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

by Terry C. Johnston

  When Crook motioned his soldiers back, Bat said, “She says they are from Spotted Tail, General.”

  “The agency?”

  “Yes. Says they was going in to get food.”

  Crook blinked a moment, then asked, “I suppose we’re all hungry, aren’t we?”

  Assured of safety now, the young woman went to stand on the other side of the general. From the folds of her blanket she took an infant whom she had hidden through the entire tense ordeal with Baptiste at the bottom of the ravine. Hardly half a year old, the baby’s face was a picture of pain—yet the stoic child, surrounded by so many hairy faces, did not cry as its mother brought it into the light and the cold. She gripped one of the child’s ankles in a crimson-drenched hand, -attempting to stop the flow of blood. There was no foot below that hand: shot off by one of the soldier bullets.

  “How many more are in there?” Crook asked in a quiet voice, his eyes registering his own pain as he looked over his four new captives.

  Bat wagged his head. “Don’t know for sure.”

  “Then tell the others, talk to them in their language— and convince them that these will be cared for. Convince them that all will be safe if they just surrender now.”

  Singly and in pairs nine more women and four more children soon emerged, seeing for themselves that the soldiers did not immediately shoot their prisoners as they had expected. In all, seventeen surrendered, crowding in a circle about the red-bearded soldier chief. One of the young women, shot through the hand and bleeding on the muddy ground, paid no attention to her wound, but instead huddled close so she could understand all Bat’s assurances— when three shots cracked the discussion, bullets whining overhead. The soldiers and Sioux captives all scurried for cover like an overturned nest of field crickets.

  “Looks like the rest ain’t gonna give up,” Pourier declared to the general.

  “Then I’ll just have to convince them that they have to surrender,” Crook said, “or die.”

  After his prisoners were taken back to safety into the village, Crook ordered his officers to bring a concentration of fire from both his infantry and cavalry on the mouth of the ravine. For close to an hour Bat watched the soldiers pour more than three thousand rounds into the brush. As clouds of gunsmoke hung above the whole scene in the sodden air, the general called again for the assault to stop.

  “Tell them again that I will grant them my mercy,” Crook told Baptiste. “But they must come out now.”

  Once more Pourier crawled to the mouth of the coulee with Grouard, and they called out to the Sioux warriors. For close to an hour they appealed to the warriors, and just when it seemed all efforts were about to fail, one of the squaws rejoined Crook on the hillside, asking for the chance to talk to the warriors. In moments she joined the half-breeds at the ravine opening, calling out to the men barricaded within. It wasn’t very long before one young warrior came out, holding a carbine across his chest.

  “This one, her husband,” Bat explained.

  Crook accepted the man’s rifle and took his hand, shaking it before he directed the warrior to stand beside him and call out to the others. A strong voice answered from the ravine.

  “They will come out,” Baptiste translated, “if their lives will be spared.”

  The general asked, “Who is that in there?”

  “The chief—one what wants to come out,” Grouard explained.

  “Tell him I want no more killing today,” Crook replied.

  Cautiously, Pourier and Grouard crept farther into the ravine and waited. Then waited some more, listening as muffled voices argued. More long, interminable minutes. At last a tall warrior inched forward stoically, one arm clutched at his middle, a bloody sash tied around his lower belly, and his other arm slung over the shoulders of a younger warrior.

  Bat exclaimed, “You are wounded.”

  The tall one pulled part of the damp sash from his belly, showing the half-breeds his terrible wound. He had been shot in the abdomen, and part of his intestine was already protruding from the gaping wound.

  As the older one replaced the sash around his wound, the young warrior looked at the two scouts and asked, “You are the traders’ sons?”

  “Yes,” Pourier replied. “What is your name?”

  “I am Charging Bear.”

  Unable to take his eyes off the older man for long, Big Bat turned back to the tall warrior, marveling at his immense courage. “Are the others coming?” he asked in Lakota.

  “Only two,” Charging Bear responded.

  Again Pourier looked into the older man’s eyes, the warrior’s face ashen with agony—with each flush of pain,grinding down on that small stick shoved between his teeth. “And you—your name—who are you?”

  Slowly the handsome warrior dragged the stick from his mouth and drew himself up proudly. “I am American Horse. Chief of the Miniconjou.”

  As Seamus watched, American Horse gave his rifle to the soldier chief with solemn dignity. Through the half-breed interpreters the Sioux leader told Crook he would surrender if the lives of the last two warriors in the ravine would be spared.

  Amid angry shouts of “No quarter!” from the soldiers looking on, Crook gave his guarantee, and American Horse called to the holdouts. When the younger warrior attending the chief was turned over to Colonel Chambers’s guard detail, Surgeon Clements and his stewards took charge of the wounded American Horse.

  Slowly the doctor pulled back the bloody sash from the sticky wound. More of the intestine escaped the hole. Gritting on the stick between his teeth, the chief immediately poked and shoved the best he could, pushing the bowel back into the ragged hole in his belly. But it was no use.

  “I’m sorry, General,” Clements told Crook. “The wound is mortal.”

  Crook turned to Grouard and said, “Tell the chief he will die before morning.”

  American Horse made- no reply when told. His face registered nothing more than the pain already visited upon him. Clements led the chief away, hobbling slowly toward the small fire nearby, where the rest of the captives warmed their cold hands and feet. The chief settled among the women and children, his teeth still clamped on the stick. The surgeon left to return to his hospital tent, explaining that there was nothing else he could do for one so seriously wounded. It was but a matter of time.

  Charging Bear stayed with Crook for a few minutes,talking to the soldier chief through the half-breed interpreters.

  “Very soon Crazy Horse will come to free our village,” the warrior warned the general. He went on to express convincingly his belief that word of the attack had already reached the other villages in the surrounding countryside, and a great fighting force was then on its way, likely to arrive before nightfall.

  Crook said, “You tell this man that’s just what I’ve hoped. I’ve prayed for nothing less than a good fight with Crazy Horse for a long, long time.” Then he had the infantry guards take Charging Bear away.

  It did not take long before the last two warriors appeared from the tangle of brush farther up the ravine. One of them wore a corporal’s tunic, taken from Custer’s own L Company. He was eager to shake hands all around with the scouts and the officers—in fact, with any soldier who would shake hands as he grinned, relief washing over his face.

  With the surrender of those last two warriors, Frank Grouard counted what the holdouts had left in ammunition. Six cartridges each. When the prisoners were escorted from the scene, Sergeant Von Moll of the Third Cavalry brought in a squad of his soldiers from Private Wenzel’s own A company to claim the body, the rifle still gripped in the dead man’s cold hands. Two empty cartridges lay near his right side, a live round still in his carbine, cocked and ready to fire.

  As the angry troopers carried away their comrade, Donegan followed the half-breed scouts into the ravine. They found the walls of the coulee riddled, tracked, and scarred with the paths of thousands of bullets. Twisting, brushy yards from the entrance they discovered five bodies: three women, a warrior shot in
the head, and an infant.

  Bullets had repeatedly found one woman’s body; what was left of her clothing crusted over with muddy slime and coagulated blood. Her neck was nearly severed by one shot, three more had torn open her chest and shoulder. Two more grisly holes in each arm and leg. The bodies of the other two women had suffered nearly as many wounds— one with her head blown completely in half, clear down to the upper palate. From what Seamus could see, it appeared the warriors had used the bodies of their dead to hide behind during the onslaught of soldier lead.

  Curious himself, Captain Anson Mills entered the ravine behind the three scouts, accompanied by the young girl who had been discovered in a lodge hiding beneath a pile of robes and who had attached herself to the officer. At the sight of one of the dead women, the girl rushed forward to fall upon the body, crying pitifully. She hugged the body, brushed the matted hair from the bloody face, her little tears falling upon the cold cheeks as she wailed.

  “Her mother,” Pourier whispered to Mills and Donegan.

  The captain wagged his head. “Why … why the women?”

  Crook had his men drag the battered bodies from the coulee, where they lay for close to an hour while soldiers looked over the enemy dead. It struck Donegan as a pagan ritual, this satisfying the curiosity of the soldiers who had lost their own comrades in battle. While most only stared at the bodies before moving on, some chose to spit on the corpses.

  Yet no soldier defiled the dead like Ute John, also known among the column as “Captain Jack.”

  Chattering in his garbled pidgin English, the civilian member of Stanton’s Montana Volunteers made quite a show of it for a crowd of curious soldiers as he knelt over each of the squaws and scalped them with elaborate ceremony, demonstrating to the white men just how it was done.

  “Injun style,” he explained, his mouth half-filled with rotted teeth.

  Having joined the troops in May when a band of miners had affixed themselves to Crook’s column, John was in reality only half-Northern or Weber Ute, the other half Shoshone. Called Nicaagat by his own people on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming Territory, he had acquired a desperate thirst for the white man’s whiskey. That thirst took him to Salt Lake City for a six-month sojourn, during which time he claimed he’d been Christianized by Brigham Young’s Mormons.

  “Ute John’s a Klischun,” he proudly reminded the onlookers, perhaps to convince them that what he was doing to the dead was not so barbaric an act as it might appear. “A Mo’mon Klischun.”

  A loving Mormon family had given him shelter and taught him the rudiments of the English language. He had been “heap washed” of his sins, as many as three times in one year, and got a “heap b’iled shirt” of his very own to wear when he attended Sunday meetings to hear Prophet Brigham preach for hours on end.

  While most of the soldiers turned away from the grisly spectacle, a few clamored to have a try at the scalping themselves. Donegan grumbled and started to turn aside, disgusted that none of the officers attempted to stop this savage depravity of tearing the hair from women’s skulls.

  “What’s the matter with you, Irishman?” one of the old files asked Donegan. “You seen a lot worse before, I’d care to wager.”

  “I have,” Seamus replied bitterly.

  “So where the hell you get off being so goddamned righteous about it?” the veteran snarled. “Them prisoners the general took sure as hell getting treated good, ain’t they? Just think how things’d be for a bunch of us white men if we was took prisoner by a village of these sonsabitches. What fun they’d have killing us off real slow! So you just think about that, Irishman—before you go off being so goddamned high and mighty and looking down your nose at the likes of us gonna take a little revenge for what we seen done to our friends in the last ten years.”

  Looking over that sullen group of angry soldiers who had turned to glare at him, Donegan finally said, “When I rode for the Army of the Potomac, and served Sheridan’s Army of the Shenandoah—I never once killed a woman or a child. And I’ll be damned if I’ve got to stand here and watch a coward take his revenge on women.”

  “Just shut your mouth and go ’way,” Ute John grumbled, wagging his knife where he knelt on the ground to slice apart one of the women’s scalps so that each of the sympathetic soldiers could have a small lock.

  “You best go, Irishman,” the old veteran suggested caustically. “Since you can’t seem to remember that these Injun bitches fight just as hard as the bucks.”

  “Goddamned right,” one of the other soldiers chimed in.

  The veteran continued sourly. “I seen enough of my friends cut down by red bitches—it don’t make me no never mind to kill all the squaws I can.”

  Another soldier cried out, “Just means there’s fewer wombs for these red devils to make papooses!”

  Seamus straightened, the words smacking him like grapeshot. Back there at Laramie, his woman carried his child in her womb.

  Looking squarely in the old Apache-fighter’s eye, he quietly said, “An old file like you what seen so much killing during the war, so much killing since—never took you to be a man what fancied butchering children and babes.”

  For a moment the veteran stood there in utter silence, haughtily glaring back at the Irishman. Then Donegan thought he saw an almost imperceptible quake shoot through the man, a quiver crossing his big shoulders that visibly shook the two small and faded chevrons sewn on his muddy sleeves. When he finally spoke, his mighty jaw trembled, but his gaze was steady.

  “I had me a family once. So don’t you ever again say O’Reilly’s not a man to protect the little ones what can’t protect themselves.”

  The old soldier turned on his heel and crossed the five yards to where Ute John was holding court, shoving his way into the midst of those reveling soldiers, and picked up the body of the dead infant off the soggy ground, all to the stunned silence of everyone, even Seamus Donegan. Like a great white oak sheltering a tiny seedling, the veteran cradled the dead infant within his arms as he elbowed his way from the angry, cursing mob and strode past Donegan, his eyes brimming with tears.

  “Cawpril,” Seamus said quietly just as the man passed him.

  The soldier stopped. His shoulders heaving once, he finally turned round as Donegan walked up and touched the man’s arm. “This morning when we was going through the lodges, I remember seeing a small piece of blanket what might work nicely.”

  With a nod the soldier followed Seamus to a lodge where they found not only a blanket to wrap around the infant’s bloody body, but a basket large enough to serve as a coffin. Only then did the two take the child across the hillside to that small fire where the prisoners sat within a ring of guards. The old soldier laid the basket at the feet of the young women. No one moved. Not American Horse, not Charging Bear, not any of the women. They only stared at the two white men, perhaps unable to comprehend this surprising act of kindness in the midst of the cruelty, barbarity, the utter savagery of both sides of this great Sioux War.

  It wasn’t long afterward that Seamus and the corporal went to sit on a grassy hillside above the ravine, there to talk about wives and children and all that the loss of family could destroy in a man—when the attack the captives had promised came to pass.

  Chapter 42

  9 September 1876

  Just past four o’clock surgeons Bennett Clements and Valentine McGillycuddy ordered a quartet of troopers to lock down the limbs of a heavily sedated Lieutenant Adolphus Von Leuttwitz. Because the bullet was still lodged in the bone, this grisly, open-air amputation could be put off no longer.

  It amazed those who watched just how much fight was still left in the officer, rambling with fever and groggy by virtue of heavy doses of morphine administered throughout the afternoon, as the huge, serrated knife began to bite into that torn flesh above the wounded right knee. Completely around the limb Clements drew his knife in a long circular motion, the blade sinking through the thick muscles, where it scraped along the femu
r. Then at just the moment the knife was withdrawn from that deep incision, McGillycuddy was already pushing his handsaw’s blade through the bloody gash, working feverishly to hack through that largest bone in the human body.

  Unlike those Civil War surgeons who after a short time became so proficient in amputations that they could remove an arm in eight seconds, a leg in no more than eleven, these two had approached their surgery as a last resort—praying that by sacrificing the limb, they could save their patient’s life.

  In moments Clements yelled for the infantry bayonet he had buried in the coals of a nearby fire. With it the surgeon cauterized the severed stump as a steward dragged away the useless limb and wrapped it in a small piece of greasy blanket taken from one of the captured lodges about to undergo destruction. As the lieutenant thrashed and fought, both surgeons sealed off the bleeding vessels and daubed the great open wound with iodine, wrapping it in clean surgical dressings before moving on to perform the same task on Private Edward Kennedy, who had been wounded in both legs during the siege at the ravine.

  About the same time, just minutes past four P.M., Sergeant Von Moll’s men from A Troop were turning the damp sod with Lieutenant Bubb’s spades, carving out two graves west of the ravine for scout White and Private Wenzel—when the sudden war cries and the gunfire reverberated from the bluffs to signal the attack.

  “Injuns firing into the herds on the front of the Third Cavalry!” came the alarm.

  That moment found many of the cavalrymen who had been put afoot during the march taking part in the auction Mills’s men were holding just north of the Third Cavalry camp at the northwest corner of the village. One by one they were selling off the ponies Crook had awarded them for attacking the enemy village. It had become a rowdy and raucous affair, with a lot of good-natured disputes as to the value of various animals from the other regiments, as well as arguments concerning just how the troopers from the Fifth and Second could be trusted to pay their debt when the expedition finally reached their duty stations.