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

by Terry C. Johnston

  With Nelson A. Miles in the lead and the regimental band playing the rousing, patriotic air “Sherman’s March to the Sea,” six companies of the Fifth Infantry had boarded sixteen stuffy Missouri Pacific freight cars at Leavenworth, Kansas, early on the evening of 12 July and rumbled north by rail through towns heavily draped in black bunting to mourn the Little Bighorn dead. All the way to Yankton, South Dakota, they rode, where to the cheers of an immense throng of well-wishers at the dock the colonel’s foot soldiers marched two by two up the gangplank and crowded onto the decks of the E. H. Durfee, a steampowered stern-wheeler that would take them up the Missouri to Fort Buford at the mouth of the Yellowstone, then to the Rosebud Landing where, early on the afternoon of 2 August, nearly four hundred men of the Fifth marched down the gangplank onto the soil of Montana Territory, reinforcing General Alfred Terry’s battered, butchered, and demoralized command.

  On their crawl north against the Missouri’s current, Miles had been overjoyed to see the citizens of those riverside communities turn out to wave handkerchiefs, hold up banners of good wishes, and raise their voices as the steamer chugged its way into Dakota Territory. But upon passing the Standing Rock Agency, the colonel grew angry when he learned that the agent there had recently delivered nearly one hundred thousand rounds of ammunition to nonagency Indians.

  Possessors of a proud and honored tradition of battle readiness that dated back to the earliest days of the Republic, the Fifth Infantry had been organized in 1798. Over the next fourteen years the regiment was periodically disbanded; reactivated, then ultimately consolidated with other units during the War of 1812. From that point on, however, the Fifth stood proud and alone through the Black Hawk war of 1841-42, then marched courageously across the border to fight the Mexican War of 1845-48. No less a hero than the redoubtable Major General Zachary Taylor had commanded the Fifth at the battles of Resaca de la Palma and on to Monterrey. Later placed under the leadership of Major General Winfield Scott, the regiment distinguished itself at Churubusco and Molino del Rey, as well as when storming the walls of the palace at Chapultepec, which finally brought about the surrender of Mexico City.

  For the next few years the Fifth was posted in Indian Territory, then briefly used in fifty-seven to quell a Seminole uprising in Florida. Before long the regiment proudly marched beneath its banners back to the opening frontier, part of the government’s war against the uprising of Brigham Young’s Mormons in Utah Territory. During the long and bloody conflict of the Civil War back east, the Fifth remained in New Mexico Territory, capably holding the thin blue line against Confederate incursions from Texas, principally at Peralta and Apache Canyon.

  In the days of the army’s reorganization following the treaty at Appomattox, the Fifth was included in the Department of the Missouri, assigned to garrison the Kansas Forts Riley, Hays, and Wallace, as well as Fort Lyon in Colorado Territory. After seeing extensive service during the Cheyenne outbreak in sixty-eight, the regiment was consolidated with the old Thirty-seventh Infantry when it acquired a new commander, Nelson A. Miles.

  Through his leadership the colonel had proudly seen the Fifth become one of the finest Indian-fighting outfits on the plains—tested by the Kiowa, Southern Cheyenne, and the powerful Comanche in the Red River War of 1874-75. So grew his reputation as a hard-bitten, no-nonsense officer, yet a soldier at times unashamedly sentimental, as when his men rescued two young white girls, the German sisters, held captive by the Cheyenne.*

  Standing now on the deck of the Far West, at the door to the room General Terry was using as his office, Nelson remembered that Sunday morning of the twenty-third of July when the E. H. Durfee reached the landing across the river from Bismarck, Dakota Territory. He had quickly disembarked ahead of his troops and hurried up the slope to Fort Abraham Lincoln to pay his respects to Custer’s widow. How he had struggled to find words to express himself, looking into Libbie’s face, reading the anguish in those red-rimmed eyes … and scolding himself for thinking almost exclusively of his own wife, Mary. Would she survive so great a tragedy? he asked himself again.

  “You have no idea of the gloom that overhangs that post with twenty-seven widows,” he had written home to Leavenworth, trying to explain to Mary the air he sensed about Fort Lincoln, perhaps even trying to sort it out for himself. “I never saw anything like it. Mrs. Custer is not strong, and I would not be surprised if she did not improve. She seemed so depressed and in such despair.”

  And now he was here, a matter of miles from the dusty hillside where Custer had fallen. Only a hard two day’s ride from where the real Autie had died, where the mythic and immortal George Armstrong had been given birth at the hand of the vengeful Lakota.

  God, how he resented Custer for the way he had died! How he hated the man’s memory more than he had ever loved the man himself.

  Even though Nelson had decided he would find the Seventh Cavalry demoralized from its devastating loss, he hadn’t been ready for the shock he received upon arriving at the Terry-Gibbon camp that second day of August.

  “I never saw a command so completely stampeded as this, either in the volunteer or regular service, and I believe entirely without reason,” he had confided in a letter to Mary. “Terry does not seem very enthusiastic or to have much heart in the enterprise.”

  To Miles’s way of thinking, General Terry clearly had been bested by events, if not by the likes of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. And Colonel John Gibbon—why, he was slow and plodding at best, overly cautious and downright scared at worst. Someone needed to seize affairs in Montana Territory, with a firm grip. But Terry and Gibbon refused to move in those first weeks after the disaster on the Little Horn, waiting for more than merely reinforcements and supplies, perhaps waiting on the indecisive Crook somewhere in the shadow of the Big Horns, three days’ ride to the south. As much as he might rail about his superiors here on the frontier, Miles found much to complain about when it came to the eastern brass as well: he despised Sheridan for his excessive reliance on cavalry and even criticized his wife’s uncle, William Tecumseh Sherman, for his lack of attention to organizational matters.

  “The more I see of movements here,” the energetic and outspoken Miles wrote his wife from the mouth of the Rosebud, “the more admiration I have for Custer, and I am satisfied his like will not be found very soon again.”

  Then after five windy, rainy days of indecision, vacillation, and heated argument in that camp Terry’s soldiers had disparagingly named “Fort Beans,” a delay during which Nelson wrote home that “the campaign thus far would not have been creditable to a militia organization,” Terry was finally moved to put his command on the march, planning to head south so they could effect a union with Crook’s command known to be somewhere beyond both the headwaters of the Rosebud and the Chetish Mountains. Even though they were about to go into action, Miles nonetheless remained disgusted: the enemy plainly was no longer to the south. The Sioux were fleeing to the east.

  The following morning at three A.M., 8 August, bugles blew reveille, and at five the combined Dakota and Montana tolumns, some 1,700 strong in horse and foot, along with 75 white, Arikara, and Crow scouts, all marched away from the mouth of Rosebud Creek. Terry was bringing along 240 heavily laden freight wagons, stuffed to the gunwales with forage and rations to last thirty-five days, leaving behind 120 dismounted cavalry troops and Company G under Captain Louis H. Sanger of the Seventeenth Infantry to post a guard around the supply depot. Gibbon, a former artillery instructor at the U.S. Military Academy who was known to the Indians as the “Limping Soldier,” commanded a brigade composed of four infantry battalions from not only Miles’s Fifth, but the Sixth, Seventh, and Twenty-second regiments. Major James S. “Grasshopper Jim” Brisbin was given leadership of both his own four troops of the Second Cavalry out of Forts Ellis and Shaw in Montana Territory, as well as command over Major Marcus Reno’s remnants of the Seventh Cavalry, a regiment reorganized in recent weeks into eight troops.

  For two days that c
olumn of infantry, cavalry, wagons, ambulances, and beef herd crawled beneath a torrid, cloudless sky at something worse than a snail’s pace, suffering galling temperatures that reached 105 degrees. The anxious Terry and the nervous Gibbon put their Crow scouts out far ahead and flung wide on both flanks. It wasn’t lost on Nelson Miles that Reno’s Seventh was retracing the steps it had taken marching to the regiment’s destiny at the Little Bighorn. Gloom and fear hung like a murky pall over the column as Miles grew all the more impatient.

  At two o’clock that first afternoon some of the farranging Crow scouts returned to the column with a report of sighting the Sioux about forty miles ahead. About five P.M. another band of Crow who had gone to make contact with Crook’s column rode in to tell of sighting a large body of Sioux making for the Rosebud from the Tongue River. After covering only eleven miles in a twelve-hour march, a halt was ordered in a wooded area that in June had served as a campsite for the enemy village that destroyed Custer’s five companies. In the misty twilight Terry’s Arikara and Crow scouts discovered the tree burial of an infant.

  It revolted Nelson’s stomach to see the trackers drag the little body out of its resting place, hack it to pieces, and defile the scaffold.

  Now more than ever he felt convinced he had to find some way to shed himself of Terry and Gibbon, just the way Custer had detached himself. Through that chilly and drizzly Wednesday evening of the ninth, Miles brooded on the trap that snared him, brooded on how to extricate the Fifth Infantry. He needed a miracle and he needed it now.

  This plodding behemoth of a column would never catch the Sioux, much less bring the warriors to a decisive battle. And if Terry should ever succeed in uniting with Crook’s column—why, this nightmare campaign would be as good as over. They’d both suck each other dry as they lumbered along the enemy’s old trails, wearing out men and breaking down the horses.

  And in the end neither column would have a single warrior, much less a decisive battle, to show for it when the season dosed down the high plains for the coming of winter.

  “It looks like an organization for a walk-around,” he wrote Mary by firelight that evening. “If this kind of campaigning is continual, it will last a year or two without much credit to the army.”

  Setting his pencil aside, Miles snorted. “A stern chase,” he muttered to himself sourly, recalling Phil Sheridan’s words in prodding both Terry and Crook to get up off their numbing rumps and go after the enemy that had murdered Sheridan’s fair-haired boy. Nelson wagged his head, muttering, “A stern chase, my ass.”

  The very next afternoon Nelson Miles stared south into the distance—watching as his worst fears took shape out of the shimmering, heat-baked plain of southern Montana Territory.

  Prospect of an Early Fight

  CHEYENNE, July 26—Advised from General Crook’s command in camp on South Fork of Tongue river, July 23, via Fort Fetterman, July 26, are of importance. The main body of Sioux are believed to have taken to the Big Horn mountains where game is more plenty and grass fresher. The Indian efforts to burn the grass of the valley make it almost imperative on Crook to follow them up at once. His force musters about 1,200 regular soldiers and citizen volunteers, besides 200 Snake allies, and he feels he can at least hold his own on any ground that emergency may select. It is expected that the wagons will be parted with on the main Tongue river, near the mountains, and with a pack-train loaded with from fifteen to twenty days rations, a vigorous but careful advance will immediately follow. It is not deemed advisable for Crook’s force and Terry’s force to join previous to a move under one or other of the commanders. It is thought that the Indians would make a stand against one of the columns, and that by engaging them and having the other column reserved to either fight or follow up with, something decisive may be expected during the summer campaign. The enemy is believed to be on the headwaters of Ash creek and Little Big Horn, not far from the Montana and Wyoming line, and from thirty to forty miles from Crook’s present camp. General Merritt left Fetterman this morning with eight companies of the Fifth cavalry. Two more on the way to Fetterman will take a hundred and fifty recruits and follow in a few days.

  On the seventh of August, Crook’s Wyoming column crossed from the Tongue westward to the Rosebud on a wearying march of twenty-two miles over rough and broken country, every yard of it beneath a merciless sun. In that valley the Shoshone scouts came upon an immense trail, the earth scarred by thousands of unshod pony hooves and hundreds upon hundreds of travois poles.

  That day Seamus saw the first of the scaffolds bearing the Sioux dead killed in the Rosebud or Little Bighorn fights. It brought the Ute and Snake guides no end of delight to haul down the burial platforms, tear open the buffalo robes and blankets, robbing the graves of their bows and quivers, even a nickel-plated revolver or perhaps a Winchester “Yellow-Boy.” But the superstitious allies gave wide berth to one particular scaffold, believing it was surrounded by “bad medicine.” Only Ute John, one of the so-called Montana Volunteers, was brave enough to profane the platform in hopes of a splendid reward—finding it of such a vintage that instead of riches upon slashing open the burial robes, he was greeted with a nest of field mice.

  The Shoshone also delighted in halting wherever they found a rattler along the column’s march. Several of the allies would dismount and tease the snake into coiling, hollering the only English they had picked up from the troops: “Got tamme you! Got tamme you!”

  After having enough of this sport a warrior chosen from among their number would lance the snake before they remounted and continued down the Rosebud.

  Sunset found the column a few miles downstream from where Crook fought his frustrating duel with Crazy Horse eight days before Custer was destroyed. Just below the site of their bivouac that seventh day of August, Grouard and the Crow discovered where the enemy had recently encamped, tepee rings covering a mile-wide strip of bottomland that stretched for more than four miles along the Rosebud. Grouard reported that the Crow allies judged the site to be no more than ten or twelve days old. Although that estimate of age was grossly mistaken, this discovery of the seven massive camp circles convinced every one of the command’s officers that the extensive site had indeed been the camp of the great village they had fought that long, bloody day seven weeks before.

  Instead of having been the place where Sitting Bull’s village stood when the Sioux fought Three Stars on the seventeenth of June, it was in fact where the hostiles had camped on the tenth of July as they were turning back around, meandering to the north and east at a leisurely pace. A succession of war parties that had been harassing Crook’s Goose Creek camps, and setting the rear-guard grass fires, had crossed over that trail, making it all but impossible for any of the Shoshone, Üte, or Crow trackers to judge accurately the age of the site.

  Little grass remained to feed the column’s animals after the enemy’s twenty thousand ponies cropped the valley bare. Two days into Crook’s chase of the Sioux, the slow and gradual destruction of the cavalry command had begun to tell already. While the enemy did not stand and fight the soldiers who followed them, the Sioux nonetheless had already begun to strike at Crook’s vulnerable Achilles’ heel: horses gone more than two months without their accustomed forage, now forced to subsist on that scorched prairie, could not possibly do what the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition would soon require of them.

  Mile by mile the toll would add up, and fifty days from now the destruction would be all but complete.

  The sun rose sluggishly on the morning of the eighth, emerging an opaque orange behind murky skies smudged with the thick haze of nearby prairie fires that choked man and animal alike. After crawling at a snail’s pace for some five miles, Crook called a halt for his column and ordered his scouts to probe the ground ahead while his troops took advantage of some patches of grass the enemy had failed to burn off. During their wait the bony horses and mules were put out to graze. With the sun high in that endless blue dome, scout Jack Crawford rode in from the south w
ith another civilian. Widely known on the frontier as the “poet scout,” John Wallace Crawford had set out from Fetterman on the twenty-eighth of July with his dispatches for Crook. He had reached Furey’s wagon train four days later, only to learn that the expedition was somewhere to the north.

  The general glowered as he read a letter of rebuke from Sheridan.

  If you do not feel strong enough to attack and defeat the Indians, it is best for you to form a junction with Terry at once. I have sent to you and General Terry every available man that can be spared in the Division, and if it has not made the column strong enough, Terry and you should unite your forces.

  “I brought something of interest for you too, Buffalo Bill,” Crawford declared as he turned to his erstwhile theatrical partner and reached into a saddlebag to pull forth a bundle wrapped in wide-wale corduroy. Peeling back the cloth, he brought forth a bottle of amber liquid to the envious gasps of those nearby.