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

It was long after the last shots had faded from the hills when Sergeant Von Moll’s men from A Troop finished their graves. By that time Von Moll found Lieutenant Joseph Lawson fast asleep, unable to read from his Common Book of Prayer over the departed. In the light of burning brands taken from the nearby fires and held high overhead, the spades had scraped the last bit of earth from the graves. With Private Wenzel’s body wrapped in his ragged blue overcoat, and Charlie White tied within a funeral shroud of thick gray army blanket, the soldiers slowly lowered each into their last resting places. In the absence of that devout lieutenant’s Irish Presbyterian reading of the burial service, Von Moll improvised and repeated what verse he could remember from childhood over those dark holes.

Beside White’s grave Seamus had crossed himself and murmured a prayer remembered from his early catechism, thinking of the young man’s friend, Bill Cody. And of the last time the friends had been together.

Nearby John Finerty repeated lines from an old poem.

No useless coffin enclosed his breast,

      Not in sheet or in shroud they wound him;

But he lay like a warrior taking his rest;

      With his martial cloak around him.

Later when the burial detail sat huddled around a fire listening to the rain hiss as it fell into the flames, their damp blankets steaming in the chilled air, a figure approached out of the darkness.

“We’ll need another grave, Sergeant.”

Von Moll and the rest turned to find a somber Surgeon Clements halt inside the warm corona of firelight.

Anxiously, Finerty asked, “Von Leuttwitz, Doctor?”

“No. Private Kennedy. He didn’t survive the amputation,” Clements answered, gesturing into the darkness. “I waited to tell you until you were finished with the others.”

Into a third grave Von Moll’s men consigned the soldier’s body along with his severed limb, then scooped out a shallow hole in which to bury Von Leuttwitz’s leg. The soldiers were just beginning to turn spades of the damp soil into the graves when the eerie darkness erupted with wails.

A cold dash of ice water spilled down Donegan’s spine as he turned to gaze up the hill, looking through the sheets of rain at the dim, flickering firelight near the tent fly, where the women who were gathered at the side of American Horse keened and screeched and tore at their hair in bitter remorse. Nearby the children began their own high-pitched cry.

“What do you suppose that’s all about?” Finerty asked.

“The chief just died,” Donegan replied, quickly crossing himself again. “His spirit is free at last.”

The newsman shuddered, wagging his head. “Damn— I wish I had some whiskey right about now.”

With a nod Seamus said, “First Wenzel and White, then Kennedy. And now American Horse. All of ’em killed at the ravine. Fitting it is that their souls take flight together.”

At first light the Sioux had Crook’s men up and out of their frosty, wet blankets. The warriors pressed in on the outlying pickets as soon as there was enough light to pick out targets in the roiling fog that clung to the low places that Sunday morning.

“Roll out! Roll out!” came the order as the third fight of Slim Buttes got under way.

Every man who bellied up to the picket lines peered into the shifting mists for the enemy’s charge as the fog began to burn off, but there was no concerted assault made against those four companies of infantry who were ordered up to hold the line. Nonetheless, here and there the warriors made it a warm skirmish in trying to break through the soldier positions while Major Upham’s battalion of the Fifth Cavalry continued to carry out Merritt’s order to destroy any remaining enemy property: guns were shattered, then tossed into the flames of what lodges Captain Powell hadn’t put to the torch the previous afternoon. In a matter of minutes, with the echo of gunfire rattling all about that camp in the chill gray light, leaping bonfires illuminated the dark underbellies of the clouds suspended right over their heads. Meanwhile, the men destroyed iron kettles and tinware by chopping them into fragments, or crushing them under the hooves of their horses.

Shivering in the cold drizzle, Charles King fought the fevered stiffness in that old Apache wound as he rolled up his blanket. He brooded on the way the cold from a night on the ground had seeped right into that shoulder, then stomped over to the mess fire, where he chewed on the enemy’s dried meat and gulped at a cup of hot coffee made from beans found in the captured lodges. He didn’t have a chance to finish his breakfast before K Company was ordered out to replace the infantry Crook had taken off the line and put into column, forming up for their day’s march.

At the same time, the general ordered Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Carr to bring the prisoners to him.