On the 5th of September we made a long march of thirty miles in drizzling rain and sticky mud, pushing up Davis Creek, and benefiting by the bridges which Terry’s men had erected in many places where the stream had to be crossed; we reached the head of the Heart River, and passed between the Rosebud Butte on the right and the Camel’s Hump on the left. Here we again ran upon the enemy’s rear-guard, which seemed disposed to make a fight until our advance got up and pushed them into the bluffs, when they retreated in safety, under cover of the heavy fog which had spread over the hills all day. Of the fifteen days’ rations with which we had started out from the Yellowstone, only two and a half days’ rations were left. When Randall and Stanton returned from the pursuit of the enemy, the Rees, who were still with us, gave it as their opinion that the command could easily reach Fort Abraham Lincoln in four days, or five; Glendive, on the Yellowstone, in our rear, could not be much farther in a direct line; but here was a hot trail leading due south towards the Black Hills, which were filling with an unknown number of people, all of whom would be exposed to slaughter and destruction. There is one thing certain about a hot trail: you’ll find Indians on it if you go far enough, and you’ll find them nowhere else. Comfort and ease beckoned from Fort Lincoln, but duty pointed to Deadwood, and straight to Deadwood Crook went. His two and a half days’ rations were made to last five; the Rees were sent in with despatches as fast as their ponies could travel to Lincoln, to inform Sheridan of our whereabouts, and to ask that supplies be hurried out from Camp Robinson to meet us. With anything like decent luck we ought to be able to force a fight and capture a village with its supplies of meat. Still, it was plain that all the heroism of our natures was to be tried in the fire before that march should be ended; Bubb concealed seventy pounds of beans to be used for the sick and wounded in emergencies; Surgeon Hartsuff carried in his saddle-bags two cans of jelly and half a pound of cornstarch, with the same object; the other medical officers had each a little something of the same sort—tea, chocolate, etc. This was a decidedly gloomy outlook for a column of two thousand men in an unknown region in tempestuous weather. We had had no change of clothing for more than a month since leaving Goose Creek, and we were soaked through with rain and mud, and suffering greatly in health and spirits in consequence.
We left the Heart River in the cold, bleak mists of a cheerless morning, which magnified into grim spectres the half-dozen cottonwoods nearest camp, which were to be imprinted upon memory with all the more vividness, because until we had struck the Belle Fourche, the type of the streams encountered in our march was the same—timberless, muddy, and sluggish. The ground was covered with grass, alternating with great patches of cactus. Villages of prairie dogs extended for leagues, and the angry squeak of the population was heard on all sides. “Jack,” the noble Newfoundland dog which had been with us since we started out from the mouth of Powder, was now crazy for some fresh meat, and would charge after the prairie dogs with such impetuosity that when he attempted to seize his victim, and the loosely packed soil around the burrow had given way beneath their united weight, he would go head over heels, describing a complete somersault, much to his own astonishment and our amusement. After turning the horses out to graze in the evening, it generally happened that camp would be visited by half a dozen jack rabbits, driven out of their burrows by fear of the horses’ hoofs. The soldiers derived great enjoyment every time one was started, and as poor pussy darted from bush to bush, doubled and twisted, bounded boldly through a line of her tormentors, or cowered trembling under some sage-brush, the pursuers, armed with nose-bags, lariats, and halters, would advance from all sides, and keep up the chase until the wretched victim was fairly run to death. There would be enough shouting, yelling, and screeching to account for the slaughter of a thousand buffaloes. We learned to judge of the results of the chase in the inverse ratio to the noise: when an especially deafening outcry was heard, the verdict would be rendered at once that an unusually pigmy rabbit had been run to cover, and that the men who had the least to do with the capture had most to do with the tumult.
The country close to the head of Heart River was strewn with banded agate, much of it very beautiful. We made our first camp thirty-five miles south of Heart River by the side of two large pools of brackish water, so full of “alkali” that neither men nor horses cared to touch it. There wasn’t a stick of timber in sight as big around as one’s little finger; we tried to make coffee by digging a hole in the ground upon which we set a tin cup, and then each one in the mess by turns fed the flames with wisps of such dry grass as could be found and twisted into a petty fagot. We succeeded in making the coffee, but the water in boiling threw up so much saline and sedimentary matter that the appearance was decidedly repulsive. To the North Fork of the Grand River was another thirty-five miles, made, like the march of the preceding day, in the pelting rain which had lasted all night. The country was beautifully grassed, and we saw several patches of wild onions, which we dug up and saved to boil with the horse-meat which was now appearing as our food; General Crook found half a dozen rose-bushes, which he had guarded by a sentinel for the use of the sick; Lieutenant Bubb had four or five cracker-boxes broken up and distributed to the command for fuel; it is astonishing what results can be effected with a handful of fire-wood if people will only half try. The half and third ration of hard-tack was issued to each and every officer in the headquarters mess just the same as it was issued to enlisted men; the coffee was prepared with a quarter ration, and even that had failed. Although there could not be a lovelier pasturage than that through which we were marching, yet our animals, too, began to play out, because they were carrying exhausted and half-starved men who could not sit up in the saddle, and couldn’t so frequently dismount on coming to steep, slippery descents where it would have been good policy to “favor” their faithful steeds.
Lieutenant Bubb was now ordered forward to the first settlement he could find in the Black Hills—Deadwood or any other this side—and there to buy all the supplies in sight; he took fifty picked mules and packers under Tom Moore; the escort of one hundred and fifty picked men from the Third Cavalry, mounted on our strongest animals, was under command of Colonel Mills, who had with him Lieutenants Chase, Crawford, Schwatka, Von Leuttewitz, and Doctor Stevens. Two of the correspondents, Messrs. Strahorn and Davenport, went along, leaving the main column before it had reached the camp of the night. We marched comparatively little the next day, not more than twenty-four miles, going into camp in a sheltered ravine on the South Fork of the Grand River, within sight of the Slim Buttes, and in a position which supplied all the fuel needed, the first seen for more than ninety miles, but so soaked with water that all we could do with it was to raise a smoke. It rained without intermission all day and all night, but we had found wood, and our spirits rose with the discovery; then, our scouts had killed five antelope, whose flesh was distributed among the command, the sick in hospital being served first. Plums and bull berries almost ripe were appearing in plenty, and gathered in quantity to be boiled and eaten with horse-meat. Men were getting pretty well exhausted, and each mile of the march saw squads of stragglers, something which we had not seen before; the rain was so unintermittent, the mud so sticky, the air so damp, that with the absence of food and warmth, men lost courage, and not a few of the officers did the same thing. Horses had to be abandoned in great numbers, but the best of them were killed to supply meat, which with the bull berries and water had become almost our only certain food, eked out by an occasional slice of antelope or jack rabbit.
The 8th of September was General Crook’s birthday; fifteen or sixteen of the officers had come to congratulate him at his fire under the cover of a projecting rock, which kept off a considerable part of the down-pour of rain; it was rather a forlorn birthday party,—nothing to eat, nothing to drink, no chance to dry clothes, and nothing for which to be thankful except that we had found wood, which was a great blessing. Sage-brush, once so despised, was now welcomed whenever it made its appearance, as it began to do from this on; it at least supplied the means of making a small fire, and provided the one thing which under all circumstances the soldier should have, if possible. Exhausted by fatiguing marches through mud and rain, without sufficient or proper food, our soldiers reached bivouac each night, to find only a rivulet of doubtful water to quench their thirst, and then went supperless to bed.
In all the hardships, in all the privations of the humblest soldier, General Crook freely shared; with precisely the same allowance of food and bedding, he made the weary campaign of the summer of 1876; criticism was silenced in the presence of a general who would reduce himself to the level of the most lowly, and even though there might be dissatisfaction and grumbling, as there always will be in so large a command, which is certain to have a percentage of the men who want to wear uniform without being soldiers, the reflective and observing saw that their sufferings were fully shared by their leader and honored him accordingly. There was no mess in the whole column which suffered as much as did that of which General Crook was a member; for four days before any other mess had been so reduced we had been eating the meat of played-out cavalry horses, and at the date of which I am now writing all the food within reach was horse-meat, water, and enough bacon to grease the pan in which the former was to be fried. Crackers, sugar, and coffee had been exhausted, and we had no addition to our bill of fare beyond an occasional plateful of wild onions gathered alongside of the trail. An antelope had been killed by one of the orderlies attached to the headquarters, and the remains of this were hoarded with care for emergencies.
On the morning of September 9th, as we were passing a little watercourse which we were unable to determine correctly, some insisting that it was the South Fork of the Grand, others calling it the North Fork of Owl Creek—the maps were not accurate, and it was hard to say anything about that region—couriers from Mills’s advance-guard came galloping to General Crook with the request that he hurry on to the aid of Mills, who had surprised and attacked an Indian village of uncertain size, estimated at twenty-five lodges, and had driven the enemy into the bluffs near him, but was able to hold his own until Crook could reach him. The couriers added that Lieutenant Von Leuttewitz had been severely wounded in the knee, one soldier had been killed, and five wounded; the loss of the enemy could not then be ascertained. Crook gave orders for the cavalry to push on with all possible haste, the infantry to follow more at leisure; but these directions did not suit the dismounted battalions at all, and they forgot all about hunger, cold, wet, and fatigue, and tramped through the mud to such good purpose that the first infantry company was overlapping the last one of the mounted troops when the cavalry entered the ravine in which Mills was awaiting them. Then we learned that the previous evening Frank Gruard had discovered a band of ponies grazing on a hill-side and reported to Mills, who, thinking that the village was inconsiderable, thought himself strong enough to attack and carry it unaided.
He waited until the first flush of daylight, and then left his pack-train in the shelter of a convenient ravine, under command of Bubb, while he moved forward with the greater part of his command on foot in two columns, under Crawford and Von Leuttewitz respectively, intending with them to surround the lodges, while Schwatka, with a party of twenty-five mounted men, was to charge through, firing into the “tepis.” The enemy’s herd stampeded through the village, awakening the inmates, and discovering the presence of our forces. Schwatka made his charge in good style, and the other detachments moved in as directed, but the escape of nearly all the bucks and squaws could not be prevented, some taking shelter in high bluffs surrounding the village, and others running into a ravine where they still were at the moment of our arrival—eleven A.M.
The village numbered more than Mills had imagined: we counted thirty-seven lodges, not including four upon which the covers had not yet been stretched. Several of the lodges were of unusual dimensions: one, probably that occupied by the guard called by Gruard and “Big Bat” the “Brave Night Hearts,” contained thirty saddles and equipments. Great quantities of furs—almost exclusively untanned buffalo robes, antelope, and other skins—wrapped up in bundles, and several tons of meat, dried after the Indian manner, formed the main part of the spoil, although mention should be made of the almost innumerable tin dishes, blankets, cooking utensils, boxes of caps, ammunition, saddles, horse equipments, and other supplies that would prove a serious loss to the savages rather than a gain to ourselves. Two hundred ponies—many of them fine animals—not quite one-half the herd, fell into our hands. A cavalry guidon, nearly new and torn from the staff; an army officer’s overcoat; a non-commissioned officer’s blouse; cavalry saddles of the McClellan model, covered with black leather after the latest pattern of the ordnance bureau; a glove marked with the name of Captain Keogh; a letter addressed to a private soldier in the Seventh Cavalry; horses branded U. S. and 7 C.—one was branded D 7
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C were proofs that the members of this band had taken part, and a conspicuous part, in the Custer massacre. General Crook ordered all the meat and other supplies to be taken from the village and piled up so that it could be issued or packed upon our mules. Next, he ordered the wounded to receive every care; this had already been done, as far as he was able, by Mills, who had pitched one of the captured lodges in a cool, shady spot, near the stream, and safe from the annoyance of random shots which the scattered Sioux still fired from the distant hills.
A still more important task was that of dislodging a small party who had run into a gulch fifty or sixty yards outside of the line of the lodges, from which they made it dangerous for any of Mills’s command to enter the village, and had already killed several of the pack-mules whose carcasses lay among the lodges. Frank Gruard and “Big Bat” were sent forward, crawling on hands and feet from shelter to shelter, to get within easy talking distance of the defiant prisoners in the gulch, who refused to accede to any terms and determined to fight it out, confident that “Crazy Horse,” to whom they had despatched runners, would soon hasten to their assistance. Lieutenant William P. Clarke was directed to take charge of a picked body of volunteers and get the Indians out of that gulch; the firing attracted a large crowd of idlers and others, who pressed so closely upon Clarke and his party as to seriously embarrass their work. Our men were so crowded that it was a wonder to me that the shots of the beleaguered did not kill them by the half-dozen; but the truth was, the Sioux did not care to waste a shot: they were busy digging rifle-pits in the soft marly soil of the ravine, which was a perfect ditch, not more than ten to fifteen feet wide, and fifteen to twenty deep, with a growth of box elder that aided in concealing their doings from our eyes. But, whenever a particularly good chance for doing mischief presented itself, the rifle of the Sioux belched out its fatal missile. Private Kennedy, Company “C,” Fifth Cavalry, had all the calf of one leg carried away by a bullet, and at the same time another soldier was shot through the ankle-joint.