Wolf Mountain Moon: The Battle of the Butte, 1877 tp-12

by Terry C. Johnston

  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,” brandi
es, 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.