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

by Terry C. Johnston

  Yet Mills wasn’t the one who discovered that guidon. Charging the Sioux village, Private W. J. McClinton sprinted in with his C Troop from the Third Cavalry, and that very day presented the flag to Captain Mills. Years later when McClinton received his discharge papers from the army, he found the face of the document emblazoned in bold red ink with a testament to the fact that he had captured the guidon. Upon his discharge McClinton remained in the West, soon to become a resident of Sheridan, Wyoming, where he enjoyed a long and successful business career. More than a decade later John Bourke wrote,“[McClinton] never tires of singing the praises of General Crook and the brave men who opened up the rich valleys of the Tongue and Goose Creek [near present-day Sheridan] to settlement.”

  But while that guidon went to Mills’s care, the story is yet incomplete. Not long after the arduous campaigns of the great Sioux War, Anson Mills loaned the relic, among other “trophies,” to the Museum of the Military Service Institution on Governor’s Island, New York. Years later upon its return he was dismayed at how the museum curators had allowed moths to have their way with the flag. He promptly had it encased in glass, and after the old soldier’s death, the Mills family donated it to the Custer Battlefield National Monument (now renamed the Little Bighorn Battlefield). There visitors can see that very same guidon that flew over the heads of Myles W. Keogh’s I Company as they stood their ground along Massacre Ridge, then fell into the dust when the standard-bearer died on that hillside, and finally traveled with the victorious Sioux to Dakota Territory—there to be recaptured by the U.S. Cavalry.

  There is still something of a controversy regarding these relics. Are they, in fact, a “smoking gun” proving that this band of Miniconjou were indeed at the Little Bighorn battle? Years afterward Indians on the Standing Rock Reservation claimed that Iron Plume (as American Horse was better known among his people) had not been at the Greasy Grass fight at all. They testified that the Seventh Cavalry relics were instead brought into American Horse’s camp by visiting Oglalla in those eleven weeks after the soldiers were wiped out.

  Nonetheless, Jerome Greene has stated there is sufficient evidence to believe that some of the warriors who were in that camp on the morning of 9 September had also been camped beside the Little Bighorn on the afternoon of 25 June. Perhaps most compelling are the words of Miniconjou Red Horse given to Judge Eli Ricker in his statement testifying that he was at both fights.

  It seems conceivable to me that both sides in this controversy are correct. It is not hard at all to believe that in American Horse’s village that September morning there were both those who had fought the Seventh Cavalry on that hot summer day eleven weeks before, and those who had joined up with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse only in the days immediately following their great victory. The Indian populations of various warrior bands and clan groupings underwent growth and shrinkage throughout that spring, summer, and into the fall, with much coming and going as the seven great circles finally merged in the days before crushing Custer, then almost immediately began to slowly disperse and mosey off to the four winds as Crook and Terry sat on their thumbs—not knowing what to do.

  Despite their hunger for a victory of some kind over the Sioux who had defeated the Seventh Cavalry, there was considerable disagreement, and outright argument, over Captain Mills’s attacking a village of unknown strength without first alerting Crook. The general himself criticized Mills for not having sent a courier back during the long night of the eighth, upon Grouard’s discovering the enemy camp. This, Crook attested, would have given him time to bring up the whole column, surrounding the camp and preventing the escape of all those “two hundred” Sioux into the nearby hills and bluffs.

  Another source of heated discussion among Crook’s officers was the fact that Mills had opened up the battle with a dangerously limited supply of ammunition. All this criticism quickly made its way into the press of the day. Robert Strahorn wrote in his dispatches to the Rocky Mountain News:

  Crook was very much disappointed because Mills didn’t report his discovery last night, and there was plenty of time to have got the entire command there and so effectually surrounded the village that nothing would have escaped; but the General is also pleased, all things considered.

  Reuben Davenport of the New York Herald, never a fan of Crook, nonetheless took this opportunity to rebuke Mills:

  All the circumstances lead to the inevitable conclusion that had Col. [Mills] reported the discovery to headquarters, instead of attempting to steal a march on the camp himself, the whole column could easily have reached and effectually surrounded the entire village before daylight … instead of this village of over 250 to 300 hostile savages getting off with whole skins, they could easily have been swooped down upon and annihilated.

  How unfortunate that none of those contemporaries of Captain Anson Mills appear to have asked one simple question: what was the best information Mills operated with at the time of his discovery of the village? When he departed from the main column, pushing on with Lieutenant Bubb to secure provisions from the Black Hills settlements, Crook informed Mills and his lieutenants that he would be remaining in bivouac that next day and not moving south on Mills’s trail until the morning of the ninth.

  So when Grouard discovered the hunters, then the pony herd, and finally the village late on that rainy afternoon of the eighth—Anson Mills had nothing to indicate that George Crook and the rest of the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition were anywhere but a minimum of thirty-five miles or more to their rear, right back where his battalion had left them. To send a courier on that backtrail wouldn’t have made much sense, at least to me—because given the condition of Crook’s men and animals, no courier could have conceivably crossed thirty-five miles of that treacherous, muddy country to reach Crook, and no column could have then marched another thirty-five miles across the same gumbo prairie, in time to launch a concerted attack at dawn!

  Everything considered—the distant position of reinforcements from Crook’s column, and Mills’s dangerously low supply of ammunition—I believe the captain made the only decision he could, and all arguments then and now are nothing more than niggling, meaningless carping.

  Still, it isn’t hard for me to understand the conditions that would make such heated debates arise: great, passionate welling of sentiment from those who continued to suffer the terrible privations of that campaign, two harrowing days of battle, and the additional horrors of their horse-meat march between Owl and Willow creeks. Simply put, we must remember that those soldiers had been in the wilderness for four and a half months without leave or relief.

  In the Huntington Library collections we find the papers of Lieutenant Walter S. Schuyler, who wrote to his father upon Crook’s return to Fort Laramie:

  It has been a march through the heart of the enemy’s country, almost wholly unexplored by white men, and thoroughly misunderstood by them, a march which has tried men’s souls as well as their constitutions, a march which will live in our history as the hardest ever undertaken by our army, and on which the privation and hardship were equaled only by the astonishing health of the command while accomplishing it.

  Years after that grueling march of survival and sheer willpower, Lieutenant John Bourke found his own health failing. In writing his book, On the Border With Crook, he asked his public to study the roster of those soldiers who had suffered terribly through twenty-two days of constant hunger, cold, and rain.

  If any of my readers imagines that the march from the head of Heart River down to the Belle Fourche was a picnic, let him examine the roster of the command and tell of the scores and scores of men, then hearty and rugged, who now fill premature graves or drag out an existence with constitutions wrecked and enfeebled by such privations and vicissitudes.

  Fourteen years later in his short story about the campaign, which he titled “Van,” Charles King wrote:

  We set out with ten days’ rations on a chase that lasted ten weeks … We wore out some Indians, a good many sol
diers, and a great many horses. We sometimes caught the Indians, and sometimes they caught us. It was hot, dry summer weather when we left our wagons, tents, and extra clothing; it was sharp and freezing before we saw them again.

  In an attempt to capture some of that grueling privation, as depicted in a closing scene of this novel, a photographer rode out from Deadwood with his cameras and his portable, wagon-borne darkroom to record for history through staged photographs some of what Crook’s troops managed to live through. For this alone we are indebted to photographer Stanley J. Morrow. With the assistance of Bantam Books and through the courtesy of folks at the Little Bighorn National Battlefield who searched through their photographic archives, we have in this book reproduced a few of Morrow’s momentous photos.

  Perhaps the most evocative picture for me is the one showing the famous hide lodge salvaged from the captured village and used as Dr. Clements’s “hospital” for the next several days. The photo, taken after the column had reached the Black Hills, also shows the captured I Troop guidon on display. Standing left to right are scout Frank Grouard, Private W. J. McClinton (who captured the flag), and Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka. Seated left to right are Lieutenant Colonel William B. Royall (who commanded a battalion at the Battle of the Rosebud), Captain William H. Andrews (prominent for his gallantry on Royall’s flank during the Rosebud fight), Captain Anson Mills, and Lieutenant Joseph Lawson.

  This last officer was generally known as a “character” among his comrades in the Third Cavalry. A native of Seamus Donegan’s Ireland, Lawson emigrated to the Ohio River country of Kentucky, where he ran a grocery store, married, and fathered five children before joining the Union Army with the outbreak of the Civil War—at the age of forty! In his remarkable career during the Indian wars, this unassuming soldier never asked any handicap of troopers half his age, being able to stay in the saddle and outride all but a handful of younger men in the Third Cavalry. Six feet tall and thin as a rail, with tobacco juice perpetually staining his scraggly red beard, Lawson had remained behind with Crook and the pack-train at the time of Reynolds’s Powder River fight, March 17, 1876. Three months later, after having displayed conspicuous courage during the Rosebud battle, the lieutenant was finally promoted to captain while Crook’s column was still recouping in the Black Hills, September 25, 1876. He would go on to distinguish himself at the Thornburg fight against Ute warriors on Colorado’s Milk River in 1879 … but there will be more on that to come in a future volume of this long-running series.

  This buffalo-hide lodge was to remain the personal property of Captain Mills. Knowing that the captain did not return to the Belle Fourche with Lieutenant Bubb and the wagons loaded with supplies, choosing instead to remain behind for a day or so to recoup his strength, we can therefore determine with some accuracy that Morrow took this photo sometime after Mills rejoined the column at one of its Whitewood Creek camps.

  By that time Crook and his entourage of officers and reporters were speeding back to Fort Laramie. Yet correspondent Reuben Davenport had already offered five hundred dollars to scout Jack Crawford to break away from Frank Grouard and Captain Anson Mills—and race to the dosest telegraph key. At the same time, Grouard carried dispatches for the three other reporters. In our next volume, A Cold Day in Hell you will be treated to the amusing adventures of that cross-country race between the two army scouts.

  After reaching Laramie, correspondent Davenport limped on to Cheyenne, where he finally collapsed as a result of his exertions following the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition. On his sickbed the newsman completed a fifteen-thousand-word story that was promptly printed in its entirety by the New York Herald—an article in which Davenport declared that Crook should be court-martialed for his conduct on the trail. He believed the campaign from thereon out would be remembered with the same historical disgust as was Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow during a cruel Russian winter, despite the fact that “a freak of fortune” had allowed the discovery of a small village and its “inglorious” capture.

  About a week after reaching Fort Laramie, John Finerty returned to Chicago, reporting to his editor, Clint Snowden, and the paper’s owner, Wilbur Storey. After a series of in-depth articles on Crook’s campaign, Finerty’s final article appeared on October 6 in the Chicago Times:

  Since my return I have had to endure the usual boredom shoved upon an ephemeral human curiosity … The constitutional, inevitable, universal “damphool” has asked me a dozen times: “You weren’t in earnest when you said you lived on horse meat? Didn’t you make that up?” This species of biped jackass flourishes in every community, and can hardly be expected to be absent from Chicago.

  On the second of December, 1876, the U.S. Army awarded the medal of honor to those three couriers who courageously carried General Terry’s letter south through territory believed to be teeming with hostiles, destined for Crook at his Camp Cloud Peak: Privates William Evans, Benjamin F. Stewart, and James Bell—all of E Company, Seventh U.S. Infantry.

  Anson Mills would eventually secure another brevet rank of colonel for his meritorious service in launching the charge on the village at Slim Buttes. Then forty-five years later in 1921, some twenty-four years after he had retired from the army with the rank of brigadier general, and thirty-one years after Crook died, Mills applied through former commanding general of the army General Nelson A. Miles for a Medal of Honor. Those fellow officers who joined Miles in supporting the award read like a Who’s Who of officers who served with Crook’s Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition in that terrible march: Major General Samuel S. Sumner, Brigadier General Charles King, Brigadier General William P. Hall, Brigadier General Peter D. Vroom.

  But, sadly, Mills had applied too long after the fact, according to the army’s regulations. Some historians believe he waited so long because his application would have been denied by Crook, who might still voice his criticism of Mills’s “precipitous” attack. If this appraisal is correct, then why did Mills wait a full thirty-one years after his old antagonist’s death?

  Most confusing are two minor inconsistencies found in otherwise scholarly books. Jerome Greene puts Finerty with Davenport as the two reporters who departed with Mills on the night of 7 September. But one has only to read John Finerty’s book to learn that he stayed behind and was with Crook when George Herman, Mills’s courier, showed up to announce the taking of the village. We know there were two reporters along from their subsequent accounts of the morning battle. So from my own research poring over the microfilm copies of old issues of the Rocky Mountain News, in which “Alter Ego’s” stories of Captain Mills’s morning “fight” would later appear, I believe I can trust John S. Gray’s account that it was indeed Robert Strahorn who was there at dawn.

  In yet a second discrepancy Greene appears to be the correct party. Whereas Oliver Knight gives “Alfred Milner” as the name of the soldier killed by Sioux along the Belle Fourche during the return of Major Upham’s battalion from its fruitless patrol, Greene accurately reports the name from duty rosters in the military archives as Cyrus B. Milner of Company A.

  Still, it is the confusion surrounding the identity of “Buffalo Chips” White that most befuddles me. Charles King states that the scout’s name was James White. John Finerty records him as “Charley, alias Frank White.” Then we find his gravestone at the Slim Buttes battle site is inscribed with the name Jonathan White. James and Jonathan, maybe—a discrepancy caused by the slightest error in someone’s memory—but where did Finerty ever come up with Frank?

  It was likely easier for historians to locate and identify the Slim Buttes site than it was to determine the scout’s real first name!

  Like so many other dramatic chapters of the Indian wars, the fight at Slim Buttes quickly faded from memory, thrust back into the shadows behind the more startling but no more consequential Little Bighorn battle. Thirty-one years would pass before amateur Indian wars’ historian Walter M. Camp, then editor for the “Railway Review,” would interview old Miniconjou wa
rriors on the Standing Rock Reservation, thus learning of Crook’s attack on their village.

  It took another seven years, in 1914, for Camp to convince two veterans of Crook’s campaign, Anson Mills and Charles Morton, to accompany him to South Dakota. In Belle Fourche they rented a car and drove north, but after spending several days searching along the eastern face of the buttes, neither could confirm the site of the Miniconjou village. The three returned east empty-handed.

  But Camp would not be deterred. Undaunted, he pursued his quest for another three years, and finally, in June of 1917, with the help of a map drawn by Charles King as well as hours of research by Bill Rumbaugh, a ranch hand working for a local cattleman in South Dakota, Camp finally determined the battlefield site.

  While working cattle across that ground year after year, Rumbaugh had discovered pieces of shattered iron cookware destroyed by Crook’s troops, spent .45/70 cases in the still-visible rifle pits, along with burned lodgepoles and the presence of human skeletal remains. Accompanied by Rumbaugh, in addition to six other local ranchers, an overjoyed Camp finally walked over that hallowed ground and verified the battle site located in the extreme northwestern corner of South Dakota. In his subsequent searches he found a variety of artifacts, including iron tea kettles, galvanized water buckets, broken butcher knives, iron hooks and handles, tin pans, basins, cups and cans, broken and melted glass bottles, broken earthware dishes, coffeepots, clothes buttons, and a stone pestle.

  Still, it was the discovery of human skeletal remains that caused Camp the most excitement and speculation. One of the local ranchers took the researcher to the top of a little knoll less than a quarter of a mile from the south side of the creek. There Camp was shown a skeleton, complete but for the skull. Beneath the remains lay a burned and bent carbine barrel, as well as three spent cartridge cases.