UNBEKNOWNST TO TERRY, weeks earlier and more than a hundred miles to the west, a small detachment of soldiers and Crow scouts from the Montana column had discovered the main camp of the hostiles.
General John Gibbon’s Montana column had been operating along the Yellowstone River for more than a month, ordered to head east from Fort Ellis in eastern Montana with five companies of infantry and four cavalry troops under Major James Brisbin. The column, comprising about four hundred men, was accompanied by two Gatling guns, fifty-four Crow scouts, and twenty-five white scouts and guides, and its mission was to find and engage nontreaties. Gibbon, the commander of the military District of Montana, had proved himself a true hero in the Civil War, leading the famed Iron Brigade in the war’s early years and then breaking Pickett’s Charge on the third day of Gettysburg. A war injury led his Crow guides, who had hired on for three months as Privates at the standard $13 a month, to call him “Limping Soldier” or “No-Hip-Bone.”
On the morning of May 16, a conscientious young Lieutenant under Gibbon named James Bradley, in charge of a mounted detachment of twelve infantry scouts, lay atop a lookout bluff thirty-five miles down Rosebud Creek. He spotted an immense Lakota camp along the river about eight miles distant. Bradley, his men, six Crow guides, and a half-breed interpreter stole quietly away and made for the Yellowstone as fast as they could ride.
Upon hearing Bradley’s report of a large hostile village a day’s march away, Gibbon ordered his command to cross the Yellowstone and strike at the encampment. On May 17, the same day the Dakota column commenced its march hundreds of miles to the west, the crossing began. The fast-flowing Yellowstone made it difficult for the small boats carrying the troopers, who led swimming horses behind them. After an hour, only ten horses had crossed, and when four drowned, Gibbon canceled the movement. Another factor in his decision was the sight of a Lakota party on the high bluffs across the river watching the attempted crossing. Clearly, a surprise attack would now be impossible.
The Lakotas continued to monitor Gibbon’s column, occasionally swimming the river to steal government horses. They also harassed hunting parties, killing and scalping three of Gibbon’s men.
On May 27, Bradley returned to his previous lookout point. The village he had spied eleven days earlier had now grown to almost five hundred lodges and had moved from the Tongue River to the Rosebud, the next waterway of any size to the west. But when he delivered his startling news to Gibbon, there was no response. The chief of scouts and others were puzzled by Gibbon’s refusal to take action,18 though Bradley later surmised that the number of Indians — possibly twice Gibbon’s four hundred men — might have had something to do with it. More puzzling was the fact that just hours after hearing Bradley’s news, Gibbon wrote to Terry but only mentioned this important news — the sighting of a large enemy village — offhandedly, in a postscript: “P.S. A camp some distance up the Rosebud was reported this morning by our scouts. If this proves true, I may not start down the Yellowstone so soon.”19
Gibbon’s report was delivered by courier to Terry a week later. Terry, meanwhile, had ordered Gibbon to move east down the Yellowstone toward the Little Missouri, where the hostiles were mistakenly believed to be gathering, and to meet and cooperate with the Dakota column, which had already turned south and then southwest to canvass the area between the Little Missouri and the Powder. The next afternoon, an anxious Terry took two companies of the Seventh and rode north toward the Yellowstone in search of Gibbon and desperately needed information.
ACCOMPANIED BY FIVE newspapermen (to the Dakota column’s one), George Crook headed north, reaching Goose Creek on June 11 and establishing a base camp there. The column was bolstered by the addition of a group of 65 discouraged Montana miners who had joined it on June 8 and the long-awaited arrival of 260 Crow and Shoshone scouts (both tribes longtime foes of the Sioux) on June 14. Crook left the wagon train and the pack train with a guard of a few soldiers and some 200 packers and teamsters and continued north with four days’ rations early in the morning of June 16 with about 1,300 men, including 175 infantrymen mounted on green wagon mules. This large force was confident of victory should they find the Indians.
But where were the hostiles? Throughout the march, the soldiers had observed smoke signals daily, and small groups of warriors had harassed the column, sniping at the fringes and trying to stampede the horses. The location of their village, however, remained a mystery. The Crows had reported to Crook their belief that the enemy was located somewhere on the Tongue River or thereabouts. But now Grouard read signs that indicated to him that they were on Rosebud Creek.20 As it turned out, he was right — the large gathering of nontreaty Indians was camped about fifty miles away from Crook’s camp. By this time, plenty of agency Indians had come into the village bringing news of the belligerent soldiers. So the Indians packed up their tepees and moved west over the divide into the valley of the Little Bighorn River on June 15. Another, much smaller band of Cheyennes under Magpie Eagle also was in the area.
On the afternoon of June 16, two Cheyenne hunting parties stalking a herd of buffalo came upon Crook’s Wyoming column. The Cheyennes returned to the nontreaties’ village — and its almost 1,000 warriors21 — located to the northwest on a creek that emptied into the Little Bighorn. The chiefs of all the tribal circles met in one large council and after discussion advised prudence. But the younger warriors overwhelmingly pushed for an immediate attack, and finally that course of action was decided on. Throughout the evening, groups of Lakotas and Cheyennes from every camp circle ate a quick meal of roasted buffalo meat and prepared themselves spiritually for the battle, then rode south to check the column before the soldiers found the village and its women and children.
These preparations were sometimes quite elaborate. White Bull, nephew of Sitting Bull and a celebrated Minneconjou veteran of many battles, wore a pair of dark blue woolen leggings decorated with beads, beaded moccasins to match, a red flannel breechcloth reaching to his ankles, and a shirt. Around his waist he wore a folded black blanket, and over it a cartridge belt with one hundred bullets. He hung over his right shoulder a small thong that supported his war charms: four small leather pouches of “medicines” (earths of various kinds), a buffalo tail, and an eagle feather. The final touch, worn just for its beauty, was a long bonnet of red and white eagle feathers that reached to the ground. Fine war clothes made one more courageous, and if he died, he did not want people to think he was poor.22
The Indian force comprised at least seven hundred warriors23 — some had remained with the village — and Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse rode with them. But Sitting Bull would not participate in the battle, and for good reason.
SITTING BULL and his one hundred lodges of Hunkpapas, with some Cheyennes and Oglalas, had wintered on the Yellowstone near the mouth of the Powder, midway between Forts Peck and Berthold on the Missouri.24 They had traded at both places and continued to pressure the traders and wolfers at Fort Pease, the misguided trading post recently erected opposite the mouth of the Bighorn. By March they had moved up the Powder. Most of the other hunting bands also were camped along the river or a few miles up one of its tributaries.
The village, which had by then grown to 235 lodges, had followed the buffalo west from the Powder to the Tongue and then the Rosebud, where, as word of the Powder River attack on Old Bear’s village spread, other hunting bands joined the camp: the Minneconjous of Lame Deer, Fast Bull, and Hump; the Sans Arcs of Spotted Eagle; the Blackfeet of Kill Eagle; and even Sitting Bull’s old friend Inkpaduta, now very old and almost blind, down from his refuge in Manitoba. With him were his twin sons, the warriors Tracking White Earth and Sounds the Ground as He Walks, an attractive daughter,25 and thirty lodges of Dakotas and Nakotas. They were poor and ragged, and some were even without horses. But they were ready to stand with their brethren if necessary.
By mid-June, the village had swelled to 450 lodges — all the nontreaty bands and the first trickle of agency warriors and families. For over a
month now, they had been harrying the white soldiers on the north side of the Yellowstone (Gibbon’s Montana column), and some Cheyenne hunters had reported another force of soldiers advancing from far to the south, on the Tongue. As they had with Gibbon’s troops, scouts kept track of Crook’s column, occasionally trying to stampede the horses.
Around the same time, at a site almost fifty miles south of the Yellowstone, something momentous occurred. Sitting Bull’s village had been slowly ascending the Rosebud for a couple of weeks, stopping to make several camps as they journeyed south. (The waterways of the region flowed north to the Yellowstone.) The long, brutal winter had finally subsided. The green grass fattened the ponies, and there were plenty of buffalo. The time was right: Sitting Bull decreed that the Hunkpapas would hold an early Sun Dance.
This most sacred of Lakota religious ceremonies, held every summer to purify and strengthen tribal unity and faith and to test the manhood and dedication of young warriors, lasted for several days. Only Hunkpapas participated this time, but many from the other tribes came to look on as young men endured various traditional ordeals to prove their fortitude and courage in hopes of achieving warrior status, while older men, through suffering and self-torture, hoped to induce a prophetic vision from the gods. Sitting Bull, who a few weeks earlier had received a vision from Wakantanka of a great Indian victory over the soldiers, was among them. Surrounded by dancing warriors, he sat with his back against the tall central lodgepole as his adopted brother, Jumping Bull, used an awl to remove fifty small pieces of flesh from one arm, then fifty from the other. Afterward, Sitting Bull danced around the pole for hours, his face raised to the heavens. Eventually, he stopped and stood motionless, still gazing upward, until Black Moon and others helped him to the ground.26
He described the vision he had just received. Many soldiers and horses above an Indian village, all falling into the village upside down. Some of the villagers were upside down, too, but not many. It would be a great victory. But, Sitting Bull added, a voice had warned him that his people were not to loot the soldiers’ bodies.
Sitting Bull’s village — by now consisting of virtually every Cheyenne and Lakota nontreaty band — derived even more confidence and strength from his prophecy. With the conclusion of the Sun Dance, they continued up the Rosebud, then decided to follow the buffalo herds that their scouts had sighted to the west, in the valley of the Greasy Grass, the river the whites called Little Bighorn.
So when the warriors rode from their camp on a creek just east of the divide, Sitting Bull accompanied them. His arms still swollen and painful from his ordeal a week earlier, he would not fight but only ride among his men giving them encouragement and instruction. Besides, his family was represented by younger men — Jumping Bull and Sitting Bull’s adopted son One Bull — and that was honor enough for one tiospaye. Nobody expected an old-man chief of forty-five to ride into battle unless it was in direct defense of Sioux women and children.
CROOK HAD MARCHED north from Goose Creek, a hard thirty-three miles, and bivouacked just a few miles from the Rosebud. At six the next morning, June 17, the column moved out. After a ride of an hour or so, the Rosebud — here just a thin stream flowing through boggy lowlands surrounded by broken terrain and bluffs — came into sight. Crook called a halt; he was convinced that the Indian camp was only eight miles away, at the other end of a canyon the creek entered a couple of miles downriver, and Indian scouts were sent ahead to reconnoiter.
Crook’s men took full advantage of the midmorning break. After unsaddling and picketing their horses on either side of the creek, they relaxed, some erecting tent shelters against the warm sun, others making coffee. Crook settled into a game of whist with his staff officers, and the Shoshones and Crows raced ponies — odd behavior for a command believing itself in close proximity to a large hostile camp.
Less than an hour later, gunshots were heard from the north. Scouts rushed in yelling of approaching Sioux: “Lakota! Lakota!” The Shoshones and Crows jumped on their mounts and galloped toward the front. Crook ordered pickets sent out in the same direction, and his men ran to their horses and saddled up. The Battle of the Rosebud had commenced.
Sitting Bull’s men had traveled all night, stopping only at dawn to rest their horses and apply their war paint. Each warrior wore his best clothing. The paint was part of their “medicine,” and would protect them, but the clothes reflected more earthly concerns: in case of death, every man wanted to look his best.
After their final preparations, they continued south until they ran into Crook’s Indian scouts, who, via an undisguised return to camp, led them straight into the soldiers. The Sioux and Cheyenne warriors found the wasichus twenty-five miles from their village in the Little Bighorn Valley — less than a day’s ride away.
Over the next six hours, a furious contest between the 1,300-man column and the 700 or so nontreaties raged over the meadows, hills, and ravines of the area. The warriors fought with no grand strategy, but as individuals in quest of war honors, as they always did, though they employed some group tactics. Finerty, the newspaperman from Chicago, reported that one chief “directed their movements by signals made with a pocket mirror or some other reflector.”27 To the constant roar of 8,000 pounding hooves and perhaps 1,500 guns, and the shrieks of eagle-bone whistles, a constant ebb and flow of horsemen swept over the broken ground. “There were charges back and forth,” remembered Wooden Leg, a noted Cheyenne warrior who was eighteen at the time. “Our Indians fought and ran away, fought and ran away. The soldiers and their Indian scouts did the same. Sometimes we charged them, sometimes they charged us.”28 Sitting Bull’s men fought with a persistence previously unseen. Usually they broke off an attack after their initial charge, as Plains Indians almost always did when they owned no clear-cut advantage in numbers, tactics, or firepower. But this day was different. They charged into the soldiers head-on and “were extremely bold and fierce,” said the reliable Lieutenant Bourke, who took notes during the fighting, “and showed a disposition to come up and have it out hand to hand. . . . They advanced in excellent style.”29 The fractured battle seemed to consist of countless smaller clashes as small flocks of individual warriors and groups rode at breakneck speed up and down the ravines and ridges north of the creek. A unit of soldiers would successfully drive the Indians before them, only to find that the warriors had quickly deployed to attack their flanks after the troopers were separated by the terrain.
The Shoshone and Crow scouts fought tenaciously, and Indians on both sides made many daring rescues. A veteran Cheyenne warrior named Chief Comes in Sight was one of the first to charge the soldiers. As he was making a bravery run back and forth in front of them, his pony was killed from under him. From the Indian lines, a rider raced through the soldiers’ rifle fire up to Chief Comes in Sight, stopped and pulled him up behind, and safely galloped off. The rider was his sister, Buffalo Calf Road Woman, and afterward the battle was always spoken of by the Cheyennes as “Where The Girl Saved Her Brother.”30 The rescue was a classic example of how the smaller Indian ponies — one or two hands shorter than the big cavalry mounts — were superior in quickness and agility.31
Crook had rushed to a nearby hill to establish a command post, and after a few hours he thought the battle was under control. He still believed the Indian encampment to be nearby, perhaps six or eight miles downriver — the ferocious attack of the nontreaties, clearly launched to provide the women and children time to escape, seemed proof of it — and he ordered half his cavalry out of the fray and down the Rosebud to attack the village. But the premature withdrawal inspired the Lakotas and Cheyennes, who fell upon the battalion as it followed the creek curving north and then massed on Crook’s central position. A countercharge by Crook’s Shoshones put an end to the immediate threat, but another problem had developed: a battalion led by Lieutenant Colonel Royall, Crook’s cavalry commander, was surrounded after cavalierly chasing some warriors. Royall had mishandled what should have been an easy job of re
joining the main force. Crook quickly realized the precariousness of the situation.
As the detached battalion followed the creek bend north, the troopers could see that the canyon narrowed somewhat to about a half mile wide, its sloping sides thick and dark with pine trees. Before they could continue, an adjutant arrived with orders to return to the battlefield. The battalion turned west into the hills west of the creek, returning to the battlefield through the flanks and rear of the surprised hostiles. The Indians began retreating through the ravines and hills to the north. Crook ordered a pursuit, but his men soon gave up and returned.
Crook now led a march downstream in search of the elusive village. (Since he had preferred charges against Reynolds two months earlier for not securing the Indian camp on the Powder River, he surely felt obligated to find this one and attack it.) But his scouts balked at the entrance to the narrowing canyon, fearing a classic Sioux ambush, and convinced Crook to fall back. Though Crook and his subalterns would enthusiastically embrace this entrapment danger in their reports, the Sioux force was in fact miles away, returning to their camp in jubilation over their success. They had halted fighting because they were afraid that the Crow and Shoshone scouts would make for their village.32 Besides, they were hungry, and their horses were tired. They knew that it had been a good day of many coups and much glory.
The Wyoming column was obviously less happy, and the men spent the night on the battlefield after burying their dead comrades. Crook would officially report ten dead, including one young Shoshone scout. Burdened with more than twenty wounded and low on rations and ammunition — his men had expended 25,000 cartridges to inflict about a hundred casualties, a telling example of army marksmanship, or the lack thereof — Crook saw no choice but to turn south. Ironically, Crook’s reputation in Apache country had been made with the use of finely tuned pack trains, which had enabled him to remain in the field to hound his quarry. Against the larger Plains tribes, he had ventured out from his base camp without a pack train, carrying only four days’ rations and not enough ammunition, and thus could not pursue the enemy. The next morning, he returned to his wagon train at Goose Creek.
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