For the inveterate researchers among you, this map can be found among the papers of General Frank D. Baldwin, housed in the William Carey Brown Collection in the library at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Among the few accounts we have of the Lame Deer fight there exists some minor variations in the number of lodges that comprised the village. In his count made at the edge of the village late on the afternoon before the battle, White Bull showed William Rowland his tally of only thirty-eight lodges. The only way I am able to explain this too-small, incorrect number is that the Cheyenne holy man did not see the entire camp from where he was in hiding as he made his count. From Sergeant Charles Grillon’s map of the village, as well as my own roadside visits to the area, I can logically deduce that with the twists and bends in Muddy Creek (now renamed Lame Deer Creek), as well as the knotting of willow and undergrowth clotting those twists, that White Bull simply was unable to see the entire village.
Beyond the holy man’s tally of thirty-eight, there were two other incorrect counts recorded for history. One record gave the number of lodges as fifty-one, while another listed sixty-three, somewhat minor inconsistencies one must admit when considering the sixty-one lodges most historians generally accept as the number of “tepees” in the camp. At the same time you must remember that this figure did not include those brush bowers the bachelor warriors used for sleeping—young fighting men who had forsaken their south-bound families in giving allegiance to Lame Deer.
The site where the village stood that spring day in 1877 is now all but obliterated, covered by a hodgepodge of mobile homes on the south edge of the Cheyenne community, fittingly named Lame Deer.
Here along what is now BIA Route 4, Cheyenne historian George Bird Grinnell tells us that the hillside where Lame Deer fell is some fifty to sixty yards up the slope from (that is, to the southeast of) a shallow coulee that scars this narrow creek valley. Today, as on the day of the fight, one can gaze up the slope to locate a little red knoll above the coulee. Just beyond that, to the south-southeast, rises a taller knoll strewn with dark rocks lying among some stunted trees. It was on this higher point where Lame Deer was buried.
Twenty summers after the fight, Grinnell himself visited the site, watching as Lame Deer’s daughter mourned beside his final resting place. National Park historian Jerry Greene confirms that Lame Deer’s remains were later interred at that site Grinnell described: a sandstone cave on the heights overlooking the village site, close to the place where he fell.
No more than forty yards farther up that ravine lies a slight prominence dotted with some taller trees. Reports have it that this slope is where Lame Deer fell, just south of that coulee, collapsing sideways in death across a pine sapling. Greene records that at a point just west of where the chief was killed, there is that sandstone rock formation referred to by the Cheyenne locals as “Lame Deer’s Tomb.”
Robert Jackson, the half-breed Blackfoot scout, was among the first to examine Lame Deer’s corpse that fateful day, counting seventeen bullet holes in the Lakota chief’s body from that devastating barrage fired at him as he sought to escape.
Another half-breed army scout, Joseph Culbertson—although not near the scene when Lame Deer was killed—later maintained that the chief was finished by a shot from fellow scout Robert Jackson. But a contemporary account in the New York Herald, dated June 11, 1877, confused matters all the more by ascribing Lame Deer’s killing to Private Henry L. Davis of L Company, Second Cavalry. Muddying the discrepancies all the more, the newspaper account states that Davis reportedly presented the chief’s headdress to Miles later that day. Additionally, Private Anthony Gavin, who declared he was one of the first to reach the body, recalled for the same Herald article that it was Robert Jackson, and not White Bull, who scalped Lame Deer, declaring that Jackson took “ears and all,” and kept the war chief’s scalp on his bridle “for over a week after the fight.”
Just as we noted in the killing of Dog Soldier chief Tall Bull at Summit Springs in 1869 (Black Sun—vol. 4, The Plainsmen Series), there is no little argument on who might have fired the shot that killed Lame Deer’s nephew, Iron Star. Intriguing too is that we have two separate accounts among Indian recollections recounting the Lame Deer–Miles episode that state the agitated nephew on the scene was actually named Big Ankle (or Big Ankles) instead of Iron Star.
Private David L. Brainard of L Company, Second U.S. Cavalry (later an army colonel who came up through the ranks), did indeed witness the killing of Lame Deer. He did not, however, watch the death of Iron Star with his own eyes.
According to Brainard’s report:
When the old man fell, Iron Star escaped over the hill through our left, and ran into the face of G troop under Wheeland [sic], and was shot by Wheeland, who used a pistol.
The private’s statement nonetheless does corroborate that a pistol was used to kill Iron Star—an important detail that Brainard likely could have heard from the lips of those who did witness the killing. In the same manner, he might well have overheard the reports from Wheelan’s men that credited their company captain with making the kill, rather than credit the coup to a half-breed scout.
Private Brainard would later receive a commission in the Second Cavalry and begin his climb through the ranks, late in life becoming a noted explorer who served in the Arctic with Adolphus Greely.
For the record, the reader should understand that the incident involving a Second Cavalry trooper murdering the old Lakota woman on the slope of a hill just beyond the lodges has not been manufactured by me. It happened the morning of the fight, and is not a product of my imagination. Rather, it is recounted by Jerry Greene in Yellowstone Command and provides a tragic counterpoint to the brief but hot fight at that moment raging between the soldiers and the camp’s warriors.
Was this an isolated incident? I feel safe in stating that such a cold-blooded act was a rarity in the frontier army.
A murder committed by a soldier worked into a lathered blood lust? Perhaps. We know for certain that this anonymous trooper hadn’t seen any action during the Great Sioux War while other units were either getting in their licks or getting licked by the “savages.” Most probably he was a member of that squadron of four companies of Major Frank Brisbin’s Second Cavalry, which Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer refused at the fateful meeting aboard the Far West on June 21, 1876, before he marched up the Rosebud with his Seventh Cavalry. Now that this trooper was in the thick of it he might well have been helpless—his emotions running at fever pitch—to make any distinctions between a fleeing warrior and a noncombatant.
For most of the soldiers who saw action on the western frontier, more often than not there was no practical distinction between the fighting men and those in the village. All of the hostiles were the army’s enemies. In fort barracks and around campaign fires the old files and veteran frontiersmen often repeated an old saw that had much basis in fact: in the heat of battle, in any attack on a village, the women as well as old men and young boys could be every bit as deadly as the battle-proven warriors. Truth was, most women could wield a firearm, club, or knife, could fire a bow with accuracy.
Forgetting that fact, or ignoring it through either the softness of his heart or the white man’s cultural deference to a female, might just get a soldier killed.
Not an attitude found among the plains tribes. One has only to read the record concerning how an attacking tribe might well kill every one of the defeated enemy, no matter their age or sex. The reader can refer to the Northern Cheyenne destruction of a small camp of Shoshone just prior to Mackenzie’s destruction of the Dull Knife village in the fall of 1876 (A Cold Day in Hell—vol. 11, The Plainsmen Series).
No matter the soldier’s mind-set, no matter the era—that killing was a murder. Pure and simple. A murder made all the more tragic because the killer went free.
In his recounting of the fight many years later, Brigadier General William Carey Brown stated that the army casualties were four kille
d and seven wounded. However, I was able to locate an accounting of eight wounded in Jerry Greene’s landmark study of the Fifth Infantry on the Yellowstone. And with some more digging, I located two more wounded soldiers listed in a contemporary article of the well-respected Army-Navy Journal, bringing the total of wounded to ten!
In regard to the enemy dead, however, the official report listed fourteen Sioux killed and abandoned on the battlefield, of which two were Lame Deer and Iron Star. Beyond the army’s record, however, discrepancies arise upon checking other sources. George Bird Grinnell notes that only six Sioux were killed in the fight. And White Bull himself later declared that he knew of only five Sioux dead: three men and two women.
At that time the Cheyenne holy man stated “others may have been killed above,” perhaps meaning on the hillside above the village site, or in the running fight beyond the top of the hill, but he did not personally know of any.
In addition, White Bull stated for the record that he recalled two soldiers were killed in the fight, along with hearing that one other person—either civilian or soldier—was killed while with the pack-train.
On the morning after the battle, during the mounting of Colonel Miles’s “Eleventh Cavalry,” Lieutenant Lovell H. Jerome watched in bemused horror as the infantry’s doughboys were catapulted into the air by the captured Indian ponies they were attempting to mount. Jerome records that he hurried to the colonel’s side and:
“… told Miles that [the horses] were mostly squaw ponies and that the squaws mounted from [the] right side and that if the men would try to mount in the same way they would have less trouble. They did this and got along with them all right.”
For the duration of the Fifth Infantry’s tenure at Tongue River Cantonment, a seasoned number of Miles’s foot soldiers would put those Lakota horses to good use in the months to come as they completed the final mopping-up of the northern plains.
Upon their return to their Yellowstone post, Miles would recommend several of the cavalry and his own infantry officers for brevets awarded for their performance in the fight: Captains Ball, Wheelan, Norwood, Tyler, Dickey, and Poole; along with Lieutenants Jerome, Casey, Fuller, and Cusick.
Upon the colonel’s commendation, five enlisted men received Medals of Honor for their conduct in the battle: Corporal Harry Garland, Farrier William H. Jones, Private William Leonard (who held out in that lonely seige behind his dead horse), and First Sergeant Henry Wilkens, all of Company L, Second Cavalry; in addition to Private Samuel D. Phillips, Company H of the Second Cavalry.
It is also of interest to note that for many years White Bull kept the army rifle (perhaps a shorter cavalry carbine?) given him by Miles at the time he volunteered to become a scout for the Bear Coat in that spring of 1877. He managed to hunt with that weapon until the summer of 1905 when it was destroyed, as his home on the Northern Cheyenne reservation burned to the ground.
In those minutes before the soldiers began to torch the lodges, White Bull and some of the other Cheyenne scouts rescued pounds of buffalo meat and what they called “white grease” from the flames. It’s only conjecture on my part, but the army pork they had been eating as rations would have rendered a “gray grease.” Perhaps these former roamers of the plains were starved for buffalo “fleece,” that layer of fluffy white fat lying just below the skin. Could this be what the holy man would later describe to an interpreter as “white grease?”
Remember that Johnny Bruguier had killed a man on the Standing Rock Reservation just before he fled to settle in with Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa?
Although he did not come along on the Lame Deer campaign and would not return to the upper Yellowstone until much later that summer of 1877, Luther S. Kelly recounts that subsequent to the Lame Deer fight,
Brughier [sic] gave himself up to the courts, where he was defended by that brilliant genius of the law, “Bill” Erwin, the famous criminal lawyer of Minnesota, and cleared of the charge held against him.
More than fifty-five years later in the August 30, 1932 issue of the periodical Winners of the West, General Hugh L. Scott also wrote about Bruguier and his brush with the law:
Johnny Brughiere [sic] killed a man at Standing Rock Agency in the early seventies and ran off to the hostile Sioux where he could not be reached and was a clerk for Sitting Bull.
When tried for murder at Fargo, in December, 1879, General Miles and Baldwin went to his trial. He was found “Not Guilty.” He was finally murdered in Poplar, Montana.
I was unable to locate any mention of the journey General Scott said Miles and Baldwin made to that trial in Fargo, Dakota Territory. Would they have made that trip merely as curious spectators? More likely, the two of them would have gone to testify as to Johnny’s character in Erwin’s defense strategy once the half-breed was getting his day in court. Remember that Bruguier helped Baldwin time and again during his search for Sitting Bull in the fall of 1876 (Wolf Mountain Moon—vol. 12, The Plainsmen Series). And you’ve just finished reading my account of how invaluable the half-breed was in delivering Old Wool Woman and the Bear Coat’s message back to the wandering camps.
I don’t find it difficult to believe that both Miles and Baldwin would have made that journey to Fargo for the sole purpose of assisting in Johnny’s defense, especially after the colonel had promised he would do all that he could to get the charges dropped. After all, in his memoirs, Miles is quoted describing Bruguier as “the man to whom I am largely indebted for the success of my campaign against Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.”
You might recall that as Seamus Donegan was taking his leave of the battlefield, Miles explained how he understood the Irishman’s anxiousness to be back in the arms of his wife. He told Donegan how he was planning to have his wife, Mary, visit him at Tongue River Cantonment. Not only did she and their daughter, Cecilia, visit the Yellowstone post in the summer of 1877, but the following August of 1878 found Mary and the wives of other officers taking an extended trip into the field to visit not only the Lame Deer site, but also the Custer battlefield.
On the ground where the soldiers fought Lame Deer’s Lakota some fifteen months before, a member of the entourage later reported in the September 15, 1878 issue of the New York Herald,
“We … found the rifle pits, empty shells, bones, clothing, ornaments and clothing of several Indians … [One member] was particularly fortunate in finding the breastplate worn by Lame Deer himself, and in having it identified by some of the Sioux Indians in the party who knew that warrior. To the ladies of the party this little excursion was exceedingly interesting, as it was where nearly all their husbands had risked their lives and the first battle ground they had visited.”
As I have done before in the afterword to these Plainsmen novels, I want to list the sources I used to write this compelling story of the peace negotiations, the personal and political struggles within the Cheyenne and Crazy Horse camps, as well as the bloody climax in that crushing of Lame Deer’s bitter-enders. For those of you who want to read more on this tragic and triumphant winter waning into spring, you can read:
A Good Year to Die—The Story of the Great Sioux War, by Charles M. Robinson, III
Army and Navy Journal, Volume 14: May 12, 1877
Army and Navy Journal, Volume 14: June 16, 1877
Autobiography of Red Cloud, War Leader of the Oglalas, edited by R. Eli Paul
Battles and Skirmishes of the Great Sioux War, 1876-1877—The Military View, compiled, edited, and annotated by Jerome A. Green
Black Elk Speaks, Being the Life of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, as told through John G. Neihardt
Cheyenne and Sioux—The Reminiscences of Four Indians and A White Soldier, compiled by Thomas B. Marquis
Cheyenne Memories, by John Stands In Timber and Margot Liberty
Crazy Horse Called Them Walk-A-Heaps—The Story of the Foot Soldier in the Prairie Indian Wars, by Neil Baird Thompson
The Crazy Horse Surrender Ledger, edited by Thomas R. Buecker and R. Eli Paul
The Fighting Cheyennes, by George Bird Grinnell
Frontier Regulars—The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1891, by Robert M. Utley
A History of the Cheyenne People, by Tom Weist
Indian Fights and Fighters, by Cyrus Townsend Brady
The Indian Wars of the West, by Paul I. Wellman
Joseph Culbertson: Famous Indian Scout Who Served Under General Miles in 1876-1895, by Joseph Culbertson (and F. Delger)
Journal of the United States Cavalry Association, Volume 10: June, 1897
Lakota and Cheyenne—Indian Views of the Great Sioux War, 1876-1877, compiled, edited, and annotated by Jerome A. Greene
Lakota Belief and Ritual, by James R. Walker (edited by Raymond J. DeMallie and Elaine A. Jahner)
The Lance and The Shield—The Life and Times of Sitting Bull, by Robert M. Utley
My Experiences in the West, by John S. Collins (edited by Colton Storm)
Nelson A. Miles—A Documentary Biography of his Military Career, 1861-1903, edited by Brian C. Pohanka
Nelson A. Miles and the Twilight of the Frontier Army, by Robert Wooster
North American Indian Anthropology—Essays on Society and Culture, edited by Raymond J. DeMallie and Alfonso Ortiz
People of the Sacred Mountain—A History of the Northern Cheyenne Chiefs and Warrior Societies, 1830-1879, by Father Peter J. Powell
Personal Recollections and Observations of General Nelson A. Miles, by Nelson A. Miles
Phil Sheridan and His Army, by Paul Andrew Hutton
The Pitman Notes on U.S. Martial Small Arms and Ammunition, 1776-1933, by Brigadier General John Pitman
Sharps Firearms, by Frank Sellars
Sioux Indian Religion—Tradition and Innovation, edited by Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks
The Sioux—Life and Customs of a Warrior Society, by Royal B. Hassrick
Ashes of Heaven Page 41