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

“Pray we don’t have to find out, Johnny.” Donegan wiped a sleeve across his mouth and beard, then held his hands over the fire, warming them as he said, “Not enough fat on a dozen of those Sioux ponies to season the gruel for a sick grasshopper.”

With their midday meal out of the way and enough wood laid in for the coming night, many of the soldiers used the rest of the afternoon to fashion crude leggings and moccasins from the tanned hides they had discovered in the Sioux village and saved from Powell’s destruction. Seamus cut thin slices from a piece of brain-tanned buckskin he had rescued and stuffed inside his shirt during Mills’s attack. Then he used his knife to hack off the stiff, hardened pieces of raw horsehide he had knotted around his boots many days back, when they had begun to fall apart with wear and the constant rain. Wrapping new strips of flexible buckskin around and around his lower foot and instep before knotting the ends, he could crudely hold the flapping sole to the upper part of his boot.

At their fire the Chicago newsman asked, “You hear that Jack Crawford ended up with the rifle American Horse handed Crook?”

“The one the chief surrendered to the general?” Seamus asked.

“Yeah.”

“How’d the poet end up with it?”

“Don’t really know for sure,” Finerty replied. “But I figure he talked Crook out of it with one of his silver-tongued rhymes, eh?”

“It would have to be a mighty pretty poem to be worth the value of that rifle, Johnny.”

“Seems Crawford’s got him an eye for collectibles too,” Finerty went on. “From the camp’s spoils the poet ended up with another rifle—a Spencer repeater—and a Colt revolver.”

“Likely one what belonged to Custer’s dead,” Donegan replied sourly.

Meanwhile Crook composed his dispatch to Lieutenant General Philip Sheridan back at Chicago headquarters.There wasn’t much to gloat about—but it was a victory. After Powder River, Rosebud Creek, and the disaster at the Little Bighorn … after traipsing around for more than a month looking for a fresh trail, any trail … why, surely Sheridan would have reason to celebrate now.

Surely Little Phil’s trumpet had been heard upon the land.

Slim Buttes was the first victory of what had turned out to be a very long and costly Sioux war.

WYOMING

From the Black Hills.

CHEYENNE, September 11—Advices from the telegraph camp near Hat creek, this morning, say that the Indians drove back a government courier who left Fort Laramie with dispatches for General Crook. He was to make another start from Hat creek this morning.

From Red Cloud.

RED CLOUD AGENCY, NEB., September 11—This morning a supply train of about thirty wagons left this agency escorted by three companies of the Fourth ․․trtillery, equipped as infantry, for Custer City. The supplies are for Crook’s command which it is reported is to be there the 14th.

The night before, when General Crook had asked Frank Grouard to carry his report on to Fort Laramie or to the nearest point where a telegraph key might be found, the half-breed had refused—then refused again, even when Lieutenant Bubb volunteered to go with him through that unknown and dangerous country to the south.

But when Crook asked him to guide a second relief column under Captain Anson Mills, Grouard agreed. This time the general’s order was not only more specific, it was explicit.

“You have one mission and one mission only,” Crook explained. “To return from the Black Hills settlements with provisions.”

It would mean no less than saving the Uves of the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition.

“And if you can,” the general added, “find out what threat the hostiles have presented to Deadwood and the other mining communities.”

This time the general was hurrying forward a special detail that would not be big enough to strike the enemy. Instead Mills’s force—comprising the best of his very own M Company, Third Cavalry, as well as fifty handpicked troopers from Carr’s Fifth Cavalry—was half the size of that detail he had led away from Crook’s column on the seventh. And again the general chose Lieutenant John W. Bubb as commissary officer charged with the purchase of the needed supplies. Along with Second Lieutenant George F. Chase acting as subaltern, Mills would be joined by reporters Reuben Davenport and Robert Strahorn. Frank Grouard, bearing Crook’s report for General Sheridan, would accompany the detail at least as far as the Black Hills on the first leg of his journey to Fort Laramie. Upon reaching the mining settlements, Jack Crawford, who was the one scout most familiar with the Black Hills and was carrying reporters’ dispatches, and Seamus Donegan would both serve as guides to bring the wagons back to the general’s desperate men.

None of Tom Moore’s mules were taken south when those seventy-five men pulled out just before dawn that Monday morning, the eleventh of September. Instead of the broken-down army horses, each man rode one of the captive Sioux ponies.