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

Then she read a third, and finally a fourth time before finding she could really trust the words. After all, it wasn’t Seamus’s handwriting. And he was so very far away. So scared was she that she discovered she couldn’t overcome the doubt. She feared the worst—a dreadful hoax played on them all … yet she began to fight down the sob growing in her chest just in reading the terse message over and over again. She mentally replayed Elizabeth Burt’s assertion that the men of Crook’s command were never allowed to say too much in their brief telegrams to loved ones waiting back home.

Home.

This wasn’t home. Home was up there on the South Fork of the Tongue River. Or wherever in hell Seamus was at this moment. Home was with him. Whether it was in that barn of Sharp Grover’s down in the Texas Panhandle country, perhaps in some Denver or Cheyenne hotel, or only beneath a few yards of canvas he had stretched inelegantly over some willow or plum brush to give her some shade on their trip north through Kansas and Colorado and now to Sioux country … home was with Seamus Donegan.

For some time she had known home wasn’t four walls and a roof over her head to keep out the snow and rain, wind and sun. Home was his arms, the security and shelter and sanctuary of that embrace.

So now the two of them would wait for his letter to come down from Fort Fetterman by courier, brought there by another courier riding south out of the land of the Sioux and the Cheyenne, where Seamus was risking his Ufe.

“Dear God, dear God, dear God,” Sam whispered, turning again to the commotion on the porch as women screeched and giggled, hugged and patted one another on the back, congratulating one another on the good fortune of their husbands to this date in this summer of the Sioux.

“Watch over that man for me,” Sam whispered, dabbing the corners of her wet eyes with that yellow flimsy that meant more to her at that moment than all the gold they could dig out of the Black Hills.

“Just—bring—him—home—to—us.”

At four A.M. on Thursday, 22 June, buglers raised the shrill notes of reveille up and down that camp the Fifth Cavalry had pitched about a mile from Fort Laramie near the confluence of the North Platte and Laramie rivers.

By first light Lieutenant Charles King heard the throaty sergeants bawl, “Prepare to mount!” Then came that long-anticipated order, “Mount!” and seven companies crossed the river on a new iron bridge and were setting off on the chase. They were ordered due north toward Custer City in Dakota to intercept the trail being used by hundreds of warriors riding north to join the summer roamers known to be in the unceded hunting grounds of the Powder River-Rosebud country. For the time being Captain Robert H. Montgomery’s B Company would remain behind in post, with orders to catch up with the main column in four days.

After only two miles the column passed the charred ruins of Rawhide Station, telegraph link between Fort Fetterman and Fort Laramie, burned by hostiles as little as ten days before. The Fifth pushed on with that vivid reminder seared into their consciousness, marching into an austere land carved with majestic buttes and dry coulees, covered by only sage and cactus.

Before he had left Laramie on an inspection trip to Captain William H. Jordan’s Camp Robinson and its nearby agency at Red Cloud, District Commander Philip Sheridan had ordered Lieutenant Colonel Carr to take his Fifth and close down that trail. But at the same time, Sheridan had drafted Bill Cody to ride along eastward as guide for his own escort, which included a Beecher Island veteran, now a member of Sheridan’s personal staff, Lieutenant Colonel James W. “Sandy” Forsyth. Left behind to guide temporarily for Carr’s Fifth Cavalry were Cody’s friend, Charles “Buffalo Chips” White, and Baptiste “Little Bat” Garnier, the half-breed interpreter Crook had assigned to Fort Laramie after Colonel Joseph Reynolds’s disastrous Powder River campaign.

After a march of something on the order of thirty miles that Thursday, the regiment went into camp on the South Fork of Rawhide Creek, where water and grass could be found in abundance, but firewood was in short supply.

With another day’s march behind them, the third morning the regiment pulled away from its camp at the Cardinal’s Chair,^* a well-known geographical rock formation situated on the headwaters of the Niobrara River, at daylight on the twenty-fourth. By noon Lieutenant King, riding with Carr’s staff at the head of the column, entered the valley of what frontiersmen lovingly called the “Old Woman’s Fork” of the South Cheyenne River. There were shouts, voices leapfrogging from behind them, farther back along the column until the call reached the front.

“Rider approaching!”