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

Bullets had repeatedly found one woman’s body; what was left of her clothing crusted over with muddy slime and coagulated blood. Her neck was nearly severed by one shot, three more had torn open her chest and shoulder. Two more grisly holes in each arm and leg. The bodies of the other two women had suffered nearly as many wounds— one with her head blown completely in half, clear down to the upper palate. From what Seamus could see, it appeared the warriors had used the bodies of their dead to hide behind during the onslaught of soldier lead.

Curious himself, Captain Anson Mills entered the ravine behind the three scouts, accompanied by the young girl who had been discovered in a lodge hiding beneath a pile of robes and who had attached herself to the officer. At the sight of one of the dead women, the girl rushed forward to fall upon the body, crying pitifully. She hugged the body, brushed the matted hair from the bloody face, her little tears falling upon the cold cheeks as she wailed.

“Her mother,” Pourier whispered to Mills and Donegan.

The captain wagged his head. “Why … why the women?”

Crook had his men drag the battered bodies from the coulee, where they lay for close to an hour while soldiers looked over the enemy dead. It struck Donegan as a pagan ritual, this satisfying the curiosity of the soldiers who had lost their own comrades in battle. While most only stared at the bodies before moving on, some chose to spit on the corpses.

Yet no soldier defiled the dead like Ute John, also known among the column as “Captain Jack.”

Chattering in his garbled pidgin English, the civilian member of Stanton’s Montana Volunteers made quite a show of it for a crowd of curious soldiers as he knelt over each of the squaws and scalped them with elaborate ceremony, demonstrating to the white men just how it was done.

“Injun style,” he explained, his mouth half-filled with rotted teeth.

Having joined the troops in May when a band of miners had affixed themselves to Crook’s column, John was in reality only half-Northern or Weber Ute, the other half Shoshone. Called Nicaagat by his own people on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming Territory, he had acquired a desperate thirst for the white man’s whiskey. That thirst took him to Salt Lake City for a six-month sojourn, during which time he claimed he’d been Christianized by Brigham Young’s Mormons.

“Ute John’s a Klischun,” he proudly reminded the onlookers, perhaps to convince them that what he was doing to the dead was not so barbaric an act as it might appear. “A Mo’mon Klischun.”

A loving Mormon family had given him shelter and taught him the rudiments of the English language. He had been “heap washed” of his sins, as many as three times in one year, and got a “heap b’iled shirt” of his very own to wear when he attended Sunday meetings to hear Prophet Brigham preach for hours on end.

While most of the soldiers turned away from the grisly spectacle, a few clamored to have a try at the scalping themselves. Donegan grumbled and started to turn aside, disgusted that none of the officers attempted to stop this savage depravity of tearing the hair from women’s skulls.

“What’s the matter with you, Irishman?” one of the old files asked Donegan. “You seen a lot worse before, I’d care to wager.”

“I have,” Seamus replied bitterly.

“So where the hell you get off being so goddamned righteous about it?” the veteran snarled. “Them prisoners the general took sure as hell getting treated good, ain’t they? Just think how things’d be for a bunch of us white men if we was took prisoner by a village of these sonsabitches. What fun they’d have killing us off real slow! So you just think about that, Irishman—before you go off being so goddamned high and mighty and looking down your nose at the likes of us gonna take a little revenge for what we seen done to our friends in the last ten years.”

Looking over that sullen group of angry soldiers who had turned to glare at him, Donegan finally said, “When I rode for the Army of the Potomac, and served Sheridan’s Army of the Shenandoah—I never once killed a woman or a child. And I’ll be damned if I’ve got to stand here and watch a coward take his revenge on women.”

“Just shut your mouth and go ’way,” Ute John grumbled, wagging his knife where he knelt on the ground to slice apart one of the women’s scalps so that each of the sympathetic soldiers could have a small lock.

“You best go, Irishman,” the old veteran suggested caustically. “Since you can’t seem to remember that these Injun bitches fight just as hard as the bucks.”

“Goddamned right,” one of the other soldiers chimed in.

The veteran continued sourly. “I seen enough of my friends cut down by red bitches—it don’t make me no never mind to kill all the squaws I can.”

Another soldier cried out, “Just means there’s fewer wombs for these red devils to make papooses!”

Seamus straightened, the words smacking him like grapeshot. Back there at Laramie, his woman carried his child in her womb.