Trumpet on the Land: The Aftermath of Custer's Massacre, 1876

The past two days had witnessed even more new arrivals reaching the great encampment as the immense village eased down toward the Greasy Grass. Summer roamers, these late arrivals were called. Like American Horse’s band of some three dozen lodges, the summer roamers were those who fled the reservations when spring warmth caressed the northern plains, where they intended to hunt in the ancient way until autumn turned the buffalo herds south, when the clans would again turn back to the agencies to suffer through another winter.

Already there was much talk that this was to be the last great hunt, perhaps the greatest of all summers for the seven campfires of the Lakota Nation. Washtay! Hadn’t they defeated Three Stars and sent his soldiers scurrying south with their tails between their legs like whipped dogs? The hunting had never been better here in the timbered valleys among the Wolf Mountains.

With all that, they still had Sitting Bull’s prophetic vision yet to come!

American Horse was glad he had urged his people off the reservation early this year, happy to be included in the great strength all Lakota felt this summer. If what Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and the rest said was true—this Season of Making Fat might well hold the last great fight they would have with the white man.

And forever after the soldiers would dare not enter Lakota hunting ground.

Forever after the white man would stay far away.

No more would American Horse’s Miniconjou have to return to their agency to eat the white man’s moldy flour and rancid pig meat.

Life would be as it once was when American Horse was but a boy and he saw his first white man along the Holy Road.

Life would be so good again, with the wasichu gone forever and ever, gone forevermore.

^*The Plainsmen Series, Vol. 9, Reap the Whirlwind.

^*The North Platte River.

Chapter 2

Late June 1876

God! But the air out here smelled better than it did in those closed-in places back east.

William F. Cody drank deep of it this summer morning, chest swelling as he drew it into his lungs as one would drink a life-giving elixir. With that prairie air seeping through his body, Bill remembered his youth as teamster, those months as mail rider for the pony express, and finally his years as army scout. All of that adventure and fun, all that unfettered life crammed into his youth before he had gone and followed the siren song of fame and fortune, pursuing a career on the stage.

Now, as he led General Philip Sheridan and his headquarters staff toward Camp Robinson near the Sioux’s Red Cloud Agency in the heart of these Central Plains, his keen eyes squinting into the distance from beneath the expanse of his broad-brimmed sombrero, searching the horizon for smoke, or dust, or the dippling of human forms atop fleet ponies breaking the skyline at the crest of some hilltop, Bill Cody couldn’t for the life of him remember what had been so damned seductive about that career on the boards before the footlights that it had lured him away from the West Away from these wide and open places.

Lord, but he loved this life! A good horse beneath him, his favorite rifle—the one he had long ago affectionately named Lucretia Borgia—stuffed securely in the saddle pocket across the pommel, and the sweet smell of the tall grass trammeled beneath his buckskin’s hooves. This had to be the essence of living! Something few men would ever experience, or so Bill had long ago determined.

Leaving behind Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Carr’s Fifth Cavalry at Fort Laramie for a few days before the regiment would once again begin searching these hills and swales like an inland sea of grass, looking for any Indians trying to make it north to join the roaming hostiles, Cody itched to be shed of Phil Sheridan. He wanted to be back with the Fifth as they scoured this land for warriors fleeing the reservations. But not just any warriors. This summer they were hunting the young fighting men who were jumping the reservations to the south: the hotbloods who were stirring things up as they fled the agencies and rode out for the northern camps of those winter roamers, to join Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull.

Maybe Custer would get his chance, Bill thought. Maybe ol’ Yellow Hair will finish off those Sioux hostiles in one fell swoop like everyone back east thought only Custer would. Damn, but Bill wanted Carr’s Fifth to be the outfit that would have a crack at the action before this Indian war was nothing more than a few footnotes in dusty history books schoolboys would be reading in the decades to come.

God, how he hoped Custer and the rest of them up north left some of the fighting for the Fifth Cavalry.