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

It mattered nothing that Crook had his men build fires over the graves they left behind, then marched a thousand horses across that hallowed ground in an attempt to obliterate all trace of the burials. An empty effort, because the prisoners he set free and those warriors watching from the hills knew where the enemies’ bodies had been buried. Once the soldiers were gone from sight, the digging began.

In the continuing rain American Horse’s women cut down saplings with which to build their burial scaffold.

Shortly after noon the head of the army’s column discovered that the high, chalky ridge at the foot of which they’d been marching made a sharp angle to the east. About two P.M. Crook called a halt after making only fifteen miles. For much of the morning the surgeons repeatedly protested to the general how the march was taking a terrible toll on the wounded. Neither blanket nor gum poncho could turn the wind-driven rain that pelted those least able to protect themselves.

While most of the casualties were carried on travois pulled behind a single horse, the most seriously wounded were placed on litters. Constructed from a pair of lodgepoles lashed fore and aft by surcingles between a pair of Moore’s mules, the amputees were laid upon a piece of canvas or blanket tied around the poles to form a crude stretcher. For a man who had lost the greater portion of one of his legs, it was no cushioned ride in a royal coach.

“Goddamighty—goddamighty!” cried Adolphus Von Leuttwitz repeatedly in his excruciating pain. “Gimme a pistol, please, somebotty gimme a pistol!”

For most of the morning he had been begging, cajoling, even ordering soldiers to hand over their service revolvers to him so he could put himself out of his misery.

“Jus’ shtop and leaf me right here!” he would order in his thick accent once he realized no one had turned over their revolver to him. “Leaf me und go on so I can die on dis spot!”

As the column went into camp that afternoon, the surgeons tied an awning between some trees so they could begin to devote their attentions to changing dressings and checking for infection. As the canvas was going up, four packers volunteered to help unhitch the mule-borne litters and lower the patients to the ground. When one of the civilians walked past Von Leuttwitz’s stretcher, the lieutenant lunged for the packer’s pistol, managing to wrench it from the holster and get the muzzle pressed against his head before the civilian gripped the officer’s hand and wrist. The struggle was on. Only by jamming the meat of his thumb beneath the hammer did the packer keep the gun from going off before two other men rushed over to wrestle the pistol away from the distraught officer.

Whimpering in his defeat, Von Leuttwitz flung an arm over his face and groaned, “V’at diffrence it make to you, dommit! I no longer vant to live if I cannot be a fighting man. Not a soldier—life is not vorth living!”

It wasn’t only the condition of Crook’s wounded that caused the general to halt early in the day. Perhaps every bit as much was not knowing what lay on the other side of the ridge standing immediately in front of him. This seemed like a good place to make bivouac, so the battalions put out a strong guard, expecting the Sioux to put in another show.

Carr’s Fifth Cavalry rear guard straggled in as camp was being made beside a narrow, clear-running stream flowing northward out of the towering bluffs. Here at least there were good water and ample grass for their horses. Still, many of the men could think only that twenty-four hours before they had been dining on buffalo and wild fruits, while here they sat beneath a driving rain, once again supping on broiled pony steaks and their private miseries.

“It’s better than a broken-down cavalry nag,” Donegan observed as he chewed another mouthful of the tender and juicy red meat. “Far, far better than the best cut a man can butcher from one of Tom Moore’s wormy mules.”

“Horse,” John Finerty said with a shudder. “I don’t think I’ll ever climb into a hack, take myself a winter’s sleigh ride, much less sit on a saddle quite the same again.” Before his eyes he held a chunk of the roasted meat on the end of his knife blade and considered it. “Ah, such equestrian delight.” Then plopped it into his mouth with the relish of a starving man.

As the sun fell out of midsky, inching for the western horizon, a dozen men from Captain William H. Andrews’s I Troop of the Third Cavalry finished raising the sole buffalo-hide lodge Crook had not destroyed. In it Medical Director Clements and his surgeons could retreat from the rain with their wounded.

Here and there troopers moved through camp carrying on their shoulders great quarters of the butchered ponies like beef loins. It was a grim feast they had that night as every man filled his belly, not really caring so much what the morning would bring.

“You figure we can keep going much longer eating such meat?” Finerty asked a while later.