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

When the general had been confronted with a force of attacking Sioux the morning of the tenth, Crook had marched the column away. Then, upon finding a fresh but small trail, the general had waited more than twelve hours before deciding to send some of his cavalry in pursuit. Those very inconsistencies had begun to cause cracks in the confidence King held for the general. What Charles feared most was that the tenacious bulldog Crook wasn’t all that sure himself of just what he should do anymore.

So the lieutenant took his hat off and waved at some of those Fifth Cavalry friends who turned and bid a halfhearted farewell to those they were leaving behind that cold and gloomy morning. In minutes Upham’s patrol was swallowed by the land and the incessant rain.

Because Major Mason’s battalion was that day assigned to bring up the rear of the march, ordered to sweep along with them any and all stragglers, Charles King did not leave Owl Creek until just past seven A.M. The wind came up, inching down the temperature, seeping into the marrow of every one of those once-hardy fighting men until all a man could think of was just taking the next step. Wondering when he would lose the willpower, the guts just to keep moving. Already the neuralgia in that old Apache war wound made King grit his teeth with each flush of sudden, hot pain.

It wasn’t much past nine when the first horses started to play out. Along the left and right flanks rang the pistol shots as more and more of the troopers went afoot, caching their saddles and bridles in growing piles left upon the barren prairie. Heaving their soggy saddle blankets to their shoulders, the unhorsed soldiers set off on foot. At the rear the dismounted horse soldiers began to straggle farther and farther behind in a weaving, wobbly, unsteady column snaking south by southwest toward the prominence of Inyan Kara.

Twice that morning when Clements’s own stock failed and gave out, the surgeon had to beg ponies off those officers who rode the Sioux horses. One time he went from man to man, pleading, until he reached Charles King, who reluctantly slid from his saddle and handed over the reins, barely able to rotate that shoulder wounded years before in Arizona.

“God bless you, Lieutenant,” Clements said before turning away into the spinning curtains of rain, dragging the pony behind him through the deepening gumbo.

Men stumbled past King as he stood there, settling up to his ankles in the pasty mud, and swiped his glove across his face. It did not help. With the swirling sheets of rain, his face was wet a moment later. He looked south, finding he could not see the head of the column where Crook rode. Too far away in the roiling mist.

King turned and squinted into the north, holding down his hat’s flapping brim against the rising gusts of wind, wondering just how far back they were strung out. One by one the men of his own Fifth Cavalry trudged past, planting one boot on the slippery, adhesive prairie, leaning forward to yank the other foot out of the gumbo, then drag it forward, a most conscious act by men whose will to live diminished perceptibly with every single one of those tortured steps.

“Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn,” one of them muttered quietly as he heaved himself past, issuing his oath with each lunging step.

Others plodded past without raising their heads to look at King, murmuring only to themselves, their lungs heaving with weary fatigue, vowing death at the end of a rope to Crook and all his officers, cursing the Sioux and their army as a whole.

Charles felt the sob begin to flutter in his own chest and fought it down, swallowing hard. Turning, blinking into the dancing swirl of sheeting rain, King found an infantryman collapsing to his knees into the mud some yards off to the right.

Slowly the soldier crumpled forward, crying out to God. “Take mercy on us, Lord! Deliver us from hell!”

“C’mon,” King said quietly as he bent over the soldier. Helping the man struggle to his feet, the lieutenant found he was able to stifle his own growing despair and hopelessness. “Let’s walk together awhile, you and me.”

With an arm around one another they lumbered forward unevenly, the ground sucking at their feet so that they careened first this way, then that.

And the rain continued to fall.

More and more horses gave out.

One by one the men collapsed by the side of the trail among the cactus and the stunted grass throughout that long, terrible day in the history of the Army of the West.

Yet they somehow struggled on.