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

“Steady, men!” shouted the officers scampering up and down that line of infantry. “Keep your proper intervals!”

“Don’t fire until you get in range!” ordered a sergeant to his platoon as they crossed the creek to join in the fray. “C’mon, now. Forward at double time!”

After a volley the sergeant growled, “Dammit, Sparks, are you firing at the Black Hills? Never waste a shot, boys!”

Throwing the heat of his very own H Company of the Ninth under Lieutenants Charles M. Rockefeller and Edgar B. Robertson, along with Captain Gerhard L. Luhn’s F Company of the Fourth and the Fourteenth’s C under the command of Captain Daniel W. Burke, Captain Burt temporarily held Lieutenant Henry Seton’s D Company of the Fourth in reserve. At the same time Burt called up three additional companies to hold the cutbank itself, then leapfrogged ahead, pushing his battalion forward, attempting to wrench the momentum away from the enemy. There on the slopes of those southwestern hills most of this second fight in the Battle of Slim Buttes was to rage until nightfall.

It did not take long for more of the Sioux to realize where the soldiers had herded most of the cavalry horses. Rushing in a wide arc around the eastern perimeter of the village, the warriors put great pressure on what few troops Merritt had left behind to watch over the herds. As soon as he saw the sweeping blur of the enemy rushing past him, Major Alexander Chambers, recognizing the move for what it was, ordered two companies of the Ninth Infantry to move out at double time north of the village site, charged with holding the ridges against the threat to flank the soldiers.

At the same time that Merritt was ordering Lieutenant Frederick Sibley’s E Company to station themselves as a rear guard to drive in all stragglers and used-up horses still coming in, he also ordered Major Henry E. Noyes forward with a mounted I Troop of the Second Cavalry to set up a skirmish line east of the village. They were the only troopers to fight on horseback. The rest of the horse soldiers from the Second, Third, and Fifth regiments inched forward on foot, making dismounted foragers’ charges in conjunction with the infantry.

Throughout the late-afternoon battle Crook’s destruction of the camp continued uninterrupted.

Moving from hilltop to hilltop above the jagged soldier skirmish lines rode a war chief atop a white horse. He first appeared near the bottom southeast of camp, then he was seen leading warriors to attempt to capture some horses, then minutes later he was spotted rallying warriors on the three hills southwest of the dismounted cavalry. Because of what American Horse and the other prisoners had warned the soldiers, Crook’s men believed this warrior was Crazy Horse.

However, old Sioux veterans of the battle would one day attest to the fact that it was instead Sitting Bull who made himself the most visible and taunting target of the afternoon.

Right in the heart of the fray stood Captain Julius Mason’s battalion of Fifth Cavalry, where the Sioux hurled their first massed charge, screaming down the slopes, against the soldier lines. Yard by yard as the troopers pushed back against the horsemen, Sergeant Edmund Schreiber of Charles King’s own K Company fell. Less than a minute later a bullet tumbled Private August Dorn of D Troop.

While Major John J. Upham’s battalion of the Fifth surged forward to take some of the pressure off the left flank of Mason’s line, it was William B. Royall and his scarred Third Cavalry veterans of the Rosebud fight who flushed the Sioux from the rugged heights both northwest and immediately west of the village. How many of those men who followed the lieutenant colonel into that skirmish rallied their comrades-in-arms by asking them to remember the nightmare of their fight beside the Rosebud, history did not record.

After waiting nearly three months to avenge that day, the Third did not just hold the line—they pushed back, and pushed hard, driving the flood of retreating warriors down the slopes onto the backs of Eugene Carr’s surprised battalion of Fifth Cavalry, who had just begun to attack those Sioux sniping from the crests of the southwestern hills.

For a half hour, frightening confusion rumbled over the heights and spilled down through the ravines and coulees as the warriors poured around the ranks of Carr’s dismounted skirmishers like a foaming cascade bypassing a floodgate. Through it all, in the midst of that snarling hail of bullets whining through the trees and slapping against the rocks, Lieutenant Colonel Carr sat astride his gray stallion, buoying his Fifth.

“See there, men! They can’t even hit me—what damned wretched shots they are!”