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

Late in the afternoon the fog thinned as they reached the southern edge of the buttes, and as the mist lifted, there lay the dark-blue wall far to their front. Through the mud and the fog and the mist and the misery, they had struggled another twenty-one miles that day.

“Bear Butte,” Pourier said, pointing to the singular prominence off to the southeast. “Where the Lakota and Shahiyena go to seek their visions and pray.”

As the half-breed described it, Finerty stood hunched over his small tablet, shielding it from the drops spilling from the brim of his hat as he scribbled down notes with a lead pencil.

“And there,” Bat said, indicating the lofty peak rising to the southwest, “that is the peak the Lakota call Inyan Kara.”

At long last. The Black Hills. Relief. Food. Four walls and a roof, a place where Finerty could get out of the rain and the cold. Many times had he enjoyed the best nightlife Chicago had to offer—all the whiskey and willing women a young man about town could ever desire.

But as they went into bivouac that night, John wasn’t sure he had seen anything that looked any better, anything that had stirred his heart more than the sight of those blessed blue-tinged hills rising right out of the wilderness.

Beckoning him home.

With General George Crook in the lead, continuing to push his men painfully that day of the eleventh. Slower and slower the column plodded south by southwest, moving past the east slope of Deer’s Ears Buttes, those twin conical heights rising abruptly from the prairie floor. Because they could be seen for many miles in all directions, they had long been known to frontiersman and Indian alike.

Near Owl Creek, the Heecha Wakpa of the Sioux, along the South Fork of the Moreau, itself a tributary of the Missouri River, John Bourke rode back with the order to halt and go into camp. At least here they had plenty of wood.

After building huge bonfires the men gathered in the great circle of warmth to dry their steamy wool clothing, turning first one side, then the other to the flames where they roasted their horse-meat steaks. Washing his supper down with water from the nearby creek, the lieutenant was beginning to doubt he had ever really eaten such delicacies as ham and eggs, even a rare porterhouse steak. Perhaps it was only a dream. It had been so long ago.

Mason’s battalion of the Fifth Cavalry reached the bivouac that evening after dark, picking up and dragging with them most of the stragglers along the way. Grimly the major reported that upon returning to the village site, they had found that the Sioux had indeed dug up the graves and desecrated the bodies. And Von Leuttwitz’s greatest fear and worst nightmare was realized—the hostiles had butchered his severed leg.

For Surgeon Clements’s train of litters and travois, it was travel fast, or travel gently through the rugged badlands. Hampered by the frequent stream crossings and the coulees, hampered by the rains and by so many stops to tighten surcingles, the hospital limped into camp well after dark as the wind picked up and brought with it an icy, pelting rain. For the wounded there was no longer any hard bread nor bacon, no longer even any salt to season the pony meat and that one haunch of antelope an officer had donated to the surgeon’s mess. Rummaging through their haversacks, other officers found a little salt, a half pound of sugar, and two quarts of flour they were able to shake loose from the bottom of their packs. And in the end Valentine McGillycuddy’s thick and nourishing antelope stew was augmented by a dessert of a few tins of preserves an infantry officer had guarded with his life for weeks.

Out of the rain and the wind, once more beneath the buffalo hides of that captured lodge, with warm and delicious food in their bellies, Bourke found flagging spirits begin to brighten among Clements’s wounded. Even in grumpy Lieutenant Von Leuttwitz himself.

That afternoon John had begged himself some of the liver from an antelope killed along the trail. The meat would not stretch far; nonetheless, the lieutenant carried his treasure into camp in his nose bag as if it were a kingly ransom. For long and glorious minutes he suspended it on a green limb, broiling the liver over some pulsating coals, preparing supper for himself and the general. They had no more than halved their modest portion when a loud ruckus erupted at the commissary headquarters nearby.