Trumpet on the Land: The Aftermath of Custer's Massacre, 1876 tp-10

by Terry C. Johnston

  They wouldn’t have to wait long for word that the Cheyenne were coming.

  In a matter of hours those troopers of the Fighting Fifth would vault back into their saddles, and they wouldn’t climb back out for something on the order of thirty-six hours.

  But waiting was about all they did in Crook’s camp.

  Every interminable hour that dragged by seemed to bring renewed grumbling from Crook’s officer corps that the army ever relinquished its three posts along the Bozeman Trail. If Forts Reno, Phil Kearny, and C. F. Smith were still manned, they argued, chances were Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse would have never gained a foothold in this hunting ground. And even if the Sioux had made just such an attempt despite the presence of the army, then any campaign by Crook or Terry would be able to operate that much closer to supply depots.

  Now with this Sioux campaign grinding on much longer than any military man would have thought possible, it was abundantly clear at every campfire discussion that the officers of the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition believed the army should immediately set about erecting its three posts in the heart of the hostiles’ country: perhaps first to reactivate old Fort Reno or a new post somewhere on the headwaters of the Tongue; another in the Black Hills to protect the miners, settlers, and growing businesses flocking there; and a third somewhere on the lower Yellowstone, ideally at the mouth of the Tongue River.

  “If the army did that,” Captain Anson Mills told his compatriots that eleventh day of July, “the army would thereby maintain its presence and military influence over the wild tribes so that no hostile elements on the reservations would ever again seek to flee for what the Indians claim as their land, to recapture what they remember of their old life.”

  “Their old life is over!” John Finerty snarled. “This is beautiful land—and emigrants damn well ought to come in and snatch it up, take it away from these savages.”

  John Bourke asked the newsman, “You don’t think we can live with the red man if the Indian stayed to his agencies?”

  “No,” Finerty said flatly, plainly still suffering from his harrowing escape. “Better if the whole tribe of Indians, friendly and otherwise, were exterminated.”

  “Johnny boy,” Seamus said at their noon fire, “you’re sounding just like General Sherman—even Phil Sheridan himself!”

  “Damn right I agree with them!” Finerty growled. “And a lot of these men do too, Seamus. We all detest the red race! Don’t you?”

  Donegan’s brow knitted as he brooded on that a moment, then pulled the stub of his briar pipe from his lips and said, “It’s true that the red man’s done his best to raise my hair—that much is for sure, Johnny. But to paint them all with that same black brush—why, I’m not about to do it. I’ve seen too much good in some Injins, scouts and trackers and others, to condemn the whole of them. I could have stayed back east in Boston, even your Chicago, and not seen a single Indian for all my life. Maybe some white men brought this on themselves—taking what ain’t theirs.”

  “Wait a minute, Irishman,” said Frederick Van Vliet of the Third Cavalry. “So what should become of those good, God-fearing folks who want to come out here to settle, raise a family, and make a new life for themselves?”

  Seamus wagged his head. “You’re asking the wrong man, Captain. I’m for sure no politician, and I don’t have any easy answers on the tip of my silver tongue.”

  “Then perhaps you should think things over,” Finerty advised, “until you know what you want to believe in.”

  “Oh, I know what I believe in, Johnny boy. I damn well know what I believe in,” he replied, his bile rising at the challenge. “Seems to me what should happen to folks who come out to settle on land that belongs to other people should be what happens to any folks who steal something that don’t belong to ’em.”

  “What?” Finerty demanded in a shrill voice. “You’re saying white folks should pay those black-hearted savages for the land they want to farm?”

  “Can’t you see, Donegan?” Mills jumped into the argument. “That’s exactly what the land commission is doing at this very moment: trying to strike an accord for the purchase of the Black Hills. But the Indians are balking.”

  Seamus shook his head in disbelief. “So we don’t get what we want—we’ll take it anyway?”

  “I say we were meant to pacify this land from sea to shining sea,” Captain Peter D. Vroom said. “To make it fruitful and we to prosper thereby.”

  “But to do that,” Donegan said, “the fighting men on both sides are made victims of the war between the War Department, sent to fight the Indians, and the Interior Department, supposed to watch over the welfare of the Indians.”

  Finerty cheered, “I say the Grant administration’s done the right thing: turning the Indians over to the army. Now it’s time to let the army settle this once and for all!”

  “Odd, don’t you think, Johnny—that the men on both sides of this war are being killed by government bullets?”

  With a snap of his fingers the newsman said, “By the saints—I think you’ve got something there, Seamus. That could well be the germination of a great editorial I could write on the utter insanity of the government giving weapons and bullets to our helpless red wards, who then escape their assigned reservations, using those bullets to kill the soldiers that same government sends to drive the red savages back to their agencies.”

  With the correspondent’s last few words, Donegan began to peer to the south over Finerty’s shoulder, his attention drawn to the nearby hills where pickets had been signaling with their semaphores. Suddenly the brow of a distant hill dippled with over two hundred horsemen.

  “Johnny boy, looks like you’re gonna get another chance to show just how much you hate all red men,” Seamus said with a grin, “both friendly and otherwise.”

  With a start Finerty and some of the others twisted about, stunned to see the tall lances carried by those distant warriors.

  “Brazen sons of bitches, ain’t they?” John Bourke said. “To dare venture this close to an armed camp.”

  “Those aren’t Sioux, Lieutenant,” Donegan said, as Pourier strode up. “Right, Bat?”

  The half-breed replied, “Snake.”

  “The Shoshone?” Finerty said. “They’re back?”

  “They promised Crook they’d return,” Bourke marveled as he turned to leave. “By damn, the general will want to see this!”

  Down from the slopes came that colorful procession of fluttering feathers and streaming scalp locks tied to halters, rifle muzzles, and buffalo-hide shields. Bright-red or dark-blue trade-cloth leggings were shown off by some, while most wore only a breechclout and moccasins under the warmth of that summer sun. They carried rifles and old muzzle-loading fusils, a few even proud to brandish a cap-and-ball revolver. Wolf-hide and puma-skin quivers stuffed with iron-tipped arrows and their sinew-backed horn bows hung at every back.

  And at the head of them all rode Tom Cosgrove, that veteran of the Confederate cavalry who had made a new life for himself near Camp Brown on the Wind River Reservation after the war, marrying into the tribe and raising a family of his own, then once more answering the patriot’s call when what he loved most was threatened by the enemy. With his two closest friends, former rebels Nelson Yarnell and Yancy Eckles, Cosgrove had brought eighty-six Shoshone warriors over the mountains last month to answer Three Stars’s plea for scouts and Indian auxiliaries. After the army’s stalemate on the Rosebud, the Snake had abandoned Crook to return home.

  Now the three were back, this time bringing 220 warriors.

  Yet it was an old, stately warrior who caused the greatest stir as the picturesque parade approached camp: a handsome, wrinkled, and gray-haired war chief who sat proudly erect as he led his tribesmen to the camp of the Three Stars.

  “Who is that, Bat?” Seamus asked.

  “Only can be Washakie.”

  “The old chief himself,” the Irishman replied. “Old Big Throat himself told me Washakie goes back to the fir
st time white men came to these mountains.”

  Pourier nodded. “Days of Jim Bridger, Shad Sweete, and Titus Bass—old trappers like them. Why, Washakie’s put some seventy-two or -three winters behind him already. And he still looks strong as a bull in spring! Lookee there, he’s brought his two sons along with him. Those boys right behind Washakie, riding with Yarnell and Eckles.”

  “By damn!” Finerty said. “Even back east we’ve heard that year in and year out Washakie has been one of the most loyal allies the army could ever hope to have.”

  Donegan turned to the newsman with a grin to ask, “You mean you’re gonna get soft on Injins now, John? Figuring maybe the army shouldn’t go and kill ’em all?”

  “Maybe you just oughtta let me be, Irishman!” Finerty snapped. “Say, Bat—who are them two squaws riding behind the old boy? His wives?”

  Pourier shook his head. “I don’t figure Washakie to bring his women. They must be the wives of the two Snakes who stayed with us.”

  Donegan asked, “That pair of warriors what were too badly wounded for the others to take back to Wind River on travois?”

  With a nod Pourier replied, “Yeah. Likely those women come to be with their husbands, help put ’em on the mend.”

  Finerty shook a raised fist in the air and cheered, “Hurrah! Hurrah for Washakie’s soldiers! Now Crook can go whip Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse!”

  “I don’t think we’ll be going anytime soon,” Anson Mills grumbled. “No matter that the Shoshone have returned, I’ll wager Crook will wait some more, at least until the Fifth gets here.”

  “Why tarry so long—if the enemy is all around us?” Robert Strahorn asked.

  “I suppose it’s an old military axiom I learned at the academy,” Mills replied. “A commander must never, never underestimate his enemy.”

  “With this army made to retreat from the Rosebud, followed only days later by Custer’s regiment being butchered,” said Captain William H. Andrews of the Third Cavalry, “we’ve twice felt the savage, brutal, and bloody power of our enemy.”

  “Don’t you fear. When we finally do march,” Mills told them, “it will be to destroy what bands we don’t drive into the agencies. When we march—it will be to end this Sioux War once and for all.”

  “You looking for someone, Seamus?” Strahorn inquired.

  He said, “Yes. Someone … one of Washakie’s warriors. A fighting man.”

  “One of the Snakes?”

  His eyes misted over and he blinked them unsuccessfully. “Someone I stood back to back with a few weeks ago—not knowing when I would die with all those Sioux charging in to overrun us … sure only that I was going to die.”*

  After a moment of reflection Strahorn asked quietly, “Then this should be a joyful reunion for you.”

  “Goddamn right, Bob!” he said, turning to the newsman with a wide grin creasing his weathered face. “A bloody joyful reunion it will be for two fighting comrades who escaped death by climbing back out of the mouth of hell!”

  *The Plainsmen Series, Vol. 9, Reap the Whirlwind.

  Chapter 17

  12-16 July 1876

  The Utes—Crook

  CHEYENNE, July 14—Negotiations have been making for some time through Captain Nickerson, of General Crook’s staff, with the Utes, who are all enemies of the Sioux on account of oft-repeated attacks on them, to secure their co-operation in the present movement against northern hostile Sioux …

  Gen. Merritt’s Fifth cavalry arrived at Fort Laramie to-day, and will move north via Fetterman to join Crook, from whom no additional news had been received, although no fears are entertained of the safety of his command.

  Custer’s late action has had the effect to take courage out of couriers, and none can be had to make the trip.

  Sitting Bull Killed

  CHICAGO, July 14—The Tribune has a special from Fort Lincoln, given further details of the Little Horn fight, and says that Sitting Bull was killed and also a white man named Mulligan, Sitting Bull’s chief adviser … It is thought that Sitting Bull’s band obtained nearly $20,000, the soldiers having just been paid.

  John Finerty wasn’t going to talk Quartermaster John V. Furey out of a new pair of shoes, much less boots. When the newsman went back to Furey’s wagon camp in the morning to beg even a used pair out of supply, the answer was still no.

  Dejected, he clomped back to the bivouac he was sharing with the three other reporters, staring down morosely at the upturned toes on his brogans most all the way. What worked well in the city did not work well out here. But then, back in Chicago a man did not willingly walk mile after endless mile through deep and icy snow as he was forced to do on the Powder River campaign back in March; nor did a Chicagoan repeatedly dunk his shoes in bone-chilling mountain streams and allow them to dry right on his feet—something guaranteed to make the toes curl up on the finest Irish footwear cobbled in that windy city by Lake Erie.

  Flies buzzed and droned from sunup to sundown, and this morning of 12 July was no different from all the others endured in Camp Cloud Peak in the weeks since Crook’s fight on the Rosebud. Except for the Sibley scout, it was BOREDOM in a boldface banner headline.

  “So you’ve had your fill of scouting for a while, eh?” Baptiste Pourier had asked Finerty earlier that morning.

  “Just stay away from me, Bat!”

  The half-breed had chuckled. “When I come over here to ask you to go out with me and Frank—I figured you’d tell me you had lots of stories to write for your paper back east. Stories about the time you almost lost your hair with Lieutenant Sibley!”

  John had whirled on the scout, growling, “Told you to stay away from me!”

  “Easy, Johnny,” Seamus Donegan had cooed. “He’s just trying to pull your leg.”

  “So you’re going out to scout again, Seamus?” Finerty had asked his fellow Irishman.

  “Sure am. Like Bat told you, the three of us’re going to show Washakie and some of his warriors where we got ambushed in the mountains. Last night, soon as Grouard told him about our fight, Washakie wanted us to take him to the place where we killed White Antelope. Sure you don’t wanna come along?”

  “No, thank you,” Finerty had grumbled. “I’ve got some dispatches to catch up on.”

  He’d take a little more boredom before he grappled against a wilderness crawling with scalp-hungry hostiles.

  Besides bacon, beans, and biscuits, boredom was a commodity in plentiful supply. For literate men like Finerty, the lack of reading matter weighed particularly heavy. Except for two small libraries of paperback books a pair of officers had hauled north in their saddlebags, there was only the dog-eared, grease-stained, three-week-old newspapers that came up from Fetterman with the supply wagons to make the rounds of camp, then make the rounds again and again until the papers fell apart with so much handling. Come night the flies and other winged pests disappeared, but the wolves, coyotes, and now the Shoshone auxiliaries all raised their primal voices to the stars and the moon. Even an inveterate gambler like Finerty found the idea of a game of poker or keno too odious for words.

  That Wednesday morning Crook was having his troops prepare to break camp again just as they had been doing every few days, this time for a move to a new streamlet less than two miles to the north. Here the men would try the fishing in some new creekside pools and the horses would luxuriate in new pastures. This periodic changing of camp also accomplished another object lost on most of those soldiers whose task it was to make the moves. While the sergeants did allow the men brief liberty to swim, fish, or hunt, there was no time off that would allow real boredom to set in.

  Every other day the tents were struck, to be pitched in a new camp a few miles away. Horses were constantly herded from one patch of grass to another, picketed and hobbled against brazen raids by the enemy. Wagons had to be loaded up for every move, then unloaded when the new site was reached. New sinks near the creeks had to be dug for the mess cooks, and new latrines were a must for an army the s
ize of the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition. On those days when camp was not to be moved, the cavalry troops exercised their horses at a walk, trot, and gallop, which kept each man in constant contact with his animal.

  This steady rotation of fatigue details made Finerty come to believe that the greenest recruit who had marched north from Fort Fetterman with Crook in May couldn’t help but be a hard-muscled, savvy campaign veteran by the end of the summer.

  Like the nightly visits of the Sioux come to try running off some of the horses or Tom Moore’s cantankerous mules, as well as the warriors’ daily attempts to set fire to the grass surrounding the white man’s camp, every afternoon saw a thunderstorm roll across the valley with enough fidelity a man could set his watch. Before the onslaught of today’s downpour, Finerty figured to enjoy this sunny morning by getting in a little fishing, making only a halfhearted effort and using some of the abundant grasshoppers for bait—more an excuse to doze in the shade of rustling cottonwoods than to catch anything. He was nearly asleep when he heard the first voices of those fishing across the narrow creek.

  He sat up at the excitement in their voices, shoving his floppy slouch hat back on his head, blinking his eyes, shading them to peer into the distance where many of the other fishermen were pointing off to the north. Already his heart pounded with the memories of his narrow escape from the Sioux, swallowing hard—afraid they were under attack. With the smoky haze clinging to this high country after the hostiles’ last attempt to burn the soldiers out, John couldn’t be sure—but it appeared to be only three of them. Likely only scouts for a larger war party.

  Quickly glancing over his shoulder, he reassured himself that he wasn’t so far from camp that he couldn’t make it back on foot, even in those damned worn-out brogans. Headed his way loped Captain Anson Mills, trailed by a hastily assembled squad of troopers from his M Company following him out of camp.

  Looking again to the north, he saw the trio of riders ease off the top of that nearby hill, urging their mounts down toward the stream where Finerty stood with other fishermen.