I would imagine that for most readers of western history the Sibley scout comes as something new, perhaps just as new as the skirmish on the Warbonnet. While that military success was small (only one Indian killed), the impact of what Merritt’s Fifth Cavalry did would long reverberate across the northern plains. Perhaps as many as eight hundred Cheyenne were turned back to their agency, unable to bolster the numbers of those warrior bands recently victorious over Crook and Custer. Yet it was something far more intangible that made the Warbonnet significant that summer of Sheridan’s trumpet on the land.
No matter how small it was—it was the army’s first victory.
Except for a few tandem-wired telephone poles, that peaceful, rolling prairie grassland near present-day Montrose, Nebraska, seems unchanged in the last hundred-plus years. The place where Cody had his celebrated duel with a Cheyenne war chief was at the time called Indian Creek in regimental returns of the day, then War Bonnet Creek in later military records, but is today called Hat Creek.
There might well be a lot of confusion for those of you who go looking in the northwest corner of Nebraska for the site of that famous skirmish, simply because all three of those names appear for three separate creeks in that immediate area. While “Hat” and “War Bonnet” are two differing translations for the same Lakota term, the name of a tributary of the Cheyenne River (Mini Pusa to the Sioux), the creek called the War Bonnet on today’s maps is some forty miles south of what is today called Hat Creek, where the Fifth Cavalry successfully ambushed Little Wolfs Cheyenne.
The creek still rises with spring runoff and falls with autumnal drought, just as it has every year as white homesteaders and cattlemen moved in and pacified the land. For more than half a century no one knew for sure where the site was, nor did anyone seem to care.
By the mid-1880s the nearby town of Montrose had grown to boast a population of sixty-five! When the Sioux began to dance back the ghosts in the summer of 1890, the frightened citizenry constructed a stockade on the highest hill in the event the ghost dancers spilled off their reservation and came looking for white scalps—the very same hill used as a lookout post by King that morning of July 17, 1876.
It would take another thirty years before anyone got interested in marking the spot, and it was a group of Wyoming citizens who ended up doing it.
In 1929, while marking Wyoming’s historic sites, the Wyoming Landmark Commission discovered that the Warbonnet skirmish might well have taken place in their state. Four men promptly formed “The Amalgamated Association of Hunters of the Spot Where Buffalo Bill Killed Yellow Hand.” Attempting to use Charles King’s book, Campaigning with Crook, the association found itself empty-handed that first summer, having been sidetracked mostly by confusing geographical names. No success, until they finally followed still-visible wagon tracks of Lieutenant Hall’s supply train. Only then did the searchers discover that the site rested less than a quarter of a mile from the buildings of Montrose.
Still the commissioners felt they needed complete verification. In October of that year the four succeeded in convincing an aging Charles King to visit the site. Eighty-four at the time and in failing health, the retired general was unable to identify the battle site.
The “trees were too big,” King said.
In July of the following year King returned west to visit the four Wyoming residents, this time joined by Chris Madsen, the Fifth Cavalry signalman who had been near the site of Cody’s duel, an emigrant soldier who would later became a famous lawman in Oklahoma Territory and charge to the top of San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders.” Madsen had none of King’s doubts. Here and there the old cavalryman led the researchers across the site, relating who did what and where. King concurred.
This event led to the efforts made by Mrs. Johnny Baker, wife of Bill Cody’s foster son, to erect a monument on the site to commemorate Buffalo Bill’s defeat of Yellow Hair. At the same time Madsen led his own subscription effort to erect a second monument, this one to the Fifth Cavalry. Both were dedicated in September 1934. While King and Baker had passed on by that time, an erect and attentive Chris Madsen listened to the glowing speeches given that warm, early-autumn day—then rose to the rostrum in that dry prairie breeze, took off his hat, and wiped a dark bandanna across his forehead, then told that crowd in the simple language of a plainsman what the Fighting Fifth Cavalry had accomplished that morning fifty-eight years before.
Both those monuments can still be seen by the rare visitor who crosses that ground today. On a towering stone and cement spire, a plaque reads:
SITE
Where
Seven Troops of the Fifth U.S. Cavalry
Under
Col. WESLEY MERRITT
Intercepted 800 Cheyenne
and Sioux, Enroute to Join
The Hostiles in the North. July 17, 1876
The Indians Were Driven Back to the
Red Cloud and Spotted Tail Reservations.
Nearby, a short, squat stone-and-cement monument stands just about where Madsen stated the war chief fell. It reads:
On This Spot
W. F. Cody BUFFALO BILL
Killed
YELLOW HAIR (OR HAND)
The Cheyenne Leader Who, With
A Party of Warriors, Dashed
Down This Ravine To Waylay
Two Soldier Couriers Coming
From the West
July 17, 1876
For many years Cody’s participation in that dramatic “duel” was doubted in many circles, just as Frank and Luther North had done all they could to cast doubt on Buffalo Bill’s being the one who had actually killed Dog Soldier Chief Tall Bull at Summit Springs on July 11, 1869. But none of the assertions from others who claimed to have killed Yellow Hair have withstood close scrutiny. All those boasts are, as are the claims of the North brothers regarding Summit Springs, dispelled by Don Russell in his compelling book on Cody.
Still, a sergeant with the Fifth Cavalry can take credit for providing the best confirmation that it was indeed Cody who met and killed the Cheyenne. John Powers, stationed that summer at Fort Hays in Kansas, was what we now call a “stringer,” paid to send back reports on the campaign trail to his hometown newspaper, the Ellis County Star.
Powers’s account, composed in the days immediately following the dramatic skirmish, confirms the account of Charles King, written four years later in Campaigning with Crook: the approach of Hall’s wagon train, its guard of infantry companies, Cody’s leading the soldiers to ambush the ambushers intent on butchering the two couriers, Cody’s firing of the first shot (which killed the Cheyenne’s war pony), his firing a second shot that felled the war chief himself, and the charge of the Fifth Cavalry past the scout who stood over Yellow Hair’s body.
That scene brings to mind a minor controversy in the three accounts used to write the one you have just read. While one of those contemporary reports (each of them written by witnesses of the skirmish) states that Cody shot Yellow Hair in the chest, two of them state unequivocally that Buffalo Bill shot the Cheyenne in the head. When one studies Cody’s abilities with firearms exhibited throughout his life, it isn’t at all hard to believe he was in fact capable of shooting Yellow Hair in the head. Nonetheless, I’m still uncertain that a hardened plainsman like Cody would chance taking a shot at his enemy’s head, when he had a far bigger target in the Cheyenne’s broad chest.
While no testimony specifically reports that Yellow Hair wore his prize scalp around his neck, I have taken that poetic license with the tale, making the trophy torn from the head of a white enemy just the target Bill uses when he takes deadly aim at the war chief.
And that brings up another interesting question I haven’t been able to answer to my own satisfaction: how the name Yellow Hair, over time, eventually became Yellow Hand. Was it primarily Cody’s mistake when he sent the scalp and warbonnet on to his friend in Rochester, New York? Or was it Baptiste “Little Bat” Garnier who made the error when he trans
lated the war chiefs name for those right there at the Warbonnet skirmish that hot July morning? Or was it some unnamed historian’s attempt to distinguish between this minor Cheyenne war chief and the term the Southern Cheyenne used when referring to George Armstrong Custer (Hiestzi, or “Yellow Hair”)?
All we know for certain is that the warrior’s name was indeed Yellow Hair because, it is believed, he proudly wore the blond scalp of a white man (or woman—accounts differ on the sex of the person who once wore that yellow hair). Despite the fact that the sign reads “Yellow Hand,” any visitor to the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, Wyoming, will see for himself not only this most famous scalp of the Sioux War, but Yellow Hair’s feathered bonnet and trailer,his pistol and shield, his knife and blanket, along with the dead Cheyenne’s bridle and quirt.
It is beyond me how anyone can claim Cody ended up with these spoils if he wasn’t the one who stood over the war chiefs body, and if he himself didn’t remove them from Yellow Hair as the Fifth Cavalry began its chase of Little Wolfs band!
By that time, exactly a month after Crook’s stalemate on the Rosebud, the press had already begun its assault on the general and his handling of the campaign to that point. It was the contention of editors both east and west that Terry and Crook would never find the hostiles, that there was little hope of success. While most of the nation’s papers clamored for results in the Sioux War, the New York Tribune went so far as to blame the government’s policy in the Black Hills for the army’s lack of success, also claiming that Sitting Bull had made it clear his Sioux would not return to their reservations until the army drove the white men out of their sacred Paha Sapa.
By early August several Montana newspapers were reporting that the hostile Sioux had offered Canadian tribes an alliance against the whites on both sides of the Medicine Line. While the Canadian Cree, Blackfoot, and Assiniboine refused, the citizens of Montana Territory nonetheless fretted. Reminding his Montana readers that across the border lived more than twelve thousand warriors, the editor of the Deer Lodge New North-West wrote, “If they were to join the tribes now fighting the United States, nothing on this side of the line could prevent them.”
At the same time, the Fort Benton Record received a report from Fort Walsh just across the border in Canada that Yankton Sioux were camped close by and “making mischief.” Clearly the cry was going out: the public wanted something done, and now.
Fearing most that Sitting Bull would cross the Yellowstone and reach Canada, General Alfred Terry had eventually given up all thought of working in concert with the loner Crook. For a week he worked Bill Cody and his forces north but found nothing of the wild bands. On September 3 Terry received word from Crook, then on Beaver Creek, an affluent of the Little Missouri, that the Indian trail he had been following had petered out. To Terry there was little more his men could accomplish without using up the supplies Colonel Nelson Miles’s men would need for the coming winter as they manned the Tongue River Cantonment from which they were to patrol the lower Yellowstone.
On September 5 Terry disbanded his expedition, sent Gibbon’s infantry and Brisbin’s Second Cavalry back west to Fort Ellis and Fort Shaw, then went with the Seventh Cavalry itself as it limped home to a somber Fort Abraham Lincoln draped in mourning.
If anything was to be done now, it would be up to George Crook and his Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition to do it. But first they had to find the Sioux.
As the soldiers came trudging along through the mud, weeks behind them, the warrior bands had already reached the traditional camping grounds they had been visiting for generations. Here beside the Mashtincha Putin (what they called Rabbit Lip Creek), they raised their lodges at the foot of those long gray bluffs dappled with jackpine. The Sioux term for the geographic feature, Paha Zizipela, translates to “thin (or “horizontal”) butte”—as a snake is thin and moves horizontally, in the sense of the buttes running north-south. These buttes are indeed long (fifty miles) and very thin (less than four miles in width).
The exact number of Miniconjou in that village has long remained a source of controversy. At the time of the battles Frank Grouard told Mills and Crook the village contained two hundred occupants. Anson Mills later stated that he learned from the captives that the village comprised “two hundred souls, one hundred of whom were warriors.” Yet this ratio of warriors to other occupants seems unusually high.
However, when we apply the 1855 Thomas Twiss method of counting (whereby it was determined there were two men of fighting age for every lodge—“fighting age” determined as men from their midteens to their late thirties), we find a much more likely figure of seventy-four warriors in that camp that Mills attacked at dawn.
Still, that figure might seem a little high to those knowledgeable in the Plains Indian culture. By applying Harry H. Anderson’s computations (7 Indians per normal-sized lodge, of which 1.29 are warriors), we come up with a village population of some 260 Miniconjou and 48 warriors. When you add to those 48 any boys eager to defend their families, as well as older men and a few women who would stay behind to fight—one can see how Captain Mills just might arrive at an estimate of 100 combatants he faced on the morning of September 9.
While we can verify that Crook’s combined forces numbered just shy of 2,000 men, historians have disagreed as to the number of warriors Sitting Bull led against what the Sioux believed would be only 150 pony soldiers—those who attacked at dawn with Anson Mills. Estimates range anywhere between 600 to 800, although a few winters later Sitting Bull himself would say that he had led a thousand warriors back to attack Three Stars. No matter if he did have that many—the Sioux were still up against two-to-one odds when they tried to make it tough on Crook’s retreating army.
Rumors had long existed that the soldiers had killed their warrior captives before pulling away from the village. Four years after the battle Charles King himself made note of those rumors in his Campaigning with Crook, as did Don Rickey, Jr., in Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay. But National Park Service research historian Jerome A. Greene maintains that, “There is no substantiating evidence for the charge made fifty-nine years later by a deserter from Crook’s expedition that the captured warriors were shot to death by the troops before the command left the battlefield.”
After interviewing Sioux participants in the Battle of Slim Buttes, as well as some of their relatives, author Stanley Vestal reported that the Miniconjou losses were ten killed and two wounded. According to the Ricker Papers, Red Horse claimed seven were killed and four wounded, while a third Sioux reported the dead as three men, four women, and one infant—eight total.
What we can be even more certain of is the fact that the Sioux were fired up, furious beyond words when they returned to the site of their decimated, burned-out village after driving off the stragglers at the tail end of Crook’s column retreating to the south. Aware that the warriors in the hills—as well as Crook’s prisoners later to be released— had watched the soldiers bury their dead, we can have little doubt that the Sioux did in fact dig up the graves of White, Wenzel, and Kennedy, and so too the hole where the surgeons had buried Von Leuttwitz’s leg. The warriors and squaws in mourning would almost certainly have taken out their rage and grief not only on those dead bodies, but on that amputated limb.
Of great interest to me was the discovery of all that money and those articles taken from Custer’s dead at the Little Bighorn fight. In his reminiscences Frank Grouard declared that soldiers combing through the lodges prior to their destruction found more than eleven thousand dollars. This, most would agree, is simply too grand a figure. John Finerty reported to his readers that Crook’s troops recovered nine hundred dollars. The real amount is likely to be somewhere in between, a figure closer to that given by the Chicago newsman. Allowing for a bit of pilfering here and there, one might believe there was easily twelve hundred dollars or more to be recovered in that village.
But more so even than that cash, what piqued my interest was the discovery of those ghost
ly relics. Just as one writer of that time stated, to come across the letters written to and by the Custer dead must have been like hearing faint, eerie voices whispering from their shallow graves beside the Greasy Grass. A matter of weeks later Sergeant Jefferson Spooner recalled that when he had been going through the lodges, he came across several noteworthy articíes:a locket, a small cabinet photo of Captain Myles Keogh, two gold-mounted ivory-handled revolvers, and a Spencer sporting rifle. The cavalry sergeant went on to state, “The picture and locket I gave to an officer of the 3rd Cav., who claimed them as a relative of the officer killed with Custer, and a revolver I gave to Capt. Rodgers of ‘A’ Co. 5th Cav. The rifle I sold some days later for two loaves of bread.”
The emphasis there is all mine! Only to remind you that in less than a week of that victory over a village filled with dried meat, Crook’s troops were on the Belle Fourche and then the Whitewood, trading what little they had with the greedy merchants who came out from the Black Hills towns to charge the soldiers five, six, even seven times the going rate (already inflated due to transportation costs to the mining settlements) for the most basic of foodstuffs!
It seems from the discovery of the Keogh photograph and that locket, from the captain’s leather gauntlets, and especially from the “Wild I” company guidon, that whoever secured those souvenirs was among those who overwhelmed that tough band of cavalrymen who attempted to hold the east side of Massacre Ridge. One report states that the swallowtail flag was tied outside the lodge of American Horse, likely attached to the smoke-flap ropes. But Anson Mills states that it was discovered “in good condition, folded up in an Indian reticule with a pair of Colonel Keogh’s gauntlets marked with his name.”
Trumpet on the Land: The Aftermath of Custer's Massacre, 1876 tp-10 Page 59
