16
WHILE CROOK’S MEN MADE their wet way east, half drowned and half starved, what remained of the big camp of the Indians somehow, mysteriously, kept always a day or two ahead. Crook was convinced, and insisted in dispatches to Terry and Sheridan, that he was closing on the Indians, but his scouts, Frank Grouard and Baptiste Pourier, could not seem to find and keep hold of their trail. The Indians, for their part, generally knew Crook was about but they treated his army as they might have treated a grizzly sow with cubs down in the brush by a river—unpredictable and dangerous, but easily avoided. In one mood the Indians might go in and kill the bear; in another they might ride well around. Crook was in deadly earnest, but the Indians seem to have had enough of fighting the whites for awhile. They kept out of Crook’s way.
The scattering of the big camp had begun soon after the fight the Indians were already calling “Pehin Hanska Kasota.” Pehin Hanska—Long Hair—was the Indians’ name for Custer. During the actual fight few, perhaps none, of the Indians knew who they were fighting, but within a few days word spread that it was Custer they had killed. For those wiped out in battle the Indians used the sign of two hands rubbing together; it meant both killed and swept away, “rubbed out”—kasota.1 Immediately after the fight some of the Indians hurried away to the agencies, hoping to escape blame for the killing of so many soldiers, but for most of the Indians life went on as before.
Summer was the time for hunting and for raiding. One of the first war parties to leave camp after the Custer fight was led by Crazy Horse, who went north with two hundred men to steal the horses of the Assiniboines. Back from that foray by late July he spent only a few days in camp before setting out again, heading south this time with a smaller group for the Black Hills. Crazy Horse himself would have cited no special sense of mission for this constant raiding. It was simply what a Sioux warrior did, as a farmer might rise every morning to hoe his corn.
The northern plains were alive that summer with white miners and freighters crossing from the Missouri to the Black Hills, with Indians hunting and raiding, and with soldiers criss-crossing the plains trying to catch up with the Indians. Heading for the Black Hills to steal horses in early August were Sitting Bull’s nephew White Bull and his friend Iron Claw, just the two of them, thinking a small group might be missed or ignored by the soldiers. One night they were camped on the headwaters of the Hinhan Wakpa (Owl River)2 when a party of a dozen Indians tried to run off their horses. After a moment of excited confusion they all recognized each other; it was Crazy Horse and his friends, on their way back from their own raid into the hills.
Once that was sorted out the two parties camped together for the night. In addition to Crazy Horse himself and four Cheyenne the group of ten included Black Fox, Short Bull, Looking Horse, Low Dog, and Dog Goes—all (save the last) well-known Oglala fighting men close to Crazy Horse.3 That night Crazy Horse and his friends danced in the traditional way to celebrate success in war. After the singing was over White Bull made his bed beside the bed of Crazy Horse; before sleep they talked about the Custer fight. White Bull does not record what was said, but the fight was the talk of the plains that summer, and the Indians all seemed to understand that the big killing had settled nothing. More trouble was bound to come. In the morning White Bull and his friend continued south to the hills while Crazy Horse headed back for the big camp, then moving east from the Powder River. This encounter on the Hinhan Wakpa took place about the middle of the second week of August, when Crook and Terry were conferring on the Yellowstone.
Over the following weeks the big camp seems to have separated gradually into at least three or four large groups as it made its way east toward Beaver Creek, then on to the Little Missouri. There Sitting Bull and his Hunkpapas left the others to head north for Killdeer Mountain, while two or three other groups, including the Oglala under Crazy Horse and the Miniconjou under Red Horse, Roman Nose, and Iron Plume (a man of many alternate names), went south up the Little Missouri on a course pointed toward Deadwood in the Black Hills. Once Crook understood that the Indians were breaking up he slowed his progress to think. Bourke recorded,
The reason of our short march was that the trail began to split, showing that the hostiles knew we were in pursuit and were employing every artifice to bewilder us. Louis Richard and Frank Grouard both think they mean to draw us over to the broken country … where they can scatter like quail and reunite in our rear, or on our flank, at pleasure. Our scouts went out examining the trail with the utmost care: indications are becoming plain that we are close to a considerable band of the enemy, perhaps a strong rearguard, watching our progress.4
The scouts were seeing through a glass darkly. The Indians were indeed splitting up, and they did know Crook was following their trail, but they weren’t laying plans for an elaborate trap, and they were no longer even acting in concert. One large group (of which the Miniconjou Eagle Shield was a member) headed east, planning to surrender at Fort Sully, where the Cheyenne River joined the Missouri. But when Crook went south instead this band turned around and headed back toward the Powder. A second group (of which Swollen Face was a member) went into camp near the Little Missouri and prepared to fight, only to watch in some puzzlement as a fast-moving detachment of Crook’s men hurried on past them only nine miles away. This group may have included Crazy Horse and his Oglala. A third group of forty-eight lodges led by Red Horse and Iron Plume (of the many names) continued on south about two jumps ahead of Crook’s column. Red Horse says his band was going straight south “to give ourselves up” at the agencies near Camp Robinson in northwest Nebraska, and it may have been true—or not.5 Unsure of Crook’s location or line of march, the Red Horse group went into camp along a tributary of the Moreau River called Mashtinca Putin (Rabbit Lip), a creek bed near the sandstone outcroppings known as Slim Buttes. From this spot some of the men went out raiding while others went hunting, leaving a handful of warriors and the women and children behind.
Crook, meanwhile, having turned south at the headwaters of the Heart River, led his column of two thousand toward the Black Hills. “Frank Grouard says he knows nothing of the country this side of the Little Missouri,” Bourke wrote in his diary. The day of the turn broke with a “cold, drizzling rain”; after nightfall it turned into a downpour. At first light on September 6 the march south resumed in a “cold, chilling mist and rain.” The next day the rain was heavier. “We often stood up at nights,” one enlisted man remembered, “for to lay down we had to do so in mud and water.”6 So it continued—rain, cold, great difficulty making fire enough to boil a pot of water for coffee; very little bacon, six flat biscuits of hardtack per man per day, soaking clothes, sleeping on wet ground, and then on the third day the first slabs of half-cooked horsemeat. Some of the men pronounced it quite palatable, but the majority called it tough, repellent in flavor, with little to keep a man going.
By the third day it was apparent that the accumulating hardships were no joke. Horses were giving out and men were straggling, sure signs of trouble for any military force making its way through enemy country. “Footsore, lame and weary,” Bourke called the column stringing out along the trail; at day’s end late arrivals made their way into camp an hour behind the first, “leading tired horses.” Clothing was all but rotting on their bodies. Cracked boots could not be replaced or repaired. Blisters had no time to heal. The rain turned the gravelly soil into a porridge-like mud or gumbo that clung so heavily to feet and hooves it had to be scraped off every few hundred yards. Cavalrymen leading their horses brought up the rear of the march; from time to time a carbine or a pistol shot announced the dispatch of a horse that could go no further. The official reason for shooting the horses was to stop the Indians from getting them, but the real reason was to eat them. Whenever a horse went down men fell out to skin the carcass and slice off steaks to eat later in camp—steaks, they joked, that had “a horse or a mule shoe at one end of them.” It did not amuse the soldiers to know that the mule packers with the column were eating better than the military; unlike Crook, they had taken care to bring what they needed. Weighing these realities, Crook on September 7 ordered a detachment under Captain Anson Mills of 150 men on the best horses to hasten south to Deadwood to buy up emergency food supplies, then hurry back to relieve the main column. Riding out with Mills late in the day were the newspaper writers Robert Strahorn and Reuben Davenport, the latter doubtless hoping to escape the cold shoulder prompted by his dismissive stories in the New York Herald. John Finerty wanted to join them but his horse had played out. Mills departed in the late afternoon in a “cold, penetrating rain.”
Next day Crook’s men—more than eighteen hundred of them—shared the meat of three or four antelope shot by the scouts, barely enough for two bites per man. Passing a thicket of plum bushes in the afternoon, Lieutenant Walter S. Schuyler wrote to his father, “the whole staff, including the General, stampeded down into [the] plum patch, going down on our hands and knees to pick up the ripe fruit that the wind had shaken off.”7 Some of the men when they had a chance roasted and ate the plump parts of the cactus called Indian fig. It was filling but caused diarrhea.
It was on this day—September 8—that the eating of horses became general. One of the men on the march remembered that “there was not fat enough on a dozen horses to season the gruel for a grasshopper.”8 The remaining bacon was just enough to grease the frying pans. That night sitting with his officers Crook passed around a pint flask of whiskey he’d brought along to celebrate his forty-eighth birthday. The general and a dozen men each took a mouthful. Some of the officers had hardtack crackers to eat with their whiskey; the rest went without. “Take it for all in all,” wrote Bourke, “it was decidedly the ‘thinnest’ birthday celebration I have ever attended.”9
The men in Crook’s command, Bourke fails to add, were in no mood to be toasting the general on his birthday. With little to eat, soaked day after day in a cold rain, in clothes they had been wearing for a month, walking beside faltering horses, with mud to sleep on and nothing to hope from the morrow but more of the same, the men of Crook’s Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition were about as worn down and played out as it was possible for a body of soldiers to be. Those who made “the horsemeat march” never forgot it, and never forgave Crook for marching off into the wilderness without plan or rations. One of the officers, Captain Samuel S. Sumner, gave his opinion unvarnished in a letter to his friend Charles King in 1918:
The fact is, King, I always recall that campaign with more or less disgust. We suffered so much needless hardship, and the cavalry was practically used up by a vicious system of marching. Merritt complained bitterly at the time, while Carr simply laughed at the whole campaign as a joke in Indian warfare.10
Carr made a joke of what infuriated ordinary soldiers. Two days before the fight at Slim Buttes, Merritt told Carr that he’d heard the muttered resentment of an orderly in the headquarters tent—“General Crook ought to be hung.”11
While Crook was sharing his whiskey with his officers, many miles to the south Mills was preparing to attack an Indian camp discovered that afternoon by Frank Grouard, who had spotted the pony herd. The place was one of the favored camping grounds of the Sioux—good grass along a pleasant, winding stream, some sandstone bluffs nearby that offered protection and gave the place its Sioux name, Paha Zipzipela, Slim Buttes. Grouard told Mills he feared the village was too large to attack safely. But Mills, unlike Crook, did not think much of the scout. “[He] knew the ways of the Indians,” Mills conceded, but was a slippery, evasive character, “not to be relied upon. I always regarded him as a coward and a big liar.”12
Mills chose an odd moment to label Grouard a coward. That night he sent the scout to pin down the location of the village for a dawn attack, the sort of creeping about in the dark that might strike fear into any man. Grouard not only went but returned leading two stolen horses—a paint and a black stallion, picked out of the village herd. That worried Mills. “I at once suspected he was getting himself in shape to get away should we get into a hot fight.”13
Mills concealed his men that night in a ravine where they huddled to escape the steady rain. A bite or two of bacon or hardtack was all they had to eat. How many Indian warriors might be found in the village no one knew. The drenched soldiers each carried only fifty rounds of ammunition. A hundred and fifty worn-out men on broken-down horses were not exactly a shock force, but Mills was determined to attack. He argued that surprise would give them the advantage. His second in command, Lieutenant John W. Bubb, wanted to send word back to Crook, but Mills refused. He divided the command into three columns. They would approach the village in the dark. When there was light enough for a man to see the sight of his carbine they would charge. The center column of twenty-five men on horseback under Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka would stampede the Indian ponies. It was just what Custer had done at the Washita in 1868, and what Reynolds had done at the Powder River the previous March—a textbook dawn attack sending the Indians in all directions, or so it was hoped. There was no more to Mills’s plan than that.
About three a.m. the men began to move. By five they had closed on the camp and Schwatka was getting his column into position. The smoke from the dying fires of the Indian camp hung low with the rain and mist. But before any decision could be made or order given the pony herd picked up some alien sound or scent on the night air and snapped alive—grazing quietly in the valley one moment, then tensing the next, heads and ears up, nostrils flaring, bursting as one into an instant dead run for the Indian camp whinnying loudly.
Mills had warned Schwatka to be ready, and the lieutenant spurred up; the center column of twenty-five mounted men chased right into the village after the horses, revolvers out and firing right and left as Indians rushed out of the lodges. Figures fell on both sides dead or wounded. In a matter of moments the Indians were gone, across the stream and up into the rocks and bluffs south of the village. Some moments of relative calm followed as the day brightened; then a desultory fire opened from the Indians in the rocks on one side, and the soldiers on the other. For a time the village itself was no-man’s-land. Indians on horseback could be seen riding about between the hills and bluffs. The sun was well up by the time the soldiers all made their way into the village. They soon discovered that one small group of Indians had taken cover in a winding ravine. The occasional shot from the ravine reminded everybody to keep an eye out in that direction. It did not seem a problem at first. Meanwhile the hungry soldiers had begun to prowl around, emerging from the abandoned lodges with dried meat, dried plums and berries, even a little coffee, sugar, and flour which had been carried away from the agencies—and something else. A private held up a cavalry guidon—one of the swallowtail flags lost on the Little Bighorn by Custer’s men. From other lodges came more looted items: McClellan Army saddles, bits of cavalry uniform, paper money, a sergeant’s notebook already filled with colored drawings by some Indian, creating a kind of diary of his summer of war. Particularly noted were the leather gauntlets once worn by Captain Myles W. Keogh of the 7th Cavalry. All the officers knew Keogh. Marked neatly with his name, the gauntlets had been wrapped up with the guidon in a parfleche, one of the painted-rawhide wallets in which the Plains Indians kept precious things.
As soon as Mills had the site of the village secure (save the ravine where the Indians were holed up) he dispatched two men on the best remaining horses to summon Crook on the double. As the morning wore on the shooting subsided but Mills continued to worry. Indians were seen in the rocks and bluffs, more all the time after the women and children had been led to safety. Every little while a detachment of cavalry would rush some point where the Indians were pressing too close. It wasn’t fighting exactly, but it wasn’t quiet, either. The Indians shouted out to the soldiers. Grouard said they were taunting the whites, claiming big villages were nearby, warriors were on the way to rub out the soldiers. Grouard allowed that this was possible. The trail they had been following over the last week had been left by a lot more Indians than Mills had just chased into the bluffs. Thus matters stood for a number of hours until Crook and an advance guard of about 250 men rode up in the late morning.
The ride had been steady and hard. Baptiste Pourier and John Finerty rode side by side, talking as they had been doing for weeks past. Pencil and notebook in his pocket, ready to hand, even on horseback, Finerty peppered Pourier with constant questions. If an answer excited Finerty’s interest, he would pull out his notebook, saying, “Wait a minute, Bat, while I make a note of that.” Even hurrying to battle Finerty kept the questions coming, then stanched the flow of Bat’s commentary while he made a note of this, that, or the other.14
The country was rough, the horses of Crook’s men tired and unsteady. Bourke and King both later commented on the using up of the horses by exhausted men riding over hard ground. The Irish-born Captain James Kennington, a veteran of the Civil War, where he was wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg, rode at the head of Company B of the 14th Infantry. Worried about Mills and his small force, Crook pressed the men quickly. Only a few miles short of Slim Buttes, coming down the gravelly slope of a steep ravine, Kennington’s tired horse suddenly stumbled and Kennington lurched forward with great force, crushing his testicles against the pommel of his saddle. Ten years later he told an Army retirement board, “It hurt me underneath here”—placing his hand beneath his groin. At the time the pain was so intense that he fainted. While the rest of the command hurried on Kennington was laid on the ground. When he regained consciousness the pain seemed to have gone away. He remounted and continued on to the battlefield site at Slim Buttes, arriving after Crook was already busying himself taking command. Kennington would be tormented by this injury for the rest of his life.15
Crook’s first task was to assure himself the command was secure. He then turned his attention to the deep ravine where the Indians had taken cover. He ordered his new aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Clark, to drive out the Indians with a body of volunteers. As Clark’s group rushed up firing from several directions at once, other soldiers drifted over to watch the action, and maybe take a shot or two themselves. Bourke observed from the edge of the ravine as soldiers pressed in with shouts and curses and were met by heavy fire. One man was shot in the ankle joint, another was hit in the leg by a bullet, “carrying away the whole calf.” Down in the ravine itself Bourke saw “a pile … of squaws, and little papooses, covered with dirt and blood and screaming in a perfect agony of terror … Just in front, three or four dead bodies lay stretched, weltering in their own gore.”
On the other side of the ravine scouts had crawled close—among them Baptiste Pourier, Frank Grouard, and a scout variously known as Charley or Jim White, also called Buffalo Chips. Not far from Pourier was John Finerty, trying to see what was going on. Pourier shouted, “Keep down, Finerty, or you’ll get your damned head shot off.” But Finerty could not resist; as he lifted his head to peer into the ravine a bullet smacked into the earth next to him, driving grit into his hair and ear. Seeing this, Pourier shouted, “Make a note of that, Finerty!”16
The Chicago Tribune reporter wasn’t the only one trying to get a good look. Charley White was sticking his head up as well. Some accounts of this moment report that the Indians were hiding in “a cave,” but it seems to have been little more than a hard-to-see, hard-to-reach spot at the bottom of a gravelly ravine, hollowed out by the Indians with fingers and knives. It was an awkward spot to approach, invisible until a man peered over the lip of the ravine. Clark’s group of volunteers reeled back under the Indian fire. Charley White was lying near the lip beside Finerty and the other scouts, perfectly safe so long as he kept down. But White was determined to get off a shot. He told Baptiste Pourier he was going to get himself a scalp. Rifle in hand he raised himself up to take aim and in the same instant was hit in the chest. “My God!” he shouted. “I am shot.” With that he tumbled dead into the ravine.
In that same instant Pourier, peeping over the hill, saw the Indian who had shot White, reaching for the dead man’s revolver. “Before I could say anything,” remembered Frank Grouard, “Bat jumped into the cave where the Indians were and about five seconds afterward jumped out with an Indian’s scalp in his hand, telling me he had scalped one of the redskins alive, which I found out to be true.”17 Another witness to this astonishing moment was Valentine McGillycuddy, a surveyor with medical training who was attached to Crook’s command as a contract surgeon. “I well remember him,” he wrote later of Pourier—“that bright red hair and beard of his standing on end, he dancing on the hill, swinging the scalp around his head, and howling.”18
With that, shooting stopped. The scouts began to shout down to the Indians in the ravine, urging them to come out peaceably; nothing would happen, they had the promise of Wicahpi Yamni (Three Stars). “Waste yelo!” shouted Pourier—“It’s all right.” Soon, a few women and children appeared around a bend in the ravine and made their way downhill to the spot where Crook waited. The coaxing and reassurance went on for some time. One of the women returned to the Indians in the ravine, then brought out a young man of perhaps twenty named Charging Bear. More talking followed. Finally Baptiste Pourier, unarmed, went back into the ravine with Charging Bear, hoping to talk the headman into surrendering. The anticipation at this moment was “almost painful in its intensity,” wrote Bourke; “for the first time, almost in the history of Indian warfare, hostile savages were about to lay down their arms in the open field.”19
Back in the ravine Pourier found an older man, sitting with his rifle in a kind of hollow which “he had scooped out with a butcher knife”—the cave of so many accounts. The correspondent Robert Strahorn later claimed that it was Pourier himself who had shot and wounded the man earlier in the fight.20 After some moments the red-haired Pourier reappeared helping the older man from one side; on the other he was supported by Charging Bear, his brother. Soon the rest of the Indians emerged from the ravine, at least twenty in all. Later still the dead were hauled forth, horribly mutilated by the heavy rifle fire of the soldiers.
As the older man approached it was not immediately apparent that he had been wounded. He walked erect and uttered no sound. Then Finerty saw that he had been shot in the stomach. His hand across his midriff was holding back his intestines, which were bulging forward and partly visible. A woman approached and tied her shawl around his middle, securing the wound. Frank Grouard, watching with the rest, says he shook the bloody hand of the silent chief as he made his way down the hill to a small campfire, where he sat down with the women and children. The wounded man was the many-named Iron Plume, also known as Black Shield, also known as Iron Shield, also known as American Horse.21
McGillycuddy and another doctor, Bennet Clements, attempted to sew up the man’s wound while he bit grimly on a wooden stick; he had refused a hypodermic of morphine. “As the surgeons work, and the sweat of agony breaks out upon his forehead,” King remembered, “he bites deep into the wood, but never groans nor shrinks.”22 But the wound was too severe. One of the doctors said to Baptiste Pourier, “Tell him he will die before next morning.” Despite his wound the Indian spoke freely. He said that there were other Indian villages nearby, including the camp of Crazy Horse and his friends He Dog and Kicking Bear. Three hundred lodges was a number mentioned. By this time all the Army officers could do the math: three hundred lodges would house a thousand men of fighting age, maybe more.
For the rest of the day the soldiers methodically looted the village. Food came first—the dried meat and fruits. A brisk trade in captured Indian ponies persisted through the afternoon as footsore cavalrymen sought to replace the horses that had died. Then attention was diverted to material goods. The frontier military was always quick to snatch up Indian “relics” or “curios,” to sell or to send home as souvenirs. Even before the Indians had been rooted out of the ravine great piles of stuff were accumulated. The officers and men were invited to take what they wanted, and many of them loaded up. In a report to an Ohio newspaper one of the officers wrote that the village was “filled with soldiers wandering about, muddy, tattered, lean and gaunt, rather sleepily lounging around looking over the plunder, scattering over prized paint and porcupine quills, nosing about robes and parfleches.”23 The rifle used that day by Iron Plume was taken by the scout and frontier poet Jack Crawford. Captain Anson Mills carried off a dozen items including a pipe, pouches, and a horned headdress. He considered taking but on reflection left behind a ten-year-old girl whose mother had been killed.
Among the items most eagerly sought were relics of the 7th Cavalry at the Little Bighorn. A locket containing the portrait of Captain Keogh was given to an officer who claimed he was a relative. A cavalry sergeant took a Spencer rifle, which he sold a few days later for two loaves of bread.24 Many bitter remarks followed the discovery of two “passes”—notes attesting to the trustworthy character of this Indian or that, issued by missionaries, agents, military officers, or traders to help “good” Indians pass safely through the countryside. One, dated in January, had been written in broken English by the half-literate François Boucher, a son-in-law of Spotted Tail rumored to have been selling ammunition to the Indians. The bearer was Stabber, the chief who had been briefly detained by Custer in the Black Hills in 1874. In January Boucher had reported Stabber’s promise to return from a visit to relatives in the north after ninety days “without disturbing any white man.”25
As the day wore on Crook made no attempt to mount an expedition to go out against the nearby village cited by Iron Plume, but he deployed his men around the battlefield in anticipation of attack. Indians were seen among the rocks, and signal mirrors occasionally flashed. Late in the afternoon some officers and men gathered by the bodies of two dead soldiers wrapped in white, to read a brief service before they were committed to the earth. The service was in midsentence when gunfire from the rocks south of the creek bed commenced the second fight of the day. Soon the firing was general and continuous—“a rattling of small arms,” wrote Captain King, “the sharp, vicious ‘ping’ of the carbine and the deep ‘bang’ of the longer-ranged rifle … Just as we expected, Crazy Horse has come to the rescue, with all his available warriors. It is just half-past four o’clock by General Carr’s watch.”26
Some guessed as many as eight hundred warriors were taking position in the rocks and bluffs. Crook sent units to drive them off and an hour’s shifting fight took place as the Indians fell back before the soldiers, then pressed forward against some other point. Blue gunpowder smoke hung heavy in the air and gradually obscured the field. Some later called it a “pretty” fight—for the light at the end of the day, the flashing of guns in the smoky air, the magnificence of the scenery with its soaring sandstone buttes like “Norman castles,” in the words of John Finerty. Prettiest of all, few were killed on either side, although the whites after it was over eagerly counted pools of blood and riderless ponies as proof positive of warriors dispatched.
At the Rosebud, Finerty was the only man who claimed to have seen Crazy Horse himself taking part in the battle. Now at Slim Buttes, late in the day, he was sure that he saw him again. For two hours or more an Indian on a white horse was everywhere evident, charging close and then veering away with such persistence he “seemed to possess the power of ubiquity.” The Indians all appeared to draw courage from this man—“doubtless Crazy Horse himself,” in Finerty’s view. Perhaps it was true. He Dog and Red Feather said that Crazy Horse could turn a battle by himself; “when he came on the field of battle he made everybody brave.”27
There may have been one other man with his eye on Crazy Horse at the Battle of Slim Buttes—General Crook himself, who told the scout Charles Tackett “that on one occasion he had shot deliberately at Crazy Horse more than twenty times without effect.”28
If it happened at all it must have happened at Slim Buttes, where Crook was right in the middle of things. The general always traveled with expensive sporting arms, and had a hunter’s respect for the kind of freehand shooting that could bring down an animal on the run. Perhaps he had his eye on the same man Finerty was watching—the warrior on the white horse. Perhaps he took a shot at this dashing figure, then another, and a third … With a man like Crook the first shot would have been a casual try of luck; the twentieth would have been grimly determined, with teeth clenched, hands steadied by murderous will.
With night, the Battle of Slim Buttes drifted to an end. The burial service interrupted earlier was completed; interred with the dead private was the leg of an officer, amputated after an Indian bullet tore off his kneecap. Fires were built and captured Indian ponies killed for their meat—“grass-fed, sweet and succulent,” noted Captain King. “Better eating than beef,” said his friend Lieutenant Schuyler, in a letter home to his father, “though one does not like to see them killed.”29
During the night, Finerty recalled, Iron Plume “fell back suddenly and expired without uttering a groan.”30 When the command pulled out the next morning, many of them riding Indian ponies and carrying Indian plunder, the body of Iron Plume was left behind as a sign of respect. The chief’s wife and several other women and children were left as well, but not Charging Bear. He rode south with the soldiers. Crook set the village ablaze, then moved his men out “through the same overhanging pall of dripping mist,” noted King. The misery of the day reflected the mood of the general. “They had to go. There wasn’t a hardtack north of Deadwood.”
King was one of the officers who stayed behind with two companies of cavalry as a rearguard. As the last of Crook’s men disappeared to the south, the rearguard came under brisk fire from the surrounding ravines. It was soon obvious Crazy Horse had returned in force. Indians pressed them every step of the way, King wrote—“the slopes swarming with dusky horsemen, dashing towards us, whooping yelling, firing and retiring, always at speed, except where some practised marksman springs from his pony and prone upon the ground draws bead at our chief.”31
Perhaps it was King, not Finerty or Crook, who had the fortune to see Crazy Horse in battle; the chief’s friend He Dog said he often dismounted to take aim—he didn’t like to waste his shots.
None of the soldiers was killed in the retreat but no one doubted the fighting was serious, nor doubted it was a retreat. None of the white chroniclers of this campaign was blunt enough to note that Crook was hastening away from a second field of battle that summer. “Men are weary and hungry,” an officer noted; “one can see looking at the infantry line that the men stagger and are weak.”32 What had these bearded scarecrows achieved in their months of marching and fighting? “Nothing but disaster,” summed up one private in a letter home to a Kansas newspaper.33
The flight south spoke for itself. “Discipline had become strained,” noted Lieutenant Daniel C. Pearson of the command as it neared the Black Hills. “A condition akin to mutiny was smoldering.”34 The men of the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition delivered a collective judgment with new verses added to a popular dancehall tune “The Regular Army O.”
But it was out upon the Yellowstone we had the damndest time,
Faix, we made the trip wid Rosebud George, six months without a dime.
Some 1,800 miles we went through hunger, mud and rain,
Wid backs all bare and rations rare, no chance for grass or grain.
“Etc. Etc.,” added Charles King.35
Rosebud George himself was obsessed with the newspapers. They had been abusing him all summer. Generals Sheridan and Sherman were privately disgusted by Crook’s failure at the Rosebud but tried to buck him up. “Do not be the least bit discouraged by newspaper attacks,” said Sheridan in a letter two days after Slim Buttes. “You have done as well as could be expected and I will faithfully support and supply you.”36
But Crook was a brooding man by nature. He knew Sheridan and Sherman had a low opinion of his campaign, and he knew the newspapers wanted his blood. He took his case after Slim Buttes to Cuthbert Mills, a reporter for the New York Times. Crook gave Mills a short course in Indian fighting: travel light and fast, give the Indians no respite, hit them in winter, crush the bands one by one. He told Mills he was going to track down the Indians with Indians. “Some people say it is wrong to use the people of a tribe against itself,” said Crook. “ ’P’shaw! If I can kill one rattlesnake by making another bite him, I shall do it.”37
He had one rattlesnake in particular in mind. “Our next objective point is Crazy Horse,” Crook told Mills. “He should be followed up and struck as soon as possible. There should be no stopping for this or that thing. The Indians cannot stand a continuous campaign.”
But Cuthbert Mills was not charmed. In a story summing up the campaign he stated plainly that Crook abandoned the field at Slim Buttes for one reason only: “the command was in too crippled and broken down a condition from starvation and overmarching” to go on fighting.38 Crook’s officers carried a similar verdict back with them after the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition disbanded at Camp Robinson in October. One of them was Captain George M. Randall, a good friend of the Army surgeon Charles Winne stationed with his wife at the Sidney Barracks in Nebraska. Randall had been in charge of the several hundred Indian scouts who fought beside Crook at the Rosebud and then promptly pulled out for home. Maybe the campaign had achieved something, Randall felt, but it was too little, and at too great cost. Caroline Winne summed up Randall’s remarks in a letter home to her father. “Crook has discovered that he has a different people to deal with in these Northern Sioux,” she wrote. “He acknowledges now that he had no idea when he started in this war that he had such a warlike nation to deal with.”39