Trumpet on the Land: The Aftermath of Custer's Massacre, 1876 tp-10

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Let’s keep going,” Seamus told them.

  “Cross another creek?” came a whimper from the darkness that swallowed the group behind Sibley and his noncoms.

  “That’s right,” replied the lieutenant.

  “That water’s cold as ice,” Valentine Rufus said, stepping forward.

  Sibley inquired, “Was it you complained?”

  “No. It was me, Lieutenant,” and another soldier inched forward.

  “Collins. You been holding up till now—”

  Henry Collins tried to explain. “I can’t face another crossing. Getting soaked, sir. I’ll not make it to the other side.”

  “I’ll help you,” Sibley offered.

  “No, Lieutenant. Leave me.”

  “Me too, sir,” Sergeant Cornwall added.

  The officer tried to coax the pair, cajole them, even threatening them with court-martial if they did not follow.

  “You can shoot me now—or I can just wait here for the Injuns to get me, sir,” Collins admitted. “But I ain’t going another step.”

  Finally Sibley relented. “If I leave you two here, you must promise to stay right here. Stay back to the brush over there. We’ll send horses for you. You won’t have to cross another swollen river on foot.”

  It was just as well, Donegan decided. Let them stay there so the rest could press on while the light was coming on that ninth day of July. Sibley could not risk the lives of the others while he argued with the obstinate pair. Funny, he brooded as they cat-walked down into the cold waters of Big Goose Creek, how men who will resolve to face bullets and war clubs and scalping knives won’t dare set foot again into a mountain stream. Courage is not only a fleeting thing for some, he thought, but a fickle mistress as well.

  By the time the detail crossed to the south bank and plodded on, Grouard told Sibley he figured they still had a dozen miles left to go. The cold of the stream poured through what was left of the soldiers’ battered boots cut and carved by rocks and hard abuse. On they limped into the coming of day, heading for the mouth of Little Goose Creek. Haggard and starving, the men fairly dragged their rifles through the dust and grass, the detail getting strung out for several hundred yards through the tangle of willows and cottonwoods.

  Near five o’clock they spotted some warriors moving from south to north, off to the east of them. With little or no cover to speak of, none of the men made any effort to conceal themselves. Instead they watched the distant horsemen move on past.

  Seamus said, “If they saw us—”

  “They had to see us,” Bat interrupted.

  Donegan kept his head turned as he walked. “But they ain’t coming.”

  “Figured they didn’t see us,” Grouard said.

  “No way they could miss us,” Pourier protested.

  “Must think we’re from their village.”

  Sibley grabbed Donegan’s arm, clutching it in weary desperation as he pleaded, “You don’t think that big village has attacked Crook, do you?”

  “Ain’t like Injuns to attack an army camp.”

  “Still, they jumped us at the Rosebud,” grumbled Sergeant Day.

  “We ain’t got far to go now,” Seamus gave as his only reply. “Just keep moving: we’ll be having breakfast with the rest of Crook’s boys.”

  They grumbled, whispered, murmured among themselves. Yet they kept moving. That was most important. Keep them moving.

  “The birds!” Sibley squealed suddenly.

  Until that moment Seamus hadn’t been aware of them. Those tiny prairie wrens, each no bigger than the palm of his hand. The branches of the trees and willow were thick with them. Chirping and warbling with the coming of day.

  “One of ’em ain’t much more’n a mouthful,” Donegan replied.

  “A mouthful?” asked Sergeant Day. “I could do with just a mouthful. What do you say, Lieutenant?”

  Sibley asked, “Mr. Donegan—care to go bird hunting with us?”

  Some of the men threw down their carbines and tore at the buttons to their cavalry tunics. Bare-chested, they crept as close to the birds as they dared, then flung their shirts over the branches. After a few frantic attempts, met only with a maddening flutter of hundreds of wings, Sibley cried out.

  “I got one! Dear God—I got one!”

  The lieutenant carefully pulled a hand from beneath the shirt he had used as a net and produced a small sparrow. With a sudden snap of the bird’s neck Sibley began yanking clumps of feathers from the creature’s tail, back, and breast. Then as Seamus and some of the others watched, the officer sank his teeth into the raw, red, feathered flesh of the small bird.

  Donegan asked, “Don’t you wanna cook him first, Lieutenant?”

  The bird between his teeth, Sibley looked up at the Irishman, his eyes glazed in some primordial ecstasy. He licked his bloody lips as he reluctantly took the bird out of his mouth, sucking so he would not lose a single drop of all those juices. Wagging his head, he replied, “Don’t want to take the time to get a fire started.” Then he bit down ravenously again on what was left of the tiny breast.

  Pourier wagged his head and said to the lieutenant, “That’s pretty rough.”

  “Yes, Bat,” Sibley replied, his mouth turned a bright crimson, “but I’m so hungry that I don’t know what to do!”

  In the following minutes others began to capture their prey, devouring the tiny birds raw, the meat and blood still warm.

  Donegan said to Pourier, “Let’s see if we can find some of those Injin turnips you told me of.”

  Leaving the bird hunters behind as the sky lightened, the pair strode through the brush with their knives ready for digging. From time to time Bat would drop to his knees, showing Seamus the leafy top of the wild plant, uprooting it with his knife. Hastily scraping the moist dirt from the plump tuber, one or the other would split his treasure in half and share what he had just unearthed. At first Donegan thought it tasted like licking the bottom of a stable stall and figured the root couldn’t give him much animal strength—the way the bird meat would those who were devouring the wrens and sparrows. But the prairie turnips just might give him enough that he could limp on in to Crook’s camp.

  “Let’s show the lieutenant and his men what to look for, Bat.”

  Back among the soldiers, Pourier held out two of the leafy tufts and instructed Sibley’s men on how to find the turnips in the boggy ground. Within minutes the soldiers had scattered to dig up their own.

  It wasn’t long before the sun rose off the east, red as a buffalo cow’s afterbirth strewn upon the new prairie grass. The coming of that ninth day of July found Sibley’s shabby, bloodied patrol setting out again. Up each new slope they crawled, more dead than alive, expecting, hoping, praying each in his own way to find on the far side that inviting fringe of cottonwood that would mark their arrival at Little Goose Creek. But disappointment was all they found for the next hour and a half. More and more hills. More valleys. More rugged, rocky ground.

  “Look!” Sibley said, loudly.

  The party stumbled to a halt, those behind coming along at a clumsy lurch, finally stopping among the rest as they pointed ahead. Two horses grazed near the crest of the next hill.

  Seamus warned, “We better wait here, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes,” Sibley agreed, motioning for his anxious men to be patient. “We’ll see about things.”

  As they watched, the horses eventually turned, and even from that distance the men could see that the animals were saddled. The shimmer of reflected metal flashed beneath the sun’s new light. The glimmer of carbines in saddle boots.

  “Mary, our Mother of God!” Finerty exclaimed, lunging forward.

  He was the first of the massed wave that hurried out of hiding from the brushy willow, making for the hillside.

  “Careful!” Donegan bellowed, struggling to hurry along himself, afraid of what might be a trap.

  On the slope of the far hill a pair of men suddenly rose from the tall grass, lumbering toward their
animals and yanking their carbines out of saddle pockets.

  “Don’t fire!” hollered someone near the front.

  Others pleaded weakly, “Please! Don’t shoot!”

  “Stand and identify yourselves!”

  “Lieu … Lieutenant Frederick … Frederick Sibley. U.S. S-second Cavalry.”

  “Shit!” one of the two cried, the butt of his carbine sinking to the grass. “We thought you was dead, sir!”

  “We were,” Finerty spoke for them all as he came forward, a dozen of the soldiers right behind him. “Believe me—we were surely good as dead.”

  Sibley himself came forward. The two soldiers snapped salutes as the lieutenant asked, “Are you on picket duty?”

  “No, sir,” one answered. “We got permission to go hunting this morning. Break up the monotony at camp.”

  “M-monotony?” Finerty repeated. Then he broke out in a crazy, hysterical laugh.

  “Told you while back, newsman,” Bat chided. “Said you’d have lots of good stories to tell your readers, you decide to come with us.”

  “Damn you, Bat!” Finerty roared, whirling on the scout. “Leave me be about it!”

  Sibley said to one of the pair, “Private, I want you to ride back to camp. Get some horses from your troop, any troop. And ask Captain Dewees or Rawolle for that matter—” The lieutenant caught himself and remembered his academy courtesy. “With my compliments, of course—ask them to supply an escort to return with those horses.”

  “Yes, sir,” the soldier said, and trotted up the slope to his mount.

  Sibley hollered as loud as he could, “Tell them we’ve left three men behind who can’t come in on foot.”

  The private reached his horse, turning to reply, “I will, Lieutenant.”

  Seamus came forward to stand beside Sibley. “And, Private?”

  “Yeah?” the soldier answered as he rose to his saddle.

  “Before you go, empty your saddlebags of everything you have to eat.”

  He seemed confused. “Everything I have to—”

  “You heard the man,” Sibley instructed. “These men … my men—they haven’t had anything to eat … to eat in—”

  “A long goddamned time!” Finerty roared for them all.

  Chapter 16

  8-13 July 1876

  THE INDIANS

  Another Indian Agent Heard From—

  A Piteous Appeal

  WASHINGTON, July 14—Indian Inspector Van Derveree reports that at a council with the Indians of Red Cloud and Spotted Tail Agencies, June 30, the chiefs and others expressed a willingness to relinquish the Black Hills country on the terms offered by Van Derveree. The chiefs promised to keep their people at home, and to remain about the agencies. They declare, and the evidence here sustains their declaration, that the only Sioux who are absent are the Cheyennes who have committed depredations in the neighborhood and who have gone north to join the hostiles …

  Appended to the report is the following statement of Bear Stands Up, an Indian of the Spotted Tail agency, who arrived from Sitting Bull’s camp June 25th … Sitting Bull sends word that he does not intend to molest any one south of the Black Hills, but will fight the whites in that country as long as the question is unsettled and if not settled as long as he lives … He does not want to fight the whites—only steal from them. White men steal, and Indians won’t come to the settlements. Whites kill themselves and make the Black Hills stink with so many dead men … Sitting Bull says if troops come out to him he must fight them, but if they don’t come out he intends to visit this agency and he will counsel his people for peace.

  Colonel Wesley Merritt did not choose to march east to the troubled agencies that eighth day of July.

  Nor south to Laramie.

  Instead he decided on a third option: to stay put right there on Sage Creek, where he felt more mobile, closer to the agencies, and unquestionably closer to the northbound trail used by any hostiles fleeing the reservations. From that stockade he could respond quickly to trouble in either direction—Fort Laramie or Red Cloud.

  Through the next four days the regiment sat, fighting the thumb-sized horseflies that tormented man and beast alike. Scouting parties were sent out, but none returned having sighted any war parties or any fresh trails. Then on the evening of 11 July, the night the Fifth drew its first beef ration of the campaign, more orders arrived.

  “We’re marching back to Laramie,” King explained to Cody.

  On the lieutenant’s face it was plain to see the ardent fervor to get in his licks against the enemy. Ever since learning of the Little Bighorn disaster, that feeling was something tangible and contagious: Bill was himself every bit as eager to get a crack at those who had wiped George Armstrong Custer and half his regiment from the face of the earth.

  “From there we’re going north to Fetterman,” King went on to explain Sheridan’s new orders. “Then we can finally be on our way to reinforce Crook camped somewhere near the Big Horns.”

  At dawn the next morning, Wednesday, the command marched away from Sage Creek, heading back to the Cardinal’s Chair on the headwaters of the Niobrara River, sixteen miles closer to Fort Laramie. That evening brought exactly the sort of furious thunderstorm that midsummer had made famous on the western plains, complete with deafening thunder and a great display of celestial fireworks, accompanied by a generous, wind-driven mix of rain and hail that painfully pelted the regiment, soaking every soldier to the skin.

  Beneath overcast skies on the morning of the thirteenth, the Fifth plodded eighteen more miles and went into camp by another prominent landmark in Wyoming Territory, Rawhide Butte. Sundown brought with it another drenching thundershower.

  That very night it was whispered that Merritt had relieved Captain Robert A. Wilson from command of his A Troop under a dark cloud of suspicion. Cody learned from Lieutenant King that Wilson had long been a shirker who had conveniently wrangled himself periods of leave during the regiment’s roughest duty in Arizona during the Apache campaign. But until the long, arduous scouts Merritt had demanded of his men, as well as the soul-crushing news of the Custer disaster, no one had wanted to believe the captain was in reality a coward.

  “Surgeon Powell told me in confidence that Wilson gave himself a nosebleed and swallowed the blood,” King declared to the Fifth’s scout after dark that night. “Seems he intended to go on sick call and spit it back up to make the physicians think he was bleeding from the lung.”

  “How did the surgeon know Wilson was shamming?”

  King whispered, “Powell says blood brought up fresh from the lungs looks a lot different. So on checking him over, they found where Wilson had cut the membranes inside his nose. Found out, he immediately broke down and admitted the ruse.”

  No longer considered an officer of the Fifth, Wilson was compelled by Merritt and Carr to resign his commission as soon as the regiment returned to Fort Laramie, one short day’s march to the south—or take his chances with a court-martial. Wilson again chose the coward’s way out.

  But instead of marching for Laramie the morning of the fourteenth, at reveille the colonel called his officers together to inform them of the dispatches he had received late the night before. Cody stood nearby, every bit as expectant as any of those veterans in blue.

  “I’ve received news from the agencies, via Major Townsend at Laramie. He in turn received word from Major Jordan at Camp Robinson—wired on the eleventh— that states the Indians intend to make a mass break for the north in a matter of days.”

  “That means they could be fleeing north any day now, General,” Carr advised.

  “Exactly,” Merritt replied.

  “With the general’s permission?” Cody said sourly. “Of course the Injuns are going to jump their reservations—I’ll bet they already heard we’ve abandoned their Powder River trail and left the way wide open for them.”

  Several of the other officers murmured their agreement with Cody that they should never have marched south, away from the Chey
enne River.

  Raising his hand, Merritt quickly quieted them. “I want to break camp on the double this morning. General Carr and I have determined to march southeast rather than directly south toward Laramie.”

  “What about our orders to march north to reinforce Crook?” asked a clearly disappointed Captain Julius W. Mason.

  “May I answer that, General?” Carr inquired, using Merritt’s Civil War rank. When the colonel nodded, Carr continued. “We’ve discussed this and are both of the same mind. It seems our most pressing urgency is to stop the flow of warriors north, to prevent them from reinforcing the hostile camps that crushed Custer’s Seventh. To do that, in our opinion, takes higher precedence over reaching Crook for the present time.”

  “Remember, gentlemen,” Merritt drove home his point in the gray light of dawn, “there are between eight hundred and a thousand Cheyenne warriors still on those two agencies. We could have our hands more than full right here, without having to march north to the Big Horns to join up with Crook for a fight. At the moment, those warriors think their highway is open. I intend to take the Fifth and close the trap on them.” After a minute’s thoughtful pause the colonel concluded, “If there are no further matters to discuss at this time, let’s be marching east.”

  By noon the Fifth came upon the place where the Camp Robinson-Fort Laramie Road crossed Rawhide Creek. Merritt immediately dispatched Major Thaddeus Stanton to press on to Camp Jordan, there to determine the present situation at Red Cloud Agency. Captain Emil Adams’s C Troop was to accompany Stanton as far as the trail’s crossing at Running Water Creek, a branch of the Niobrara River, at which point the old German’s men were to begin patrolling along the Robinson-Laramie Road. While awaiting Stanton’s report, the rest of the regiment would remain in bivouac at Rawhide Creek, sixty-five miles southeast of the Red Cloud Agency—ready to ride at a moment’s notice.

  How long they would have to wait, no one could say. Some men fished, others caught up on sleep, but just about all debated what should be Merritt’s next move to stem the outgoing tide of warriors from the reservations.