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

For a moment Mills looked at the half-breed, then nodded as he turned to Lieutenant Chase. “It was Grouard here. Very well, Mr. Donegan. You’ve made your point. Mr. Chase, lead the men out.”

It was pushing noon when Frank, Donegan, and Crawford stopped the patrol again and dropped to the ground. Leading their horses off to the left about twenty yards, they knelt. Seamus stuffed his right hand into his left armpit to tear off his leather glove. With his bare hand he picked up the pony dung.

“Still warm and steamy, Frank.”

They arose together as Seamus wiped the hand off on his wet britches and jammed it back into the glove.

“Can’t be ahead,” Grouard explained to Captain Mills moments later.

“Headed east?” he asked.

“More a little east of south,” Donegan replied. “Almost the same direction we’re aiming to go.”

“Damn,” Mills growled. He sighed, looked back over his short column of twos, then waved Chase close. “Lieutenant—you’re to divide off half of the men.”

“Separate sir?”

“Yes, I believe it’s best that we split up here. Take Crawford with you. He says he knows the Hills.”

Mills then went on to explain that if they should encounter a sizable war party, he wanted one group or the other to be sure to reach the settlements and secure aid for Crook’s ailing column.

Minutes later Donegan watched the lieutenant lead some thirty men away, pointing their noses for Bear Butte as the wind came up and the rain washed over them in gusting sheets.

“Pay heed where you see them going,” Mills instructed Seamus.

He turned to the officer to ask, “Why, Colonel?”

“There may come a time when I will need to have Chase rejoin us. And I’ll need one of my scouts to have a damned good idea where he can find them.”

Through the afternoon and into the murky light of dusk, Mills pushed them relentlessly as the ground below them slowly changed from grass and cactus to grass and sage, becoming grass and cedar just before hillsides loomed out of the fog before them, gentle slopes carpeted with the dark, verdant stands of pine and fir.

They had crossed the wide, clear waters of the Belle Fourche.

Was it only his imagination? Seamus wondered as he shivered with cold, with excitement, with anticipation. Or had they really reached the Black Hills? Drawn by some unseen force, were they really there? How he wanted to believe they had been plucked out of the wilderness perhaps by nothing less than the hand of God itself.

“That’s the Whitewood!” Grouard cheered to the soldiers as he halted them at the northern bank of a narrow creek.

“Where will it take us?” Mills asked.

The half-breed turned on the captain, grinning, “Why—to Crook City. Crawford said once we get here, it can’t be more’n a handful of miles now. And Deadwood’s only ten miles beyond it.”

A couple of hours after dark they reached Crook City, a ragged column of miserable men on captured Sioux ponies. Except for the disciplined order Mills kept in his ranks as they plodded slowly down the center of that stinking, mud-daubed mining settlement, the patrol would have looked like any band of brigands, freebooters, or borderland raiders. One by one and in small knots, miners and bummers pressed against the grimy windowpanes to peer at the column passing by, or poured from the doorways of saloons and watering holes, from the clapboard and falsefronted shops and hotels, pushing aside tent flaps and stepping out into the rainy night to take themselves a good, long gander at what had just marched out of the Dakota wilderness.

“Who the hell are you fellas?” someone asked from a shadow as the captain halted his rough lot of men in a cordon on both sides of the rutted thoroughfare and prepared to dismount.

“Colonel Anson Mills, Third U.S. Cavalry. Attached to the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition under Brigadier General George C. Crook. I’ve brought the general’s commissary officer with me to secure provisions for his troops.”

Another voice from the far side of the street demanded, “Where’s Crook?”

“Yeah,” someone said, stepping into dim lamplight. “Crook hisself with ya?”

“No. Forty miles, maybe less behind us now,” Mills replied, exhaustion written on every word. “Two thousand men with him. We’ve been eating horse and mule for two weeks now.”

“Well, now,” a new voice called out, and a large, rotund man stepped out of the shadows of an awning and clomped through the mud to reach the captain’s side. “I figure you’ve come to the right place, Colonel Mills. This here town is named after the general. And we’re pleased as hell to have the army’s protection, we are.”