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

by Terry C. Johnston

  To which Crook replied by asking his own question, “General—how have you remained totally unaware that the hostiles have all fled, and into your department to boot?”

  “Listen, George,” Terry said, his eyes softening, “I want to make it clear right from the start that I’m not going to pull rank here as the senior officer.”

  “Agreed,” Crook replied with a sigh. “We have bigger fish to fry than deciding who commands what.”

  With their points made in the first moments of that tense conference, the two then got down to determining how best to give chase. While both steadfastly refused to accept that they were weeks behind the hostiles, Terry and Crook knew only one thing for certain: the enemy had turned east and was heading either northeast for the Yellowstone or would continue straight for the valley of the Little Missouri.

  But in the event that Sitting Bull’s people were in the process of heading north … Terry called in Colonel Nelson A. Miles.

  “I’m detaching you, Colonel,” the general told the commander of the Fifth Infantry. “Take your companies on our backtrail in escort with our wagon train and return to the Rosebud depot. There you are to load your men aboard the Far West and establish outposts at every possible crossing of the Yellowstone between the mouth of the Rosebud and the mouth of the Tongue.”

  Wearing a look of great satisfaction, Miles asked, “On the north bank of the river, General?”

  “Yes. You will also establish a depot at the mouth of the Powder so that our two columns can draw upon those supplies of rations and ammunition when needed as we march east.”

  “When may I depart, General?”

  “As soon as your men and the wagons are ready, Miles.”

  Terry then turned to Crook. “Before the colonel de parts, I will restore your column to a full fifteen days’ rations. I’ll be stripping my command down to light marching order as you have your command, General.”

  “I’m to understand that you’re firm in your decision that we should unite in our pursuit?” Crook questioned.

  “Yes,” Terry answered.

  “But don’t you see—as commander of the Department of the Platte, my concern is following Crazy Horse and the southern Sioux who range over hunting grounds south of the Yellowstone. My fear is that now, with the bands moving off to the east, they’re about to threaten the settlements in the Black Hills.”

  “And as commander of the Department of Dakota,” said Terry, “I’m primarily concerned with Sitting Bull’s bands of northern hostiles who usually range north of the Yellowstone, in fact all the way into Canada. My gravest worry is that the Sioux will cross the river, for at that point they have an open field all the way to the border. I won’t be able to pursue them once they’ve crossed into Canada.”

  Bourke could read the despair creeping into Crook’s eyes, the undercurrent of self-directed anger he must harbor for stumbling into the other column: now he would have to assume a subordinate role. For a man used to wielding the power of field command, for a fighting man suddenly to have to answer to a desk-wielding bureaucrat—this had to be about the toughest thing George Crook had ever swallowed in his army career.

  Crook pursed his lips as his eyes narrowed, staring at the stained and dog-eared maps that lay on the field desk between the two generals. As distasteful as the admission was, he finally said, “Alfred—you are in command.”

  Throughout their long discussions that evening, John Bourke continued to draw decided conclusions from his observations of both column commanders. While Terry was attired in a handsome uniform befitting his rank, complete with shoulder boards and straps, Crook looked more the part of an old frontiersman or campaigner in rough canvas clothing. Among all of Crook’s staff, there wasn’t a complete uniform to be found. In fact, in some of the cavalry companies that had been campaigning since spring, it had become next to impossible to tell the officers from the enlisted.

  Late that evening after tattoo, Bourke went on to write in his journal:

  General Terry’s manners are most charming and affable; he had the look of a scholar as well as a soldier … He won his way to our hearts by his unaffectedness and affability. He is the antithesis of Crook in his manner. Crook is simple and unaffected also, but is reticent and taciturn to the extreme of sadness, brusk to the point of severity. Of the two, Terry would be the more pleasing companion, Crook the stauncher friend. In Terry’s face I thought I detected faint traces of indecision and weakness; but in Crook’s countenance there is not the slightest trace of anything but stubbornness, stolidity, rugged resolution, and bulldog tenacity.

  Events would not be long in proving Bourke entirely correct in his assessment of his commander.

  It wasn’t just the dissimilarity between the two commanders, though. From the moment they encamped next to one another, the differences between the two columns were about as plain as the noses on a two-headed calf: Crook’s men shambled about in shabby uniforms, dusty and faded, their slouch hats all but shapeless on their heads, while Terry’s men and animals looked better fed from their wagon train, the enlisted more rested from having spent their nights under canvas. In fact, most of the men out of Montana and Dakota looked as if they were preparing to drill on the parade of some post back east. With the possible exception of the Seventh Cavalry— Reno’s men looking haggard and disgusted as well as just plain trail worn—the northern jaw of Sheridan’s pincers appeared to be a well-outfitted army recently arrived in the field.

  On the other hand, the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition had all the makings of little more than a ragtag band of motley brigands, horse thieves, and highwaymen.

  So it didn’t surprise Bourke that the men raised no cheers when the two commands met. What was there, after all, to celebrate when you saw just how good the other fellows had it? Nonetheless, the allied scouts attached to both columns raised enough of a howl for all. Shoshone, Crow, Bannock, Ute, and Arikara united in both backslapping and the white man’s customary shaking of hands all around as they shouted out their excited greetings right in the midst of the indifferent soldiers.

  Bourke couldn’t help but be envious of the luxury enjoyed by Terry’s men. Reno even spread out a Brussels carpet on the floor in his tent, and one of Terry’s staff had a rocking chair in his—now, that was the way to campaign! In turn Terry’s officers clearly were appalled at the Spartan conditions suffered by the Wyoming column, for each night the Dakota column slept in large wall tents complete with portable beds and even sheet-iron stoves to ward off the cold. Hospital tents served as dining rooms for the officers.

  Crook’s command slept under the stars, wrapped only in their saddle blankets, and had a solitary tin cup and a sharpened stick to broil their bacon come suppertime.

  Even Bill Cody was quick to see the real difference between the two commands. Later that evening the chief of scouts walked up to Bourke’s fire beside Seamus Donegan and declared, “Fellas, between them two generals, it’s clear to me who’s the real Indian fighter out here in Sioux country.”

  “Damn right, Johnny,” the Irishman added. “It’s plain to see who means business.”

  “I think you’ve both just discovered that our column has something that runs even deeper than all the tents and crisp uniforms and fancy carpets could provide,” Bourke agreed. “Something I don’t think Terry’s men share: an esprit de corps.”

  Donegan nodded. “In the weeks to come, when this outfit runs out of hard bread and bacon, when we run low on ammunition and our horses become nothing but boneracks … that feeling of esprit de corps, that camaraderie between fighting men, will be what separates the men from the boys. It will be the only thing that keeps some men going when others fall down on their faces and want to die right where they lay.”

  Chapter 28

  11-15 August 1876

  Crazy Horse Wants to Come in and Make a Treaty.

  OMAHA, July 29—An official telegram from Fort Laramie says a courier has just arrived from Red Cloud who says that Red Cl
oud told him that Crazy Horse was coming into the agency very soon; that his band was on the way there, and twenty lodges had already arrived. Crazy Horse has sent word to Captain Egan that he will see him, shake hands and make a treaty. The friendly Indians lately arrived won’t talk about the fight, and pretend to know nothing of it. A council was held at the Cheyenne camp while the courier was detained there to talk over the change from the civil to military authorities. Many opposed it, but Red Cloud has expressed satisfaction at the change. Fears are apprehended that any attempts to deprive the Indians of ponies and arms will be met with resistance, as they can muster a large force well armed, while the number of troops at the post is very small. It is thought they will allow themselves to be numbered without opposition.

  During that evening of the tenth, for no apparent reason, the horses of three companies of the Fifth Cavalry snapped their sidelines like twine, tore their picket pins from the flaky soil, and stampeded for the hills.

  With that commotion the entire command believed themselves under threat of attack for a few tense minutes until Lieutenant Colonel Carr organized a detail of experienced wranglers to pursue the horses of Troops A, B, and M. Late that night the horse soldiers returned with their catch, and the encampment settled down for what was left of the night.

  Early on the morning of 11 August, Nelson Miles and his Fifth Infantry marched away to the north, accompanied by Terry’s wagons filled not only with provisions for the Yellowstone River outposts, but also with what sick and disabled the combined columns would need to move downriver by steamboat. Yet it wasn’t until eleven o’clock that Crook and Terry finally took up the trail Crook had been following as it turned sharply to the east at the mouth of Greenleaf Creek, leading toward the divide that separated the Rosebud from the valley of the Tongue.

  Colonel John Gibbon, who had been in command of soldiers sent into the field as far back as March, looked over the condition of Crook’s and Chambers’s infantry as it moved at the vanguard of the march, declaring, “Why, soldiers—you’re even dirtier than my men!”

  And the men of James Brisbin’s Second Cavalry made a widely circulated joke of the dilapidated, threadbare condition of the rear of the britches worn by Crook’s horse soldiers, nicknaming the troopers “the ragged-ass patrol.”

  This immense command encompassing some four thousand men assigned to thirty-six troops of cavalry and twenty-five companies of infantry, not to mention all the attendant civilians, scouts, and Indian allies, lumbered along in the dusty wake of the fleeing hostiles. It wasn’t long before the men of the Wyoming column had themselves a good belly laugh at the expense of Terry’s pack-train. The Montana and Dakota soldiers had attempted to take horses and mules used to pulling wagons in harness and convert them into something that resembled Tom Moore’s unequaled pack-train. Hour by hour Terry’s train dropped, lost, or ruined more supplies than the whole of Crook’s command had spoiled since the end of May when the Wyoming troops marched north from Fort Fetterman.

  It didn’t take long for Washakie’s warriors to recognize the difference between the two columns. By the end of that first day the Shoshone were already growing disgusted with the pace and ineptness of what they called the “Yellowstone soldiers.”

  The sun rose high and hot that afternoon as the column toiled nine dusty miles up the divide and down again into the scorched valley of the Tongue, stifling ash rising from every boot, every iron-shod hoof.

  Along the timbered riverbank the scouts came across the site of a huge village. It was there that the Indian trail split, one branch heading upstream, the other down. Nearby the scouts found the skeleton of a solitary miner who had been killed a few months before, then left to predators. Around the body lay many empty cartridges, attesting to the lone man’s last great fight. Close by lay the carcass of his dead horse, also ravaged by beasts of the prairie. Some of Major Stanton’s Montana Volunteers saw to it the prospector’s bones were given a decent burial before the men rejoined the march.

  Up and down the west bank of the river stood old cottonwood trees from which the hostiles had peeled the bark, the better to paint on the exposed grain as if it were a pale-colored canvas: hieroglyphic figures shown carrying off captured women, hunting buffalo from horseback, and scalping soldiers.

  Worrying most that Sitting Bull’s hostiles might reach the Yellowstone ahead of his column, Terry vetoed Crook’s suggestion and ordered that the entire command wheel left into line and march four more miles downstream through the blackened river valley, where they went into bivouac at the mouth of Beaver Creek under darkening skies and stiffening winds. Threatening storm clouds massed overhead as the cavalrymen picketed their horses on what patches of unburned grass each company could locate against the hills. Coffeepots had barely begun to warm over mess fires when the sky opened up with a chilling deluge.

  In the wind-driven torrents the men did what they could: platoons combined blankets and gum ponchos, which they threw over quickly improvised wickiups lashed from willow saplings. But with the way the rain was flung horizontally at a man, nothing kept out the storm. In less than an hour every soldier sat morosely in the spongy mud, huddled close around his struggling fire, teeth chattering, cold to the marrow and filled with despair.

  Seamus sat in the midst of a puddle of cold water, his one blanket draped over his shoulders and head, already soaked and unable to turn any more of the torrent. To Cody he grumbled, “This goddamned rain is gonna wipe out a lot of our sign.”

  “Don’t much matter now, does it, Irishman?”

  For a moment he watched Cody staring into the sputtering flames of their fire feebly fighting nature’s onslaught of wind and water. “Sure it does, Bill. S’pose you tell me what’s eating you.”

  With a shrug Cody eventually replied, “I just been figuring on packing up and riding back to Laramie.”

  “Head home?”

  He nodded. “This bunch isn’t going to find any Indians, Seamus. You know that well as me.”

  “So—just like that? You figure on heading back?”

  Cody readjusted his blanket. “I got contracts. Business commitments.”

  “Your theater show?”

  “Yeah. Me and Texas Jack ought to make another go of it,” he replied. As he tossed another wet limb onto the fire, Cody said, “Now, if Crook and Terry would turn this campaign over to Carr and Royall—then I’d stay on. Make no mistake of that, Seamus.”

  For his part the Irishman was without much to say in the way of something that would change Cody’s mind. All he could do was stare at the flames, each tobacco-wad-sized glob of high prairie rain smacking the limbs with a hiss. “Wish you’d stay. If only for me.”

  Dawn finally came Saturday morning, with no real letup in the downpour. While Crook and Terry waited in that soggy bivouac with their combined columns, they ordered their scouts to take to the field in hopes of determining which of the trails might prove to be the main route of the escaping hostiles.

  “These are old trails, General,” Cody advised Crook just past noon when the guides and trackers returned.

  “My Crow scouts tell me they might be as recent as three days,” Terry countered.

  “No. Cody’s right,” Donegan said. “At least three weeks old.”

  Crook turned to Grouard. “What do you say, Frank?”

  For a moment those obsidian eyes looked at Cody and Donegan. “Old trails, General.”

  Terry wheeled on Crook. “If that trail is as old as your scouts are saying it is—then one thing is certain, General: you weren’t correct in your beliefs as to when the hostiles took flight in your front.”

  Crook immediately bristled, as did some of his staff standing nearby in the cold chill of early afternoon. “General Terry—I stand by my assertions, and my actions. Do you have a complaint to lodge against me, sir?”

  The affable Terry, suddenly confronted by the bulldog Crook, waved a hand and his blue eyes softened. “No, General. No complaint against you. Forget it.”


  “With the general’s permission,” Gibbon spoke up, “if General Crook’s column had only informed us of the hostiles’ flight, we could have put ourselves across their trail and caught them.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Royall harrumphed, “I seriously doubt that your force would have been of sufficient numbers or experience to capture that village.”

  At that moment more of the subalterns from both camps weighed in, sniping at the other column now that the long march, the cold, the rain, all of it was plainly showing in the raw edge that was every man’s nerves.

  “Are our scouts in agreement on anything?” Terry inquired.

  “Yes, General,” Crook answered. “Seems most of them say the biggest trail is heading downstream.”

  “Toward the Yellowstone?” Terry replied, worry in his voice. When Crook nodded, Terry added, “Let’s get these men moving down the Tongue.”

  At a snail’s pace the united columns dragged themselves through the mud and rain for all of a torturous thirteen miles before making camp at twilight on the twelfth. When they could, the men chose a slope for a place to settle and curl up. That way the water could not gather in depressions around them as they sat out the storm beneath their soaked blankets, eating soggy hardtack and chewing on their raw bacon. The storm lessened near dark, but within an hour it roared back over them with renewed fury. There was little sleep in that bivouac for those four thousand men for a second night in a row.

  Dawn of the thirteenth came gray and colder yet to those soldiers whose clothing and blankets hadn’t dried for more than two days. Men stamped about, blue-lipped, with their teeth chattering like boxes of dominoes, until afternoon when the rain tapered off to a misty drizzle. That day Merritt’s cavalry shot the first of its played-out, ill-fed horses. Those cavalrymen who could not bear to kill their mounts simply abandoned the animals right where the bony beasts had crumpled into the mud and refused to go on.

  By the time the command went into bivouac another twenty-four grueling miles down the Tongue, it was becoming ever clearer to even the dullest recruit that they weren’t going to catch the Sioux. But maybe the horses would begin to fare better, for by now much of the grass remained unburned, and there was more of it.