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

by Terry C. Johnston

  If anyone had taken notice, that grass was one more solid argument that proved the hostile village was scattering to the winds.

  Tom Cosgrove showed up at Donegan’s fire that Sunday night, in search of more than coffee or tobacco for his pipe. “I remember you telling me you fought for the Army of the Potomac. And with Sheridan in the Shenandoah.”

  With a nod Seamus replied, “You figure we ever looked across a battlefield at one another?”

  Cosgrove shrugged, grinning a little, then sighed and went somber. “This fight’s already over.”

  “Naw. We haven’t begun to look, Tom.”

  Wagging his head, the old Confederate said, “Crook might keep looking, but he’s not going to find them. And he sure won’t be finding the Sioux with the Shoshone along.”

  “Why? Washakie thinking of rolling his blankets and heading home?”

  “Yeah. And I can’t blame ’em none, neither. The Snake never been this far north—this far away from home.”

  “You leaving tomorrow?”

  “I don’t rightly know right now. Only sure thing is it’s just a matter of time before we pull out.”

  Daybreak on the fourteenth brought with it more gray, sodden skies and no letup in the rain. At seven the columns got under way: Terry’s led by the Seventh Cavalry, Crook’s by the Fifth. Against the stronger, grain-fed mounts of the Seventh, Carr’s gaunt horses looked ready for the boneyard. That morning the wind hurried the rain before it once more as the men were forced to cross and recross the Tongue thirteen times in less than ten miles before the Indian trail turned away again to the east, following the narrow banks of Pumpkin Creek.

  Many a man gazed downstream wistfully. Barely fifteen miles away flowed the Yellowstone itself, with its sup ply depots and rations and tents and dry, warm blankets— all of it a most inviting proposition to the men ordered to keep up, back in ranks, don’t straggle—keep up!

  After a climb of more than six miles out of the valley of the Tongue, the order was given to halt and go into camp just past noon. Here the cavalry unsaddled and put the stock out to graze in the slashing torrents of bone-chilling rain while the infantry simply sat down and curled up right where they had stopped.

  Minutes later Lieutenant Colonel Royall galloped his horse down past Chambers’s foot soldiers to the bank of the Pumpkin and halted in front of Major Andrew Evans’s still-mounted battalion of the Third Cavalry.

  Royall, a hard-bitten veteran of Summit Springs and the Battle of the Rosebud, growled, “Didn’t I order you to put your battalion in camp along the river, facing east?”

  Evans, widely known as a man who could split a hair as fine as fuzz on a hog, immediately came to attention and retorted, “Yes, sir. You did. But this ain’t a river. It’s only a creek.”

  For a moment Royall’s cold face flushed as he seethed in anger, then shouted, “Creek be damned! It’s a river—a river from this time forth, by my order, sir! Now damned well do as I order you!”

  “Yes, sir!” Evans answered, and hurried off to get his companies into bivouac across the Tongue.

  For the rest of that rainy day and on into a stormy night, the command lay in along the bank of Pumpkin Creek, where the best that could be said of the land was that the enemy hadn’t put it to the torch. Here the animals grazed on what skimpy grass grew in that naked country.

  “Muggins Taylor rode in with messages for Terry,” Frank Grouard said as he came up to Donegan picketing his big horse on a patch of old grass.

  “What’s the news?”

  “Miles been up and down the river on the steamboat. He reports no sign of Sitting Bull’s people crossing the Yellowstone.”

  “That means they’ve got to still be east of us.”

  Grouard nodded and did not say anything more for the longest time until he commented, “Two-day grass.”

  “This? Why you call it that?”

  “We camped in this country many times, when I lived with Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa. Lakota say a bellyful of this grass will do a pony good for a two-day ride.”

  Seamus stroked the withers of his exhausted, played-out animal. “Frank, right now I’ll settle for just one day’s ride on a bellyful.”

  On the morning of the fifteenth the bone-weary command followed the Indian trail of pony hooves and travois poles scouring the ground as the fleeing hostiles headed eastward up the bank of the Pumpkin.

  A small puppy was found by one of the first infantrymen passing through an abandoned campsite. He knelt, finding the dog as eager for companionship as he was when it raced over and leaped into his arms. Unbuttoning his tunic, the foot soldier carried his new friend along as they got acquainted.

  At the top of the divide the trail left the creek and entered the badlands, which filled the men not only with more despair, but also with an overwhelming sense of lonely desolation. For as far as they could see to the north and east that fifteenth day of August … nothing moved but the heavy, sodden gray clouds scudding low over their heads. As ugly as was that scorched valley of the Tongue they had left behind, it was beautiful compared to the country they now faced.

  That morning more than a dozen of Terry’s infantry could not go on and were placed by stewards in horsedrawn travois that bobbed, bounced, and jostled across the broken, muddy ground. Mile by mile the route had begun to tell on the animals. Here and there the first of the Second, Third, and Fifth cavalries’ horses were either abandoned by their riders, who switched saddle, blanket, and poncho to one of the led horses when they left a mount behind, or the worn-down horse was simply shot where it had dropped, unable to limp on behind its pleading master.

  By noon that Tuesday the sun broke through the clouds and the humid air grew stifling as the scouts gazed down into the widening valley of the Powder River, called Chakadee Wakpa by the Sioux. The Crow and Arikara guided the columns down Four Horn Creek* to its mouth, making a ford where the clear and swift-running creek joined the Powder from the southwest to mingle its waters with the milky, muddy, alkaline river. On the column continued its numbing march down the east bank of the Powder. It wasn’t long before the last of the barebacked horses led by each company had been put in service, replacing those that had played out in the climb up from the Pumpkin. Those soldiers who were thereafter forced to abandon their animals simply left everything behind: saddle and blanket, bit and bags. A trooper put afoot carried away only what he could on his back, trudging along beside the faltering column of horses.

  Yet even the infantry did not have an easy go of it that fifteenth of August. One can imagine how it must have conspired to ruin a foot soldier’s healthy state of mind as hour by hour he watched powerful, gracefully strong animals giving up and going down: tramping endlessly through brutal country, mud sucking at one’s heavy and unforgiving brogans, their leather already cracked and split from days and nights of incessant rain—feet become two bloody stumps of raw and blistered flesh, ankles and calves swollen from the cold and the exertion and the stream crossings.

  When they had no more travois for the sick and lame, the officers begged the Indian allies to double up and carry those soldiers who could not go on by their own steam. Yet there was one who was left, unnoticed, as he scrambled up beneath some concealing brush along the bank of the Powder and hid himself as the rest of the column lumbered past. There that Ninth Infantry cook named Eshleman intended to die by the hand of a hostile warrior or give himself to a predator of the high plains—anything but press on with the rest.

  Just before dawn that terrible gray day, Seamus had in fact discovered that his horse’s shoulder was a mass of oozing wounds. The animal actually shuddered as Donegan chewed a sliver of tobacco and rubbed pieces of the moist wad into the open wounds before he lay the saddle blanket back over the lesions. And throughout that long and terrible day the Irishman would lean forward against the great beast’s shoulder, whispering again what he had whispered that dawn before setting out with the other scouts.

  “I’ll strike a bargain
with you,” and he stroked its powerful neck. “You will carry me and I will keep you from going down. Just remember that if you go down, I am simply too weary to get you back up again. And I’ll have to leave you, or … or worse. And—I don’t even want to think of that happening.”

  Hour by hour man and beast both held up their end of the pact. When it seemed the horse was close to collapse, Seamus dismounted and led the animal, off and on, for what seemed like half the day.

  Early that afternoon the Shoshone found the trail dividing once more, with the deepest and widest road that remained after the pounding rains still pointing eastward toward the Little Missouri River.

  As some of the Indian allies halted at that fork in the trail, Donegan came to a stop beside the dark-skinned half-breed who had once roamed this land as an adopted Hunkpapa. For a moment Seamus wiggled a loose back tooth with his tongue, realizing that was a first sign of scurvy—one of the most dangerous afflictions of an army on the march.

  “How far east you think they’ll run?” Seamus asked his old companion.

  Frank Grouard shrugged his shoulders, gazing off into the distance where the trails scattered like a covey of quail busted out of the brush, only to disappear. “Don’t know for sure, Irishman. What I do know is the Little Missouri is good wintering ground. Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa use it year after year.”

  “Wintering ground? This early?”

  “No, they won’t winter up this early—but they’re for sure headed for the Little Missouri.”

  After slogging more than thirty miles through the bone-chilling mud of that morning followed by the blazing sun appearing in a clearing sky that afternoon, Chambers’s infantry were the first to go into camp. To everyone’s amazement the major’s command hadn’t suffered a single man to drop out through the day-long ordeal. In fact, Crook’s foot soldiers were the first to reach camp that night, arriving long before the cavalry trudged in, half of the horse soldiers dragging their led mounts behind them.

  That night another storm moved in, and the heavens opened up again for the fifth night of cold misery in a row.

  *Present-day Mizpah Creek.

  Chapter 29

  16-18 August 1876

  Graphic Account of Custer’s Fight From the Hostile Band.

  CHICAGO, August 1—Capt. Holland, of the Sixth Infantry, commanding the station at Standing Rock Agency, writes to General Ruggles that seven Sioux Indians who were in the battle of June 25th have arrived at Standing Rock and give the following account of the battle: The hostiles were celebrating the sun dance when runners brought news of the approach of the cavalry. The dance was suspended, and a general rush followed for the horses, equipments and arms. Major Reno first attacked the village at the south end, across the Little Big Horn.

  Their narrative of Reno’s operations coincides with the published account, how he was quickly confronted and surrounded, how he dismounted, ran in the timber, remounted and cut his way back over the ford and up the bluffs with considerable loss, and the continuation of the fight for a little time when runners arrived from the north end of the village or camp with the news that the cavalry had attacked the north end, some three or four miles distant. A force large enough to prevent Reno from assuming the offensive was left, and the surplus available force followed to the other end of the camp, where, finding the Indians successfully driving Custer before them, instead of uniting with them, they separated into two parties and moved around the flanks of his cavalry. They report that a small body of cavalry broke through the line of Indians in their rear and escaped, but were overtaken within a distance of five or six miles and all killed.

  After the battle the squaws entered the field to plunder and mutilate the dead bodies. General rejoicing was indulged in, and a distribution of arms and ammunition was hurriedly made….

  Sitting Bull was neither killed nor personally engaged in the fight. He remained in the council tent, directing operations. Crazy Horse, Large Band, and Black Moon were the principal leaders … The fight continued till the third day, when runners, kept purposely on the lookout, hurried into camp and reported a great body of troops, General Terry’s command, advancing up the river. The lodges having been previously prepared for a move, a retreat in a southerly direction followed, towards and along the Rosebud mountains. They marched about fifty miles, went into camp, and held a consultation, when it was determined to send into all the agencies reports of their success, and call on them to come out and share the glories that they were expected to reap in the future.

  … They report for the especial benefit of their relatives here that in the three fights they had with the whites, they have captured over one hundred stand of arms, carbines and rifles (revolvers not counted), ammunition without end, and some sugar, coffee, bacon and hard bread. They claim to have captured from the whites this summer over 900 horses and mules. I suppose this includes their operations against the soldiers, Crow Indians, and Black Hills miners.

  … I have since writing the above heard from the returned hostiles, which they communicated as a secret to their friends here, information that a large party of Sioux and Cheyennes were to leave Rosebud mountain, the site of the hostile camp, for this agency, to intimidate and compel the Indians here to join Sitting Bull. If these refuse, they are ordered to beat them and steal their ponies.

  By that Wednesday morning of the sixteenth, finding and catching the fleeing hostiles had become secondary. For Terry’s men as much as for Crook’s command, with the Sioux plainly two weeks ahead of them, it had now become a matter of survival. Simply to find food and blankets, someplace where they could recoup and sort out what to do next.

  General Alfred Terry convinced a dejected George Crook that their combined columns should limp on downstream the twenty-four miles it would take them to reach the mouth of the Powder River at the Yellowstone. While the Montana and Dakota columns set up their tents and cots, Brussels carpets, and rocking chairs on the west bank of the Powder, the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition made their miserable camp in the mud on the east bank with nothing more than what they had with them the day they marched away from Camp Cloud Peak. While Terry’s men eagerly cut open tins of meats, vegetables, and canned peaches, Crook’s impoverished soldiers had to relish the same old fare of salt pork, hard bread, and coffee. Why, Terry’s men even shaved at marble-topped washstands with mirrors!

  With no tents to shelter them, the Wyoming column could only build bonfires around which they dried their stinking blankets and campaign coats like bands of ragged, wretched thieves. For the horses of the Second, Third, and Fifth cavalries, however, their lot had improved. Not only did the animals now feed on some sixty thousand pounds of grain, but in addition the horses and mules reveled in the abundant and luxurious buffalo grass found at the mouth of the Powder. The hostiles hadn’t been there to torch their backtrail.

  Several hours after they had reached the Yellowstone, Bill Cody and Seamus Donegan watched a rescue party of Crow scouts return from upstream. Alfred Terry had been late in learning that Private Eshleman, an officer’s cook with the Ninth Infantry, had thrown in the towel and given himself up for dead.

  “I may be forced to abandon or shoot some horses,” Terry grumbled. “But I won’t allow myself to lose one more man if I can help it.”

  As soon as he became aware of Eshleman’s plight, the general had dispatched a half dozen of Gibbon’s Crow to backtrack up the Powder and find the lost soldier. Eshleman was nearly crazed when the Indians brought him in, trussed up hand and foot like a Christmas turkey and lashed atop one of the barebacked ponies.

  “As mad as a March hare,” was how Seamus Donegan put it when together they watched the surgeon’s stewards pull the raving soldier down from that pony, screaming and snapping at his handlers.

  “He might well be one of the fortunate ones,” Cody groaned, seeing how they lashed the soldier down to a hospital cot to keep him from injuring himself in all his thrashing.

  “I’ll never understand the wo
rkings of humankind,” Donegan said quietly. “Either him or you: for saying a madman may well be more fortunate than those of us who made it here whole.”

  Bill turned to the Irishman. “Are we really whole, Seamus? Oh, we may appear to be, despite our ordeal. But are we really whole?”

  In addition to the deranged cook, a few of the officers and more than a handful of soldiers had been so incapacitated by the grueling march, their constitutions weakened beyond repair by diarrhea, acute dysentery, and inflammatory rheumatism, that the surgeons ordered those cases put aboard the Far West as soon as it arrived, to be transported on the steamer’s next scheduled run downriver to Fort Buford at the mouth of the Yellowstone. In addition, there were others who were going to leave of their own volition—some of the newspapermen who had decided days back that there simply wasn’t going to be a Sioux campaign that year, and to trudge overland with Terry or Crook in a fruitless and exhaustive search for the hostiles would be nothing short of sheer lunacy.

  The noisy appearance of the Far West at five o’clock that afternoon of the seventeenth brought out every one of Washakie’s warriors. Wide-eyed, some with their hands clamped over their mouths, they stared and gaped as the stern-wheeler heaved around the far bend in the river and chugged toward the mouth of the Powder, putting in against the north bank of the Yellowstone. This had to be the most wondrous sight to the Shoshone, who had never before seen a river steamer in their part of the west. That day and for many days to come, the mighty “smoking house that walked on water” would be the sole topic of discussion in the Snake’s camp, and upon their return to the Wind River Reservation.

  The Shoshone were not the only warriors excited to see the steamer. Nearly four thousand soldiers crowded the banks to view this singular reminder of civilization brought here to the wilderness. Captain Grant Marsh’s cabin girl, a Negress named Dinah, had modestly covered her eyes or diverted them as the steamer drew in sight of the camp, what with so many naked soldiers frolicking in the sunlit river after all those days of rain and gloom.