Everyone, except the rival Elk Scrapers Society.
During the previous February the rivalry between the two warrior groups had reached a peak when Last Bull had warned of the proximity of soldiers, but was ignored, even scorned by the Elk Scrapers. Days later when a group of Elk Scraper hunters came in with news of soldiers in the area, their reports were believed. This wound to his pride would fester for nine moons until the new emergency in the Big Freezing Moon allowed him to seize control from those less ruthless than he.
Among the Northern Cheyenne, Last Bull is still strongly blamed for the disaster. He was later deposed as leader of his society. In those years to come during his final days on the reservations, Last Bull chose instead to live with the nearby Crow. Some say the Northern Cheyenne military societies “ran him off.” As a result, his son, Fred Last Bull, grew up speaking Crow in Montana.
Needless to say, Last Bull’s adolescent bravado in the Big Freezing Moon of 1876 cost his people everything.
So when it came time for the cavalry to gallop across the broken ground of the valley, the Northern Cheyenne weren’t ready. Yet some thirty or forty warriors valiantly hurried into the deep ravine and waited for Lieutenant John A. McKinney’s troopers to come charging into point-blank range. But here is where I run up against one of those historical inconsistencies in a trifling detail that just nettles the hell out of me!
There’s a problem in the campaign literature in regard to what company McKinney led in his fateful charge that cold day.
In his carefully researched biography on Mackenzie, Charles M. Robinson states that McKinney rode at the head of A Troop.
But the confusion deepens. Second Lieutenant Harrison G. Otis, who was there to assist with holding McKinney’s men when they were being shot to pieces (and who would later take over command of McKinney’s company) is listed on the military rosters as being in ? Troop. In my list of characters, I’ve arbitrarily placed Otis as second in command in McKinney’s M.
Next we have another esteemed biography of Mackenzie in which the author, Michael D. Pierce, relates that McKinney did in fact lead M Troop into action that day.
No less than John Bourke himself states for the record that McKinney led M Troop toward its fateful encounter at the deep ravine.
So, like Pierce and author Fred Werner, I’ll throw my weight behind the contemporary source, an army officer and adjutant who is accustomed to paying attention to such details.
A most fitting memorial to this fallen officer was the establishment of Fort McKinney in 1877 near the present-day town of Buffalo, Wyoming, after the army abandoned Reno Cantonment.
It never fails. In every battle I have written about in this dramatic and tragic struggle so far, there are Indian and soldier combatants who rise above the rest in the heat of conflict, throwing their bodies into the line of fire, heedless of personal danger as they pull a dead or wounded comrade out of harm’s way, or stand over a fallen comrade as the enemy charges in. And such action never fails to bring tears to my eyes, or my heart to my throat.
Time and again in this battle Cheyenne warriors rode out alone to draw soldier fire that would allow women and children to escape up the narrow canyon and on to the breastworks. Men like Yellow Eagle, who escorted the old and the infirm to safety. Men like Little Wolf, who was wounded six times that day guarding the mouth of the escape ravine. Men like Long Jaw, who repeatedly drew bullets to himself so that the shamans would be better protected. The powerful mystics: Black Hairy Dog; Coal Bear; Box Elder.
And then there was Sergeant Thomas M. Forsyth who, although wounded, stayed with the body of his company commander, the dying John A. McKinney. More than any other officer, noncoms such as he were the “bone and the sinew” of the frontier army.
Forsyth’s bravery in the face of overwhelming odds and almost sure defeat did not go unnoticed. Five days after the battle Lieutenant Harrison Otis, now in command of M Troop, went to Mackenzie to personally recommend Forsyth (along with Sergeant Frank Murray and Corporal William J. Linn) for honorable mention. Private Thomas Ryan, who of his own volition stood at Forsyth’s side over McKinney’s bullet-riddled body, was eventually awarded a Certificate of Merit, an honor reserved for privates who had distinguished themselves in combat.
While Mackenzie did approve Forsyth’s promotion to regimental sergeant major the following summer, it was not until the end of the great Indian wars that the old, white-headed sergeant finally received what he had been long deserving.
Nearing the end of his career, Forsyth wrote to Captain J. H. Dorst, former adjutant to the deceased Mackenzie, discussing the propriety of his applying for a Certificate of Merit himself at that late date after going a decade and a half without any sort of recognition. Congress had just recently passed a law that would allow noncommissioned officers to receive the award previously reserved for privates. Ever a modest, but highly sentimental, man, the sergeant wrote Dorst:
I would like to leave my children something besides my name when I answer the last roll-call and anything that could bear testimony to bravery and gallantry on the part of their father in action, would be the best and noblest remembrance, that a soldier’s children could have.
It should go without saying that Dorst was extremely moved. So moved that the captain went one step further: he began the laborious process of approving the old sergeant for the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Only months before that day when Forsyth stood ramrod straight on the parade at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Sitting Bull had been killed by his own police. Within two weeks of that murder Big Foot’s Miniconjou had been slaughtered by the remnants of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Knee. Finally, late in 1891, the Medal of Honor was approved for his heroic, selfless action that horribly cold day in the valley of the Red Fork Canyon some fifteen years before.
Sergeant Thomas H. Forsyth stood in the last rays of sunset before the assembled troops and officers, there among his wife Lizzie and what they called their “tribe” of five children, as this nation’s highest award for bravery was placed around his neck.
He had offered his life to protect a fellow soldier, and now in the final days of his long army career, Thomas H. Forsyth had finally given his children an intangible inheritance no soldier’s pension could ever match.
There are other small glimpses of bravery that history has penciled in the margins from this tragic campaign. The lone Indian scout wounded in the fight, that Shoshone named Anzi, sought to ride like a warrior as long as he could, although suffering greatly (having been shot through the abdomen). He remained in the post hospital at Reno Cantonment for nearly three weeks, then with two companions rode back home to Chief Washakie’s Wind River Reservation—more than two hundred miles away. John Bourke saw Anzi the following year at the time of the Nez Perce war.
“[Anzi] was still living,” Bourke wrote, “although by no means, so his friends told me, the man he had been before being so terribly wounded.”
A year or so after that, other Shoshone reported that Anzi was shot on a horse-stealing raid.
Captain John M. Hamilton led his troops in to rescue the remnants of McKinney’s butchered men. An extremely courageous soldier, he himself would not fall in battle until July 1, 1898, when as the lieutenant colonel of the First Cavalry, a bullet found him as he was leading his men in a charge up the side of San Juan Hill.
In our story we have mentioned that Sergeant James H. McClellan was credited with having killed the warrior named Bull Head in close-quarters combat in that struggle Wessels’s company had of it near the head of the deep ravine where McKinney’s men were ambushed. In our story of the battle, we also recount the tale of McClellan taking from the body a cartridge belt bearing a buckle engraved with the name Little Wolf. Because Bull Head for some reason had grabbed up Little Wolf’s pistol and cartridge belt at the moment of attack, it was long believed by the soldiers that they had indeed killed the Sweet Medicine Chief of the Cheyenne. Just another piece of circumstantial
evidence that history allows us to chuckle over after the fact.
As you have learned in our story, there were many items pulled from the lodges that caused a great deal of anger among Mackenzie’s troops, just as there had been when souvenirs from the Custer battle dead were found among the lodges of American Horse’s Miniconjou after the day-long fight at Slim Buttes, a tale we told you in Volume Ten, Trumpet on the Land. But perhaps no better than here in the Cheyenne village was the severity of the Custer disaster brought home as both the number and variety of personal items began to mount on the blankets where the soldiers piled those ghostly relics.
Clearly one of the most interesting of these is the roster book, the sort taken into the field, this one carried by First Sergeant Alexander Brown, G Troop, Seventh Cavalry, commanded by Lieutenant Donald Mcintosh, into the valley of the Little Bighorn. The roster was started on 19 April 1876 at which time the troop was leaving Louisiana, ordered back to Fort Abraham Lincoln for the summer campaign.
Its next-to-last entry is quite prophetic:
McEgan lost his carbine on the march while on duty with pack train, June 24, 1876.
From summer into fall, across the next five months, the pages in that roster book were filled with pictures by High Bear, its new owner, a warrior who was himself killed in the Dull Knife battle. One of the pages shows High Bear lancing a soldier clearly wearing the chevrons of a sergeant major. In the months and years to come, the officers who examined the warrior’s crude drawing, and its chronological placement among his career of those coups depicted within the book, later came to believe High Bear was the one who killed Sergeant Major Walter Kennedy, the man who attempted to ride for help once Major Joel H. Elliott’s company was completely surrounded during the Seventh Cavalry’s attack on Black Kettle’s camp along the Washita in 1868.*
I am in hopes of receiving permission to reproduce in this novel a page from Lieutenant Donald Mcintosh’s memoranda book so that the reader can see where the lieutenant has listed the “best shots” in his company, starting with Sergeant Brown himself. Unlike the Brown roster book, which is in private custody, Mcintosh’s was for a long time displayed at the little Bighorn Battlefield Visitor Center, complete with its single bullet hole perforating the entire book. Then some two years ago it was stolen, its protective case ripped from the wall. Only recently has the thief admitted that he burned this priceless, dramatic relic. What a senseless tragedy! At times I would like to believe the thief merely told federal prosecutors that it was destroyed, and that it has really been sold to some wealthy collector who, like far too many others, hasn’t the slightest desire to share his or her precious relics with the rest of us.
Unlike the stingy, niggardly kind, Lieutenant John Bourke gave to posterity those grisly trophies he collected in the Cheyenne village. Pictured in his book on Mackenzie’s last fight are the two relics not meant for the faint of heart. First, there is a beaded necklace from which is suspended at least eight complete human fingers; between their array are sections of other human fingers, as well as teeth and iron arrow points. The second necklace appears to be made of trade wool sewn to a long strip of leather, much in the fashion of a soldier’s cartridge belt, constructed in such a way as to be worn around the neck with a narrow thong. But instead of the leather loops to hold the bullets, there are beaded loops holding twenty short fingers, from the fingertips down to the first joint.
These, the amateur ethnologist Bourke reported, in addition to a bag made from a human scrotum, were once the property of High Wolf, whom the lieutenant mistakenly called “the chief medicine man” of the Cheyenne. In 1877 he presented these war trophies to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., as specimens of “aboriginal religious art.”
While such relics might appear ghoulish and offend white sensibilities, Sherry Smith explains:
To be sure, the Northern Cheyenne did not see matters the same way. The saddles and canteens branded with Seventh Cavalry insignia, the scalps, the necklace of fingers—all represented Cheyenne victories over constant enemies who had, on other occasions, done the same to them.
It is with no small regret that we now bid Lieutenant John Bourke farewell for some time to come in this continuing narrative. The defeat of Morning Star’s Cheyenne marks the end of the fighting stage of his military career. But we will see him again in the years and stories yet to come: not as a warrior, but as an observer of the Northern Cheyenne flight from Indian Territory in 1878; again during the Ute War in Colorado, 1879; and finally among the Apache campaigns of the 1880s.
But—sadly—when he rode away from the Red Fork Valley, he had fought his last fight against Indians.
He, among many others both civilian and military with George C. Crook, had been in the field constantly since the previous winter’s campaign that began with the Reynolds’s fight on, and flight from, the Powder River.* Time and again the privations, the cold, the rain and snow, the hunger, and the interminable marches between battles took their toll on lesser men—breaking the health and sanity of their fragile human bodies and psyches. This is something I cannot stress enough—how these warriors on both sides suffered, even when they weren’t wounded … but endured.
Twice John G. Bourke had narrowly escaped death: once at the Reynolds’s fight, when he barely made the retreat, and again at the Rosebud fight, when he found himself alone during that horse charge and had to wheel and gallop back to safety just ahead of the enemy’s bullets—bullets that struck the soldier racing beside him.*
Perhaps we should slow down our twentieth-century rush and pay heed to such an experienced soldier when, after all that he had been through, John Bourke began in 1877 to question the struggle of which he had been such an integral part, the mindless machinery that had cost so many lives, both red and white.
From here on out, the lieutenant will lay down his carbine and pistol and pick up a far mightier weapon: his pen.
And while we’re on the subject of plunder, I often found among the literature much made of the Pawnee scouts’ abilities as talented plunderers. Luther North was quick to point out that his battalion of scouts ended up with less from the lodges than did the soldiers themselves. What the Pawnee did ride away with it seems they paid for in one way or another. What about those saddles they left behind at the East Gap that morning just moments before the attack? Perfectly natural for the North brothers to assume that the Sioux and Cheyenne scouts cut the cinches and straps—making the saddles all but unusable—if for no other reason than the Sioux and Cheyenne scouts had followed the Pawnee into the valley that morning.
But doesn’t it somehow seem just as reasonable to consider that one or more of Morning Star’s warriors took some revenge on that property they happened upon in wandering southeast across the difficult terrain—perhaps searching for an ideal sniping position? No one was ever charged with the crime, nor has any-person or band ever claimed responsibility for the act. It simply remains one of those nagging mysteries with which the Indian wars are so rife.
Before we leave the Pawnee, it might be interesting to note that Luther North very nearly missed that dawn charge!
So weary was he by the time they reached the point where Mackenzie had his men wait and form up for the charge, that North ordered one of the Pawnee to switch his saddle over to the strong Sioux pony he had captured in Red Cloud’s village. While that was being done, he trudged over to some nearby rocks where he could get out of the cold wind and sat down, immediately falling asleep.
When Mackenzie began to call for the men to mount up, Frank went looking for his brother, sending out some Pawnee, who returned unsuccessful. Lucky for Luther that he awoke himself with the growing clamor and happened to stumble out just in time to leap aboard his Sioux war pony at the very moment his brother Frank ordered the Pawnee to charge—the first horsemen into the valley.
After all the trouble Major Frank North was caused about his own captured Sioux pony by an indignant Three Bears and his Sioux scouts at Fort Fetterman,
as well as on the march north—he finally elected to sell the horse to “a white scout who took him to the Shoshoni agency in the Wind River mountains, where he soon won the reputation of being the fastest runner in that section of the country.” Unfortunately, history does not tell us if that white scout was Tom Cosgrove or Yancy Eckles.
As had been the fate of the Sioux ponies, the captured Cheyenne ponies were later divided among the scouts, as I’ve told you, with the remainder being sold at auction. But the loss to the Cheyenne people cannot solely be measured in terms of ponies captured and lodges destroyed. The toll in human life was, as always, hardest to bear. Their casualties were never fully known until the tribe came in to surrender at Red Cloud Agency over the next year, when they ultimately submitted a list of forty warriors killed in the Dull Knife fight, but refused to speak of how many were wounded. Even sadder still, Cheyenne etiquette did not allow them to utter a word of the children and old people who froze to death escaping winter’s grip on the Big Horns. Only from what knowledgeable old soldiers and frontiersmen saw of the many gashed arms and legs of those mourning and grieving widows and orphan girls could they tell that the Cheyenne had paid a terrible price in Mackenzie’s victory. Especially in the cruel, hand-to-hand fighting at the deep ravine where the members of the tribe said at least twenty Cheyenne fell, the majority of the warrior dead.
What seems most significant to me about this campaign is that rather than merely pitting soldier against Indian—even more than pitting those longtime white allies like Shoshone and Crow and Pawnee against the Sioux and Cheyenne—this battle hurled Sioux and Cheyenne scouts from the Red Cloud Agency against the Cheyenne of Morning Star and Little Wolf. This Powder River Expedition therefore becomes as much an Indian tragedy as it is an Indian-wars tragedy.
Why would some men be induced to scout against their own people?
A Cold Day in Hell Page 53