On a knoll directly west of this first site, Camp later discovered a second skeleton in much the same condition. Not knowing at the time that Sitting Bull’s warriors had boasted of digging up the white man’s graves near the village, Camp nevertheless came to that exact conclusion years ahead of the publication of Stanley Vestal’s book.
In his own words Camp tells what he discovered:
I proposed that we look for evidence of opened graves, and this we soon found near the west edge of the village site on a low bench from the creek bottom, under a clump of buck brush that had grown up on the two mounds of earth that had been thrown out with the excavations. These two holes in the ground were three feet apart … The dirt thrown out had been weather-beaten down into flattened heaps, and enough of it had been washed back into the two trench-like openings to fill them within two feet of the general ground surface.
From subsequent inquiries of survivors of the battle I have learned that the location of these excavations is about at the place where were buried the bodies of the two soldiers (John Wenzel and Edward Kennedy) and of the scout (Charles White) killed in the fight … I am, from the evidence, led to inquire whether the Indians, who returned to the village to look for their own dead, might not have dug up these bodies, dragged them up to the two little hills, and had dances around them … Can it be, therefore, that the bones of the killed on the victorious side have been bleaching in the sunlight all these years?
Today a visitor can drive east from the small town of Buffalo for twenty-one miles, crossing over the Slim Buttes themselves. Approximately two miles west of the hamlet of Reva on the south side of the highway you will find a bronze-plaque roadside marker and the eight-foot-tall shaft of a stone monument erected on a small patch of state ground a half mile from the actual site of the village. Beyond the nearby fence the rest of the site is land owned by the family of George Lermeny, whom I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with on the phone but whom I have not had the honor of meeting in person. Lermeny’s grandfather came from Canada to settle on that ground in late 1886.
Former Sergeant John A. Kirkwood helped place the stone pylon monument that was financed by Anson Mills after Walter M. Camp confirmed the site. But, despite Camp’s protests, Mills elected to place the tall spire a half mile from the village site and close beside the highway, where the old general wanted it to be seen by the cars that passed by on that narrow east-west route. In August of 1920, three years after the ground had been identified, the markers were dedicated, complete with three separate headstones commemorating those white men who fell at Slim Buttes, all enclosed inside a tall wrought-iron fence.
Those two markers are as close as you will get to the battlefield. The passerby, tourist, amateur historian, and researcher are not allowed onto Lermeny’s property, where a third marker stands at the mouth of the ravine, indicating where Wenzel and White were killed. Erected in 1956 by the South Dakota State Historical Society, it reads:
Siege of the Ravine
American Horse, family
and six warriors ran here
at dawn attack. By noon
four warriors were dead.
American Horse, fatally
wounded, surrendered with
those left. Here Jonathan
White, “Chips,” civilian
scout, was killed.
In my phone conversations with George Lermeny, the rancher remained adamant that he wanted no further attention given to the site. “It’s been too much trouble for us already,” he said to me, then went on to tell how in recent years several researchers had come to him seeking permission to go over the village site and the surrounding hillsides with their metal detectors, and to complete analytical terrain surveys. Because those researchers subsequently wrote books on the Slim Buttes battle, Lermeny feels there’s been too much of a rising tide of publicity surrounding his family’s home.
The Reva, South Dakota, rancher told me, “We’ve had too much attention given us. I’m hoping things’ll eventually quiet down and we can go back to making a living here. This is our family business. Six generations have worked this ground. We just want to be left alone now.”
In fact, the home George Lermeny shares with his wife rests in the draw where on that rainy night of September 8, 1876, Anson Mills waited for the gray light of dawn with 150 troopers, located to the northeast (and across the present highway) from the Sioux village.
As much as I was personally disappointed in not getting a chance to meet George Lermeny and to walk that creek bottom, climb those knolls and hills south and west of the village site, look myself for the rifle pits used by Chambers’s infantry on the afternoon of September 9, then follow the path of the Fifth Cavalry’s retreat on the morning of the tenth—I can nonetheless understand his possessiveness of that beautiful piece of ground.
I can sympathize with it entirely in light of what I see done by visitors at Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, visitors to the battlefields that dot the western plains.
Shamefully, all too few American citizens are truly respectful of our past or do they truly honor the historical and spiritual significance of that sacred ground. As much as I am sorry that this is one piece of hallowed soil I did not get to walk across, much less have the opportunity to sit and listen to the ghosts whisper through the branches of the buffalo-berry bushes heavy with their bright-red fruit— I find myself in total sympathy with George Lermeny.
At the time of Crook’s Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition, Lieutenant Charles Morton served as regimental adjutant to Lieutenant Colonel William B. Royall, Third Cavalry. By 1914, when he was frequently corresponding with researcher Walter M. Camp, Morton had risen to the rank of brigadier general. In a letter the old soldier wrote to Camp on August 19, 1914, Morton included a poem composed shortly after the Battle of Slim Buttes which he credited to an unidentified officer of the Fifth Cavalry, a bit of rhyme that shows how some of Crook’s soldiers steadfastly despised their general, no matter the march of time.
At Slim Buttes, neath the noonday sun,
After the “Third” the fight had won,
Came Crook and pack-train on the run,
To jump the captured property.
Then rose a wild and piercing yell
That rent the air like sounds from hell.
And shots mid herds and pickets fell,
Stampeding Crook’s sagacity.
The skirmish thickens, “Fight, men, fight!”
One buck has fallen on the right.
Wave, George, thy flag in wild delight,
And snort with mule stupidity.
Tis done. The ration fight is o’er.
Two hundred purps lie sick and sore.
And ponies’ flanks are gushing gore
To stimulate humidity.
Too few are left who care to tell
How starved men fought and ponies fell;
But “Crook was right,” the papers yell,
To George’s great felicity.
On the twenty-fourth of October, 1876, upon officially disbanding the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition, General George Crook—the target of so much derision and outright hatred from his soldiers, the object of so much admiration among those he led into battle and forced to keep going until the end of their “horse-meat march”—addressed himself to his officers and men in General Orders No. 8:
In the campaign now closed [I have] been obliged to call upon you for much hard service and many sacrifices of personal comfort. At times you have been out of reach of your base of supplies in most inclement weather, and have marched without food and sleep—without shelter. In your engagements you have evinced a high order of discipline and courage; in your marches wonderful powers of endurance; and in your deprivations and hardships patience and fortitude.
Indian warfare is of all warfare the most dangerous, the most trying, and the most thankless. Not recognized by the high authority of the United States Congress as war, it still possesses for you the disadvantag
es of civilized warfare with all the horrible accompaniments that barbarism can invent and savages can execute. In it you are required to serve without the incentive to promotion or recognition—in truth, without favor or hope of reward.
The people of our sparsely-settled frontier, in whose defense this war is waged, have but little influence with the powerful communities in the East; their representatives have little voice in our national councils; while your savage foes are not only the wards of the nation, supported in idleness, but objects of sympathy with large numbers of people otherwise well informed and discerning.
You may, therefore, congratulate yourselves that in the performance of your military duty you have been on the side of the weak against the strong, and that the few people on the frontier will remember your efforts with gratitude.
All too few in this country, in this day and time, stop in their seventy-mile an hour, sixteen-hour workdays to give thought to those of that dramatic but bygone time … those who sacrificed so much.
Both red and white.
TERRY C. JOHNSTON
Slim Buttes, S.D.
September 9, 1994
TERRY C. JOHNSTON
1947-2001
TERRY C. JOHNSTON was born on the first day of 1947 on the plains of Kansas and lived all his life in the American West. His first novel, Carry the Wind, won the Medicine Pipe Bearer’s Award from the Western Writers of America, and his subsequent books appeared on bestseller lists throughout the country. After writing more than thirty novels of the American frontier, he passed away in March 2001 in Billings, Montana. Terry’s work combined the grace and beauty of a natural storyteller with a complete dedication to historical accuracy and authenticity. He continues to bring history to life in the pages of his historical novels so that readers can live the grand adventure of the American West. While recognized as a master of the American historical novel, to family and friends Terry remained and will be remembered as a dear, loving father and husband as well as a kind, generous, and caring friend. He has gone on before us to a better place, where he will wait to welcome us in days to come.
If you would like to help carry on the legacy of Terry C. Johnston, you are invited to contribute to the
Terry C. Johnston Memorial Scholarship Fund
c/o Montana State University-Billings Foundation
1500 N. 30th Street
Billings, MT 59101-0298
1-888-430-6782
For more information on other Terry C. Johnston novels,
visit his website at
http://www.imt.net/-tjohnston
send e-mail to
[email protected]
or write to
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P.O. Box 50594 Billings, MT 59105
TRUMPET ON THE LAND
A Bantam Book / February 1995
All rights reserved.
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Trumpet on the Land: The Aftermath of Custer's Massacre, 1876 tp-10 Page 61
