Colonel Chambers, with his plucky infantrymen, has clambered up the cliff on the south, changed front forward on his right—practically, not tactically—and got in a flank fire along the very depressions in which the Indians are settled. This is more than they can stand. The sun goes down at Slim Buttes on hundreds of baffled and discomfited Sioux. They have lost their village; lost three hundred tip-top ponies. A dozen of their warriors and squaws are in our hands, and a dozen more are dead and dying in the attempt to recapture them; and the big white chief Crook has managed to gain all this with starving men and skeleton horses.
Drawing in for the night, we post strong pickets well out in every direction, but they are undisturbed. Now comes the summing-up of casualties. The adjutants make the weary round of their regiments through wind and rain, taking the reports of company commanders, and then repairing to the surgeons to verify the lists. Two or three lodges have been converted into field hospitals; and in one of these, among our own wounded, two of the surgeons are turning their attention to a captive—the warrior American Horse. He lies upon some muddy robes, with the life-blood ebbing from a ghastly hole in his side. Dr. Clements examines his savage patient tenderly, gently as he would a child; and, though he sees that nothing can save life, he does all that art can suggest. It is a painful task to both surgeon and subject. The latter scorns chloroform, and mutters some order to a squaw crouching at his feet. She glides silently from the tepee, and returns with a bit of hard stick; this he thrusts between his teeth, and then, as the surgeons work, and the sweat of agony breaks out upon his forehead, he bites deep into the wood, but never groans nor shrinks. Before the dawn his fierce spirit has taken its flight, and the squaws are crooning the death-chant by his side.
Our own dead are fortunately few, and they are buried deep in the ravine before we move southward in the morning—not only buried deep, but a thousand horses, in column of twos, tramp over the new-made graves and obliterate the trace. You think this is but poor respect to show to a soldier's grave, no doubt; but then you don't know Indians, and cannot be expected to know that as soon as we are gone the skulking rascals will come prowling into the camp, hunting high and low for those graves, and, if they find them, will dig up the bodies we would honor, secure the scalps as trophies of their prowess, and then, after indescribable hackings and mutilations, consign the poor remains to their four-footed relatives, the prairie wolves.
Our wounded are many, and a hard time the patient fellows are having. Such rude shelter as their comrades can improvise from the Indian tepees we interpose between them and the dripping skies above. The rain-drops sputter in the flickering watch-fires around their cheerless bivouac; the night wind stirs the moaning pines upon the cliffs, and sweeps down in chill discordance through creaking lodge-poles and flapping roof of hide; the gaunt horses huddle close for warmth and shelter; the muffled challenge of the outlying picket is answered by the yelp of skulking coyote; and wet, cold, muddy, and, oh! so hungry, the victors hug their drenched blankets about their ears, and, grasping their carbines, pillowed on their saddles, sleep the sleep of the deserving.
CHAPTER XIII.
A RACE FOR RATIONS.
The village of Slim Buttes destroyed, General Crook pushed ahead on his southward march in search of the Black Hills and rations. All Sunday morning Upham's battalion of the Fifth Cavalry covered the rear, and fought back the savage attacks upon the column; but, once well away from the smoking ruins, we were but little molested, and soon after noon caught up with the rest of the regiment, and found the entire command going into bivouac along a little stream flowing northward from an opening among towering cliffs that were thrown like a barrier athwart our line of march. It was cold, cheerless, rainy weather, but here we found grass and water for our famished cattle; plenty of timber for our fires, though we had not a thing to cook, but men and horses were weak and chilled, and glad of a chance to rest.
Here Doctors Clements, Hartsuff, and Patzki, with their assistants, went busily to work perfecting the improvised transportation for the wounded. There was not an ambulance or a field-litter in the command. Two officers—Bache, of the Fifth, and Von Luettwitz, of the Third Cavalry—were utterly hors du combat, the latter having left his leg at the fight on the previous day, and some twenty-five men, more or less severely wounded, were unable either to walk or ride a horse.
Frontiersmen are quick to take lessons from the Indians, the most practical of transportation masters. Saplings twelve feet in length were cut (Indian lodge-poles were utilized); the slender ends of two of these were lashed securely on either side of a spare pack-mule, the heavy ends trailing along the ground, and fastened some three feet apart by cross-bars. Canvas and blankets were stretched across the space between; hereon one wounded man was laid, and what the Indians and plainsmen call a travois was complete. Over prairie or rockless road it does very well, but for the severely wounded a far more comfortable litter was devised. Two mules were lashed "fore and aft" between two longer saplings; the intervening space was rudely but comfortably upholstered with robes and blankets, and therein the invalid might ride for hours as smoothly as in a palace car. Once, in the Arizona mountains, I was carried an entire week in a similar contrivance, and never enjoyed easier locomotion—so long as the mules behaved. But just here it may be remarked that comfort which is in the faintest degree dependent upon the uniform and steadfast serenity of the army mule is of most uncertain tenure. Poor McKinstry, our wagon-master (who was killed in Payne's fight with the Utes last September, and whose unflattering comparison may have been provoked by unhappy experiences with the sex), used to say: "Most mules could swap ends quicker'n a woman could change her mind;" and it was by no means required that the mule should "swap ends" to render the situation of the poor fellow in the travois undesirable, if, indeed, he was permitted to retain it.