After this brief interlude in the wilderness, Stieffel went back to his hospital work. Then in September 1873, following a change of station for Company K from Harker to Fort Leavenworth, he went in desertion until the following May, being restored to duty upon his return, rather strangely, without trial but with loss of pay for the period of his absence.[18] The only possible explanation for this leniency in a period when court-martial sentences tended to severity could be that since extra-duty men had to be furnished, Stieffel was worth more to the company out of the stockade than in. With Indian unrest increasing every man counted.[19]
Figure 6.—Fort Harker, Kansas; east side. (USNM 384187; Smithsonian photo 42895.)
Following the Custer massacre on June 25, 1876, all posts in the Department of the Missouri were virtually stripped of troops, among them the 5th Infantry, and dispatched to the Department of Dakota in an all-out attempt to bring the rampaging Sioux under control. But Stieffel saw no action in the campaigns that followed. He was sick[20] and was left behind on July 12 when Company K left Leavenworth for the northwest for five years of almost continuous campaigning including numerous actions with the Sioux and the campaign against the gifted Indian tactician, Chief Joseph, and his Nez Percé. We could wish that Stieffel had been present during the Nez Percé campaign, for he might have pictured for us Nelson Miles and the 5th Infantry taking the surrender of Joseph in the Bear Paw Mountains at the end of his epochal 1,600-mile running fight.[21]
Stieffel remained at Fort Leavenworth until 1877 when he rejoined his regiment at Cantonment Tongue River, Montana Territory, renamed Fort Keogh in 1879. At Keogh he was again placed on hospital extra-duty and so remained until he was discharged June 23, 1882,[22] on a surgeon's certificate of disability. After his discharge he retired to the Soldier's Home in Washington where he died on December 14, 1886, at the age of 60. He was buried in the National Cemetery on the Soldiers' Home grounds.[23]
Stieffel painted three scenes of Fort Keogh and vicinity—one of the fort itself, one of Miles City across the Tongue River, and a landscape of the Yellowstone River near Miles City ([figs. 8]-[10]).
The Paintings
Chronologically, the first of the paintings ([fig. 2]) is that of the Indian attack on General Marcy's train escorted by Company K on September 23, 1867. This attack took place on the Arkansas River about nine miles west of Cimarron Crossing, Kansas. It was an insignificant action as such, similar to hundreds of other such fights in the West, but, in the days of wet-plate photography and low-speed camera shutters, the painting is significant as a rare eye-witness drawing and tells us far more than might any written description. General Marcy's report is somewhat cursory:
Yesterday at about 9 o'clock a.m. as we were approaching a bluff near the Arkansas River thirty-five miles above here we suddenly discovered a great many Indians approaching us from various different directions. I immediately halted our train and after arranging our escort in proper order for action went forward. The Indians circled around us at full speed firing as they ran but did not come very near us. I would not allow our men to fire at the long range, believing that the Indians would come nearer but they did not. Some of the men fired and it is believed that two were wounded as groups collected around them. They wounded Lt. Williams severely in the leg and one soldier who has since died.