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

Late that night six more stragglers showed up. The soldiers had left Crook’s bivouac to hunt early that morning, before word had arrived of Mills’s attack and everyone had set out on the rescue. They had returned later that day to find nothing but the column’s tracks. Now the six greedily chewed on the dried meat offered them at the cheery fires as sheets of mist hissed around them, and told of being attacked by a dozen or more warriors who had held them under siege for some four hours before withdrawing. Nonetheless, they had waited until dark before pushing on in hopes of finding what had become of Crook’s command.

During the night the surgeons kept their stewards busy constructing additional litters from lodgepoles, to which they lashed shelter halves or pieces of captured blankets for the morning’s journey, when Crook would lead them south once more. Only three days before, the general had ordered Mills and Bubb to secure rations among the Black Hills settlements. But at that moment the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition was no closer to relief as the rain and gloom settled down on Slim Buttes.

With their amputations on Von Leuttwitz and Kennedy complete, Doctors Clements and McGillycuddy turned their attention to American Horse. As the surgeons knelt beside their patient, some of the friends of Private Wenzel nearby grumbled profanely.

“Why don’t you just put a knife through that son of a bitch, Doc?” suggested one of the dead private’s comrades.

“Yeah,” agreed a second bitter friend. “I’ll be happy to finish off that red bastard my own self.”

“You bastards!” another old file shouted. “Why, I ain’t got no use for a doctor that’d do anything for a goddamn Injun!”

Valentine McGillycuddy whirled on the troopers clustered nearby. “The next one of you who says a damned thing will answer personally to me! Are you men no better than animals? As for myself, I’ve taken an oath to relieve suffering—and I won’t see a man in pain without giving aid. No matter the color of his skin!”

Despite his great pain and the many appeals from the half-breed interpreters, the chief steadfastly refused any of the white man’s “powerful medicine” when the surgeons offered a hypodermic of morphine or an inhalation of chloroform. Instead American Horse had one of his wives cut a new bullberry branch to clamp between his teeth as he suffered his new agony in silence. While the doctors inspected and cleaned the terrible wound, removing part of the ruptured bowel, then closing the site with crude sutures, American Horse clenched both his eyes and teeth shut, nearly chewing through the stick before he passed out. Finally McGillycuddy had some soldiers hold the chief down so that he could administer an injection of morphine that would allow the chief to rest peacefully while death approached.

Fever’s sweat beaded the patient’s brow when he awoke later, as the painkiller seeping through his veins began to wear off. Through interpreters Clements explained that there was little else they could do in what time the chief had left. At his side remained his two wives and three of his children throughout that night, all of them chanting a mournful death dirge as a soaking rain steadily drummed on the canvas tent fly stretched above the dying warrior. Into each face he gazed as the hours passed his last night, each tear-tracked cheek he touched with trembling fingertips, removing the battered stick from his bloody lips to murmur soft words of endearment to those loved ones. Perhaps to tell them that with his death he had secured their freedom come the morrow.

In the cold darkness beyond that pitiful scene flickered the hundreds of tiny watch fires where huddled the weary soldiers who had eaten in one evening enough rations to feed them for three days. They curled up on the muddy ground beneath their sole blanket and gum poncho to reap the slumber of the victorious, their bellies stuffed with buffalo tongue and dried pony meat, along with the fruit of buffalo berries, wild plum, and chokecherry. Above them on the hilltops and chalky buttes the pines soughed a mournful song beneath the rush of a plaintive wind that from time to time drove the rain before it in sheets.

To the north along the army’s backtrail Seamus heard the call of the song-dogs as coyotes discovered another of the bony horse carcasses and called in the prairie wolves. There is no other sound on earth quite like that, Donegan decided as he tossed another limb on that fire long after midnight, unable to sleep, and thinking on loved ones far away.