14
GEORGE CROOK WAS A slow and careful thinker. He kept things to himself while he made up his mind. On the trail he liked to be alone, which meant riding ahead, which meant he would be the first to know if hostiles were lying in wait. “He was frequently warned of the risk he ran,” the correspondent John Finerty wrote, “but paid no attention to the advice.”1
Riding out in front of the column, thinking, hunting when opportunity afforded—this was the pattern of Crook’s day. The enlisted men on the expedition imagined that he spoke only to the officers, while the officers complained that the general had time only for his scouts and Indian guides. During the week that Crook’s force spent cooling its heels on Goose Creek in June the reporters and officers were all trying to plumb what was going on in his mind.
Nobody knows but General Crook [one of his officers wrote] and he won’t tell. The general doesn’t make any confidants. If an officer asks him a question, he doesn’t “sit on” him, as we call snubbing out here … but generally simply says, “I don’t know” … he has a faculty for silence that is absolutely astonishing … Grant is loquacious when compared with him … It is generally believed that we are waiting for the arrival of either the Shoshones or the Crow.2
The writer’s guess was a good one. Did Crook himself know what he would do next, or was he still waiting for a plan to form? No one knew. “Crook makes up his mind at the last moment,” an officer wrote in his diary, “and then acts at once.”3 Luther North, a commander of Pawnee scouts on a later expedition with Crook, complained of the uncertainty. “We never knew when we were to move camp,” he wrote.4 But that was the man’s way; others had to hustle to keep up. Once the Crow and the Shoshones had arrived Crook pointed his men north, hoping to surprise the Sioux in their village on the Rosebud.
The first day’s march took them thirty-five miles to the headwaters of the Rosebud, where the Crow irritated Crook by ignoring his order to build no fires. They built big ones exactly as they pleased to roast some buffalo they had shot along the way. Crook was angered further when the Crow refused to scout ahead after dark, but he kept these feelings to himself. While the Crow feasted, Frank Grouard and a couple of others went out, returning later to say they had found the remains of a campfire in a gulch—probably a sign that the column had been sighted and the hostiles warned. Crook concluded he still had but one choice: push on and hope to surprise the Indians in their village. That night John Finerty slept next to Captain Alexander Sutorious, who remarked, “We will have a fight tomorrow, mark my words—I feel it in the air.”5
The column was off again by first light on June 17, following the Rosebud downstream. At about eight o’clock Crook ordered a halt on the banks of the stream. Bridles were removed so horses and mules could graze. For half an hour the men lounged while the rear of the column closed up and the scouts crossed the Rosebud and probed beyond the hills and bluffs to the north, looking for hostiles. With the sun well up the June morning grew hot. Crook sat down by a spring to play a few hands of cards with Lieutenant Bourke and others.6
The Rosebud was called a river but here, sixty miles from the Yellowstone, it was little more than a winding stream. The spot where Crook ordered a halt was an east-west stretch of a few miles through a narrow valley with bluffs to the north and south until the valley suddenly narrowed into a tight canyon as it veered sharply north. In that direction, Crook believed, was the hostile village. Above the steeps of the bluffs the ground rose away more gradually; swales between gave the high ground a look like the fingers of a hand. In a few spots rocks broke through the surface, offering cover to riflemen. A horse could carry a man pretty much anywhere, panting and scrambling up the steeps, at speed along the fingerlike ridges or down across the swales between them.
About eight thirty came the sound of shots. Captain Sutorious thought the scouts were probably after buffalo again, but moments later the first Crow raced into camp shouting, “Sioux! Sioux!”
Men jumped to their feet and grabbed for horses. The first scouts were almost immediately followed by thirty more. Behind them to the north across the Rosebud the ridgeline came alive as Sioux and Cheyenne horsemen rode into view and began to fire into the men scrambling below. What happened in the next few minutes established the course of the fight that unfolded over the following six or seven hours. The view from Crook’s place near the stream was poor. His first order was to deploy infantry in a skirmish line north of the streambed to meet whatever came. Then he ordered Captain Anson Mills with his men to seize and hold a line of commanding bluffs on the right while he himself, mounted on a black horse, rode north to the top of a low hill to get a sense of the landscape and form a plan of battle. Only one or two men rode with him. This was classic Crook—by himself, silent, figuring out what to do before issuing orders.
But while Crook was thinking the matter through, the battle was rapidly taking shape without him. Mills was already heading for the bluffs on the right. In the same moments three additional movements determined all that followed. Captain George Randall, in command of the Indian scouts, charged the hostiles on the bluffs to the northwest and in a brief, hot fight drove them back. Frank Grouard said later that “if it had not been for the Crow, the Sioux would have killed half of our command.”7 At about the same time Major Andrew Evans, a West Point classmate of Crook who had been active all through the Civil War, dispatched two companies of cavalry under Captain Frederick Van Vliet to occupy heights south of the stream. These men reached the summit just ahead of an attacking force of Sioux, who did not contest the terrain. Finally a cavalry force under Lieutenant Colonel William B. Royall made its way through the skirmish line of infantry to relieve the Crow scouts and drive the hostiles back from the bluffs northwest of the streambed. As the Indians pulled away Royall pressed after them, driving all the way up one of the fingerlike ridges to a high plain two miles or more from the valley floor.
These opening movements roughly account for the situation Crook found when he returned to the mass of his men along the stream: Mills secure in control of bluffs to the north and east above the narrowing canyon where the Rosebud turned north; Van Vliet secure in control of heights to the south; Colonel Royall with a substantial force pushed far out to the northwest in continuing contact with the hostiles. With the infantry under his immediate command Crook now moved north up one of the ridges just west of Mills, halting on a broad open flat where rocks in a few spots gave cover.
These opening stages of the fighting had occupied about two hours. Crook believed that the Indians had attacked because their village was nearby, right up that narrow canyon out of sight to his right. To go after the village Crook needed to concentrate his men, but Royall had his hands full out on the far ridgeline. At about ten thirty in the morning Crook issued a terse order to Captains Thomas Burrowes and Andrew Burt: “Stop those Indians and occupy that ridge.”8 He meant the Indians attacking Royall’s men half a mile to the west. After they finally succeeded in this maneuver at about twelve thirty in the afternoon Crook ordered Mills to proceed up the Rosebud canyon and attack the village when he got to it; he sent Captain Henry E. Noyes with five troops of cavalry to follow and join Mills; and he ordered Colonel Royall to rejoin the main force. Perhaps Crook thought Royall had only to turn his men around and ride back; in the event it took another two hours and involved intense fighting. At several points during the struggle Royall feared that one or another of his companies would be cut off by the Indians and annihilated.
Unfolding throughout the day was a classic cavalry battle of lathered horses and clouds of dust with a rising and falling rattle of gunfire. Crook’s men carried 100,000 rounds and shot off a quarter of the whole; much of the rest was scattered and lost on the ground as they moved from place to place. The Indians yelled without ceasing. Their whooping, Finerty noted, “has a sort of wolfish bark to it.” He was astonished by the scores of Indian ponies lying dead on the field—heaps of them—but, “strange to relate,” curiously few bodies of Indians. In the give and take of the fighting there were many close calls and daring rescues. Bourke at one point helped the bugler Elmer Snow from the field after a shot had broken both of his arms. Captain Guy V. Henry with Royall’s force was shot through both cheeks and overrun by the Sioux after he fell to the ground, but Crow and Shoshone scouts managed his rescue.9 Horses ran away with soldiers. Frank Grouard succeeded in slowing one just enough for the soldier to throw himself to the ground at the last minute. Another disappeared with its rider into a mass of Indians. Crook was desperate to concentrate his men and seethed inwardly at the delay.
Who was commanding this furious assault on Crook and his thousand men? Crook had no idea. If any of the scouts recognized Crazy Horse they did not say so. Finerty felt sure he had spotted Crazy Horse signaling commands with a mirror during the battle, but that was only later, when he came to write about the fight. But the Indian accounts all agree; it was Crazy Horse who was leading this fight, and his warriors were in command of the ebb and flow of battle over a period of five or six hours. Most of the whites had been through the shock of mass battles during the late war, when half a thousand men might die in a day in a fight hardly big enough to be given a name. But here at the Rosebud they were probed and assaulted by a fluid and shifting enemy in a manner that astounded them all.
Indians on both sides did not make things any easier. There were moments when the soldiers had to stop shooting because they could not tell which Indians in the fray were friendly scouts, which hostiles. Some Crow early in the fight spotted Red Cloud’s son Jack just as his horse fell dead from a bullet. The young man did not stop to take the horse’s bridle—a warrior custom to show he was not afraid—but jumped up and began to run away. The Crow rode up alongside of him, whipped him with their pony quirts, and snatched away his warbonnet and his father’s fancy gun. The fact they did not kill him was eloquent expression of contempt.10
All seemed confusion. Finerty, riding with Mills on his first charge up the bluffs, wasn’t even sure if the cavalry firing their revolvers had managed to kill or wound any Indians. “All passed like a flash of lightning, or a dream,” he recorded.
The Indians confronted them from the rocks on top of the bluffs until the soldiers approached within fifty paces—close enough for the shooting to become almost point-blank. Then the hostiles scattered. The soldiers let out “a mad cheer.” The breathless Finerty exulted that the Sioux were “unable to face the impetuous line of the superior race.” Away the Indians flew “with what white men would consider undignified speed.”11 Bourke was also irritated when the hostiles broke. “The cowardly whelps would not give us a show at close quarters,” he wrote in his diary the following day.12
Much the same happened to Crook in the center as he made his way with the main body of the force uphill from the river, rising from one crest to another. But after each scattering retreat of the hostiles, Finerty noted, “the Sioux became bold and impudent again. They rode up and down rapidly, sometimes wheeling in circles, slapping an indelicate portion of their persons at us and beckoning us to come on.”
Crook did come on, from one crest to the next, but gained nothing. “The Sioux … took to their heels every time we came within fifty or sixty yards of them,” Bourke wrote. “We followed them seven miles, chasing them from position to position.”13
——
So it went. For all the charging and shooting Crook could not bring the fight to a climax. At one point in the early afternoon his horse was shot from under him; when the horse went down the general was tossed over the horse’s head to land hard on the ground.14 That was as close as Crook got to closing with the Indians.
Royall meanwhile seemed unable to withdraw from his extended position. The aid given by Burt and Burrowes was not enough. Royall had to fight every step of the way back, in constant danger of being overwhelmed. An hour passed, then a second. Of the whites killed in the fighting on this day, almost all died with Royall while he was trying to carry out Crook’s order to rejoin the main body. By early afternoon concentrating his forces was the whole of the general’s plan; once done he planned to go up the Rosebud canyon to support Mills on his way to attack the Indian village.
It never happened. Mills pressed on alone, eager to strike a blow, but many of his men grew nervous as they felt the canyon walls closing in. Above them on both sides were numerous spots where hidden enemies might open fire. Bourke and Finerty rode with Mills. Grouard was leading the way, thinking the hostile village was somewhere ahead, around the next twist or turn. “Some of the more thoughtful officers had their misgivings,” Finerty wrote.
After proceeding several miles into the narrowing canyon Grouard came to a kind of opening of the canyon wall to the west, steep enough to require a panting climb but open enough for the force to make its way out toward the plain. Here he cocked an ear to the left while the men tightened saddle girths, sure they would find a battle just ahead. To Mills, Grouard said, “I hear firing in that direction, sir.” That direction was out and around to the ridges where Royall was trying to fight his way free of the Indians. Before Mills could answer that it didn’t matter, he had his orders, the men around him all turned to the sound of approaching horses. It was Crook’s dust-whitened aide-de-camp Azor Nickerson, arriving with a change in orders. He had ridden through the canyon with only one man for companion.
“Royall is hard pressed and must be relieved,” Nickerson said. “Henry is badly wounded and Vroom’s troop [with Royall] is all cut up. The General orders that you and Noyes defile by your left flank out of this canyon, and fall on the rear of the Indians who are pressing Royall.”15
Here something interesting emerges. Mills and others said later that they had reached the Indian village—they even had the village. They could not understand why they were being pulled back with the village and success in sight. But there was no village, not there nor around the next bend. It was twenty miles away, across the divide, where the streams fed west and north into the Little Bighorn.
Mills did as ordered. Leading their horses his men ascended the broken hillside to the west, not really much of a climb, and as they emerged from the canyon the sound of firing became clear. Mills gave the order to mount; the force moved quickly until it reached the plateau and open ground and saw Royall’s men facing a growing mass of Sioux threatening to attack. “We dashed forward at a wild gallop,” wrote Finerty, “cheering as we went.” In a moment the Battle of the Rosebud was over. “The cunning savages did not wait for us.” They scattered, and this time—it was midafternoon—they kept on going. The rule of thumb when an enemy breaks is to chase him down, but Crook ordered no pursuit.
Mills was puzzled at the way the fight petered out. Then he saw the explanation in the general’s face. “I never saw a man more dejected.” But he wanted an answer in words. “Why did you recall me?” he asked. “I had the village and could have held it.”16
To this question Crook might have answered truthfully either of two things. The first was that he needed Mills—Royall was in danger of being overrun. Men who had been in the thick of it told Mills immediately after the fight that the Indians “had swung around and overwhelmed them, charging bodily and rapidly through the soldiers, knocking them from their horses with lances and knives, dismounting and killing them, cutting the arms off several at the elbows in the midst of the fight and carrying them away.”17
And there was a second reason Crook had recalled Mills. He had concluded that it wasn’t safe to follow him into the canyon. First to give him pause were the doctors, who refused to stay with the wounded unless a big guard was left behind to defend them. Crook did not have men enough. Then the Crow scouts said there were too many Indians. Baptiste Pourier was acting as interpreter for the Crow, and later described the moment:
When the Crow scouts came to the Rosebud canyon they refused to go into it … White Face was spokesman. He told the General they wanted to go back. The General asked them what for. He said they did not want to get killed, as they all would be if they went into the canyon … The General said that he wanted to get to the Sioux village and fight them there. White Face answered and said that the force you have been fighting is only a little war party; if you go to the village you will find as many Indians as the grass … you will all be killed, and the knowing Indian rubbed the palms of his hands together in imitation of grinding stones, which is the Indian sign for complete destruction.18
To Mills, Crook said none of this. “Well, Colonel, I found it a more serious engagement than I thought,” he replied. “I knew I could not keep my promise to support you with the remainder of the force.”19
Brought back together at last, Crook’s men retraced their way down the hills to the stretch along the stream where they had stopped to water and graze their animals in the morning. There were wounded to care for, dead to bury. After dark ten bodies were put into a common grave on the banks of the streambed. A big fire was built on the spot and fed through the night. It was not uncommon for Crook to eat his dinner and drink his coffee without speaking. What he did is all we know of what he thought. “General Crook decided that evening to retire on his base of supplies,” Finerty wrote. That meant turning around to rejoin the freight wagons he had left on Goose Creek. It made sense; his men were short of everything, and the wounded could not be left or sent back alone. Of the Battle of the Rosebud, then, it might fairly be said that Crook came, he fought, he withdrew—not the sort of thing to bring men to their feet for “three cheers and a tiger,” ending with the growl customary at the time.
But officers and men were not ready to leave it at that; they wanted to know who won the fight. In the absence of fiery words from the general his men worked out a verdict on their own. The first step was to count casualties. Finerty, Bourke, and others were convinced that most of the Indian dead had been carried off by their friends. Many pools of drying blood suggested the toll was heavy. But actually on the field were found thirteen dead hostiles, the bodies of perhaps 150 Indian ponies, and, Finerty noted, “a few old blankets and war bonnets.” Bourke in his diary recorded loss among the soldiers as ten killed outright, another four wounded so seriously they were expected to die, and perhaps forty more with injuries of more or less severity. The casualty count would suggest a draw, but Bourke wouldn’t have it. “This engagement gives us the morale over the boastful Dakotas,” he puffed in his diary, but it was curious language to describe a victory. He quoted Colonel Royall as authority that they had been fighting fifteen hundred hostiles, “maybe more.”20 Bourke was working himself up to a claim that they had given the Indians what for.
But Mills with his questions got the drift of things soon enough. Once men and horses had been looked after, he wrote later, “The officers then mingled and talked over the fight.” Foremost was the horrifying account of Royall’s close call with disaster; Indians passed right through his lines—it was the way they hunted buffalo, riding in close. As bad in a different way was the discovery by the streambed after the fighting of the dead body of a Shoshone boy, left to guard horses. He had been horribly mutilated—scalped from the nape of the neck right up over the top of his head, “leaving his skull ghastly and white,” in Bourke’s words. The boy had been painting his face for war, one cheek done and one still to do when he was shot through the back. But it wasn’t the sorrow of the loss that made the soldiers stop to reflect: the Sioux who killed the boy had ridden entirely around the command to do it—the soldiers had been surrounded—and none of them had known it. “We then all realized,” Mills said in 1917 to a veterans’ group, “that while we were lucky not to have been entirely vanquished, we had been most humiliatingly defeated.”21 One of his officers, Lieutenant Daniel C. Pearson, who brought up the rear and was last to leave the canyon, was equally blunt: “No conclusion,” he wrote, “was so apparent as our defeat.”22
Very early the next morning Crook’s force pulled out of camp. The dead Shoshone boy was buried by his friends and relatives, their faces painted black. “The tears of the young men and of the squaws rolled down their cheeks,” Finerty wrote. Where the big fire had burned down over the common grave, men on horses rode forward and back over the ashes to hide the site. On the way out of camp some Crow scouts chanced on the body of a Sioux. “They said life was not yet extinct and the Sioux was moving when they came up,” Bourke wrote. “He was not moving much when they left.”
Finerty was there with his friend, Lieutenant Adolphus Von Leuttwitz, and watched what happened:
The Crow set to work at once to dismember him. One scalped the remains. Another cut off the ears of the corpse and put them in his wallet. Von Leuttwitz and I remonstrated, but the savages only laughed at us. After cutting off toes, fingers, and nose, they proceeded to indecent mutilation, and this we could not stand. We protested vigorously, and the Captain [Sutorious], seeing that something singular was in progress, rode up with a squad of men and put an end to the butchery. One big, yellow brute of a Crow, as we rode off, took a portion of the dead warrior’s person out of his pouch, waved it in the air, and shouted something in broken English which had reference to the grief Sioux squaws must feel when the news of the unfortunate brave’s fate would reach them. And then the whole group of savages broke into a mocking chorus of laughter … I lost all respect for the Crow after that episode.23
Next day, rejoined with the supply wagons he had left on Goose Creek, Crook wrote his first dispatch for General Sheridan in Chicago and sent it south to Fort Fetterman with a courier, Ben Arnold, a scout in his early thirties who had been hired by Captain George Randall when the campaign was organizing back at Fort Laramie in the spring. The newspaper correspondents all sent stories at the same time, each describing in greatest detail the part of the battle they had witnessed personally: Finerty of the Chicago Times and T. C. McMillan of the Chicago Inter-Oceanhad ridden deep into the canyon with Captain Mills; Robert Strahorn of the Chicago Tribune had remained in the center with Crook; Reuben Davenport wrote a long and detailed dispatch about the daylong fight of the men under Colonel Royall.
Arnold later said he was paid $250 for making the hazardous, 190-mile trip back to Fetterman. That was probably his Army pay; very likely he got something extra from one or more of the newspapermen as well. It was their dispatches he filed with the fort’s telegrapher as soon as he arrived, then waited two and a half hours “before I turned the government dispatches in,” as he related to his stepdaughter, Josephine Waggoner. “I did as I was told to do; there my duty ended,” he said. Told by whom? Elsewhere in his account of the summer campaign Arnold refers to a “Captain Davenport.” The only Davenport on the expedition was the correspondent of the New York Herald, who evidently secured an advantage over his rivals—a small matter in most cases, but not in this one, and not to Crook.24
Crook’s account of the fighting was brief, ending with a casualty report: nine dead and twenty wounded. “I expect to find those Indians in rough places all the time,” he added, “and so have ordered five additional companies of Infantry and shall not probably make any extended movement till they arrive.”25 He was as good as his word. Except to move camp a few miles every two or three days to find new grazing and firewood, the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition did not budge for six weeks.