On the Border with Crook

by John Gregory Bourke

We had pursued the enemy for seven miles, and had held the field of battle, without the slightest resistance on the side of the Sioux and Cheyennes. It had been a field of their own choosing, and the attack had been intended as a surprise and, if possible, to lead into an ambuscade also; but in all they had been frustrated and driven off, and did not attempt to return or to annoy us during the night. As we had nothing but the clothing each wore and the remains of the four days’ rations with which we had started, we had no other resource but to make our way back to the wagon trains with the wounded. That night was an unquiet and busy time for everybody. The Shoshones caterwauled and lamented the death of the young warrior whose life had been ended and whose bare skull still gleamed from the side of the spring where he fell. About midnight they buried him, along with our own dead, for whose sepulture a deep trench was dug in the bank of the Rosebud near the water line, the bodies laid in a row, covered with stones, mud, and earth packed down, and a great fire kindled on top and allowed to burn all night. When we broke camp the next morning the entire command marched over the graves, so as to obliterate every trace and prevent prowling savages from exhuming the corpses and scalping them.

A rough shelter of boughs and branches had been erected for the wounded, and our medical officers, Hartsuff, Patzki, and Stevens, labored all night, assisted by Lieutenant Schwatka, who had taken a course of lectures at Bellevue Hospital, New York. The Shoshones crept out during the night and cut to pieces the two Sioux bodies within reach; this was in revenge for their own dead, and because the enemy had cut one of our men to pieces during the fight, in which they made free use of their lances, and of a kind of tomahawk, with a handle eight feet long, which they used on horseback.

June 18, 1876, we were turned out of our blankets at three o’clock in the morning, and sat down to eat on the ground a breakfast of hard-tack, coffee, and fried bacon. The sky was an immaculate blue, and the ground was covered with a hard frost, which made every one shiver. The animals had rested, and the wounded were reported by Surgeon Hartsuff to be doing as well “as could be expected.” “Travois” were constructed of Cottonwood and willow branches, held together by ropes and rawhide, and to care for each of these six men were detailed. As we were moving off, our scouts discerned three or four Sioux riding down to the battle-field, upon reaching which they dismounted, sat down, and bowed their heads; we could not tell through glasses what they were doing, but the Shoshones and Crows said that they were weeping for their dead. They were not fired upon or molested in any way. We pushed up the Rosebud, keeping mainly on its western bank, and doing our best to select a good trail along which the wounded might be dragged with least jolting. Crook wished to keep well to the south so as to get farther into the Big Horn range, and avoid much of the deep water of the streams flowing into Tongue River, which might prove too swift and dangerous for the wounded men in the “travois.” In avoiding Scylla, we ran upon Charybdis: we escaped much of the deep water, although not all of it, but encountered much trouble from the countless ravines and gullies which cut the flanks of the range in every direction.

The column halted for an hour at the conical hill, crested with pine, which marks the divide between the Rosebud and the Greasy Grass,—a tributary of the Little Big Horn,—the spot where our Crow guides claimed that their tribe had whipped and almost exterminated a band of the Blackfeet Sioux. Our horses were allowed to graze until the rear-guard had caught up, with the wounded men under its care. The Crows had a scalp dance, holding aloft on poles and lances the lank, black locks of the Sioux and Cheyennes killed in the fight of the day before, and one killed that very morning. It seems that as the Crows were riding along the trail off to the right of the command, they heard some one calling, “Mini! Mini!” which is the Dakota term for water; it was a Cheyenne whose eyes had been shot out in the beginning of the battle, and who had crawled to a place of concealment in the rocks, and now hearing the Crows talk as they rode along addressed them in Sioux, thinking them to be the latter. The Crows cut him limb from limb and ripped off his scalp. The rear-guard reported having had a hard time getting along with the wounded on account of the great number of gullies already mentioned; great assistance had been rendered in this severe duty by Sergeant Warfield, Troop “F,” Third Cavalry, an old Arizona veteran, as well as by Tom Moore and his band of packers. So far as scenery was concerned, the most critical would have been pleased with that section of our national domain, the elysium of the hunter, the home of the bear, the elk, deer, antelope, mountain sheep, and buffalo; the carcasses of the last-named lined the trail, and the skulls and bones whitened the hill-sides. The march of the day was a little over twenty-two miles, and ended upon one of the tributaries of the Tongue, where we bivouacked and passed the night in some discomfort on account of the excessive cold which drove us from our scanty covering shortly after midnight. The Crows left during the night, promising to resume the campaign with others of their tribe, and to meet us somewhere on the Tongue or Goose Creek.

June 19 found us back at our wagon-train, which Major Furey had converted into a fortress, placed on a tongue of land, surrounded on three sides by deep, swift-flowing water, and on the neck by a line of breastworks commanding all approaches. Ropes and chains had been stretched from wheel to wheel, so that even if any of the enemy did succeed in slipping inside, the stock could not be run out. Furey had not allowed his little garrison to remain inside the intrenchments: he had insisted upon some of them going out daily to scrutinize the country and to hunt for fresh meat; the carcasses of six buffaloes and three elk attested the execution of his orders. Furey’s force consisted of no less than eighty packers and one hundred and ten teamsters, besides sick and disabled left behind. One of his assistants was Mr. John Mott MacMahon, the same man who as a sergeant in the Third Cavalry had been by the side of Lieutenant Cushing at the moment he was killed by the Chiricahua Apaches in Arizona. After caring for the wounded and the animals, every one splashed in the refreshing current; the heat of the afternoon became almost unbearable, the thermometer indicating 103° Fahrenheit. Lemons, limes, lime juice, and citric acid, of each of which there was a small supply, were hunted up and used for making a glass of lemonade for the people in the rustic hospital.

June 21, Crook sent the wounded back to Fort Fetterman, placing them in wagons spread with fresh grass; Major Furey was sent back to obtain additional supplies; the escort, consisting of one company from the Ninth and one from the Fourth Infantry, was commanded by Colonel Chambers, with whom were the following officers: Munson and Capron of the Ninth, Luhn and Seton of the Fourth. Mr. MacMillan, the correspondent of the Inter-Ocean of Chicago, also accompanied the party; he had been especially energetic in obtaining all data referring to the campaign, and had shown that he had as much pluck as any officer or soldier in the column, but his strength was not equal to the hard marching and climbing, coupled with the violent alternations of heat and cold, rain and shine, to which we were subjected. The Shoshones also left for their own country, going across the Big Horn range due west; after having a big scalp dance with their own people they would return; for the same reason, the Crows had rejoined their tribe. Five of the Shoshones remained in camp, to act in any needed capacity until the return of their warriors. The care taken of the Shoshone wounded pleased me very much, and I saw that the “medicine men” knew how to make a fair article of splint from the twigs of the willow, and that they depended upon such appliances in cases of fracture fully as much as they did upon the singing which took up so much of their time, and was so obnoxious to the unfortunate whites whose tents were nearest.

In going home across the mountains to the Wind River the Crows took one of their number who had been badly wounded in the thigh. Why he insisted upon going back to his own home I do not know; perhaps the sufferer really did not know himself, but disliked being separated from his comrades. A splint was adjusted to the fractured limb, and the patient was seated upon an easy cushion instead of a saddle. Everything went well until after crossing the Big Horn Mountains, when the party ran in upon a band of Sioux raiders or spies in strong force. The Crows were hailed by some of the Sioux, but managed to answer a few words in that language, and then struck out as fast as ponies would carry them to get beyond reach of their enemies. They were afraid of leaving a trail, and for that reason followed along the current of all the mountain streams, swollen at that season by rains and melting snows, fretting into foam against impeding boulders and crossed and recrossed by interlacing branches of fallen timber. Through and over or under, as the case might be, the frightened Crows made their way, indifferent to the agony of the wounded companion, for whose safety only they cared, but to whose moans they were utterly irresponsive. This story we learned upon the return of the Shoshones.

To be obliged to await the train with supplies was a serious annoyance, but nothing better could be done. We had ceded to the Sioux by the treaty of 1867 all the country from the Missouri to the Big Horn, destroying the posts which had afforded protection to the overland route into Montana, and were now feeling the loss of just such depots of supply as those posts would have been. It was patent to every one that not hundreds, as had been reported, but thousands of Sioux and Cheyennes were in hostility and absent from the agencies, and that, if the war was to be prosecuted with vigor, some depots must be established at an eligible location like the head of Tongue River, old Fort Reno, or other point in that vicinity; another in the Black Hills; and still another at some favorable point on the Yellowstone, preferably the mouth of Tongue River. Such, at least, was the recommendation made by General Crook, and posts at or near all the sites indicated were in time established and are still maintained. The merits of Tongue River and its tributaries as great trout streams were not long without proper recognition at the hands of our anglers. Under the influence of the warm weather the fish had begun to bite voraciously, in spite of the fact that there were always squads of men bathing in the limpid waters, or mules slaking their thirst. The first afternoon ninety-five were caught and brought into camp, where they were soon broiling on the coals or frying in pans. None of them were large, but all were “pan” fish, delicious to the taste. While the sun was shining we were annoyed by swarms of green and black flies, which disappeared with the coming of night and its refreshingly cool breezes.

June 23, Lieutenant Schuyler, Fifth Cavalry, reported at headquarters for duty as aide-de-camp to General Crook. He had been four days making the trip out from Fort Fetterman, travelling with the two couriers who brought our mail. At old Fort Reno they had stumbled upon a war party of Sioux, but were not discovered, and hid in the rocks until the darkness of night enabled them to resume their journey at a gallop, which never stopped for more than forty miles. They brought news that the Fifth Cavalry was at Red Cloud Agency; that five commissioners were to be appointed to confer with the Sioux; and that Rutherford B. Hayes, of Ohio, had been nominated by the Republicans for the Presidency. General Hayes had commanded a brigade under General Crook in the Army of West Virginia during the War of the Rebellion. Crook spoke of his former subordinate in the warmest and most affectionate manner, instancing several battles in which Hayes had displayed exceptional courage, and proved himself to be, to use Crook’s words, “as brave a man as ever wore a shoulder-strap.”

My note-books about this time seem to be almost the chronicle of a sporting club, so filled are they with the numbers of trout brought by different fishermen into camp; all fishers did not stop at my tent, and I do not pretend to have preserved accurate figures, much being left unrecorded. Mills started in with a record of over one hundred caught by himself and two soldiers in one short afternoon. On the 28th of June the same party has another record of one hundred and forty-six. On the 29th of same month Bubb is credited with fifty-five during the afternoon, while the total brought into camp during the 28th ran over five hundred. General Crook started out to catch a mess, but met with poor luck. He saw bear tracks and followed them, bringing in a good-sized “cinnamon,” so it was agreed not to refer to his small number of trout. Buffalo and elk meat were both plenty, and with the trout kept the men well fed.