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

Foreword

At the beginning of some chapters and some scenes, you will read the same news stories devoured by the officers’ wives and the civilians employed at the posts or those in adjacent frontier settlements—just what Samantha Donegan herself would have read—taken from the front page of the daily newspapers that arrived as much as a week late (and sometimes more), that delay due to the wilderness distances to be traveled by freight carriers.

These newspaper stories are copied verbatim from the headlines and graphic accounts of the day. Remember as you read, that this was the only news available for those people who had a most personal stake in the army’s last great campaign—those people who had tearfully watched a loved one march off to war that summer of the Sioux in 1876.

What happened to George Armstrong Custer and five companies of his Seventh U.S. Cavalry on the afternoon of June 25—only eight days after George C. Crook was stalemated on Rosebud Creek—was to shock, stun, and ultimately outrage an entire nation. News of that disaster would all but eclipse every other event that summer, even the most wondrous advancements in science and industry at that moment on display at Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition.

By starting the chapters and scenes with an article taken right out of the day’s headlines, I hope that you will be struck with the immediacy of each day’s front page as you finish reading its news—just as Samantha Donegan would have been from the relative safety of Fort Laramie. But, unlike her, you will then find yourself thrust back into the action of an army on the march, an army intent on fulfilling General Philip Sheridan’s prophecy that the hostiles of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse who had destroyed Custer on the Greasy Grass would soon hear a trumpet on the land.