No confidence can be placed in the official report of the battle of the 25th of June. It is full of inaccuracies, and has been read with something approaching astonishment by the men who took part in the fight. . . .
If the public want to know the whole truth about the Custer Massacre, there must be a full and searching investigation where the witnesses will have to answer on their oath. If such investigation should be held, startling revelations may be looked for. . . . Your correspondent has gleaned some important facts which must compel further investigations, but the officers of the regiment will give no further information unless they are compelled to do so.
O’Kelly went on to speak of the officers who had clammed up and why: “Men there were who could tell the truth, but they were soldiers; it was their duty to be silent. . . . They were loyal to their regiment; there was a secret and they felt themselves bound in honor to be silent. It was also their interest.” He also spoke of a less honorable reason for their silence: self-preservation. According to O’Kelly, some lieutenants were afraid of losing their commissions if they spoke the truth.
“There is buried with the dead a terrible secret,” claimed O’Kelly, “but the witnesses still live, and the government can learn the whole truth if the government wants to know it.”
The article was more than a vilification filled with flimsy conjecture. It thoroughly questioned the officially accepted version — Reno’s primarily — of what had happened in the valley and of the command’s inaction on the bluffs while the sound of heavy firing was distinctly audible. O’Kelly had also ferreted out the true nature of Weir’s advance north — that it had not been ordered in that direction as Reno had claimed in his report. “What were seven companies of cavalry doing gathered upon a hill when four miles away their comrades were fighting desperately for their lives?” For good measure, he questioned Benteen’s failure to hasten his command to the scene of the battle.51
O’Kelly’s accusations seemed at the time to have little effect on public opinion and none on the government. But this story, and others appearing here and there (such as a packer’s claim that Reno, “from the effects of liquor, was unable to direct his command”),52 sowed the seeds of a public outcry for the truth.
THOUGH TERRY HAD made little effort to track the Indians, the last communication from Crook indicated that they had moved south toward the Bighorn Mountains. The reinforced command, now known as the Yellowstone column, moved up the Rosebud Valley on August 8 with thirty-five days’ rations and forage. Two days later, they met up with the Wyoming column, which had only recently ventured away from its extended idyll at Cloud Creek Camp after being reinforced itself. The force was guided by William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, Crook’s lead scout, who had left the stages of the East and his popular show “Buffalo Bill’s Own” to join Crook’s expedition back in June, before the battle.53 He had guided one element of that command, the Fifth Cavalry, seven years earlier in their successful campaign against Tall Bull and his Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, and now he felt an obligation to rejoin his comrades54 — and perhaps polish his reputation for frontier derring-do.
The combined force — now an unwieldy mass of more than 4,000 men — headed east and continued its pursuit of the hostiles through August, slogging through heavy rain and mud to the Tongue and Powder rivers. Crook, chafing under Terry’s control, broke away near the end of the month — decamping early one morning without even informing his superior — and headed farther east after the Indians who had embarrassed him on the Rosebud. Confident that he could overtake them in a matter of days, he left his supply wagons behind — along with his Shoshone and Crow allies, who went home fed up with the white man’s way of fighting and eager to draw their forthcoming annuities. Only a few half-breed scouts, Frank Grouard among them, remained to guide the Wyoming column. In the interest of mobility, a mere two days’ supply of food was taken.55
Crook’s pursuit degenerated into a grueling trek dubbed the “Starvation March” after his men were forced to shoot and eat scores of their played-out horses and abandon hundreds of others.56 The 2,000 wet, hungry, chilled, and altogether miserable troopers turned south on September 5. Three days later, at Slim Buttes in Dakota Territory, a 155-man detachment of cavalry sent ahead to find food discovered a small camp of about forty lodges of Minneconjous led by American Horse.57 A dawn attack the next day secured the village, but hundreds of warriors from other camps in the vicinity, including Crazy Horse’s, rushed to the scene to provide support. When Crook and his main force came up in midmorning, the two sides exchanged fire but did little damage. The Indians fell back before dark. After four hundred miles of hard marching and many days with only horsemeat to eat, neither the exhausted and dispirited soldiers nor their commander had the stomach for a major battle — or the rations for the pursuit that might follow. Crook made little effort to attack these several hundred Indians, who were clearly among those who had annihilated Custer.
The next day, the column headed south, away from the Sioux they had hunted for six months; the warriors harassed them as they marched away. The only material goods that came of the encounter were the herd of 200 Indian ponies and the 5,000 pounds of dried meat in the camp, enough to stave off starvation for a while. (Also found was a pair of gauntlets marked with the name of Captain Myles Keogh of the Seventh Cavalry, along with his I Company guidon.)58 A few days later, Crook’s men staggered into Custer City, a Black Hills mining settlement named after the late General. They were in no condition for anything much more strenuous than recuperation for some time afterward, thus effectively ending Crook’s campaign. Aside from the capture of the small Minneconjou village, it had been a fruitless effort, a lumbering pursuit of a will-o’the-wisp. One newspaperman attributed the “utter failure of the campaign” and the “humiliation of defeat . . . to the fact that the several commanders knew nothing of the work to be accomplished or the character to be traversed.”59
Terry’s column fared no better. On September 5, after weeks of marching about the country north and south of the Yellowstone near the Tongue without finding the Indians, he ordered his units back to their posts, with the Seventh Cavalry ordered to scout along the northern bank of the Yellowstone and then the Missouri on their way home. This was in response to reports of a large force of Sioux in the area — who were later found to have crossed the Missouri several days earlier on their way to Canada. Weir summed it up well: “As the Sioux have failed to find us, we are going home.”60
The sense of anticlimax in the Seventh was palpable. When the regiment reached Fort Buford on the Missouri, Reno and his adjutant and quartermaster took advantage of a steamer heading downriver to leave the regiment and return to Fort Lincoln early. Weir, as senior Captain, was now in command, since Benteen had departed earlier in the month for recruiting duty in New York. Weir’s excessive drinking — exacerbated by the trauma of the Little Bighorn — caused his physical condition to deteriorate significantly. Reno had confined him to his tent at one point, but hopes for an extended period of sobriety had been dashed when a kindhearted herder had smuggled him some alcohol.61 Another officer described Weir as “terribly used up with liquor.”62 After the regiment reached Fort Stevenson, Weir got so drunk that he wandered off and was found later that night in a water hole. At the head of the command the next morning, remembered Garlington, “he presented a sorry spectacle; his clothes were all wet and wrinkled. . . . He always carried his shoulders very high, but this morning his head seemed to be buried in them.” Even Weir’s handsome black horse seemed humiliated.63 Soon after the regiment’s return to Lincoln, Weir left for New York, switching places with Benteen, who had experienced a change of heart and wrangled a release from the assignment.64
About noon on September 26, 131 days after leaving their station, the trail-weary Seventh reached Bismarck. Turning out to meet the regiment were quite a few saloonkeepers, bullwhackers, and gamblers.65 “Tears came unbidden to many an eye,” noted the Bismarck Tribune, “for Custer, the b
rave Custer, his noble brothers and fellows, were not there. . . . A few familiar faces were recognized, but those with whom Bismarck people were best acquainted lie in the trenches of the Little Horn.”66 At Fort Lincoln, no band greeted them with “Garry-Owen” or “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” Instead, the doorways and windows of the officers’ quarters — most of which had been vacated by the widows and orphans of the regiment — had been painted black in mourning.67
That evening, after bathing and donning a change of clothes for the first time in more than four months, quite a few cavalry and infantry officers gathered at the officers’ club room for dinner and relaxation. After a goodly number of drinks had been downed, the talk turned to the battle. When an infantry lieutenant voiced his support of Rosser’s criticism, Reno took offense. The two officers soon came to blows, rolling in the slop, spittle, and spilled liquor on the floor. When Reno tried to throw the lieutenant out of the room, Charles Varnum moved to break it up. Reno switched his fury to his subaltern.
“If you intervene, Mr. Varnum,” said the Major, “I will make it a personal matter with you.”
Weir stepped in to mediate this second altercation. He persuaded Varnum to extend his hand, but Reno would have none of it. “Don’t you touch my hand,” he said, and challenged Varnum to a duel. When a newly assigned lieutenant intervened, Reno pushed him away and shouted, “Who the hell are you?”68
The fracas was finally smoothed over, but with Reno’s unfortunate talent for alienating acquaintances, it was inevitable that the kind of talk O’Kelly had only heard whispered back at the Yellowstone would grow louder behind the closed doors of the Seventh’s own post officers’ club room.69
THE INDIAN NATION that had turned back Crook and defeated Custer would never again approach that military high-water mark. “Custer’s Last Stand” was theirs also.
In the wake of that battle, the name of Sitting Bull became synonymous with the hostile Sioux tribes. Whereas previously he had been “recognized as chief of all the wild Indian bands,”70 now he was the military mastermind behind Indian victories whose “Napoleonic tactics and strategy” were trumpeted.71 A public unable to believe that an unlettered aborigine had defeated the cream of the nation’s military was inundated with sensational, often wildly inaccurate stories based on distorted dispatches from the frontier. The hostiles, it was claimed, had been advised by white frontiersmen or unrepentant Confederates, possibly reinforced by a horde of half-breeds. A persistent rumor claimed that Sitting Bull was really “Bison” McLean, a peculiarly hirsute graduate of West Point, where he had honed his military genius — and his resentment, after being denied his diploma for ungentlemanly conduct.72 Though the Hunkpapa spiritual leader dominated the news, Crazy Horse, too, gained infamy. The Oglala leader had previously been almost unknown to the American public, since he never attended treaty talks or drew agency rations. Now his name began to appear more frequently as a principal Sioux leader and war chief.
A few days after the battle, having marched several miles south toward the Bighorn Mountains, the massive village had splintered into two main groups. The Hunkpapas of Sitting Bull, Crow King, and Gall, with some Minneconjous and Sans Arcs, rode east toward the Powder River and then north. Crazy Horse led his band of Oglalas and others northeast into the Powder River country,73 then south toward the Black Hills.
For the rest of the summer, after the army reinforced, resupplied, and regrouped, the Sioux and Cheyennes led the forces on a wild-goose chase. But the constant movement took its toll. By the spring of 1877, it was clear that the continued existence of any nontreaty band off the reservation would entail a life of constant movement and serious food supply problems. The eternal vigilance and pressure to remain one step ahead of the wasichus provided no time to hunt and stockpile the meat necessary for their usual six months of hibernation. The days of the tranquil winter camp were gone. Nontreaty Indians would not be left in peace again.
AFTER DISBANDING HIS forces, Terry left Nelson Miles and his Fifth Infantry, reinforced by some troops of the Twenty-second Infantry, to winter on the Yellowstone, in a cantonment at the mouth of the Tongue River. Miles was a commander in the Custer mold: energetic (altogether too energetic, complained some of his own officers), resourceful, and aggressive. “If you hear of a fight, look out for Miles,” wrote one correspondent.74 He had done good work during the Red River War two years before, rounding up the recalcitrant Indians of the southern plains, though he had chafed at having to serve under officers whom he considered his inferiors. Now, given a virtual free hand, he took full advantage. His troopers skirmished with Sitting Bull’s warriors a few times in mid-October and parleyed with the Hunkpapa leader twice. Sitting Bull refused to give in, but when it became clear that the well-supplied soldiers were determined to remain in the Indians’ country and pursue them, other chiefs representing several hundred lodges, most of them Minneconjous and Sans Arcs, surrendered and were escorted in to their agencies.
Miles continued to send out well-outfitted expeditions throughout the winter, north into the country south of Fort Peck between the Yellowstone and the Missouri after Sitting Bull, and southwest after the Oglalas and Cheyennes under Crazy Horse, Two Moon, and others. His forces skirmished frequently with these Indians and kept them on the run. In early January, several hundred of them surrendered after a brief engagement with a force of about 350 soldiers under Miles, and in the early spring, two more bands numbering about 1,000 came in.75
During the retreat from Miles, Crazy Horse’s people left behind many of their belongings, and the bitter cold and lack of provisions caused much suffering among them. There was little game to be found, and not enough grass or cottonwood bark for the ponies, many of which died and were eaten. There was talk of surrender. The failure to defeat the soldiers had crushed the Indians’ confidence, and the hard winter had weakened them both physically and spiritually. The wasichus had shown that they would continue to pursue and attack the Indians wherever they might hide. When news of the sale of the Black Hills and the unceded country to the west reached their camp, their spirits were further dampened. Sitting Bull and his bands found Crazy Horse’s people in mid-January and brought with them a mule train of much-needed ammunition. The large village remained together on the Tongue River for about two weeks, then split again. Sitting Bull headed north, while Crazy Horse moved west into the valley of the Little Bighorn in search of buffalo.76
As the harsh winter continued, Crazy Horse began acting oddly — even more so than usual. “He was always a queer man, but that winter he was queerer than ever,” remembered Black Elk, his cousin.77 He spent most of his time out away from the village. “I am making plans for the good of my people,” he told another relative.78 But there was nothing he could do — or rather, only one thing. On May 6, 1877, after some negotiating over terms, Crazy Horse bowed to the inevitable and brought 889 Oglalas into Camp Robinson, Nebraska, near Red Cloud Agency. They surrendered 12,000 gaunt ponies and 117 arms.
Crazy Horse was allowed to settle on the reservation. He still commanded great respect from the Lakota people. With no desire for power, he did his best to avoid becoming swept up in agency politics and refused repeated entreaties to travel to Washington. He wanted a reservation of his own in Wyoming, and he repeated his request whenever he could to whomever he could, General George Crook included. But other Indian leaders, jealous of Crazy Horse, began to circulate rumors that he planned to leave the agency, that he and many warriors would go north and return to the warpath. The white authorities became increasingly suspicious. When some of Crazy Horse’s followers left his camp, the Indian agent was sure that trouble was imminent. And when a jealous nephew of Red Cloud’s revealed that Crazy Horse was planning to kill Crook at a council, Crook told a group of prominent Lakota leaders that they needed to arrest, and perhaps kill, the Oglala warrior. When Colonel Luther Bradley, the commander of Camp Robinson, heard of this, he ordered Crazy Horse arrested and sent to Fort Jefferson on the Dry Tortugas off
Key West, Florida, where the worst Indian troublemakers were imprisoned, usually for a long time.
On September 3, about twenty followers of Red Cloud found Crazy Horse in the process of moving his camp to the quieter Spotted Tail Agency. He refused to leave with them, but after another confrontation, this time with Spotted Tail and hundreds of his men, he was convinced to return to Camp Robinson to discuss his move. Two days later, he was escorted by several of his friends and a growing group of Spotted Tail’s warriors. A young army lieutenant temporarily assigned as Indian agent, Jesse M. Lee, also accompanied Crazy Horse at the Oglala’s own request.
Word had spread of Crazy Horse’s approach, and when he arrived at Camp Robinson, several thousand Lakotas were there to witness his arrest and subjugation. Though Lee had promised the Oglala that he would be able to speak his piece, Bradley refused to allow it and insisted that Crazy Horse be taken into custody. Bradley assured the Indians that no harm would come to him.
When Crazy Horse was told this, he voluntarily went with the officer of the day, who led him toward the guardhouse next door. He entered the jail but then realized what was about to happen. Drawing a hidden knife, he ran outside and made a wide sweep with the blade, cutting one Oglala behind him who had grabbed his arms; Little Big Man, a warrior who had fought beside Crazy Horse for many years but who now worked for the whites, fell to the ground. There was a rush on all sides toward Crazy Horse, and the officer of the day yelled, “Kill him! Kill him!” One of the surrounding soldiers lunged forward with his rifle and bayoneted the Oglala leader near his left kidney, in the back. Crazy Horse collapsed in the dirt. Amazingly, even with tensions high, no further bloodshed occurred, though his followers resisted an attempt to move him into the guardhouse. He was carried into the adjutant’s nearby office, where a doctor gave him morphine as he drifted in and out of consciousness, comforted by his father and his old friend Touch the Clouds. About 10:00 p.m., he asked for Lieutenant Lee. Crazy Horse told Lee that he did not blame him for what had happened. The greatest war chief of the Oglalas, who only wanted peace and quiet after his surrender, died about midnight.79
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