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

Chapter 28

11-15 August 1876

Crazy Horse Wants to Come in and Make a Treaty.

OMAHA, July 29—An official telegram from Fort Laramie says a courier has just arrived from Red Cloud who says that Red Cloud told him that Crazy Horse was coming into the agency very soon; that his band was on the way there, and twenty lodges had already arrived. Crazy Horse has sent word to Captain Egan that he will see him, shake hands and make a treaty. The friendly Indians lately arrived won’t talk about the fight, and pretend to know nothing of it. A council was held at the Cheyenne camp while the courier was detained there to talk over the change from the civil to military authorities. Many opposed it, but Red Cloud has expressed satisfaction at the change. Fears are apprehended that any attempts to deprive the Indians of ponies and arms will be met with resistance, as they can muster a large force well armed, while the number of troops at the post is very small. It is thought they will allow themselves to be numbered without opposition.

During that evening of the tenth, for no apparent reason, the horses of three companies of the Fifth Cavalry snapped their sidelines like twine, tore their picket pins from the flaky soil, and stampeded for the hills.

With that commotion the entire command believed themselves under threat of attack for a few tense minutes until Lieutenant Colonel Carr organized a detail of experienced wranglers to pursue the horses of Troops A, B, and M. Late that night the horse soldiers returned with their catch, and the encampment settled down for what was left of the night.

Early on the morning of 11 August, Nelson Miles and his Fifth Infantry marched away to the north, accompanied by Terry’s wagons filled not only with provisions for the Yellowstone River outposts, but also with what sick and disabled the combined columns would need to move downriver by steamboat. Yet it wasn’t until eleven o’clock that Crook and Terry finally took up the trail Crook had been following as it turned sharply to the east at the mouth of Greenleaf Creek, leading toward the divide that separated the Rosebud from the valley of the Tongue.

Colonel John Gibbon, who had been in command of soldiers sent into the field as far back as March, looked over the condition of Crook’s and Chambers’s infantry as it moved at the vanguard of the march, declaring, “Why, soldiers—you’re even dirtier than my men!”

And the men of James Brisbin’s Second Cavalry made a widely circulated joke of the dilapidated, threadbare condition of the rear of the britches worn by Crook’s horse soldiers, nicknaming the troopers “the ragged-ass patrol.”

This immense command encompassing some four thousand men assigned to thirty-six troops of cavalry and twenty-five companies of infantry, not to mention all the attendant civilians, scouts, and Indian allies, lumbered along in the dusty wake of the fleeing hostiles. It wasn’t long before the men of the Wyoming column had themselves a good belly laugh at the expense of Terry’s pack-train. The Montana and Dakota soldiers had attempted to take horses and mules used to pulling wagons in harness and convert them into something that resembled Tom Moore’s unequaled pack-train. Hour by hour Terry’s train dropped, lost, or ruined more supplies than the whole of Crook’s command had spoiled since the end of May when the Wyoming troops marched north from Fort Fetterman.

It didn’t take long for Washakie’s warriors to recognize the difference between the two columns. By the end of that first day the Shoshone were already growing disgusted with the pace and ineptness of what they called the “Yellowstone soldiers.”

The sun rose high and hot that afternoon as the column toiled nine dusty miles up the divide and down again into the scorched valley of the Tongue, stifling ash rising from every boot, every iron-shod hoof.

Along the timbered riverbank the scouts came across the site of a huge village. It was there that the Indian trail split, one branch heading upstream, the other down. Nearby the scouts found the skeleton of a solitary miner who had been killed a few months before, then left to predators. Around the body lay many empty cartridges, attesting to the lone man’s last great fight. Close by lay the carcass of his dead horse, also ravaged by beasts of the prairie. Some of Major Stanton’s Montana Volunteers saw to it the prospector’s bones were given a decent burial before the men rejoined the march.

Up and down the west bank of the river stood old cottonwood trees from which the hostiles had peeled the bark, the better to paint on the exposed grain as if it were a pale-colored canvas: hieroglyphic figures shown carrying off captured women, hunting buffalo from horseback, and scalping soldiers.

Worrying most that Sitting Bull’s hostiles might reach the Yellowstone ahead of his column, Terry vetoed Crook’s suggestion and ordered that the entire command wheel left into line and march four more miles downstream through the blackened river valley, where they went into bivouac at the mouth of Beaver Creek under darkening skies and stiffening winds. Threatening storm clouds massed overhead as the cavalrymen picketed their horses on what patches of unburned grass each company could locate against the hills. Coffeepots had barely begun to warm over mess fires when the sky opened up with a chilling deluge.

In the wind-driven torrents the men did what they could: platoons combined blankets and gum ponchos, which they threw over quickly improvised wickiups lashed from willow saplings. But with the way the rain was flung horizontally at a man, nothing kept out the storm. In less than an hour every soldier sat morosely in the spongy mud, huddled close around his struggling fire, teeth chattering, cold to the marrow and filled with despair.

Seamus sat in the midst of a puddle of cold water, his one blanket draped over his shoulders and head, already soaked and unable to turn any more of the torrent. To Cody he grumbled, “This goddamned rain is gonna wipe out a lot of our sign.”

“Don’t much matter now, does it, Irishman?”

For a moment he watched Cody staring into the sputtering flames of their fire feebly fighting nature’s onslaught of wind and water. “Sure it does, Bill. S’pose you tell me what’s eating you.”

With a shrug Cody eventually replied, “I just been figuring on packing up and riding back to Laramie.”

“Head home?”

He nodded. “This bunch isn’t going to find any Indians, Seamus. You know that well as me.”

“So—just like that? You figure on heading back?”

Cody readjusted his blanket. “I got contracts. Business commitments.”

“Your theater show?”

“Yeah. Me and Texas Jack ought to make another go of it,” he replied. As he tossed another wet limb onto the fire, Cody said, “Now, if Crook and Terry would turn this campaign over to Carr and Royall—then I’d stay on. Make no mistake of that, Seamus.”

For his part the Irishman was without much to say in the way of something that would change Cody’s mind. All he could do was stare at the flames, each tobacco-wad-sized glob of high prairie rain smacking the limbs with a hiss. “Wish you’d stay. If only for me.”

Dawn finally came Saturday morning, with no real letup in the downpour. While Crook and Terry waited in that soggy bivouac with their combined columns, they ordered their scouts to take to the field in hopes of determining which of the trails might prove to be the main route of the escaping hostiles.

“These are old trails, General,” Cody advised Crook just past noon when the guides and trackers returned.

“My Crow scouts tell me they might be as recent as three days,” Terry countered.

“No. Cody’s right,” Donegan said. “At least three weeks old.”

Crook turned to Grouard. “What do you say, Frank?”

For a moment those obsidian eyes looked at Cody and Donegan. “Old trails, General.”

Terry wheeled on Crook. “If that trail is as old as your scouts are saying it is—then one thing is certain, General: you weren’t correct in your beliefs as to when the hostiles took flight in your front.”

Crook immediately bristled, as did some of his staff standing nearby in the cold chill of early afternoon. “General Terry—I stand by my assertions, and my actions. Do you have a complaint to lodge against me, sir?”

The affable Terry, suddenly confronted by the bulldog Crook, waved a hand and his blue eyes softened. “No, General. No complaint against you. Forget it.”

“With the general’s permission,” Gibbon spoke up, “if General Crook’s column had only informed us of the hostiles’ flight, we could have put ourselves across their trail and caught them.”

Lieutenant Colonel Royall harrumphed, “I seriously doubt that your force would have been of sufficient numbers or experience to capture that village.”

At that moment more of the subalterns from both camps weighed in, sniping at the other column now that the long march, the cold, the rain, all of it was plainly showing in the raw edge that was every man’s nerves.

“Are our scouts in agreement on anything?” Terry inquired.

“Yes, General,” Crook answered. “Seems most of them say the biggest trail is heading downstream.”

“Toward the Yellowstone?” Terry replied, worry in his voice. When Crook nodded, Terry added, “Let’s get these men moving down the Tongue.”

At a snail’s pace the united columns dragged themselves through the mud and rain for all of a torturous thirteen miles before making camp at twilight on the twelfth. When they could, the men chose a slope for a place to settle and curl up. That way the water could not gather in depressions around them as they sat out the storm beneath their soaked blankets, eating soggy hardtack and chewing on their raw bacon. The storm lessened near dark, but within an hour it roared back over them with renewed fury. There was little sleep in that bivouac for those four thousand men for a second night in a row.

Dawn of the thirteenth came gray and colder yet to those soldiers whose clothing and blankets hadn’t dried for more than two days. Men stamped about, blue-lipped, with their teeth chattering like boxes of dominoes, until afternoon when the rain tapered off to a misty drizzle. That day Merritt’s cavalry shot the first of its played-out, ill-fed horses. Those cavalrymen who could not bear to kill their mounts simply abandoned the animals right where the bony beasts had crumpled into the mud and refused to go on.

By the time the command went into bivouac another twenty-four grueling miles down the Tongue, it was becoming ever clearer to even the dullest recruit that they weren’t going to catch the Sioux. But maybe the horses would begin to fare better, for by now much of the grass remained unburned, and there was more of it.

If anyone had taken notice, that grass was one more solid argument that proved the hostile village was scattering to the winds.

Tom Cosgrove showed up at Donegan’s fire that Sunday night, in search of more than coffee or tobacco for his pipe. “I remember you telling me you fought for the Army of the Potomac. And with Sheridan in the Shenandoah.”

With a nod Seamus replied, “You figure we ever looked across a battlefield at one another?”

Cosgrove shrugged, grinning a little, then sighed and went somber. “This fight’s already over.”

“Naw. We haven’t begun to look, Tom.”

Wagging his head, the old Confederate said, “Crook might keep looking, but he’s not going to find them. And he sure won’t be finding the Sioux with the Shoshone along.”

“Why? Washakie thinking of rolling his blankets and heading home?”

“Yeah. And I can’t blame ’em none, neither. The Snake never been this far north—this far away from home.”

“You leaving tomorrow?”

“I don’t rightly know right now. Only sure thing is it’s just a matter of time before we pull out.”

Daybreak on the fourteenth brought with it more gray, sodden skies and no letup in the rain. At seven the columns got under way: Terry’s led by the Seventh Cavalry, Crook’s by the Fifth. Against the stronger, grain-fed mounts of the Seventh, Carr’s gaunt horses looked ready for the boneyard. That morning the wind hurried the rain before it once more as the men were forced to cross and recross the Tongue thirteen times in less than ten miles before the Indian trail turned away again to the east, following the narrow banks of Pumpkin Creek.

Many a man gazed downstream wistfully. Barely fifteen miles away flowed the Yellowstone itself, with its sup ply depots and rations and tents and dry, warm blankets— all of it a most inviting proposition to the men ordered to keep up, back in ranks, don’t straggle—keep up!

After a climb of more than six miles out of the valley of the Tongue, the order was given to halt and go into camp just past noon. Here the cavalry unsaddled and put the stock out to graze in the slashing torrents of bone-chilling rain while the infantry simply sat down and curled up right where they had stopped.

Minutes later Lieutenant Colonel Royall galloped his horse down past Chambers’s foot soldiers to the bank of the Pumpkin and halted in front of Major Andrew Evans’s still-mounted battalion of the Third Cavalry.

Royall, a hard-bitten veteran of Summit Springs and the Battle of the Rosebud, growled, “Didn’t I order you to put your battalion in camp along the river, facing east?”

Evans, widely known as a man who could split a hair as fine as fuzz on a hog, immediately came to attention and retorted, “Yes, sir. You did. But this ain’t a river. It’s only a creek.”

For a moment Royall’s cold face flushed as he seethed in anger, then shouted, “Creek be damned! It’s a river—a river from this time forth, by my order, sir! Now damned well do as I order you!”

“Yes, sir!” Evans answered, and hurried off to get his companies into bivouac across the Tongue.

For the rest of that rainy day and on into a stormy night, the command lay in along the bank of Pumpkin Creek, where the best that could be said of the land was that the enemy hadn’t put it to the torch. Here the animals grazed on what skimpy grass grew in that naked country.

“Muggins Taylor rode in with messages for Terry,” Frank Grouard said as he came up to Donegan picketing his big horse on a patch of old grass.

“What’s the news?”

“Miles been up and down the river on the steamboat. He reports no sign of Sitting Bull’s people crossing the Yellowstone.”

“That means they’ve got to still be east of us.”

Grouard nodded and did not say anything more for the longest time until he commented, “Two-day grass.”

“This? Why you call it that?”

“We camped in this country many times, when I lived with Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa. Lakota say a bellyful of this grass will do a pony good for a two-day ride.”

Seamus stroked the withers of his exhausted, played-out animal. “Frank, right now I’ll settle for just one day’s ride on a bellyful.”

On the morning of the fifteenth the bone-weary command followed the Indian trail of pony hooves and travois poles scouring the ground as the fleeing hostiles headed eastward up the bank of the Pumpkin.

A small puppy was found by one of the first infantrymen passing through an abandoned campsite. He knelt, finding the dog as eager for companionship as he was when it raced over and leaped into his arms. Unbuttoning his tunic, the foot soldier carried his new friend along as they got acquainted.

At the top of the divide the trail left the creek and entered the badlands, which filled the men not only with more despair, but also with an overwhelming sense of lonely desolation. For as far as they could see to the north and east that fifteenth day of August … nothing moved but the heavy, sodden gray clouds scudding low over their heads. As ugly as was that scorched valley of the Tongue they had left behind, it was beautiful compared to the country they now faced.

That morning more than a dozen of Terry’s infantry could not go on and were placed by stewards in horsedrawn travois that bobbed, bounced, and jostled across the broken, muddy ground. Mile by mile the route had begun to tell on the animals. Here and there the first of the Second, Third, and Fifth cavalries’ horses were either abandoned by their riders, who switched saddle, blanket, and poncho to one of the led horses when they left a mount behind, or the worn-down horse was simply shot where it had dropped, unable to limp on behind its pleading master.

By noon that Tuesday the sun broke through the clouds and the humid air grew stifling as the scouts gazed down into the widening valley of the Powder River, called Chakadee Wakpa by the Sioux. The Crow and Arikara guided the columns down Four Horn Creek^* to its mouth, making a ford where the clear and swift-running creek joined the Powder from the southwest to mingle its waters with the milky, muddy, alkaline river. On the column continued its numbing march down the east bank of the Powder. It wasn’t long before the last of the barebacked horses led by each company had been put in service, replacing those that had played out in the climb up from the Pumpkin. Those soldiers who were thereafter forced to abandon their animals simply left everything behind: saddle and blanket, bit and bags. A trooper put afoot carried away only what he could on his back, trudging along beside the faltering column of horses.

Yet even the infantry did not have an easy go of it that fifteenth of August. One can imagine how it must have conspired to ruin a foot soldier’s healthy state of mind as hour by hour he watched powerful, gracefully strong animals giving up and going down: tramping endlessly through brutal country, mud sucking at one’s heavy and unforgiving brogans, their leather already cracked and split from days and nights of incessant rain—feet become two bloody stumps of raw and blistered flesh, ankles and calves swollen from the cold and the exertion and the stream crossings.

When they had no more travois for the sick and lame, the officers begged the Indian allies to double up and carry those soldiers who could not go on by their own steam. Yet there was one who was left, unnoticed, as he scrambled up beneath some concealing brush along the bank of the Powder and hid himself as the rest of the column lumbered past. There that Ninth Infantry cook named Eshleman intended to die by the hand of a hostile warrior or give himself to a predator of the high plains—anything but press on with the rest.

Just before dawn that terrible gray day, Seamus had in fact discovered that his horse’s shoulder was a mass of oozing wounds. The animal actually shuddered as Donegan chewed a sliver of tobacco and rubbed pieces of the moist wad into the open wounds before he lay the saddle blanket back over the lesions. And throughout that long and terrible day the Irishman would lean forward against the great beast’s shoulder, whispering again what he had whispered that dawn before setting out with the other scouts.

“I’ll strike a bargain with you,” and he stroked its powerful neck. “You will carry me and I will keep you from going down. Just remember that if you go down, I am simply too weary to get you back up again. And I’ll have to leave you, or … or worse. And—I don’t even want to think of that happening.”

Hour by hour man and beast both held up their end of the pact. When it seemed the horse was close to collapse, Seamus dismounted and led the animal, off and on, for what seemed like half the day.

Early that afternoon the Shoshone found the trail dividing once more, with the deepest and widest road that remained after the pounding rains still pointing eastward toward the Little Missouri River.

As some of the Indian allies halted at that fork in the trail, Donegan came to a stop beside the dark-skinned half-breed who had once roamed this land as an adopted Hunkpapa. For a moment Seamus wiggled a loose back tooth with his tongue, realizing that was a first sign of scurvy—one of the most dangerous afflictions of an army on the march.

“How far east you think they’ll run?” Seamus asked his old companion.

Frank Grouard shrugged his shoulders, gazing off into the distance where the trails scattered like a covey of quail busted out of the brush, only to disappear. “Don’t know for sure, Irishman. What I do know is the Little Missouri is good wintering ground. Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa use it year after year.”

“Wintering ground? This early?”

“No, they won’t winter up this early—but they’re for sure headed for the Little Missouri.”

After slogging more than thirty miles through the bone-chilling mud of that morning followed by the blazing sun appearing in a clearing sky that afternoon, Chambers’s infantry were the first to go into camp. To everyone’s amazement the major’s command hadn’t suffered a single man to drop out through the day-long ordeal. In fact, Crook’s foot soldiers were the first to reach camp that night, arriving long before the cavalry trudged in, half of the horse soldiers dragging their led mounts behind them.

That night another storm moved in, and the heavens opened up again for the fifth night of cold misery in a row.

*Present-day Mizpah Creek.