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

That moment found many of the cavalrymen who had been put afoot during the march taking part in the auction Mills’s men were holding just north of the Third Cavalry camp at the northwest corner of the village. One by one they were selling off the ponies Crook had awarded them for attacking the enemy village. It had become a rowdy and raucous affair, with a lot of good-natured disputes as to the value of various animals from the other regiments, as well as arguments concerning just how the troopers from the Fifth and Second could be trusted to pay their debt when the expedition finally reached their duty stations.

But all that was forgotten when the Sioux rode down on Rabbit Lip Creek to continue the Battle of Slim Buttes.

“This has to be them three hundred lodges of Oglalla the prisoners told us about!” Baptiste Pourier huffed as he rushed up, joining Donegan.

They dashed past Captain William H. Powell and his G Company, Fourth Infantry, under Crook’s orders to begin the burning of the lodges, and of everything else not already salvaged for food or souvenirs. In the midst of the growing battle, towers of oily black smoke began to rise into the leaden, heavy air.

“This bunch won’t have no problem turning back a few warriors,” Seamus replied in the noisy clamor of dogs barking, men shouting orders, the keening of women prisoners mingled with the cries of their children.

All around them men scampered up from their blankets where they had been napping, or snatched up their weapons as they leaped to their feet beside cookfires where they had been feasting on the spoils of the captured village. At long last Chambers’s infantry and the rest of Merritt’s cavalry would get a crack at the enemy. For the moment all hunger and fatigue were forgotten. This was, after all, exactly what they had marched and starved and frozen for.

“Them prisoners said there was other camps nearby too,” Bat added. “Not just the camps of Crazy Horse, He Dog, and Kicking Bear.”

Above them mirrors flashed in the hills that surrounded the natural amphitheater. To the south some among the milling horsemen signaled their answer. In a matter of minutes the entire southern perimeter seemed to crawl with hostiles as the warriors swarmed over the rolling hillside, intent on retaking the village in one fell swoop. Just beyond the soldier lines atop a trio of low ridges that stood southwest of the camp, many warriors dismounted and began a long-range duel with soldiers of the Ninth and Fourth infantries.

Crook’s first orders to his battalion commanders was to protect their stock. For days they had abandoned or shot their horses, forced to go afoot. There wasn’t a cavalryman on the battle lines now who wanted to give up what ponies they had just captured, much less lose any more of their own horses and mules to the screaming horsemen pressing in from nearly all points of the compass.

“Sound to arms, Bradley!” Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Carr bellowed to his chief trumpeter. “I won’t let the red bastards have a one of my animals!”

But just as some of Carr’s troopers reached what was left of their herd, a half-dozen Sioux horsemen on fresh, well-fed ponies rushed through their midst, stampeding more than half of the big, bone-lean, and leg-weary American horses. Reacting quickly, Corporal J. S. Clanton of Captain Montgomery’s B Troop snagged a halter and flung himself bareback aboard one of the grays, kicking furiously to catch up to the lead horse as a half-dozen other men followed in the corporal’s wake to lend a hand.

When almost among the screeching, painted enemy, Clanton drew beside the first escaping mount, leaning over to latch on to the horse’s dangling halter. He succeeded in turning it and the rest who followed just short of some thirty onrushing Sioux, making a wide five-hundred-yard circle as Lieutenant Colonel Carr watched the rescue in awestruck admiration. Returning with all of Montgomery’s grays, the men and officers of the Fifth Cavalry raised their cheers and gave Clanton a stirring round of applause.

But off to the southeast on the other side of camp, about ten Sioux horsemen had better luck, managing to break through the infantry’s lines to spook a few cavalry mounts being held in the creek bottom near the heart of the captured village.

Now in control of most of his stock, Crook ordered Major Chambers to have his infantry retake the high ground just seized by the enemy southwest of the village. Chambers directed Captain Andrew Burt to take two companies of the Fourth, along with one of the Ninth and one of the Fourteenth regiments, to move out on the double from their bivouac at the north side of the camp, rushing straight through the smoking village and across the stream to climb the cutbank, where they began to push back the sudden and fierce attack.

On the nearby slopes the Sioux taunted, yelled insults, exposed themselves, and patted their rumps to show their contempt for their enemy.