Wolf Mountain Moon: The Battle of the Butte, 1877

Afterword

Ah, the very stuff of history oft makes for some interesting speculation!

Crook and Miles did not enjoy a mutual respect during their years serving the Army of the West. Simmering animosities begun during this year of war on the northern plains would later boil to the surface during the final Apache campaigns in the southwest when Crook (who had experienced much success during the earlier Apache wars) was eventually “nudged” aside and Miles assigned to replace him.

At the time of this Great Sioux War there was clearly no affection shared between these two great military figures. If they communicated at all, they would have done so through normal military channels, which would have taken an excruciatingly long time. Today we realize just how little one column knew of the disposition of another column back then: their whereabouts, their contact with the roaming warrior bands, the status of their logistical lines of supply.

Back in 1876-77 great distances across the trackless and “wireless” wilderness dictated that Crook operate from the south not knowing what Miles was doing along the Yellowstone. And it meant that Miles continued to operate as he always had: wary of superiors Crook and Terry; seeking to better his own position with Sheridan and Sherman by accomplishing against the Sioux and Cheyenne what Crook had consistently failed to do; and in the end putting all his energies into earning his general’s star.

From my reading of the two men, from giving so much thought to who they were down under their uniforms, and ultimately from trying to walk around in their boots as much as I can on the ground where these professional soldiers plied their deadly trade … if any overture had been attempted between the two armies, I’d put money on its having been Crook trying to get word to Miles.

Completely out of touch on the Belle Fourche in the Black Hills country, knowing that the Crazy Horse camps lay not all that far to the northwest, realizing that just beyond that dangerous country lay the Yellowstone and the mouth of the Tongue, where Miles might well be doing all he could to keep Sitting Bull from joining back up with Crazy Horse—it’s simply not that great a leap of imagination to conceive of George Crook attempting to courier some dispatches to Colonel Miles.

After all, you have to consider what the alternative would have been: sending a rider south to Reno Cantonment, beyond to Fetterman; from there the message could be wired to Laramie, then along the Platte until the electronic impulses in that simple wire reached a point back east, where George Crook’s questions could start north toward Chicago; from there they would travel across Phil Sheridan’s desk, on to Minneapolis, where Alfred Terry would have his look at them prior to forwarding Crook’s dispatches through a few more miles of telegraph to Fort Abraham Lincoln, and from there they would all rely on a network of overland, horse-mounted couriers because there was simply no paddle-wheel traffic on the upper rivers at that season!

Racing across the upper tier of territories just below the Canadian border, the army couriers might—and I emphasize might—reach Tongue River Cantonment with their leather envelope, barring attack by roving hostiles, a horse breaking a leg and putting a courier afoot, countless flooded or ice-bound rivers, or any of a dozen other reasons that would delay or prevent a rider from reaching the theater of operations against the Northern Sioux.

If any such attempt was made, I believe the smart money would have been on a rider making it from the Belle Fourche region across the Powder River country to the mouth of the Tongue. Look at your regional map in the front of the book. Trace a finger across the route I’ve just described. Then look at a map of the U.S. and trace another route from Minneapolis to Bismarck, on across Dakota Territory to Tongue River Cantonment. If Crook had wanted to find out what campaign Miles was pursuing in those weeks prior to Christmas when he was being forced to disband his own campaign due to supply problems, wouldn’t Crook have gotten himself a volunteer?

Was Miles the sort who would have sent a courier off to communicate with Crook? I don’t think so—not as jealous and thin-skinned as he was.

From the military record we know for a fact that Crook and Mackenzie sent out Lakota scouts (who had been invaluable during the Dull Knife campaign) from the Belle Fourche to the Little Powder, from there down to the Powder to look for any sign of the Crazy Horse village that continued to elude Crook in this most frustrating year of fight-and-chase-and-wait-for-resupply. From that point it wouldn’t take a horseman much more than a week to complete the trip across that frozen winter wilderness. Just how much of a frozen wilderness it is in the winter … well, you’ll have to come up here and see for yourself. That is, if you truly want to experience what these plainsmen, soldiers, and roaming villages endured that winter of record.

If I had to speculate, I’ll say it happened just as I wrote it: Crook to Miles, Belle Fourche to the Yellowstone, a single rider traveling as fast as he dared across an icy landscape, suffering terribly from the cold and hunger and fear, but enduring not only because he had a job to do, but because he had others who were counting on him to provide for them.

Of course, as far as we know, Crook did not send a scout (civilian or otherwise) to Miles that winter, so we’ve taken a wee bit of license to get Seamus shipped off to this next battlefront of the Great Sioux War.

If you’ve found some fault with my line of reasoning, be sure to drop me a line. After all, one of my most important tasks in writing each of these twenty novels is to have everything plausible, probable, if not entirely possible. Much, much different from what I too often see on television, more different still from what Hollywood spends millions on to show us in the movie theaters.

Remember: you have my promise that I’ll continue to do my best to make every one of Seamus Donegan’s adventures so real that you will say, “If it didn’t really happen that way, then—by God—Terry sure makes it seem like it could have!”

And while we’re on the subject of speculation, can you imagine the lively debates, and what might have easily turned into fistfights, between the Democrats and Republicans counted among the officers of the Fifth Infantry as they argued over the controversy of just who would eventually be elected president back east? Those weeks dragging into months during that winter were very much akin to those weeks and months just before the Civil War broke out. In 1876 Reconstruction Republicans were aligned against the growing strength of the Democratic party in the defeated South. If, as President Grant was prepared to do to protect the Union, he had dispatched troops across the Mason-Dixon—many of those states threatened to secede a second time.

In such a scenario soldiers on the frontier again would have started to journey home to either north or south: saying farewell to friends and brothers in arms for perhaps the last time before they met on the field of battle … just as soldiers had done in 1861. History was indeed poised to repeat itself.

In this case, by the time the spring of 1877 arrived, Congress itself had reached a compromise that kept the nation from tearing itself apart. The Republicans would retain the White House, while the southern Democrats won the end of the much-hated Reconstruction.

Back on the northern plains Nelson A. Miles himself left little in the record for us to know fully what he promised the Sioux during his conferences with them in the autumn of 1876. It took the diligent research of author George E. Hyde (Spotted Tail’s Folk) to unearth new material on Miles’s offer of an agency in the Powder River country if the warrior bands would only surrender. In addition, Hyde located archival materials that testified to the fact that Crazy Horse bullied those families wanting to leave for the agencies during that autumn and winter of 1876-77.

It’s unfortunate that Miles’s faith and belief in those Sioux chiefs went unreciprocated for the most part. After his parleys with the leaders on Cedar Creek and a few days later on the Yellowstone (A Cold Day in Hell), at the end of which the colonel took five chiefs prisoner as security against their people keeping their promises, very few of the Sioux ever went in to their reservations until the mass influx of the following summer. And those few who did drift back to the agencies that fall did not feel compelled to stay on their reservations for very long. They were soon lured out a second time to live in the old way … at least until Miles finally convinced them that there was no hope in wandering the old road.

Some of those Sioux chiefs and war leaders would eagerly sign up when Miles came asking for scouts during the Nez Perce War of 1877 … but that will be a two-part story I have yet to tell in the years ahead.

I hope that all of you had to pull on a sweater or at least toss another log onto the fire while reading of these two winter campaigns. If I’ve given you a shiver or two, then I’ve done my job to transport you back into that brutal time when men marched and slept, ate and fought, outdoors. And for those few of you who still need a little help in sensing the cold all the way to your marrow, gaze again at the three photographs we’ve reproduced from those days at the Tongue River Cantonment: look at the soldiers in their muskrat hats and buffalo coats; look at the gun crews around their artillery pieces; then carefully study the crude log barracks.

Believe me—those log huts were far preferable to taking the campaign trail when a man had little choice but to be out in the cold, day and night. For weeks on end the army surgeons’ thermometers were unusable simply because the mercury froze in a tiny gray bulb at thirty-nine below zero. The following winter, when spirit thermometers were finally put into use by the army, at one point the temperature on those Montana plains registered sixty-six degrees below zero—and that was before the chill factor!

It was widely known that the country of the Powder and Tongue rivers was so inhospitable during the winter that it was “impossible for white men to winter there except in a well-prepared shelter.” In fact, when Miles wrote General Terry of his intentions to pursue the warrior bands without pause, Terry replied that it was “impossible to campaign in the winter, as the troops could not contend against the elements.”

And for a time there it seemed everything was working against Nelson A. Miles getting his winter campaign under way. After his success at Cedar Creek, he wanted to follow and capture the “wounded and weakened” Sitting Bull. But first he had to prepare his troops against the elements. In those few days before they set off on the Fort Peck Expedition, the colonel learned just how desperate his situation was. There weren’t enough horses and mules for the job at hand, and they didn’t even have enough grain to feed what animals they did have. What’s more, most of the regulation winter clothing he had ordered early in the fall still had not arrived from downriver, forcing his men to spend their skimpy salaries to purchase what they needed from the sutlers in the way of extra underwear, shirts and britches, caps and gloves. Most men wore layer upon layer, often pulling on at least five shirts and three pairs of trousers.

The fact that Crook had received the winter clothing he ordered for his campaign would continue to nettle Miles as he prepared to march north. In a letter to his wife Miles privately confided that an army investigation into the matter would likely ruin not only Crook himself, but the venal army quartermaster staff as well.

All the meteorological reports of the day state that the winter of 1876-77 was one of the most severe on record, especially across the Montana, Dakota, and Wyoming territories. Subzero cold and snow came early that year, and rarely did the snow disappear long enough to see bare ground before a new storm brought even more. Not only did the cold and the snow make waging war an even tougher proposition, the weather that winter killed off much of what game wasn’t driven south. In the villages of the winter roamers, bellies went hungry because the buffalo and big-game animals simply were not available.

What those sunken cheeks and hollow eyes, those whimpers and cries from the Lakota and Cheyenne people, would surely have done to touch the hearts of their leaders—convincing them that little hope remained in following the old life. It seemed as if the weather itself had conspired to do all in its power to convince the winter roamers that they could no longer survive off their reservations.

For those troops Miles left behind to garrison the post while he was off on both campaigns, the daily fatigue work continued. More walls were raised and roof joists laid on. The insides of exterior walls were plastered to eliminate what they could of the howling Montana winds. One of the cabins that was entirely finished by the time the men returned from the Missouri River region was that used by the contract sutler. It was a place that would soon cause Miles some serious problems of morale and discipline.

As mentioned in the story, not only did the government sutler sell intoxicating spirits to the soldiers, but two or three other enterprising civilians showed up from downriver with some “high wines,” brandies, and a potent whiskey. This liquor was sold to the soldiers without proper regulation in mid-December and the number of men locked up in the guardhouse multiplied until one officer observed, “the Guard House was always full to overflowing & Genl Miles said the whiskey caused him more trouble than the Indians.”

After attempting several different solutions, the colonel finally closed down the sutler’s saloon for good in the early spring of 1877. At that point the traders simply moved beyond the eastern border of the military reservation to set up shop. It infuriated Miles that one of the unscrupulous traders was selling a lethal moonshine concoction that left several of his soldiers dead. An unnamed band of angry soldiers soon took care of the problem themselves: either they ran the trader out of the country or they killed him, for the man was never seen in Montana Territory again, and nary a trace was found of the scalawag.

During the next year a civilian community slowly blossomed around the shantytown of whiskey traders’ log cabins. First known as Milesburg, then called Milestown, and now known as Miles City, Montana—the place was never so notorious as it was back then. By 1879, however, the modest community could boast its own courthouse, a one-room school, several cafés to accompany its saloons, along with those shops where many industrious carpenters, painters, blacksmiths, and coopers plied their trades, totally dependent upon the post for their livelihood.

We are fortunate to have more than the military record when it comes to the Fort Peck Expedition and the wanderings of its three battalions in November-December of 1876. Three soldiers left us their observations of one another, the weather, and the day-to-day life on the campaign trail. Whereas the first is an account written by an unnamed soldier, which Jerry Greene found printed in the Leavenworth Daily Times (what must surely have been the soldier’s hometown paper), the second-most valuable is that written by First Lieutenant George W. Baird (who served as regimental adjutant).

But by far the most enlightening is the daily field notes taken by Lieutenant Frank D. Baldwin himself. He faithfully recorded his observations in a pocket-sized notebook, which he later expanded into a ledger. It is this undated manuscript that rests in the William Carey Brown collection of the Western History Collections at the Norlin Library, University of Colorado, in Boulder.

Baldwin’s minute remembrances add immensely to the historical record of the continued contact between the army and the Sitting Bull camps in the autumn and winter of 1876–77 as the army harried the Sioux and chased them about the country north of the Yellowstone. None of the Lakota participants in either the skirmish at Bark Creek or the fight at Ash Creek left any record with interpreters during the “reservation period,” as they would leave accounts of other battles and conflicts with the soldiers. One wonders if it was merely too embarrassing for those veteran warriors to make mention of those two defeats, or if they simply determined it would be best to stay quiet, since those two encounters with the army only served further to prove Sitting Bull’s admonition that to take spoils from the Little Bighorn dead would bring down the wrath of Wakan Tanka upon their people.

Late in the summer of 1920 Frank Baldwin journeyed to the high plains of Montana to accompany Joseph Culbertson to the site of their December 1876 attack on Sitting Bull. By then a general retired from the army, Baldwin and the young scout, who was barely eighteen winters old at the time of the expedition, wandered over the site, sharing reminiscences together. It wasn’t long before a six-foot-high stone monument in the shape of a pyramid was erected on the site where Sitting Bull’s people had abandoned their village that cold winter day when Baldwin’s troops rumbled toward their camp in those noisy wagons.

Success at last against the leader of the “hostile” Sioux!

As Robert Utley describes in The Lance and the Shield, his master work about Sitting Bull:

In the perception of the white citizenry, Sitting Bull was the man to get, the archdemon of the Sioux holdouts, the architect of Custer’s defeat and death, the supreme monarch of all the savage legions arrayed against the forces of civilization. Newspapers vied with one another in profiling this all-powerful ruler, and no story was too silly for their readership.

Equally silly was General Sheridan’s effort to deflate Sitting Bull. He had no reason to believe, he declared, that such an individual as Sitting Bull even existed. “I have always understood ‘Sitting-bull’ to mean the hostile Indians, and not a great leader.”

… But precisely because he was a great leader, Sitting Bull had indeed come to mean, for Indians and whites alike, the hostile Indians.

If Phil Sheridan had trouble on this point—Nelson A. Miles sure knew Sitting Bull existed in the flesh. And make no mistake, so did Lieutenant Frank Baldwin.

This Ash Creek fight in Montana Territory is all but unknown, even among those who have a speaking acquaintance of the Great Sioux War. All too few understand just what a signal victory Baldwin and his small battalion accomplished by surprising the larger, stronger, confederated village and driving them into the wilderness with little more than what they had on their backs. They had no choice but to head south, hoping to find Crazy Horse, where they would be welcomed as they had welcomed him and the Cheyenne survivors the previous winter. Baldwin had turned the tables on the Lakota—and successfully shattered the myth of an all-powerful Hunkpapa-led coalition.

Considering the scale of this defeat at Ash Creek (and, once the Hunkpapa village reached the Crazy Horse camp, finding them so recently defeated by Miles at Battle Butte), it becomes all the more clear why it would take Sitting Bull and his chiefs only a matter of weeks to decide that their only course lay in fleeing across the line to Canada.

The army had the bands on the run, harried and harassed on the northern plains. So what do you think would have happened if the Lakota peace delegates from the Crazy Horse village had reached the cantonment to discuss terms of surrender with Miles?

So close—perhaps only a matter of several hundred yards—to have come on this journey with the blessings of Crazy Horse, Little Wolf, and Morning Star themselves … only to be set upon by the cowardly Crow auxiliaries Tom Leforge had recruited for Lieutenant Hargous.

Think of it: had not the Crow cold-bloodedly murdered those five brave men, within sight of a wavering Crazy Horse, such a surrender would have represented at least six hundred lodges—which meant more than some twelve hundred fighting men! Miles and the frontier army would have struck a powerful coup. Sitting Bull and his confederated chiefs would have been left completely isolated, alone, and vulnerable. Had not the Crow cowards committed those inexcusable murders against their ancient enemies, then escaped back to the safety of their reservation before they could be punished for their crimes … the Great Sioux War would have been over before Christmas!

Take a moment to consider it now: as things turned out, this cowardly act by Crow murderers caused the war to drag on at least another six months.

This half-day Battle of the Butte between Miles and Crazy Horse during a snowstorm in southeastern Montana is really not all that better known than Baldwin’s Ash Creek fight. In fact, it was so little known among Indian Wars’ historians that it was called the Battle of Wolf Mountain. Yet all one has to do is look at a good map of that part of Montana, and you will see that the Wolf Mountains are many miles from the site—the very same range crossed by Custer’s Seventh Cavalry as they marched west from the Rosebud, past the Crow’s Nest, on to the valley of the Little Bighorn. So what the academics might call the Battle of Wolf Mountain is better known in these parts as the Battle of the Butte.

Come up here and take one of my tours of the northern plains when we travel to this site, and you will readily see just how appropriate is that name.

One of the sources I relied upon before my very first trip up the Tongue River to Battle Butte was a small self-published book by the late Charles B. Erlanson. Having come to Montana in 1911 as a young wrangler, Erlanson went right to work for the Flying V Ranch, and later cowboyed for the Three Circle Ranch—both of which were on the Cheyenne Reservation. For better than fifty years Erlanson not only rode up and down the Tongue River, back and forth across the ground where this story took place, but also knew several of the old Cheyenne storytellers who spoke of the fight, and of the toll that terrible winter took upon the once-powerful Shahiyela people.

One of Erlanson’s closest informants was none other than John Stands In Timber, the Cheyenne tribal historian who collaborated with Margot Liberty on his book of Cheyenne culture and stories. On one trip the two old horsemen made to the battle site, Erlanson took a photograph of Stands in Timber beside the low pile of red rocks Wooden Leg had stacked up to mark the spot where Big Crow was shot. A stoic, but bright-eyed, Cheyenne historian looks back at the camera, pointing to that simple, but eloquent, marker with his wooden cane.

As the howling blizzard closed down upon the valley of the Tongue River, Miles ordered some of his unit to pursue the fleeing enemy—in hopes of learning just how close was the Crazy Horse camp. For many years a legend lived on that stated the soldiers chased the warriors for miles up the valley, passing through their hastily abandoned camp where they fought the rear guard protecting the village, and where the soldiers captured a huge store of dried meat.

Perhaps this historical error is what led no lesser an artist than Frederic Remington to paint one of his most famous works: Miles Strikes the Village of Crazy Horse. Although it does give the viewer a clear conception of the blowing snow, the bitter cold, the gusty wind, and the shoot-and-advance / shoot-and-advance nature of such battles, along with the drama of soldiers kneeling to fire in the foreground, with an officer and an Indian scout behind them (who might clearly be the Bannock called Buffalo Horn), Remington’s painting is nonetheless nothing more than a work of the imagination.

The painting would be better ascribed to Mackenzie’s attack on Morning Star’s village: the on-foot, lodge-to-lodge fight of it made on 25 November 1876.

Truth is, the Sioux and Cheyenne village was at least seventeen miles south of Battle Butte. A man who knows firsthand the nature of not only that terrain but a half century of Montana snowstorms, Charlie Erlanson himself, said of this controversy, “The last part of the battle was fought in a blizzard of such intensity that it … would have been futile for Miles’s foot soldiers to attempt to pursue the ‘finest light cavalry in the world’ through the deep snow.”

Having myself visited the site on a clear winter day, with close to a foot of snow on the level, I have to concur not only with William Jackson (the half-breed Blackfoot scout with Miles), but with the current thinking of historians: that the pursuing soldiers did not chase the Indians to and through their village. Instead, the infantry would have been lucky to follow those fleeing horsemen a matter of two, perhaps three, miles at most, on foot before they were forced to turn back beneath the onslaught of a Montana blizzard.

By considering only the record of casualties, one might infer that this was an inconsequential affair brought to an indecisive conclusion only by the extremities of severe weather. But even the casualty counts are conflicting for some reason.

William Jackson states that three soldiers were killed (although his recollection may be clouded by time and by witnessing Batty’s death earlier on their march upriver). He goes on to state that eight soldiers were wounded. Two other writers concur with these same figures, one of which was Captain Edmond Butler in his own brief account of the campaign.

So why, I ask myself, did Miles officially report one man killed and nine wounded during the battle? Because of the soldier who died on the northbound march, I think I can understand a discrepancy of one fatality—but this still does not account for the other death.

Perhaps it’s nothing more than the fact that these eye witnesses are recalling Private Batty’s death before the battle, Corporal Rothman’s death during the battle, and Private McCann’s death after the battle.

As for the casualties on the Indian side of the fight, we first look at the “body count” given by the officers and enlisted men immediately after the fight. Lieutenant Baldwin wrote in his personal diary that the Indian loss “must have been considerable.” Trumpeter Edwin M. Brown recorded in his journal that “the loss of the Indians was estimated at 15 killed and 25 wounded.”

Another army source noted that ten Indians fell in front of the Casey-Butler-McDonald battalion, in addition to the war chief in the fancy warbonnet (Big Crow). In the subsequent reports submitted to Miles, the officers of the Fifth Infantry noted that as many as twenty-three Indians fell during the battle and were presumed dead. The colonel himself wrote that he believed the enemy’s loss to be “about twelve or fifteen killed and twenty five or thirty wounded.”

The belief of these officers that they had taken a great toll on the Crazy Horse warriors was strengthened the following day when they more carefully examined the Indian positions on the ridge, finding much blood on the snow as well as a great deal of blood trails along the escape route upriver.

Yet all of this appears to clash with what are consistent reports from the Indian participants themselves—those who, like Eagle Shield, eventually gave a rendition of the fight through interpreters. Wooden Leg states that Big Crow was the only Cheyenne casualty but goes on to say that two Sioux warriors were killed as well. Red Cloth, a Miniconjou, later testified that in addition to the two Sioux killed in the battle, three more Lakota had been wounded, and two of those had later died. Again and again the Indian reports consistently testify to a much, much smaller casualty count than Miles and his officers had represented.

Considering all the shooting from both sides, especially in light of all the bullets used up by Casey’s, Butler’s, and McDonald’s companies, it is surprising that there were not more Indian casualties. Still, this fact once more points up the true lack of marksmanship on the part of most frontier soldiers. The army supplied ammunition enough to waste in battle but would not provide ammunition to use for target practice at their posts.

In addition to the soldiers killed and wounded, the Indians did take a further toll with their marksmanship (or, some might argue, lack of it): three of the army’s horses were killed, and one horse and two mules wounded.

Although we do not have a single written account of Sitting Bull’s fight with Baldwin’s battalion at Ash Creek in December, we are much more fortunate to have a record in the case of the Battle Butte fight. A handful of stories were made through interpreters in subsequent weeks, as the warrior bands began slipping back in to the agencies. But for the most part, more stories of the “Battle of Wolf Mountain” were related over the next ten years—not a long time at all, considering a culture with an oral tradition. These were people who passed along their history in a precise and unembellished manner. What is shown by the record from Cheyenne renderings to Sioux versions of the fight is that they all generally conform to the military record of the battle (while adding a detail here or there depending upon a particular warrior’s individual exploits).

One of the most interesting facets of the warrior tales of the fight is that the warriors of Crazy Horse had again planned on using the tried-and-true decoy technique that had worked for them across the last ten years—ever since the Fetterman massacre in December 1866. Their statements record the fact that they planned to ambush the Bear Coat by using a small decoy party to draw the main body of the soldiers from their bivouac to a point some two miles upstream (between Battle Butte and the mouth of Wall Creek), where the mass of warriors lingered on ground the war chiefs considered favorable for the fight.

Again, as in most cases, the young, eager decoys advanced much too quickly, engaging the soldiers, revealing their positions, and thereby giving away the plan before they could lure the soldiers south. When the first shots were fired and the army engaged, the warriors waiting in ambush had no choice but to hurry north with their Henry and Winchester carbines, along with a few of the Springfields taken as spoils from the Custer dead.

This ruined ambush was but another indication to many of the war chiefs that their people had indeed failed to listen to the Great Mystery’s warning not to take the spoils from the Greasy Grass fight. Not only did their decoy plan not work, but they were forced by a potent winter storm to withdraw—two more acts by Wakan Tanka to show the Lakota people his great displeasure with them.

The village, with a population that ranged anywhere between twenty-five to thirty-five hundred people (of which at least a thousand were of “fighting age”), limped away to the south during the storm. While there was renewed talk of resistance, there was also a growing voice among those who recommended surrender at the reservations.

Wooden Leg himself would stay out until the Cheyenne went in after the spring. While the flowers bloomed along the Tongue River, he made the journey back to the rocks where he had carefully buried Big Crow. With the warmth of summer coming, Wooden Leg found the body, still wrapped in its buffalo robe, undisturbed by time and predators. Its location somewhere south of Battle Butte along the eastern rim of the Tongue River Valley remains a secret to this day—as it should. Big Crow continues to be a hero to his people.

The army selected some of their own for hero status following the battle. Private Philip Kennedy and Private Patton G. Whited, both from Captain Edmond Butler’s C Company, were later awarded the Medal of Honor for their courage in being the first two men to reach the crest of the ridge in the face of heavy fire from the enemy. For his action in leading the charge, Butler himself was given a Medal of Honor and received a brevet rank of major.

In addition, Captain James Casey and Lieutenant Robert McDonald received Medals of Honor from the army for their heroism that day in the face of the enemy. Lieutenant Frank Baldwin went on to win universal acclaim for his singular act of bravery in bringing that case of ammunition to the battalion, then leading them against the snowy slope.

With so many who had distinguished themselves in the line of duty, it is sad and unfortunate to me that the officers of the Fifth Infantry soon split into rival camps when attempting to assess the results of the “Battle of Wolf Mountain.”

A thin-skinned Butler attempted to minimize Baldwin’s role in the charge against the heights—perhaps due to the fact that Baldwin’s actions tended to diminish the yard-by-yard bravery exhibited by the Irish captain as well as Butler’s readiness to continue pitching into the warriors despite being low on (or in some cases out of) ammunition for their Spring-fields.

In consequence, other officers far from the bluffs where the hottest fighting took place—men like Lieutenant James Pope and Adjutant George Baird—sought through the record to minimize Butler’s gallant courage in the face of the enemy—leading his men in the assault as ordered by Miles.

Sad indeed that these personalities, all officers in one of the finest regiments involved in the Indian Wars, would descend to such petty backbiting and ego baiting. Even Baldwin—hero of McClellan Creek, the hero who held his men together at Bark Creek, and the hero who a few days later routed Sitting Bull at Ash Creek—yes, even Frank Baldwin would later snipe away at his fellow officers by saying:

With the exception of Pope & Dickey there was not an officer on duty with companies who seemed to comprehend the character of the engagement beyond blindly defending the point they were assigned, or by chance might drift to.

Now, for those of you who haven’t had yourselves enough of this crucial and pivotal month (or “Moon”) in the Wolf Mountain country with our beloved gray-eyed Irishman, I have some suggested reading for you—titles I used in compiling my story of the beginning of the end for the warrior bands that terrible winter.

Battle of the Butte—General Miles’ Fight with the Indians on Tongue River, January 8, 1877, by Charles B. Erlanson

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

“The Battle of Wolf Mountain,” by Don Rickey, Jr., Montana, The Magazine of Western History, vol. 13 (Spring, 1963)

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown Cheyenne Memories, by John Stands In Timber and Margot Liberty

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

Crazy Horse Called Them Walk-A-Heaps, by Neil Baird Thompson

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

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

A Dose of Soldiering—The Memoirs of Corporal E. A. Bode, Frontier Regular Infantry, 1877-1882, edited by Thomas T. Smith

Faintly Sounds the War-Cry—The Story of the Fight at Battle Butte, by Fred H. Werner

The Fighting Cheyennes, by George Bird Grinnell

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

“Historical Address of Brigadier General W. C. Brown,” Winners of the West, August 30, 1932

Indian-Fighting Army, by Fairfax Downey

Indian Fights and Fighters, by Cyrus Townsend Brady

Lakota and Cheyenne—Indian Views of the Great Sioux War, 1876-1877, by Jerome A. Greene

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

Memoirs of a White Crow Indian (Thomas H LeForge), as told by Thomas B. Marquis

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

Nelson A. Miles and the Twilight of the Frontier Army, by Robert Wooster

People of the Sacred Mountain: A History of the Northern Cheyenne Chiefs and Warrior Societies, 1830–1879, by Peter J. Powell, S.J.

Personal Recollections and Observations of General Nehon A. Miles, introduction by Robert Wooster

The Plainsmen of the Yellowstone, by Mark H. Brown

Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem, by James C. Olson

Soldiers West—Biographies from the Military Frontier, edited by Paul Andrew Hutton

Spotted Tail’s Folk—A History of the Brule Sioux, by George E. Hyde

Stone Song—A Novel of the Life of Crazy Horse, by Winfred Blevins

Sweet Medicine: The Continuing Role of the Sacred Arrows, the Sun Dance, and the Sacred Buffalo Hat in Northern Cheyenne History, by Peter J. Powell, S.J.

The U.S. Army in the West, 1870-1880—Uniforms, Weapons, and Equipment, by Douglas C. McChristian

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

War in the West—The Indian Campaigns, by Don Rickey

Warpath and Council Fire—The Plains Indians’ Struggle for Survival in War and in Diplomacy, by Stanley Vestal

William Jackson, Indian Scout, as told by James Willard Schultz

Wolves for the Blue Soldiers—Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860-1890, by Thomas W. Dunlay

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

“Yellowstone Kelly”—the Memoirs of Luther S. Kelly, edited by Milo Milton Quaife

To the small-minded it seems that great battles must surely have horrendous death tolls. Such niggardly people point to the Alamo, the Fetterman fight, and the Custer battle—none of which had any immediate or lasting effect on the war of which it was a part.

On the other hand, the Battle of the Butte, this “Battle of Wolf Mountain,” was to seal the fate of the winter roamers, those warrior bands who for the better part of a year had stymied, defeated to fight another day, or completely crushed the finest outfits in the frontier army.

After 8 January 1877 the Cheyenne were done. What Mackenzie had begun at the Battle of the Red Fork in November was finished at Battle Butte by the Fifth Infantry. The richest tribe on the northern plains had suffered all they could. They would surrender to Miles or trudge into their agencies that spring … to begin a last and even more tragic chapter in their history at Fort Robinson (a story we will tell in a forthcoming volume).

With so little buffalo and game to feed the camps, with such extreme cold and the constant harrying by soldiers from both the north and the south, the Sioux bands splintered, fractured, never to coalesce again as they had in the spring and summer of 1876—the zenith of their greatness. As the camps fractured into bands, the bands split into clans, and the clans broke apart into family units, there seemed no longer to be any use in trying to stay together in the great camp circles that had greeted Reno’s charge that hot June day, the great confederation that had encircled and utterly crushed Custer’s five companies.

This terrible winter a man had to worry about his family—feeding them, keeping them warm, keeping them safe from the wolfish armies prowling their traditional hunting grounds.

After a while this matter of the unceded hunting grounds did not matter. There weren’t any buffalo left anyway. If a man could not be a hunter and provide for his family—of what use was he to his people?

The stormy fight at Battle Butte pierced these two great nations to the very heart of what they were as a culture. The bleeding had begun, drop by drop, that winter and continued into a cold, rainy spring. There would be no way to stop that bleeding.

The hoop was unraveling.

What once was would never be again.

Saddest of all—it was to be Crazy Horse’s last fight.

At Battle Butte he chose the ground where he would engage his antagonist, Nelson A. Miles. This was the fight that proved the Bear Coat good at his word. At the Cedar Creek parleys^* he had promised the Sioux he would not give them any rest that winter. Miles kept his vow. The winter roamers learned that the army could and would hunt them down, despite the most severe weather.

Day by day, moon by moon, it was becoming more and more clear that there would be no peace until they went in to their agencies.

This last battle for Crazy Horse was a fight that stripped the Northern Cheyenne of what little they still had left after close to a year of constant war.

This was a winter that proved to Crazy Horse that his people could not go on any longer.

After 8 January 1877, the choices were as clear as a high-country stream: follow Sitting Bull in fleeing to Canada … or limp into one of the agencies and hope for the mercy of those who have labored long and hard to defeat you.

For Crazy Horse, the greatest warrior of the Titunwan Lakota nation, the hardest thing for him to do was to consider giving up his war pony, handing over his weapons, and abandoning the path being a defender of his people. Harder still to leave the land that rested in his bones and ran in his blood.

If the Battle of the Butte accomplished nothing more, it convinced Crazy Horse that the war was over. The fight was done.

No longer was there any home on the face of his beloved land for a warrior.

Many winters before, his feet had been planted on the road that would hurtle him toward his youthful vision of a man he called Horse Rider—a vision in which Horse Rider could not be killed by the white man. Instead, Crazy Horse knew Horse Rider was to die at the hands of his own people … the way they clawed at him, tugged at him, trying to hold him back.

With his fight against the white man done, Crazy Horse knew he had those last terrible steps to take along the trail that would lead him to his fate.

And to the spiritual death of his people.

The Battle of the Butte was his last fight.

So what did death matter when his people no longer had need of a warrior, no longer had need of a Shirt Wearer … no longer had need of this Strange Man of the Oglalla?

—Terry C. Johnston

Battle of the Butte

Quarter Circle U Ranch, Montana

8 January 1996

^*A Cold Day in Hell, vol. II, The Plainsmen Series