The new troops were the Montana column of Colonel John Gibbon. Conceived by Sheridan as a blocking force to hold the nontreaty bands south of the Yellowstone, Gibbon’s command numbered barely 450 men, comprising six companies of the Seventh Infantry and four from the Second Cavalry. Reflecting the preoccupation of the Lakotas with another attack from the south, their hunters, war parties, and scouts had all repeatedly missed Gibbon’s command.9
On May 22 and 23, however, warriors targeted Gibbon’s hunting parties. Their intelligence convinced Crazy Horse and the other leaders that the Montana column would stay put. Confidence in Lakota fighting superiority was affirmed by another visionary experience of Sitting Bull, who dreamed he saw a great dust storm approaching from the east, soldiers’ arms and horse gear glinting behind the storm front. The wind smashed into a tranquil cloud formed in conical peaks like a tipi camp. Because the storm dissipated, leaving the cloud intact, Sitting Bull told Crazy Horse and the other chiefs his dream assured the people of a great victory. Scouts were posted to warn of any troop approach from the east.10
A new Cheyenne contingent reported that forces were assembling at Fort Laramie for Crook’s second crack at the Northern Nation. Patrols were already policing the Black Hills Trail as agency-based war parties targeted the spring traffic. Processing all reports, Crazy Horse and the other chiefs ordered the villages moved slowly upstream on May 25.
During the second week of May, Little Big Man’s recruiting mission had departed from Red Cloud Agency with an estimated one hundred lodges of Oglalas. A further twenty, as well as fifty lodges of Brules and a straggle of northern visitors, also departed White River. They carried substantial arms and ammunition for the war effort. Red Cloud’s son Jack bore a symbolic weapon—the engraved Winchester presented his father in Washington in 1875.11
Traveling via Bear Lodge Butte, Little Big Man’s party hurried north to find the Sun Dance village. From Cheyenne River and Standing Rock, similar parties were heading onto the hunting grounds, answering Sitting Bull’s call for one big fight with the soldiers.12
The departures underlined the urgency of Crook’s role in the Sheridan strategy. Approaching the hunting grounds from the south, Crook was to hammer the Indians against Gibbon’s Yellowstone anvil. Throughout May, Crook’s command reassembled at Fort Fetterman. Over one thousand officers and men made the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition the strongest of the summer operations. Ten companies of the Third Cavalry, five of the Second, and five infantry troops formed the core of the command, tailed by 120 wagons and a mule train expanded to one thousand animals. Urgent requests for Shoshone and Crow scouts had been wired to their tribal agencies. On the morning of May 29, Crook’s command started once more up the Bozeman Trail.13
Still off the Lakota radar, Sitting Bull’s dust storm from the east had blown out of Fort Abraham Lincoln on May 17. The last arm in Sheridan’s pincer strategy, the Dakota column, was commanded by departmental chief General Alfred H. Terry. Over nine hundred men strong, it comprised the entire Seventh Cavalry and three infantry companies marching with the 150-wagon supply train. A battery of three Gatling guns accompanied the command, while forty Indian scouts—Arikaras and in-married Lakotas—broke trail. Nominally second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer rode at the head of the Seventh. The Terry column planned a juncture with Gibbon along the Yellowstone. Steamboats established a supply base at the junction of Glendive Creek, but the projected union slipped off schedule as Terry’s command battled across prairie rendered gumbo by spring rains. Crazy Horse’s intelligence reports still lacked any knowledge of the Dakota column.14
As the Moon When the Ponies Shed closed, the village shifted slowly upstream. The first substantial agency defections began filling out the six camp circles. The advance of Little Big Man’s party, hurrying on from Bear Lodge, was one of the first. Crazy Horse dispatched scouts to escort in the new arrivals: “Everyone rejoiced to have us back there,” recalled Crazy Horse’s twelve-year-old cousin Black Elk. More White River defectors were approaching via the east side of the Black Hills. The first increments from the Missouri River agencies were within ten days’ travel, but the main body was still gathering along the Little Missouri, 120 miles east.15
On June 4 the villages repitched camp for the Sun Dance. Sitting Bull had pledged to undergo the ordeal of the ceremony so that Wakan Tanka would assure his people of strength and abundance. Sitting Bull sought to secure the presence of Crazy Horse, pointedly absent from the previous year’s ceremony, since the warrior named to fell the Sun Dance tree was Good Weasel, Crazy Horse’s battlefield lieutenant. Holy men reverently painted the pole while warriors hung from its leafy forks sprouts of chokecherry, and rawhide cutouts of a buffalo and a male human, for power over game and enemies. Warrior societies danced to pound down the earth, to the harangue of the Ceremonial Decider, Nape of Neck, who closed the day’s events with two songs—. “very beautiful ones,” recalled Good Weasel—encouraging the people to dance and give gifts.
Daylight of the fifth saw the line of pledgers enter the arbor and sit at the honor place. Among the pledgers, two men were to be pierced through the chest. Holy men, murmuring prayers, held up skewers to the sun before assistants pierced the pledgers’ breasts and looped over the skewers the ropes hanging from the center pole. Each mentor seized his pledger around the waist and pulled back hard, four times, to a general wail from the watching women. As blood started from their wounds, pledger were each given a staff and ordered to start the slow shuffling dance step. Nape of Neck addressed the sun, asking that the pledgers’ wishes be fulfilled, then held up before each dancer a glassy crystal and ordered him to look through it at the sun. Then the pledgers threw themselves backward, to tear away the skewers.16
Despite the interruption of a torrential downpour, dancing continued through the sixth. The dancers stopped only when a final pledger entered the arbor alone. Naked from the sweat lodge, Sitting Bull first offered a pipe to the powers and the assembled leaders. Then he sat against the center pole. His adopted brother knelt beside him, prizing fifty small pieces of flesh from each of Sitting Bull’s arms. With blood streaming down his sides, Sitting Bull danced for hours before the pole, gazing at the sun. Suddenly, he stopped. His body wavered but did not fall, as if momentarily held at the still center of the world. Through a stretched silence, he peered sunward. Then he staggered, and a press of assistants and bystanders helped him lie on the earth. Water was dashed in his face to revive him. After drinking, in a low voice he confided to Black Moon what he had seen in the intense burn of vision. Then, exhausted and half-blinded by his ordeal, Sitting Bull sank into semiconsciousness.
Hushed with anticipation, the crowd listened attentively as Black Moon walked over to the center pole and called out, “Sitting Bull wishes to announce that he just heard a voice from above saying, ‘I give you these because they have no ears.’ He looked up and saw soldiers and some Indians on horseback coming down like grasshoppers, with their heads down and their hats falling off. They were falling right into our camp.” The murmur of wonder built to exultant cries. Crazy Horse and the row of seated chiefs, convinced of Sitting Bull’s prophecy, enthusiastically affirmed the vision as proof of a great victory at hand. The ceremony, with another two days to run, wound anticlimactically down after that. On June 8 the village moved up the creek, its screen of hunters and scouts urged to greater vigilance. At any moment, the upside-down soldiers might arrive.17
Ever since Sitting Bull’s vision the previous year, people had pondered the identity of the vanquished foe. Now the debate took on new urgency. Clearly, the enemy was not Gibbon’s Montana column, still fixed across the Yellowstone but moving slowly downstream, away from the Northern Nation. As the village marched, Crazy Horse remembered that the dust storm would come from the east. In fact, at dusk that same day, June 8, General Terry arrived on the Yellowstone, conferred with his forward supply base, and arranged a summit with Gibbon for the next day. Bivouaced at
Powder River, still almost one hundred miles northeast of the Lakotas, Custer and his cavalry contingent impatiently awaited marching orders.
More immediate, a threat lay sixty miles south of the village. Incoming bands continued to update the war chiefs of Crook’s approach. A rumor among Crook’s staff and ranks held that Crazy Horse had sent a message by his iyeska scouts to Crook, warning that “he would begin to fight the latter just as soon as he touched the waters of the Tongue River.”18 One day previously, June 7, Crook’s command went into camp at the junction of the Tongue with Prairie Dog Creek, straddling the Montana-Wyoming boundary. The local knowledge of his guides was wearing thin, and Crook awaited the promised arrival of Shoshone and Crow auxiliaries.
Late in the afternoon of the eighth, after a twelve-mile march up the Rosebud, the procession of villagers stopped. The Cheyenne camp was already raised when a returning war party streaked into the circle shouting the news of Crook’s march. Along the length of the village, to the shouted summons of heralds, councils convened. Not waiting for the chiefs’ decision, a party of young men departed south after nightfall. At 6:30 P.M. on June 9, as Crook’s horse herd was driven in, the warriors poured a heavy fusillade into the lines of Sibley tents across the Tongue. The command answered in kind, quickly dispersing the warriors.19
For three days, spring rains lashed the Rosebud, keeping the Indians in camp. Crazy Horse and his peers debated the intelligence from Tongue River. Convinced by Sitting Bull that the real threat would come from the east, Crazy Horse was reluctant to commit his strength to combating the southern menace. They agreed that scouts would continue shadowing Crook, but no further preventive action would be taken unless he came within a day’s march of the village. Even in such an eventuality, only half the warrior force would challenge Crook, lest the people be caught off guard by a double blow. Instead of numbers, Crazy Horse affirmed, astute tactics and precision planning should be used to disadvantage the enemy, and every chance seized to stampede his horses. The war chief was relieved, late on the eleventh, when the word he wanted arrived: that morning Crook’s command had turned around and started south, as if withdrawing from the hunting grounds. When day rose bright and cloudless on June 12, the heralds ordered another move. Satisfied that Crook was neutralized, the villagers continued upstream twelve miles.20
In the days following the Sun Dance, the first arrivals from the Missouri River agencies began to trickle in. Crazy Horse asked closely about soldiers from the east, but the new arrivals could do little more than confirm reports of troop aggregation at Fort Abraham Lincoln. Still no news of the dust storm of soldiers Sitting Bull had predicted.
On June 16 the village started west, eventually descending the ridges to the forks of Sun Dance (modern Reno) Creek. Two miles separated the Cheyenne camp from the Hunkpapa circle. At the Cheyenne council tipi, a meeting of all the chiefs was heavy with the threat of impending danger.
Cheyenne intelligence once more alerted the villagers. As darkness fell and hunters returned with meat, a series of approaching wolf howls sounded, and presently a knot of dusty riders dismounted to report that through the daylight hours, they had shadowed a massive army crossing from the Tongue toward the head of the Rosebud. Its line of march clearly indicated that the troops would continue down the Rosebud tomorrow. A screen of 262 Crow and Shoshone scouts, far ahead of the column, probed dangerously near the village approaches. Uproar seized the camps. As heralds’ announcements rang out, women hurried to pack everything but immediate essentials. Some even began striking their lodges. Men and youths hurried into the darkness to guard the pony herds.21
Crazy Horse and his peers anxiously debated the reports, augmented by fresh intelligence. Lakota hunters targeting the buffalo herd south had swapped insults with outlying Crows, and one party had spotted scouts with soldiers going into camp scarcely twenty miles south. Talks bogged down in confusion, focusing on the sudden appearance of the enemy. Fearful of a decoy strategy, elders swung consensus against premature action. Reinstating the line Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull had so long resisted, the elders had heralds cry the camps, “Young men, leave the soldiers alone unless they attack us.”22
As Crazy Horse quickly divined, the army was Crook’s, reinforced by his tardy Indian auxiliaries. That morning, Crook had departed his Goose Creek base, cutting loose from the supply train in response to Crow intelligence of the Lakota presence along Rosebud Creek. Just hours before, his column had camped at the source of the Rosebud’s south fork, anticipating a second day’s march downstream.
Augmented by Indian and civilian reinforcements, Crook’s effective force numbered more than thirteen hundred men—significantly outnumbering the Lakota strength. But convinced of their rightful victory, warriors ran for weapons and ponies. Dabbing hurried paint, they mounted and paraded the camps. The council hurriedly agreed that Crazy Horse lead the defense. Heralds updated the situation: “The scouts have returned and they have reported that the soldiers are now camping on the Rosebud River, so young warriors, take courage and get ready to go meet them.”23
As the drain of warriors started up the creek, Crazy Horse and Good Weasel joined them, a string of Oglalas knotting behind. A straggle of visiting Brules, convinced of Crazy Horse’s medicine, attached themselves to the party. At the Hunkpapa circle, riders milled outside Sitting Bull’s tipi. The Hunkpapa chief, still afflicted with sore eyes and swollen arms after his Sun Dance ordeal, restricted himself to urging courage. But younger war leaders rallied the men. Then, following Crazy Horse and the rest, some 750 warriors streamed into the darkness.24
A thirty-mile ride separated the two armies. Traveling through the night in isolated groups of comrades, communication failed. Everyone knew that it was too late to intercept Crook at his bivouac, that he must be caught on the march. One party struck through the Wolf Mountains. Their only plan to lay straight into Crook, they steered toward a break in the hills, meeting the Rosebud near its upper bend. Through the morning, other groups in scores or hundreds laced the hills. One group of two hundred, including Crazy Horse, sliced across country toward the Rosebud ten miles farther downstream. One or more camps of agency people were known to be just across the Rosebud on Trail Creek, and the time gained permitted a concerted ambush. Just before daybreak of June 17, as they neared the Rosebud, the Trail Creek contingent met them. Jack Red Cloud, sporting a superb trailer headdress and his father’s famous Winchester, stood out among the reinforcements. The growing throng unsaddled and let their ponies graze.
Crazy Horse and the other leaders conferred quickly. Akicita were drafted to ride a deadline. None should pass upstream of Trail Creek. Just what the strategy was is unclear, but persistent reports credited the Indians with preparing a massive ambush for Crook. Strategy would have been flexible, but the course of Rosebud Creek upstream of the deadline is deeply cut for several miles, its canyon broken with gullies blocked with brush, timber, and even old Indian corrals—ideal terrain for an ambush. Recalling High Backbone’s success in 1866, the leaders undoubtedly considered some variant on the decoy tactic.25
But events quickly rendered all planning redundant. Four scouts were selected to cut over the hills and monitor Crook’s progress, while the warriors prepared for battle. For the untried, fathers and mentors prayed as they attached wotawe charms or shook out war shirts and bonnets, explained paint designs, and imparted quiet advice. Suddenly shots sounded upstream, and everyone strained to see four Crows, skylined on a distant ridge, shooting at the Lakota scouts before whipping northward, yelling “Lakota! Lakota!” Before the akicita could restrain them, a rush of men poured in pursuit and, to a mounting barrage of gunfire, the war chiefs were forced to order a general attack.
The Battle of the Rosebud, June 17, 1876
Meanwhile, Crook’s command, on the march before dawn, had halted to eat breakfast beside the Rosebud ten miles upstream. Men settled to coffee and cards while the Indian scouts reconnoitered the northern bluffs. Convinced of the proximity o
f the enemy, the Crows were restive, but Crook was skeptical until he heard distant shots, as his outriders met Crazy Horse’s scouts—a pause, then more shots sounded closer. Barely had Crook assessed the threat from his right, downstream, when more scouts galloped down the hills. “Heap Sioux!” they cried, as a line of painted warriors—the Wolf Mountains contingent—swept into the valley from upstream and raced straight at the left of Crook’s halted line.
Amid wild confusion, officers hurried to rally their men, but many acknowledged that their position would have been overrun if not for the superb courage of the Crows and Shoshones. The general was able to dress skirmish lines, but for twenty minutes the battle teetered in the balance. Crook’s allies gradually forced the Cheyennes and Lakotas back onto the hills. Even as the general hurried men to seize the blufftops, however, more warriors poured across the hills on his right, opening a new phase of the battle.
Crazy Horse and his warriors had streamed up the Rosebud toward the sound of the guns. A westward bend in the creek obscured the action, but with a mounting barrage sounding to their right, Crazy Horse’s followers sliced up a side canyon onto the tableland to survey the battleground. From the valley bottom, units of cavalry and dismounted troopers were deploying uphill along a broad front. Atop the slopes to the west, hundreds of Crows and Shoshones were galloping in pursuit of the retreating first assault, and many Lakota ponies were bleeding or dropping from exhaustion.
Forced to abandon any ambush plan, Crazy Horse had to think on his feet. A more mobile battle was possible, such as he had envisaged in the aftermath of the Bozeman Trail campaigning. First priority was to save their comrades, and the new arrivals poured a charge downhill through a gap in the bluffs. In these minutes, two actions stamped their imprint on Indian memories of the Battle of the Rosebud. In one not redounding to Oglala honor, Jack Red Cloud’s pony was shot from under him. Fleeing uphill, Jack was quirted by Crow scouts.
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