A Terrible Glory

by James Donovan

  Within a few days, the Crow scouts and all but a few of the Shoshones left for their homes, disgusted with the white man’s style of fighting — the Crows called Crook “Squaw Chief”33 — and the wagon train with the wounded returned to Fort Fetterman, 175 miles to the southeast. Crook and his men remained in camp at Goose Creek for almost six weeks, waiting for supplies and reinforcements that he now professed to need. “It was patent to every one,” observed Bourke, “that not hundreds, as had been reported, but thousands of Sioux and Cheyennes were in hostility and absent from the agencies.”34 While waiting, Crook and his men spent much of their time fishing, hunting, prospecting, even playing baseball. “My note-books about this time seem to be almost the chronicle of a sporting club,” Bourke wrote.35

  News of the debacle reached Chicago on June 23. In his report to Sheridan, Crook claimed a victory — after all, he asserted, he had driven the hostiles from the field “in utter rout.”36 If so, it was a hollow one, which Sheridan was quick to recognize; his official report called the victory “barren of results.”37 Strategically, Crook had lost, for he had retreated the next day and abandoned his mission. The newspapermen saw through the pretense. Finerty noted the General’s dissatisfaction, and another reporter termed the retreat “cowardly.”38 In regard to the Plains Indians, Crook changed his tune. At the campaign’s outset, he had predicted that “they would never stand punishment as the Apaches had done.”39 Now he insisted on reinforcements and the construction of several forts in the area before commencing any further operations.

  As the weeks passed, Crook’s attempts to track the large Indian force or locate their village were minimal. It was not until July that a detachment led by Grouard headed out in search of signs.40 And Crook made no attempt to communicate to Terry or Gibbon to alert them of the numbers, ferocity, or firepower of the enemy, despite his personal complaint that no news was heard from the Generals and their commands.41 Though he would notify Sheridan on June 19 of the battle and his withdrawal, that valuable intelligence would not reach Terry for weeks — July 9, to be exact. Never before on the plains had such a large force of Indians attacked an even larger force of soldiers, or fought with such cohesion and tenacity, and that knowledge would almost certainly have altered Terry’s plans. True, there were plenty of hostiles somewhere to the north, but two weeks previous, Grouard and three civilian scouts had traveled three hundred miles in that direction to the Crow Agency west of the Little Bighorn and returned safely with 175 Crow allies.

  Crook’s reports to Sheridan late in July reveal his helplessness and his true concern: his own reputation. He referred to a plot to “do the command and myself great injustice” through “most villainous falsehoods” published in the New York Herald. He also wrote that the correct account, by the New York Tribune reporter, “never reached its destination and it is supposed here that it was suppressed in the telegraph Office, at Fetterman.”42 Crook would eventually admit a kind of failure by blaming the disappointing results at the Rosebud on some of his officers, notably Lieutenant Colonel Royall, expressing regret that he had not had them court-martialed.43 But that would occur ten years later. Now he cast about for someone to excoriate.

  When the news reached the East, at least one newspaper fastened on the root of the problem. On June 27, the New York Herald opined:

  When Crook, with thirteen hundred men, was unable to follow up a fight with Sitting Bull we may well be anxious over the fate of either of Terry’s detachments, numbering less than seven hundred men, if they should meet them single handed. If Crook, with even his present forces, could be sent forward to the support of Custer and Terry it might, although still at great risk, end the difficulty. Reinforcements for both columns should be swiftly hurried forward.

  Sheridan had expressed his hope that the columns would operate independently but eventually effect a juncture. The strongest arm of the campaign was out of action, the nontreaties were numerous and determined to fight, and Terry knew none of it. He was more in the dark than he realized.

  THE LAKOTAS AND Cheyennes returned to their village also believing that they had triumphed. About twenty warriors had been lost, and many more had been injured.44 But with a fighting force little more than half that of the wasichus, they had checked the threat to their village and forced the soldiers to retreat. “We knew that we had defeated him because he turned back,” said the Oglala He Dog.45 Many warriors had earned great honors on the field of battle, and despite the mourning for the dead, there were four days of celebrating, feasting, and dancing in the tribal circles after the village had moved down the creek into the beautiful valley of the Greasy Grass. Clearly, Sitting Bull’s medicine was strong, and the confidence of the Lakotas and Cheyennes soared as even more of their brethren from the agencies joined the camp. If the whites were foolish enough to come again, let them.

  EIGHT

  The Fruits of Insubordination

  Faint heart never won fair lady, neither did it ever pursue and overtake an Indian village. . . . Few officers have ever had such a fine opportunity to make a successful and telling strike and few have ever failed so completely to improve their opportunity.

  GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER

  At the outset of the campaign, Terry had ordered Gibbon’s smaller command to move down the Yellowstone to the mouth of the Bighorn River, prevent any Indians from getting away to the north, and strike a hostile camp only if the opportunity arose. His Montana column had been encamped some twenty miles east of the mouth of the Bighorn since April 20. The next day, a dispatch from Terry reached him with orders to stay put until the weather-delayed Dakota column got under way — most likely in a few weeks. Gibbon moved his command downstream to the mouth of the Rosebud a month later, on May 21, four days after the failed river crossing, in response to his scouts’ report of a large body of Indians headed that way. He found no Indians but established a new camp there. A week later, pursuant to fresh orders from Terry to move east toward the Little Missouri, he began marching downriver to join the Dakota column against the hostiles then believed to be in that vicinity.

  The Dakota column had reached the wide and shallow Powder River a few miles below the Yellowstone late on June 7, after several days of hard marching through the rugged Badlands. A week earlier, a freak snowstorm had halted its progress for two days; when the march was resumed, three scouts from Gibbon’s command rode up and delivered the news that the Indians were in considerable force south of the Yellowstone. They also brought word that the supply depot established at Stanley’s Stockade, a crude fort built during the 1873 Yellowstone Expedition at the confluence of Glendive Creek, had received supplies from the paddle steamers Far West and Josephine, chartered by the government for the duration of the campaign.

  After more than five weeks on the Yellowstone, Gibbon’s command of almost five hundred men had accomplished little. True, it appeared that no large force of hostiles had escaped across the Yellowstone, but the Indians, far from planning an escape, seemed indifferent to the soldiers to the north and unfazed by the potential danger, as they crossed to the north side of the river frequently. They had intermittently harassed the base camp and had even inflicted the ultimate humiliation by absconding with all of the Crow scouts’ thirty-two horses. (The seventeen Crows, master horse raiders themselves, wept copiously in anger and embarrassment upon waking one morning to find themselves mountless.)1 Two half-breed interpreter-guides even conducted a conversation with some Sioux warriors across the river using sign language and dialogue. The Sioux told the guides that they had left the agencies because they were starving and were now out hunting food. They said that they did not want to fight white men and asked to be left alone.2

  Terry sent Gibbon’s couriers back with orders to halt where he was and directed the Captain of the Far West to proceed to the mouth of the Powder River with a company of infantry to establish a new supply depot there. The couriers were turned back by hostiles — or at least they thought they were: the large party of Indians
they sighted were actually Crow scouts attached to Gibbon’s command.3 The Josephine returned downstream, but the Far West, piloted by the knowledgeable Grant Marsh,4 arrived at the Powder on June 6 with a company of infantry aboard to wait for Terry.

  Captain Marsh had already made quite a reputation for himself as the best riverboat Captain on the upper Missouri. It was said that he could navigate a boat on heavy dew and once had “actually walked his boat half a mile over dry land.”5 Marsh had been traveling the region’s waterways for thirty years, ever since he had signed on as a twelve-year-old cabin boy on a steamer in Pittsburgh. He was the only man ever to have navigated the upper reaches of the Yellowstone — he had guided a steamer to explore up the river for the army the previous summer and had reached a spot 250 miles from the Powder’s confluence. No one knew the river better.

  In late May, less than two weeks before, the Far West had been docked at Fort Lincoln, taking on supplies, and Marsh had entertained the officers’ wives on board the boat one afternoon. He had dissuaded Libbie Custer and Lieutenant Algernon “Fresh” Smith’s wife, Nettie, from accompanying him upriver to meet their husbands. (Mindful of the dangerous territory, Marsh had suggested that the ladies would be more comfortable on the passenger steamer Josephine, which they might board when it next came downriver.) Libbie and her husband had planned such a reunion before the column’s departure, and she had been counting on it. Ever since he had left, she had been visited by premonitions as never before. For his part, Custer missed Libbie so badly that a few days out of Lincoln, he proposed in all seriousness to hand-deliver dispatches back to the fort “just for the sake of getting home again for a few hours.”6

  UPON ARRIVING AT the Powder, Terry sent Arikara scouts downstream to the new depot at the mouth of the river to contact the Far West. They returned late the next morning having accomplished their mission and bringing the erroneous news that Gibbon’s couriers had encountered forty Sioux and had returned to the boat with Terry’s new orders. But the vital answers to many questions were still unanswered: Where exactly was Gibbon? Where was the hostile village, how large was it, and which way was it headed? Was the new depot sufficiently stocked to begin long-range operations? During the three-week journey, Terry’s impatience had increased. He had recently written his sister of his worry that the Indians “have scattered and that I shall not be able to find them at all. This would be a most mortifying & perhaps injurious result to me.”7 At one point on the difficult descent to the valley of the Powder, he had uncharacteristically grabbed a pick and shovel to help blaze the trail. Terry decided to waste no more time resting in camp with the column and waiting for dispatches to arrive. He left at half past noon with an escort of two companies of the Seventh and rode the twenty-two miles down the Powder River to its juncture with the Yellowstone. He would commandeer the Far West and steam upriver to find Gibbon himself, if necessary.

  Before he left, Terry ordered the wagon train mules out of their harnesses and refitted to carry pack saddles in preparation for a scout by the entire Seventh Cavalry up the Powder.8 Though Crook had made his reputation with the help of mule trains, they had never been used in the Department of Dakota. The process provided some sorely needed levity. The entertainment of the past five weeks had chiefly been limited to the sight of Custer’s staghounds attempting to bring down elusive rabbits and fleet-footed antelope, a nightly serenade by the Seventh’s band, and the occasional evening poker game. As the stubborn, bucking mules resisted their training, there were many scenes of swinging hooves and flying troopers. Custer, left in command of the column, spent much of the day in his tent writing his latest article for the Galaxy, one of several about his Civil War experiences.

  Terry reached the Yellowstone that evening to find the Far West already moored there. On board he discovered that his message ordering Gibbon to halt had not been delivered, and that Gibbon had continued his leisurely march down the Yellowstone and was even now just a day and a half away. Terry sent couriers upstream to stop Gibbon’s progress and summon him down to the steamer to report. Early the next morning, June 9, Marsh steamed upriver with Terry to meet Gibbon. They hailed Gibbon five miles downriver from the Montana column’s camp. Gibbon came aboard, and he and Terry conferred for two hours. When Terry learned from Gibbon of the large Indian village sighted on May 26 by Lieutenant Bradley just eighteen miles up the Rosebud, he ordered Gibbon to retrace the fifty-five miles back to his recent camp at the Rosebud’s mouth. Gibbon’s four companies of cavalry, under the direct command of the ambulance-bound Brisbin, prepared to move out that afternoon, but a heavy downpour delayed them until the next morning. While the Far West ferried infantry troops and supplies from Stanley’s Stockade to the new depot at the mouth of the Powder, Terry returned to the Dakota column. Neither column had received word from Crook, who was known to be marching north from Fort Fetterman. If he had encountered the hostile camp, the Indians might at this moment be heading down the Rosebud to escape across the Yellowstone into the rugged country north of the upper Missouri.

  From the fresh intelligence now available to Terry, it appeared that the hostiles were somewhere to the west, along the Rosebud or one of the next rivers, either the Bighorn or its tributary the Little Bighorn. But since no one had seen the hostile camp in two weeks — Gibbon apparently had not even kept it under observation — the village may have moved east. Thus, before heading west, a reconnaissance in search of any scattered Sioux along the Powder, the Little Powder, and the Tongue was uppermost in Terry’s mind.

  But Terry needed a guide who knew the area. Capable Charley Reynolds may have been the best hunter on the northern plains, but he was unfamiliar with the country south of the Yellowstone. He had led the Dakota column astray in the Badlands east of the Powder, though Custer, who had a knack for pathfinding, had found an acceptable trail to the river. So when Terry left the Far West to return to the Dakota column, with him rode Michel “Mitch” Boyer, a half-Sioux, half-French scout who had been trained by the legendary Jim Bridger himself. He and Bridger had led the Raynolds-Maynadier Expedition of 1859–60, which had mapped some of the country south of the Yellowstone, and he had scouted for the army in the area during Red Cloud’s War a decade earlier. Boyer had been Gibbon’s main guide through this rough region and had performed impressively. Married to Magpie Outside of the Crow tribe, and the father of her four children, Boyer spoke English, Sioux, and Crow. He was soft-spoken and hesitating in his speech and on the short side.9 He dressed like a white man and wore a hat, though he looked more like an Indian with his dark skin. Gibbon judged him the best guide in that part of the country, second only to Bridger.10 Having guided immigrant trains and army expeditions in the area for almost twenty years,11 he had performed such valuable service that the Sioux had sworn vengeance against him — a fact that Boyer had mentioned to Gibbon more than once.12 Sitting Bull, he claimed, had offered one hundred ponies for his head.13 But Boyer had shrugged off the threat. “If the Sioux kill me,” he said, “I have the satisfaction of knowing I popped many of them over, and they can’t get even now, if they do get me.”14

  Upon his arrival back at the Dakota column, Terry gave orders for the reconnaissance. He had now decided that only the right wing, six companies, of the regiment would go — under Major Reno. It appears that Custer had expected to lead the scouting expedition, as he had led every other during the march from Fort Lincoln.15 But Custer had tested Terry’s patience more than once on the march, and Terry may have wanted to show him who was in command. Besides, it seemed unlikely that there was any large body of hostiles in the area.

  This was what Reno had been waiting for: an independent command and a chance to show what he could do. Before they had left Lincoln, Custer, the regiment’s acting Colonel and field commander, had directed Reno to perform the duties of Lieutenant Colonel, but those duties had been few thus far.16

  Custer thought the scout unnecessary and made his feelings clear in an anonymous dispatch to the New York Herald.17 N
ot only did he believe that the Indians were farther to the west, but he feared that the reconnaissance would alert them of the column’s proximity, thus inciting the tribes to flee and compromising the success of the expedition.18 Captain Frederick Benteen shared Custer’s fears. He thought that Reno’s scout would “precipitate things,” he wrote to his wife, and “cause the Indians to cross the Yellowstone before we can get in striking distance — and per consequence, prolong our stay in this country.”19 True, he admitted, the scouting expedition might make contact with Crook somewhere to the south, but time was of the essence. Should a reconnaissance that was not expected to find the main body of Indians delay operations for almost two weeks? After all, Terry had ordered twelve days’ rations for the detachment. The most recent confirmed sighting of the village had been on the lower Rosebud, two weeks previous. Why not implement an operation that would center on that area, or send the Seventh Cavalry reconnaissance in force now, or send out small scouting parties to locate the camp first?

  If any of these alternatives was presented to Terry, he was not persuaded. His written orders called for Reno to ascend the Powder “to the mouth of the Little Powder. From the last named point he will cross to the headwaters of Mizpah Creek, and descend that creek to its junction with the Powder River. Thence, he will cross to Pumpkin Creek and Tongue River, and descend the Tongue to its junction with the Yellowstone.”20 There he would rejoin the Dakota column, which would then move out immediately. Reno’s written orders were precise and detailed, and allowed little room for improvisation. Terry also instructed Reno verbally to stay away from the Rosebud, clearly to avoid tipping off the hostiles, who were most likely there.