With Sully into the Sioux Land

by Joseph Mills Hanson

They bivouacked that night on the prairie and early next morning marched down into the forbidding basin, knowing not whether they would ever emerge from it alive.

All day long in suffocating heat and under the glare of an almost intolerable sun they toiled forward, winding in and out through gorges with high, perpendicular walls and yawning ravines so narrow that only one wagon could pass at a time. No water could be found save a little which was bitter with alkali. A large pioneer party was in advance, grading along hillsides and filling gullies so that the wagons might pass; by nightfall the army had succeeded in covering twelve miles and found itself on the bank of the Little Missouri, where at least water and grass were abundant. But the expedition was literally buried in the Bad Lands, which, on the western side of the stream, still stretched before them in a wilderness of mountains and gorges even more forbidding than those they had already passed. Fortunately no Indians had yet opposed them, and many of the men, especially those in the advance and on the flanks, had found some pleasure mixed with their labor in viewing the strange and beautiful rock formations through which they passed. Here were many petrified stumps and fallen trunks of trees on the tops and sides of the hills. Some of them were of immense size and wonderfully preserved, showing the bark, the stumps of branches, and the age rings of the interior wood. At one place was seen what the men called a "petrified sawmill", consisting of what appeared like a pile of lumber and slabs under the edge of a hill and, close by it, a large tree, cut up into logs of exact length, such as might be found around any sawmill, but all of stone as hard as granite. In addition to the trees, many of the men found impressions of leaves in the rocks of sizes and shapes belonging to no vegetation of the present age, while others discovered the footprints of unknown animals which had once inhabited this ancient land.

Colonel Pattee with his detachment of the Seventh Iowa crossed the Little Missouri the following morning to trace out, if possible, with the Yanktonais guide, a route leading westward from the river. He was gone for some hours and, meanwhile, a few of the men seized the opportunity to take their horses outside the lines in search of better grazing. They had not been out very long when they saw a party of thirty or forty Indians bearing down upon them, intent on cutting them off from camp. The soldiers were too few to think of fighting, so they fled at utmost speed, and all succeeded in getting in, though several escaped very narrowly. The attempted surprise seemed to be the signal of the Indians for the beginning of a general attack on the army, for in a moment the bluffs across the river were swarming with warriors, who opened a hot fire on the camp, though at such long range that their bullets could not reach half the distance. Just after they began firing, a horseman dashed out of the ravine directly beneath their position, which Colonel Pattee's detachment had ascended, and plunging into the river, trotted and galloped his horse across amid a great splashing of water. It was Lieutenant Dale, who had followed Colonel Pattee with an order an hour or two before. General Sully met him at the river bank.

"What's the matter?" he demanded, the moment the Lieutenant reached him.

"The Seventh Iowa is attacked back there two or three miles, in the hills," replied Dale. "Colonel Pattee wants reinforcements."

He had scarcely finished speaking when there arose the sound of many hurried hoof beats in the ravine from which he had just emerged. The General looked toward it with a growing smile which presently broke into a laugh as a confused crowd of cavalry rushed from the ravine and galloped furiously down to and through the river.

"The Seventh has evidently come after its own reinforcements, Lieutenant," said he. "They must be in a hurry for them."

"It looks like it," answered Dale, grinning.

He retired, while the leading officer of the frightened cavalry hastily explained to the General that the Indians had come upon them in such a position and in such numbers that the only way they could save themselves was by instant flight.