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

Except for a few tandem-wired telephone poles, that peaceful, rolling prairie grassland near present-day Montrose, Nebraska, seems unchanged in the last hundred-plus years. The place where Cody had his celebrated duel with a Cheyenne war chief was at the time called Indian Creek in regimental returns of the day, then War Bonnet Creek in later military records, but is today called Hat Creek.

There might well be a lot of confusion for those of you who go looking in the northwest corner of Nebraska for the site of that famous skirmish, simply because all three of those names appear for three separate creeks in that immediate area. While “Hat” and “War Bonnet” are two differing translations for the same Lakota term, the name of a tributary of the Cheyenne River (Mini Pusa to the Sioux), the creek called the War Bonnet on today’s maps is some forty miles south of what is today called Hat Creek, where the Fifth Cavalry successfully ambushed Little Wolfs Cheyenne.

The creek still rises with spring runoff and falls with autumnal drought, just as it has every year as white homesteaders and cattlemen moved in and pacified the land. For more than half a century no one knew for sure where the site was, nor did anyone seem to care.

By the mid-1880s the nearby town of Montrose had grown to boast a population of sixty-five! When the Sioux began to dance back the ghosts in the summer of 1890, the frightened citizenry constructed a stockade on the highest hill in the event the ghost dancers spilled off their reservation and came looking for white scalps—the very same hill used as a lookout post by King that morning of July 17, 1876.

It would take another thirty years before anyone got interested in marking the spot, and it was a group of Wyoming citizens who ended up doing it.

In 1929, while marking Wyoming’s historic sites, the Wyoming Landmark Commission discovered that the Warbonnet skirmish might well have taken place in their state. Four men promptly formed “The Amalgamated Association of Hunters of the Spot Where Buffalo Bill Killed Yellow Hand.” Attempting to use Charles King’s book, Campaigning with Crook, the association found itself empty-handed that first summer, having been sidetracked mostly by confusing geographical names. No success, until they finally followed still-visible wagon tracks of Lieutenant Hall’s supply train. Only then did the searchers discover that the site rested less than a quarter of a mile from the buildings of Montrose.

Still the commissioners felt they needed complete verification. In October of that year the four succeeded in convincing an aging Charles King to visit the site. Eighty-four at the time and in failing health, the retired general was unable to identify the battle site.

The “trees were too big,” King said.

In July of the following year King returned west to visit the four Wyoming residents, this time joined by Chris Madsen, the Fifth Cavalry signalman who had been near the site of Cody’s duel, an emigrant soldier who would later became a famous lawman in Oklahoma Territory and charge to the top of San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders.” Madsen had none of King’s doubts. Here and there the old cavalryman led the researchers across the site, relating who did what and where. King concurred.

This event led to the efforts made by Mrs. Johnny Baker, wife of Bill Cody’s foster son, to erect a monument on the site to commemorate Buffalo Bill’s defeat of Yellow Hair. At the same time Madsen led his own subscription effort to erect a second monument, this one to the Fifth Cavalry. Both were dedicated in September 1934. While King and Baker had passed on by that time, an erect and attentive Chris Madsen listened to the glowing speeches given that warm, early-autumn day—then rose to the rostrum in that dry prairie breeze, took off his hat, and wiped a dark bandanna across his forehead, then told that crowd in the simple language of a plainsman what the Fighting Fifth Cavalry had accomplished that morning fifty-eight years before.

Both those monuments can still be seen by the rare visitor who crosses that ground today. On a towering stone and cement spire, a plaque reads:

SITE

Where

Seven Troops of the Fifth U.S. Cavalry

Under

Col. WESLEY MERRITT

Intercepted 800 Cheyenne

and Sioux, Enroute to Join

The Hostiles in the North. July 17, 1876

The Indians Were Driven Back to the

Red Cloud and Spotted Tail Reservations.

Nearby, a short, squat stone-and-cement monument stands just about where Madsen stated the war chief fell. It reads:

On This Spot

W. F. Cody BUFFALO BILL

Killed

YELLOW HAIR (OR HAND)

The Cheyenne Leader Who, With

A Party of Warriors, Dashed

Down This Ravine To Waylay

Two Soldier Couriers Coming

From the West

July 17, 1876