap.

“To the left—by the saints!” Donegan shouted. “Ride to the left!”

In among the trees and some low-lying rocks Sibley’s men flooded in a panic, the three scouts closing the file as every last one of them leaped from his horse, scrambling to whatever cover he could find, and turned to fight.

“Finerty?”

Seamus knelt over the newsman lying flat on his back among the legs of his mare that stumbled to the side, out of the way, as Donegan came up. Finerty fluttered his eyes open. While the tree branches above them snapped and rattled with bullets, the air whining with lead, Donegan laid a hand on the fallen man’s chest and pleaded, “Say you’re not hit, Johnny!”

The reporter slowly propped himself up on an elbow, swiping dust and pine needles from his face and hair. “Son of a bitch! That goddamned bastard threw me!”

“Your horse?”

“Gloree, that hurt!” Finerty exclaimed as he rolled onto his knees.

With his first glance Seamus plainly saw the blood slicking the lathered chest, saw the oozing hole. That next moment the animal crumpled onto its forelegs, settled, then kneeled onto its side, big chest heaving.

Donegan said, “He’s done for, Johnny.”

“Goddamn good and well too,” he grumbled. “Cursed animal—throwing me the way it did.”

“You dumb shit!” Seamus growled, shoving Finerty backward into the dirt and needles. “The poor thing threw you when it was hit.”

In amazement the reporter just stared at the man standing over him. “I … I didn’t—”

“He took that bullet for you!” Seamus bellowed, turning on his heel and flinging himself behind a tumble of deadfall. It hurt something deep within him when a big, beautiful animal gave its life for its master.

Other horses whickered and whinnied, crying out in pain as stray bullets connected, falling among the army’s frightened mounts and Trailer Jack’s braying mules milling behind them in the timber.

“We gotta get back into the woods, Frank!” Pourier hollered.

“You’re right, Bat. Get some cover,” Grouard replied anxiously, and began waving his pistol. “Lieutenant! Take your men into the timber! Back into the timber!”

“Bat!” Seamus bellowed. “Stay with me here and cover the retreat! We gotta make enough lead fly to force them red h’athens to keep their heads down in them rocks. Just long enough.”

For a moment Pourier looked longingly at the retreating soldiers, then flung himself back up the slope to join Grouard and Donegan at a small cluster of boulders.

Seamus slapped the half-breed on the shoulder. “Thanks, Bat. I owe you.”

Pourier winked and shoved his cheek onto the stock of his Springfield carbine, looking for a target.

In no time Sibley got his detail up and moving without having to prod a single man. Latching on to their horses, the soldiers zigzagged down to their left with the mounts, Becker bellowing at the mules, all of them racing through a few trees for some thicker stands of pine and fir a few hundred yards farther down the slope. There among some deadfall the men tied off the animals and turned about, flopping onto the ground behind nature’s own breastworks.

“Look on up the trail, Frank,” Seamus huffed after his run as he finally slid in between Grouard and Pourier near the soldiers, pointing the long, octagonal barrel of his Sharps up the slope where the trail wound itself between two high bluffs.

The half-breeds nodded.

“Yeah,” Frank said. “If they got us in there—none of us wouldn’t come out with our hair.”

Pushing the Sharps lever down, Donegan ejected the empty cartridge, then replanted a live round in the breech. “Seems those warriors dogging our tails was just a little too anxious to close the trap, don’t it?”

“Lucky us,” grumbled Finerty as he crabbed up to join the three, whining lead following the white men into the timber.

Grouard rolled onto his back and found Sibley, then instructed, “Lieutenant, tell your boys not to fire a shot until they got a good target.”

“These men have fought before,” Sibley snapped testily.

“Just remind ’em!” Donegan added. “We’re going to need every last bullet we have before this day’s done. Maybe by the time we try to get back to Crook.”

Nodding, a grim Sibley responded, “All right.”

“And … Lieutenant,” Seamus said, causing the officer to halt in a crouch, “tell your men it’s a good idea to keep one last round in their pistols for themselves.”