Jerome A. Greene

by 1864-1898 Indian War Veterans: Memories of Army Life;Campaigns in the West

  But I am digressing from the story. After breakfast, we pitched camp in the agency and for nearly a month the command was busy getting in shape for a winter campaign. The weather was unusually cold, but everybody was busy drilling, [conducting] target practice for the recruits, breaking in a string of sixty pack mules, drilling a detachment of Indian scouts, organizing the remaining 500 or 600 Indians, and issuing rations. The Hotchkiss field guns amused the Indians a great deal; we used a big lime rock and for a while an old cabin a mile away as a target, but as the cabin lasted only one hour for a target we had to fall back again on a large limestone cliff across the valley. They could understand the workings of the gun, but the explosion of the shell remained a mystery to the old Indians, and they actually were afraid of the shell. You could not get one to as much as touch a cartridge.

  About a week after the outbreak, General Miles took command of all the forces in the field, and as he had no superior as an Indian fighter and organizer everything went off according to schedule. The weather was fierce at times, but right at the start General Miles equipped all the troops with suitable clothing. His strategy consisted in making a big drive from all directions to one common center; this center was the Pine Ridge Agency. And he succeeded in this admirably. When the roundup was complete there was something like 18, 000 hostile Indians in one camp in White Clay Creek guarded by something like 3, 500 soldiers in four different camps. But I am getting ahead of the story. Nothing very exciting occurred at the Rosebud except that we received a big batch of recruits which nearly doubled the strength of the companies. It was of course quite a change for these boys from some quiet farm in Indiana where most of them came from, to an Indian agency in the middle of winter, where to go beyond the protection of the camp meant certain death. The issuing of beef on the hoof to the Indians was a revelation to most of them, for it was nothing to see an Indian riding through the camp at top speed with 100 feet of gut tied to the horn of his saddle, rope fashion. The gut represented his share of the beef. Or to see a number of otherwise attractive young squaws sitting around the agency building chawing raw beef gut, the same as a white girl would gum, while the blood was running down both sides of their jaws. However, they [the recruits] soon got bravely over being surprised at anything and by the time they got into Fort McKinney the following spring they were veterans in every sense of the word. The American soldier in every case proves his adaptability. They had also no more illusions about the Indian.

  Non-commissioned staff at Fort Niobrara, Nebraska, 1886. Standing, left to right: Hans Schroeder, Assistant Hospital Steward; Hans Petersen, Principal Musician, Eighth Infantry; Raymond Wiegand, Post Quartermaster Sergeant; Simon Askins, Commissary Sergeant. Sitting, left to right: Albert Fensch, Hospital Steward; Charles Cramer, Drum Major, Eighth Infantry; Professor Carlsen, Band Leader, Eighth Infantry; George Castle, Sergeant Major, Eighth Infantry; “Billy” Edwards, Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant, Eighth Infantry. Hospital Steward Fensch attended the dying Lieutenant Colonel William H. Lewis at the Battle of Punished Woman’s Fork in 1878, and prepared the account of that engagement presented in this book. Editor’s collection

  Christmas day came and went a little more dreary than it would have been at a fort, but not much more so. (This holiday is always a heart-wringer to young soldiers no matter where stationed. A soldier in the Regular Army in those days had to depend on his own resources for recreation; companionship outside of the fort we had none.)…. Like a flash out of the sky came the order to march at 9:30 p.m. on December 27, 1890. This made a stir, as it was thirty minutes after taps had sounded. The camp was full of wild rumors, but nobody outside of the commanding officer knew even where we were going. All we knew…was that we had to march at midnight. The command consisted of two troops of the Ninth Cavalry, the mountain guns, and Company A, Eighth Infantry, to guard the wagon train. Captain Folliot A. Whitney was in command and Charles Taggett was chief of scouts, of which we had six. Young Spotted Tail was a member of the scouts. This Charles Taggett was a half-breed, his father having been a missionary for forty years among the Brulé Sioux. He was highly educated and all the tribes had the greatest confidence in him. He became chief interpreter during the big powwows the Indians and General Miles had in February, 1891, as the Indians refused pointblank to have Frank Grouard act in that capacity. I nearly forgot to mention Foolish Elk, the best Indian scout at that time in Dakota—outside of Charles Taggett. I was sorry that my own company was not selected as an escort because A Company had the worst reputation in the Regular Army as a feeder, and I was assigned to this outfit for rations. No matter what the ration consisted of, in this company you received only hardtack, bacon, and coffee. Even beans were considered a luxury. On the other hand, my own company furnished the most substantial meals I ever saw anywhere. Here, as nowhere else, one can see the value of management and honesty [wherein] the members of one company perpetually went hungry while the next company lived on the fat of the land on the identical same rations.

  Promptly at midnight we pulled out. The new moon went down before we were a mile on the road. The cavalry disappeared in the darkness, so we just plodded along the best we could. Sometimes we noticed that we were on a trail, sometimes for miles we followed old buffalo trails. If we were going into action, we knew it could not be a surprise, for we could see the Indian signal fires sixty miles to the northwest as soon as we left the agency, and so the chances were the Indians in the badlands knew more about our movement than we knew ourselves. But we never worried over the future. We were happy to be on the road again, no matter where it would lead us. It was bitterly cold, but we were equipped for a winter campaign, were young and optimistic. It sounds funny, but the only thing we ever worried about was to keep our stomachs full of chow, and to tell the truth we had good reason to worry about that if we had to live with A Company. We did suffer terribly at times for the want of water. This was on account of the sowbelly diet, improperly cooked, and sometimes, in these badlands, where there was no wood, not cooked at all.

  But on the whole we could eat snow, but we could not help but be sorry for the mules. We fed [them] corn, all they could eat, but no hay sometimes for weeks at a time. All the springs were frozen tight unless we came to a good-sized spring, and this happened but twice in 128 miles. The work and pack animals received no water. We could, of course, not turn them loose for a minute, for the Indians would stampede them in spite of all we could do. But you must remember that the field army is always made up of young men who can stand anything; the same rule applies to the mules. We received most of the pack and team mules fresh and unbroken from Kentucky and they were a congregation of devils. There were only a few that would not bite, strike, and kick at the same time, and what that means with sharp shod animals after being tied all night in a blizzard to a wagon wheel, without hay, must be lived through. You cannot imagine it. The wagon boss nearly had his ear bitten off one day by what was supposed to be a mule, but really was a bull dog.

  Well, just at break of day we came to White River, quite a large stream at this place, something like 150 feet wide and from three to four feet deep. The ice was thick enough to hold up the cavalry horses, but not the heavy-loaded six-mule wagons. So a passage had to be cleared out, and after much difficulty getting the wagons down the steep banks without upsetting them, we got the wagon train across and camped on the other side to cook coffee. One six-mule team would not tighten a tug for some reason after they got in the stream, and so another six-mule teamster had to get in that ice water up to his hips and hitch on another team. While this was going on, the atmosphere turned blue, and it was not from the cold, either. After we filled up on sowbelly and alkali water we pulled out again about 8 a.m. The cavalry left us here again and we did not catch up with them until next day about noon, when we found them standing by their horses near a dry lake during a blizzard. We ourselves camped at 9 p.m. on a bare hillside without wood or water that night and raw bacon and snow was our supper. We had marched twenty-on
e hours and were fifty-eight miles from the Rosebud Agency.

  At 4 o’clock sharp [December 28] reveille sounded and as there was nothing to cook and the mules would not eat their corn unless they were watered, and there was no water, it did not take us long to get ready, and at 5 a.m. we pulled out in a blizzard. We pounded along in the cavalry and then pulled about four miles further to where the scouts thought we could get some water. We camped here about one hour and watered the poor mules and filled them up on corn, for we were told that there was nearly a twenty-mile hike ahead of us before camp would be made for the night. We made camp this night something like three hours after dark at an old deserted ranch. In spite of hunger and cold, we slept like dead men and it seemed only an hour when reveille called us again to put icy harness on the mules and frozen shoes and overcoats on ourselves. At 5 a.m. we were on our way. By daylight, when we were something like six or more miles out, Foolish Elk, who was always the furthest out, came loping back to the command with another scout, a white man. After they had a short talk with the major, we left our line of march and struck out northwest through those desolate hills of Dakota. We knew that this scout had brought important news. The command was kept in close order, only the Indian scouts were from one to three miles out. We were told that no stop would be made for coffee that day and not to spare the buckskin. As we had been running a race with the devil for the last three days and nights, we were as anxious as the commanding officer to get some place, no matter where, and we all pushed to the limit. We naturally thought that the race since five in the morning was made for the purpose of heading off a band of Indians and the day’s march would wind up with a fight. We knew that Short Bull had left the badlands with nearly 1, 000 warriors, and several other subchiefs had done likewise. But we were disappointed in our hopes before the sun went down on this day.

  Between 2 and 3 o’clock in the afternoon we saw several of the Indian scouts galloping back to the command, and a few minutes later we were halted and the command given to corral the train. In the meantime, Captain Whitney advanced over the hill with the cavalry, but before we got the train in shape for defense an orderly came back and ordered us to advance again. About a half mile further on, we crossed the brow of a small hill and beheld a small valley about one-half mile wide spread out in front of us. A small creek fringed with brush and cottonwoods meandered down through the center and finally disappeared to the northwest in some pine-covered rough hills. This was our first sight of Wounded Knee Creek. Between us and the creek there was a small egg-shaped hill, approximately fifty feet higher than the surrounding bottom land. This hill was occupied by the cavalry, whom we soon joined. We were told that a battle had taken place the day before, on December 29th, just across the creek from us, but with whom we had no way of knowing. We could see on the other side of the creek the ground strewn with the bodies of horses and even wagons and the remnants of a burned camp, and what looked like the bodies of human beings could be seen over an area of 200 or 300 acres. The first thing the troops did was to start a trench large enough to hold all of the 120 men in the command. The job actually took several days, for the ground was frozen as hard as flint. Before we got something to eat, Captain Whitney took the scouts, the doctor, and the stretcher bearers and my ammunition wagon with hospital supplies and went over to the battlefield to take care of the wounded if there were any. I just got as far as the first dead pony and Indian when the mules gave the place just one whiff and look and stampeded, as luck would have it, toward the creek, where they finally tangled themselves up in the woods and here I tied them, took my gun, and went back to the battlefield.

  The dead Indians were laying around single and in bunches over about 200 acres, and the first sight of the mutilated bodies and the expressions of the faces had the effect of turning one sick. But, of course, you get used to it. Our first effort was to look for wounded in order to find out what regiment had been in the fight. We found, after a careful search, five wounded Indians. We packed them to an old cabin and made them as comfortable as possible. They didn’t, however, answer a single question of the scouts. The only word they ever uttered was “water.” We never found out until the next evening that the fight had been between the Seventh Cavalry and Big Foot’s tribe. These wounded had been lying on the battlefield a little over twenty-four hours and we knew they could not live. One squaw was shot five times through the body. But to the last they were defiant and our reward for making them comfortable were looks of the blackest hate. You could not help but admire such courage in the face of the dead. As I stated, we made them as comfortable as possible for the night, but we found them all dead next morning. The battlefield was divided by a deep washout thirty to forty feet wide and all of fifteen feet deep; several cow trails crossed this dry gulch and near the lower end, toward the creek, a wagon road crossed also. In searching for the wounded, I ran down this road and on coming out on the other bank I was confronted by a pile of dead Indians. On top of all, and in a sitting position, with his arm extended full length and the forefinger pointing straight up in the sky, was an Indian, painted green as grass from head to toe, and looking with wide open, clear eyes, straight at me. It startled me and the next second I had a bead on his forehead, but second thought made me hesitate about pulling the trigger, for while a soldier will kill in the line of duty, unnecessary shooting is murder nevertheless, and so, after looking at him for a minute over the sights of the gun, I noticed that he never batted his eyes and so I came to the conclusion that he was dead and so he was. Lucky for me I did not shoot—the boys would have guyed me to death.

  The next day we were busy getting the camp in shape for defense; we even dug a round trench deep enough at each end of the hill to hold the Hotchkiss, for after all we were only a small command of ninety-six men and officers and there were from 30, 000 to 40, 000 Indians roaming around, and about the poorest policy a commander of troops could follow was to get careless or underestimate the fighting qualifications and determination of the Sioux Indians. Along in the afternoon a scouting party with dispatches from General Miles came into camp, and as the escort of the dispatch rider consisted of troopers of the Seventh Cavalry who had been in the fight, we got the first account of the battle. We tried to get one of these troopers to go over the battlefield with us to show us on the ground just how it happened, but he stated that his bunky got killed and he never wanted to see the place again.

  [The following account of the fighting, while hearsay, represents an apparently commonly held view of the action among the troops.] It seems that the Seventh Cavalry had been on the road for several days from the badlands to the Pine Ridge Agency, with the tribe of Indians as prisoners, but they were not disarmed. The government throughout this campaign insisted on the Indians giving up their arms, but the Indians refused to the last to comply with this condition. They told General Miles again and again they would [not?] surrender their arms, and the Battle of Wounded Knee was proof of their contention. The night before the battle they camped on what turned out to be the last camping grounds for all of the Indians but one tiny papoose and a great many of the soldiers. The guy ropes of the soldiers tents and the tepees joined. Forsyth had orders, it seems, to disarm this tribe before bringing them to the agency, and as this was the last day’s march he called the chiefs for a powwow early in the morning of December 29 to his tent. While this powwow was going on a row started among the soldiers and Indians and at the first shot the chiefs pulled their war clubs, which they had concealed under their blankets, and fell on the officers, knocking the brains out of Captain George D. Wallace and wounding several others. In two minutes it was a free-for-all fight, and the mix-up was so great that the soldiers were killing one another, so the general sounded “Boots and Saddles,” the soldiers extricated themselves as best they could, made for their horses, mounted and rode over a low hill, halted here, formed into their proper organization again, and prepared to charge the Indians and their own camp. At this stage of the game, the Indians made a fa
tal mistake. When they saw the soldiers ride over the nearest hill 400 yards away, they thought they were running away, so they crossed the dry gulch on foot and horseback, and some even in wagons, and started across the short flat and up the hill. The leaders, who were on fast horses, nearly got to the top of the hill when the soldiers came back as fast as their horses could charge. The Indian furthest up the hill was a young squaw on a pinto pony and it looked as if she received the first fire from all the troopers in the regiment, for she was literally riddled with bullets. I counted over forty bullet holes in the upper part of her body. The troopers shot and ran the Indians across the flat and into the dry gulch; they got no chance to make a stand here, for the soldiers were right on top of them. The gulch was literally piled full in places with horses, wagons, and dead Indians. Some tried to climb up the cow trails on the other side, but few managed to do it and get to the tepees, which were just beyond. At the bottom of every trail there was a pile of dead, and you could see by their positions that they tumbled back down in the gulch after being shot on the trail above. The whole thing happened so quickly that all of the Indians did not get a chance to pursue the soldiers. About seventy-five bucks, most of the squaws, and all of the papooses were in and around the tepees yet, and these now cut slits in the tepees and opened a murderous fire on the soldiers on the other side of the gulch only 75 to 100 yards away with telling effect. But the Hotchkiss opened up on these with case shot and soon silenced them. During this last phase of the fight, all the papooses but one were killed. Of course, this was very sad, but it could not be avoided. (This one papoose was found alive and uninjured by an officer, who raised and educated it as his own daughter.)