11
AS THE INDIANS REMEMBERED it, the first warning came from an old man who had gone out early, maybe to check on his horses, maybe to pray. “The soldiers are right here!” he shouted. “The soldiers are right here!”1
But he shouted in Cheyenne, not in Lakota. Some Oglala were also camped there on the Powder River—eight lodges belonging to He Dog, his brother Little Shield, and other relatives—but most of the people were Cheyenne, with their chiefs Old Bear, Little Wolf, and Two Moon. Moments later came the warning cry of a boy who had been out with the horses a few hundred yards to the south of the village. Then a woman emerging from her lodge and seeing the soldiers began to yell. The sun was well up; people were dressed and about their business, and as soon as the warnings were shouted and the horses of the cavalry could be heard everybody began yelling and running. After that came the sound of gunfire—the revolvers of the cavalry as they charged across the flat to run off the Indian ponies, some firing of carbines from the bluffs to the west, the rattle and pop of Indian guns in response.
Many of the warriors were gone from camp—ten had been sent out the night before to check on a report that soldiers were near. According to He Dog another group of men were on a war expedition in the north.2 The camp was not expecting an attack. Only a day or two earlier some Sioux had arrived from the south, among them a man named Crawler, bringing a message from the Red Cloud Agency: “It is spring; we are waiting for you.”3
The first shots and cries ended the peace of the morning. While the women were snatching up the smaller children and running for the river, He Dog took a position in a clump of trees at the south end of the village, facing the charge of the cavalry. He had a revolver, two rifles, a bow, and a quiver full of arrows. He immediately opened fire on the attacking force and inevitably it shied to one side. As the cavalry closed on the village, horses went down, then some soldiers—ten were killed or wounded in all, many right there at the edge of the Indian camp. The cavalry dismounted, holstered their revolvers, and began to fire their carbines as they moved in among the lodges. But the attack had come too late and too slow. The Indians all escaped across the river or into the hills to the north, even Old Bear, leading his wife on a horse. After the women and children had been hurried to safety the Cheyenne warrior Wooden Leg turned back to fight and found himself with two friends, Bear Walks on a Ridge and young Two Moons, son of the chief. Before them was a soldier, somehow cut off from the rest of his unit.
Two Moons had a repeating rifle … he stood it up on end in front of him and passed his hands up and down the barrel, not touching it, while making medicine. Then he said, “My medicine is good. Watch me kill that soldier.” He fired but his bullet missed. Bear Walks on a Ridge then fired … [and] hit the soldier in the back of the head. We rushed upon the man and beat and stabbed him to death. Another Cheyenne joined us to help in the killing. He took the soldier’s rifle. I stripped off the blue coat and kept it. Two Moons and Bear Walks on a Ridge took whatever else he had and they wanted.4
By nine thirty in the morning the initial fighting had died down. The soldiers were in possession of the camp and most of the Indian ponies. Despite the heavy firing from many directions only one Indian had been left behind dead, a man named Whirlwind. He had been caught in the open on the shoulder of the hills to the west. No one knew exactly how he was killed or when. Where his body was found later was high enough to give him a good view over the camp to the east, so maybe he was one of those restless men who are always up early to watch the sun rise.5
The village was on a flat curled into a bend of the Carli Wakpa Tanka—in Lakota, the Big Powder River. All around the camp from the north to the west and south was a kind of bench or shoulder, backed by a rising tier of hills. Scrambling down that shoulder to reach the village on foot was not easy, on horseback impossible. So the village was both hemmed in and protected all around its western edge. The cavalry had attacked after making its way down through a narrow defile to the southern end of the flat. In a ravine on the southwest were soldiers on foot, also firing into the village. But on the shoulder to the west and above it in the hills to the north there was no enemy—the way was entirely open—and this fact allowed all the Indians to escape in the first minutes of the attack save only the one man killed and an old woman who had been shot in the thigh. From the rocks and hills above the village the Indians watched while the soldiers rounded up the ponies and began to set fire to their lodges and all their possessions, including all that remained of their winter’s supply of food. Everything went into the flames—robes and quilled clothing and rawhide boxes filled with wasna, the mix of dried meat and animal fat, which burst into flame and sent thick clouds of smoke boiling up into the sky. From time to time cartridges or a canister of gunpowder exploded. Soon after, to the Indians’ surprise, the entire force of white soldiers mounted up and departed upriver toward the south, driving the Indian ponies as they went.
That night, reinforced by the Indians who had been off scouting, the Cheyenne and their Oglala allies sent a party in pursuit of the soldiers in hope of recapturing the pony herd. Passing through the burned village they found one lodge still standing; in it was the old woman who had been shot during the fight. “We talked about this matter,” Wooden Leg remembered, “all agreeing that the act showed the soldiers had good hearts.” Also at the edge of the burned village were the abandoned bodies of four dead white soldiers, a most surprising fact. Indians did all in their power to rescue their own dead from the field and whites normally did likewise, but not this time.
This lapse of battlefield discipline was followed by another of greater moment for the Indians left poor by the burning of their possessions. As night fell twenty or thirty warriors followed the white soldiers to their camp upriver. While the soldiers slept the Indians crept up on the pony herd. “I see my horse,” one man might whisper. “There is mine,” another would add. Luck was with them; for some reason guards were few so the Indians spooked the horses and drove off some of them. Shots were fired. When one bunch had been driven to safety the Indians came back for another. The night was punctuated with shooting and excitement as they gradually reclaimed the larger part of their horses and then headed back north to the hills where the women and children were sheltering from the cold.
Early the next day the village began to move north down the Powder in search of their relatives, guided by He Dog and his brother Little Shield. On the fourth day, after crossing the Little Powder, they found the Hunkpatila village of Crazy Horse. The Oglala were almost as short of food as the northern Cheyenne, so the two camps decided to join and march together to the north and east until they found the village of Sitting Bull. It took two days. There two large council lodges were set up to shelter the people who had lost everything. Hunkpapa women came with gifts of clothing, robes, and blankets. Horses were given to the men who had none. “I can never forget the generosity of Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa Sioux,” said Wooden Leg.6
The impoverished Cheyenne and Sioux from the Powder River told Sitting Bull that the soldiers had been led to their camp by Yugata, the Grabber. Some had seen him and some had heard him shouting in Lakota, calling on Crazy Horse to come out and fight. The Hunkpapa chief was angry with Grouard and himself alike. “One time that man should have been killed and I kept him, and now he has joined the soldiers,” the chief said. “He is no good and should be killed.” His nephew White Bull later remarked, “Grouard was the only white man who ever fooled Sitting Bull, and he fooled the whole tribe.”7
When the Cheyenne and the Oglala all joined Sitting Bull the camp grew large—probably three hundred lodges or more, as many as fifteen hundred to two thousand people. Soon came a large band of Miniconjou under Lame Deer, then more Cheyenne under Lame White Man arrived, followed by a steady accretion of other groups, large and small, as winter softened into spring. The chiefs and leading men were in constant discussion. They knew by this time that the white men had threatened war if the Indians did not come into an agency. Most said they would rather fight than submit. He Dog said later that before the attack they had been planning to work their way south to the Red Cloud Agency, keeping their promise of the previous summer to Young Man Afraid of His Horses. Now his band wanted nothing to do with the whites. Every few days the growing camp in the north moved to find clean ground, grass for the ponies, and meat for the people. For a time, feeling safer as the camp grew with fresh arrivals from the agencies, the combined Sioux and Cheyenne moved north up the ladder of creeks which ran into the Powder River from the east, then crossed the river and headed west by easy stages toward the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn, following the grass and the buffalo as spring came to the northern plains.
Heading down through broken country the day after the fight, Crook and his men blundered into a band of Indians driving a large herd of ponies. In Crook’s view those Indians should have been dead or running. It was his first hint that things had not gone well the previous day. Crook himself snapped off a quick shot at a man in a warbonnet and knocked him off his horse, but other Indians lifted the wounded man from the ground and carried him off. After they met up Crook told Bourke about his freehand shot. Bourke in turn told the general about the fight, which was officially described henceforth as the first victory in the war against the Sioux and as a painful blow against one of the “worst” of the chiefs, Crazy Horse. Crook and Bourke both insisted as long as they lived that it was Crazy Horse who had been attacked on the Powder River. But Bourke wrote in his diary, and probably told Crook on seeing him, “that when our men were leaving the village on one side, the Sioux were entering on the other.”8 That told the story of the fight on the Powder River.
From Bourke, Reynolds, Grouard, and others Crook soon gathered an account that raised troubling questions. Why had the Indians all managed to escape when the soldiers had the advantage of surprise? Why had Colonel Reynolds burned all the dried meat found in the Indian village when the soldiers were short of food themselves? Why had all the ammunition found in the village been destroyed when the soldiers were short of ammunition? Why had the Indian blankets and buffalo robes been burned when scores of soldiers were suffering frostbite from the bitter cold? Why had Reynolds hastily abandoned the village when the soldiers were in firm control? Why had the bodies of dead soldiers been left behind in Reynolds’s precipitous retreat, and with them, it was said—Bourke didn’t see it, but he believed it—“one poor wretch, shot in arm and thigh, [who] fell alive into the hands of the enemy and was scalped before the eyes of a comrade”?9 And finally, why had Reynolds left the Indian ponies unguarded the first night, thus allowing most of them to be recaptured?
But Crook was a realist. Surprise was gone, food and ammunition were low, there were wounded to think of, so he turned around and led his command back up the Powder River to rejoin his wagons at old Fort Reno. Next day, continuing south, Crook told Grouard to ride with him in the ambulance on the trip back to Fort Fetterman. For two days Grouard had been telling Crook “about everything that occurred at the Crazy Horse battle … I didn’t spare them a bit in the world,” Grouard recollected. “I told him just how the whole thing had been run.” Now, in the ambulance going south, Crook told Grouard a few things.
He spoke of the stories that had been told against me by the scouts, the bad reputation they had been giving me … Reshaw [Louis Richard] had been trying to put up a job on me from the time I had started out by myself on Tongue River. He had circulated stories around amongst the officers and told the general I was in communication with the Indians every night, that I was fixing up a plot with them to have the command massacred … General Crook told me that all the officers believed it except himself.10
The way Grouard added it up, the most suspicious of all was Colonel Reynolds, who feared Grouard had led him into a trap. The colonel panicked and fled, in Grouard’s view. Bourke in the privacy of his diary had a simpler explanation: “incompetency” and “imbecility.”11 The Rocky Mountain News reporter Robert Strahorn came closest to saying outright what most believed—that Reynolds had botched the affair, destroying supplies he should have saved and allowing the Indians to recapture their ponies.
Was a botch the same as a defeat? This Crook did not want to concede. The answer came down to numbers. By official count, Reynolds’s command suffered four dead and four wounded. Strahorn hedged on his estimate of Indian casualties, quoting soldiers who “state it all the way from thirty to fifty.”
Bourke in his diary was shy on the question as well. Despite the absence of actual bodies, he scribbled the night after the fight, “we had excellent reasons for believing we had killed and wounded many in the enemy’s ranks.”12 In the first published reports of the fight, Strahorn’s “thirty to fifty” and Bourke’s “many” were bandied freely, but the dispiriting truth spread in military circles soon enough. Caroline Frey Winne, wife of the Army surgeon stationed at the Sidney Barracks, wrote scornfully to her brother a month after the fight, “Come to get down to the facts of Crook’s expedition, the one hundred Indians killed amounted to just four killed, so some of the Indians who have come into the agencies report … we fail to see the success. ‘But ’twas a famous victory.’ ” 13
What Crook thought he kept at first to himself. Bourke recorded that the general was “annoyed and chagrined,”14 but a week’s brooding convinced him that Reynolds’s failures were inexcusable. At Fort Fetterman, on his way back from the winter campaign, Crook drew up formal charges and specifications against Reynolds preparatory to a general court-martial to affix responsibility. Reynolds protested bitterly to no effect.
With charges filed, and prodded by an impatient General Sheridan, Crook began to organize a second expedition to go after the hostiles. A few weeks later, in May, it was all unfolding just as it had the first time—gathering of officers and men at Fort Fetterman, perched high on the south bank overlooking the North Platte River. From the fort it was quite a drop down into the river valley below, well greened up by now. The view north from bluff’s edge was unobstructed—an endless rolling emptiness of grass and sage disappearing into the sky. For two weeks men, wagons, and animals were ferried across the river to a tent city where Crook, in the last days of May, took command of a new expedition of twelve hundred men and made ready to follow Frank Grouard and the Bats north against the hostiles.
George Crook was in charge of his own show, but he was answering to Sheridan at his headquarters in Chicago. The two men had gone into the Civil War as little-known officers of modest rank, friends from their days at West Point, eager for command. But from the very outset luck seemed to favor the odd small man with the red face, long arms, and big head. Both men were offered regiments by state governors—the 2nd Michigan Cavalry to Sheridan, the 36th Ohio Infantry to Crook. But Sheridan managed to succeed with General Henry Halleck, the Union Army’s chief of staff, where Crook had failed with President Lincoln. Halleck stretched the rules to let Sheridan serve as an officer in the regular army, while Crook was a volunteer. A colonel was a colonel, but only till the war was over, at which moment the volunteers would revert to their prewar rank.
So it went. Within days, lucky Phil Sheridan was jumped to command of a brigade to fill the vacancy of a general moving up. Three weeks later, when his eight hundred men were attacked by a Confederate force of five thousand at Booneville, Mississippi, Sheridan extracted an astonishing victory by sending two companies down a little-known woods road to attack the Confederates in the rear just as he assaulted them in front. The rebels panicked and fled. Five fellow officers, all brigadier generals, promptly wired Halleck: “Brigadiers scarce; good ones scarcer … The undersigned respectfully beg that you will obtain the promotion of Sheridan. He is worth his weight in gold.”15
A general’s star soon came Sheridan’s way. In Mississippi, too, he acquired a black gelding with three white stockings which stood five feet eight inches at the shoulder, a gift from one of his officers. Sheridan named the horse after the Mississippi town where he got him: Rienzi.16 It was a big horse for a small man. President Lincoln himself once remarked that Sheridan was “a brown, chunky little chap, with a long body, short legs, not enough neck to hang him, and such long arms that if his ankles itch he can skratch them without stooping.”17 Soldiers joked that Sheridan, at five foot four (or five, or six, according to the witness), had to climb up his saber to mount the big Morgan. Sheridan may have been small—by the last year of the war his men were calling him “Little Phil”—but there was a great deal of fight in him. When fortune offered him an opportunity he generally improved it, and in 1864 General Ulysses Grant brought him east to command Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley. Among the generals under Sheridan was his friend from Ohio, West Point, and the Indian wars in California, George Crook, in command of a force with the imposing title of the Army of West Virginia. In reality it was little more than two divisions stretched thin.
Sheridan had risen fast, Crook not so fast. If Sheridan was lucky, you could say Crook was unlucky. He got off to a slow start, no fault of his own, under Major General John C. Frémont, known as “the Pathfinder” for his early explorations of overland routes to California. Frémont ran for president but lost, and then proved a failure at war. The men under him, including Crook, got little chance to show their merits. In one early fight Crook was wounded in the foot by a “spent ball,” which soon hurt like blazes, worse even than the poisoned arrows of the California Indians. After Frémont resigned his command, Crook and his 36th Ohio were attached to Major General John Pope’s headquarters in time to witness the Union disaster at Second Bull Run in August 1862; after the battle Crook rounded up stragglers—“my first introduction to a demoralized army.” Nightfall ended the rout and a drizzling rain next day gave the Union forces time to move out.
Crook’s Civil War followed the classic pattern—an endless ordeal of marching and counter-marching, bad food and foul weather, opportunities lost and campaigns that sputtered out, all of it punctuated with bloody fights small and large. Sometimes these fights were very large, with thousands of men killed, wounded, or reported missing. Crook was at South Mountain on the fourteenth day of September 1862 and at Antietam on the sixteenth. From Virginia he was transferred to Tennessee for a year’s list of places and dates, including Chickamauga, where armies broke or held, then returned to Virginia and the Shenandoah early in 1864.
Crook rose, but not fast. It was the custom to reward officers in the regular army with brevet ranks for valor or performance. Besides the honor, the practical consequence was the fact that a brevet rank could trump regular rank when command on the field was in question. But that rarely happened. The honor was the main thing. Crook got his share of brevets, and he was promoted general of volunteers, and he was eventually placed in command of the grandly named Army of West Virginia. But in a long war which catapulted all sorts of unexpected men to national prominence, glory in the newspapers, and excited talk in Washington, the steady, dependable, laconic George Crook never approached center stage. He was not outwardly a warm or effusive man, but the officers under him, and the men under them, generally trusted and liked him. One who learned to value Crook was Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes, commander of the 23rd Ohio Infantry at the Battle of Cloyd’s Mountain in May 1864. On the morning of the battle Crook surveyed the rebel position with a field glass and remarked, “They may whip us, but I guess not.”18 A battery of Confederate artillery entrenched on a hill threatened Crook’s men. To put it out of action required a charge across a muddy stream and an open field three hundred yards wide. It was soon littered with the bodies of dead and wounded Union officers and men, but the battery was taken and the field won. “It being the vital point,” Hayes wrote to an uncle of the desperate run across the open field, “General Crook charged with us in person … Altogether, this is our finest experience in the war, and General Crook is the best general we have served under.”19
Crook in his clipped way had guessed right; it was the Confederates who got whipped. His men rarely heard him go beyond a few flat words of that sort. But there was something reassuring in his watchful way. “We all feel great confidence in his skill and good judgement,” Hayes wrote his mother. Calm on the outside, Crook was imagined by his men to be calm all the way through, but it was not entirely so.
Hurt pride was Crook’s secret vice. He felt others got the credit for things he achieved. “It has been ever thus through my life,” he wrote of an early incident in California when a newly arrived officer took credit for something Crook had done. “I have had to do the rough work for others afterwards to get the benefits from it.”20 After Sheridan took command in the Shenandoah in July 1864, Crook perhaps felt his star might shine a little more. Sheridan was a friend; he knew the sort of man Crook was and wouldn’t need reminding. They often met in the evening to talk about the California days.
But credit for military success proved harder to share than memories of early Army days, and in the course of the Shenandoah campaign small injuries to Crook’s self-regard gradually accumulated, opening a gap between the two men which steadily widened. First came fights at Opequon Creek near the town of Winchester and at Fisher’s Hill, two of the three climactic battles that ended southern control of the Shenandoah. No arena of conflict had changed hands more often during the war. By one count the town of Winchester had been won and lost seventy times when Sheridan set his sights on it again in mid-September 1864. Grant listened to his plan and told him, “Go in.”21
The battle eventually called Third Winchester was one of the stupendous fights so common during the war, with almost ten thousand men killed, wounded, or missing on both sides in the course of the day. Crook’s part in the fight was small but critical and brilliantly executed. In mid-battle he departed from the letter of his orders when he saw an opportunity to flank Jubal Early’s men, breaking their line and capturing over a thousand Confederate soldiers. By day’s end Early was in full retreat up the valley turnpike to Fisher’s Hill nearly twenty miles to the south. Crook and Sheridan shared a moment of strange intimacy on entering the town of Winchester, where they were met in the street by three highly excited and effusive girls, exulting over the victory. They spoke so openly and loudly of their pleasure in the Union victory that Crook, who knew them well, tried to quiet them with a reminder, as Sheridan recorded in his memoirs, “that the valley had hitherto been a race-course—one day in the possession of friends and the next of enemies—and warned [them] of the dangers they were incurring by such demonstrations.” Something of Crook’s plain, steady character is revealed in this frank warning to the girls that the Union’s brilliant victory, owing so much to his own role, might be followed as quickly by a reversal.22
But even as these two men savored the day’s victory a seed of anger was sprouting in Crook’s heart; the thousand Confederates his men had captured had been led from the field—“gobbled up”—by the late-arriving Union cavalry, who got the credit for their capture. “I complained of this to Sheridan,” Crook recorded, “who asked me to say nothing about it in my report, but that he saw the whole affair, and would give me credit for it.”23
Two days later at Fisher’s Hill the story was repeated almost verbatim. In Sheridan’s quarters on September 21, the night before the battle, Sheridan at first wanted to attack Early’s right, which was anchored on a bluff—the actual Fisher’s Hill—overlooking the Shenandoah River. A different approach was suggested by one of Crook’s division commanders, Colonel Hayes. Better, he said, to send Crook’s two divisions around to Early’s left, up over a timbered mountain. Early had placed his weakest units there, a clear sign he was convinced no attack would come that way. Sheridan at length agreed, and prepared the rest of his army to make a great to-do next day along Early’s front, convincing the Confederates that the attack would come head on. Hayes did the talking, but one of the officers present, Captain Henry A. Du Pont, later wrote that everybody understood the plan to move secretly up over the mountain was really Crook’s idea.
Conceiving it was the easy part; much harder was the exhausting uphill march the following day, starting before dawn and continuing until four o’clock in the afternoon, with Crook on foot leading the way. He believed that an officer of infantry should walk with his men, not ride. They made the climb in two long parallel lines, with flags lowered and keeping silence. When the time came to attack, Crook had only to order a left flank, march! and his divisions were instantly facing down the timbered hillside toward the unsuspecting Confederates, who were still expecting an attack from the opposite direction. As soon as Crook’s men started down the hill a great roar came up from all of their throats at once. This must have been one of the signal moments of Crook’s life—a perfectly executed maneuver, an unsuspecting enemy, the soft fruit of victory ready to fall into his lap. In his autobiography he wrote,
Unless you heard my fellows yell once, you can form no conception of it. It beggars all description. The enemy fired a few shots afterward, but soon the yell was enough for them. The most of them never stopped to see the fellows the yell came from, but dug out. By the time we reached the open bottom there weren’t any two men of any organization there.24
The collapse of Early’s left was soon followed by the breaking of his whole army, one division after another peeling away, as the panic spread across the southern line from left to right. Soon Early was retreating pell-mell up the valley turnpike, heading south. Sheridan was hoping for the ultimate in military success—the capture of an entire army—but the cavalry divisions he had sent on ahead to block the turnpike and trap Early’s army, and the infantry he had sent in pursuit, pressing Early from behind, both quit as darkness came and went into bivouac. Sheridan was infuriated by this “backing and filling”; what he wanted, he roared in a message, was “resolution and actual fighting, with necessary casualties.”25 But of course the moment was lost. Early had received a sound whipping, but his army was intact. At day’s end Sheridan was thinking of the failure, Crook of the triumph. He had conceived the plan and marched his men for twelve hours to get into position. His attack had rolled up the enemy. But the newspaper reports did not single out Crook for praise; recognition of his merit would have to wait on Sheridan’s official report, just as it did for the battle at Winchester.
But it was a third incident not quite a month later that poisoned the friendship of Crook and Sheridan for good and all. Over the intervening weeks Sheridan and his army chased Early right up the Shenandoah Valley, until the northern transport began to show signs of strain. Better, Sheridan thought, to call a halt and move back down the valley, destroying barns and carrying off the year’s harvest. Grant could not argue. This had been his idea—to “eat out Virginia clean and clear as far as they go, so that crows flying over it for the remainder of the season will have to carry their own provender with them.”26 Sheridan did the job thoroughly. By mid-October he was back down the valley near the town of Middletown and the point where Cedar Creek flowed into the Shenandoah, just north of Fisher’s Hill. Early’s army had of course followed them back down, his cavalry nipping at Union heels. Sheridan was meanwhile summoned to Washington for a meeting on endgame strategy. Grant, Sheridan, and Halleck, general of the Army, all had different ideas about what to do next. But Sheridan went uneasily; an intercepted message suggested Early might have been reinforced. Sheridan thought the message a ruse but wasn’t sure. He spent half a day in the capital, then hurried back to Winchester, where he spent the night of October 18, about fifteen miles north of the point where his army had deployed in a line blocking the valley turnpike. Holding the left of the line was Crook with his two divisions.
Now Crook learned about flanking marches from the receiving end. On the ground at the time there was only one clear warning of what was to come. Crook’s officer of the day, hearing noise in the dark beyond the pickets standing guard, went out to investigate. He did not return. It is not clear when Crook learned of this fact, which should have stirred him to action. But he recorded early signs of trouble aplenty in his memoirs, beginning with Sheridan’s removal of the cavalry pickets from Crook’s front. These pickets were an early-warning system; without them Crook’s divisions were exposed. Crook also notes that his divisions were deployed more than a mile from the rest of the army. This meant they were further exposed. Finally, Crook informs us that his divisions had been whittled away by losses in battle and by the removal of men detailed for guard duty and the like elsewhere. He was down “to less than three thousand men.” He was simultaneously exposed and weakened.
The reader of Crook’s memoir, noting the many excuses for the general laid out in advance by Crook the author, is amply warned of the gathering catastrophe, which arrived on the morning of October 19. “Just at the peep of day,” Crook writes, his men in their tents and trenches were suddenly assaulted by four Confederate infantry divisions which had made their way undetected over a narrow mountain path—much as Crook had done at Fisher’s Hill. Surprise was complete. Crook’s men broke. The rest of Sheridan’s army panicked as well and soon the whole Union force was retreating in the direction of Middletown in total disarray. At a stroke, in effect using Crook’s own plan, Early was about to regain everything he had lost, and it was Crook, whose men broke first, who had opened the way. By late morning Sheridan’s army was desperately reforming itself west of the town of Middletown. “Our new line was getting stronger all the time by stragglers joining from the rear,” Crook recorded.27 It was as close as he could bring himself to claiming that the situation was under control. Of course, it was not.
Sheridan meanwhile had been woken at about six o’clock in the morning by an officer reporting the sound of artillery to the south. Desultory firing was not uncommon, so he did not immediately rise. He lay and worried. Then he got up, asked again about the artillery, ordered breakfast, ordered the horses to be saddled, worried about the message he had concluded was a ruse.
Sheridan thus stirred himself with increasing urgency until he mounted at about nine a.m. and with three staff officers and a cavalry escort headed south on the road to Cedar Creek, listening all the while. At one point he dismounted and put his ear to the ground. Now he stopped trying to reassure himself. The sound of the cannons was steady, it was louder, and it was coming his way. Just south of Kernstown, he came to the first signs of disorder and confusion among troops and wagons along the road, soon followed by the panicked chaos of an army in full retreat.
At first, Sheridan thought of trying to establish a new defensive line at Winchester, but then the fighting spirit boiled up in him, he remembered his victories, he told himself the men would fight if he rode to lead them, and that is what he did. Sometimes he was on the road, sometimes he took to the fields alongside to get round the wagons and men. He took his hat off because the soldiers liked that. The cheers buoyed him along and the officers riding with him noted that his jaw was set, his eyes were fiery.
“About-face, boys!” he shouted to the soldiers streaming down the pike away from Cedar Creek. “We are going back to our camps! We are going to get a twist on those fellows! We are going to lick them out of their boots!”28
Twelve or fifteen miles up the valley pike Sheridan charged on his big black horse, Rienzi. When he got to Middletown he found his army in the process of reforming, just as Crook would write later. From about ten thirty until about four in the afternoon Sheridan reformed and reorganized his army, waiting until he thought it was ready, and then he attacked back up the road to Cedar Creek. “Go after them!” Sheridan yelled when the Confederates took to their heels. “We’ve got the god-damnedest twist on them you ever saw.” He drove Early’s divisions first from their captured positions and then, whipped and thoroughly beaten, all the way back to Fisher’s Hill, where the Confederates spent a night before continuing on south.
While Early was facing the reality of defeat that evening at Fisher’s Hill, Sheridan took a seat beside Crook at a campfire on Cedar Creek. Crook’s worst day was Sheridan’s greatest. But by Crook’s account Sheridan said to him a remarkable thing about his ride from Winchester and the turning of the tide of battle. Sheridan was no sentimentalist, but it is hard to see his words as anything but salve on the wound of a friend. “Crook,” he said, “I am going to get much more credit for this than I deserve, for, had I been here in the morning the same thing would have taken place, and had I not returned today, the same thing would have taken place.”29
More credit than he deserved? It had been another bloody day—5,600 men lost by Sheridan, half as many by Early—but the casualties did not reveal the import of the event. Cedar Creek was one of the great and decisive Union victories of the Civil War; it turned defeat into resounding triumph in the space of a day, pushed Early right out of the valley, and sealed the reelection victory of President Lincoln three weeks later. Sheridan had the kind of warlike spirit that inspired men on the battlefield; at Cedar Creek they felt better as soon as they saw him. He deserved plenty of credit, but what he got was astounding, the kind of thing that lifts a man from ordinary mortal to legend. It happened this way. On Monday morning, November 3, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the actor James Murdoch was preparing a selection of patriotic verse he had promised to read at a local theater that night. His friend Buck—Murdoch’s nickname for the painter and occasional poet Thomas Buchanan Read—was with Murdoch when Read’s brother-in-law arrived with a copy of the latest Harper’s Weekly. In it was Thomas Nast’s drawing of Sheridan on Rienzi, dashing from Winchester to Cedar Creek. “Buck,” said the actor, “there’s a poem in that picture.”
Read went to work. By noon he had written something. That night, just eight days before the election, Murdoch rose to read a dramatic poem celebrating “Sheridan’s Ride.” It was the kind of thing an actor could boom out over the footlights, and the poem went on to sweep the country.
Up from the South at break of day,
Bringing to Winchester fresh dismay,
The affrighted air with a shudder bore,
The terrible grumble and rumble and roar,
Telling the battle was on once more,
And Sheridan twenty miles away.30
On it went for sixty-three lines. That poem would be a staple of patriotic gatherings for years to come. No general of the Civil War ever enjoyed a more intoxicating whirlwind of fame than Sheridan at thirty-three, and he got it lavishly and right away. Crook’s failure of the morning at Cedar Creek had been reversed by day’s end, but that was about the best that could be said of his performance. For his solid achievements at Winchester and Fisher’s Hill in September, Crook still awaited the recognition and credit promised by Sheridan. These never came—quite the contrary. In May 1876, as he prepared to cross the North Platte in pursuit of the hostile Sioux, he carried in his heart a tender place fed by resentment of Sheridan. His onetime friend had waited until the war was over to write up his long-promised report. When Crook read it in February 1866, he was stunned by Sheridan’s cleverly worded implication that turning the Confederate left at Winchester had been his own idea—not Crook’s. When Sheridan wrote of Fisher’s Hill he did it again, sliding over Crook’s role in his report, then flatly claiming the plan as his own in his memoirs.31 There is no evidence that Crook protested to Sheridan himself when he saw these bald grabs for credit and glory. Probably he said nothing. Grown men are not supposed to cry at being overlooked. But in Crook’s heart bitterness grew.