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

Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, by Joe DeBarthe

The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill, by Don Russell

My Sixty Years on the Plains, by W. T. Hamilton

My Story, by Anson Mills

Nelson A. Miles: A Documentary Biography of His Military Career, 1861-1903, edited by Brian C. Pohanka

On the Border with Crook, by John G. Bourke

Paper Medicine Man: John Gregory Bourke and His American West, by Joseph C. Porter

Personal Recollections and Observations, by General Nelson A. Miles

The Plainsmen of the Yellowstone, by Mark H. Brown

Rekindling Campfires, edited by Lewis F. Crawford

The Shoshonis: Sentinels of the Rockies, by Virginia Cole Trenholm and Maurine Carley

Sitting Bull: Champion of the Sioux, by Stanley Vestal

The Slim Buttes Battle: September 9 and 10, 1876, by Fred H. Werner

Slim Buttes, 1876: An Episode of the Great Sioux War, by Jerome A. Greene

War Cries on Horseback: The Story of the Indian Wars of the Great Plains, by Stephen Longstreet

War Eagle: A Life of General Eugene A. Carr, by James T. King

Warpath: A True Story of the Fighting Sioux, by Stanley Vestal

War-Path and Bivouac: The Bighorn and Yellowstone Expedition, by John F. Finerty

Warpath and Council Fire: The Plains Indians’ Struggle for Survival in War and in Diplomacy, 1851-1891, by Stanley Vestal

Washakie: An Account of Indian Resistance, by Grace Raymond Hebard

Wooden Leg: A Warrior Who Fought Custer, interpreted by Thomas B. Marquis

Yellowstone Command: Colonel Nelson A. Miles and the Great Sioux War, 1876-1877, by Jerome A. Greene

There are some who place no confidence whatsoever in Frank Grouard’s recollections when he told Joe DeBarthe years later that he scouted north from Crook’s camp and ran across that piece of ground just east of the Little Bighorn that would come to be known as Massacre Ridge. But by carefully studying the maps of the terrain between Goose Creek and the Greasy Grass, by considering how fast (or how slow) a man on horseback might travel in hostile country after dark, and finally, by adjusting what the half-breed scout recounted by as little as one day—I was able to see just how feasible it would have been for Grouard and his skittish horse to have found themselves among those naked, mutilated, bloated bodies of the Custer dead.

So it seems to me more than reasonable to expect that Grouard could get his facts skewed by a day or so—seeing as how he dictated his Ufe story decades after the fact.

Yet when I’m given an opportunity to read an account fresher than Grouard’s, something written closer to the event—I’ll go with it every time.

For example, there isn’t all that much written on the harrowing adventures of those men who went for that scout with Lieutenant Frederick Sibley. And what is available often varies in the details. Here I have relied on four sources: Sibley’s own account, Frank Grouard’s recollections, those of John Finerty, and the dictated recollections of Baptiste “Big Bat” Pourier. Since Grouard, Pourier, and Sibley all related their stories many years later, for this novel I have primarily embraced the Chicago newsman’s version (with few, minor exceptions)—since I could draw what I believed was a fresher tale from the reporter’s dispatches written immediately after his return to Camp Cloud Peak.

I would imagine that for most readers of western history the Sibley scout comes as something new, perhaps just as new as the skirmish on the Warbonnet. While that military success was small (only one Indian killed), the impact of what Merritt’s Fifth Cavalry did would long reverberate across the northern plains. Perhaps as many as eight hundred Cheyenne were turned back to their agency, unable to bolster the numbers of those warrior bands recently victorious over Crook and Custer. Yet it was something far more intangible that made the Warbonnet significant that summer of Sheridan’s trumpet on the land.

No matter how small it was—it was the army’s first victory.