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

By early August several Montana newspapers were reporting that the hostile Sioux had offered Canadian tribes an alliance against the whites on both sides of the Medicine Line. While the Canadian Cree, Blackfoot, and Assiniboine refused, the citizens of Montana Territory nonetheless fretted. Reminding his Montana readers that across the border lived more than twelve thousand warriors, the editor of the Deer Lodge New North-West wrote, “If they were to join the tribes now fighting the United States, nothing on this side of the line could prevent them.”

At the same time, the Fort Benton Record received a report from Fort Walsh just across the border in Canada that Yankton Sioux were camped close by and “making mischief.” Clearly the cry was going out: the public wanted something done, and now.

Fearing most that Sitting Bull would cross the Yellowstone and reach Canada, General Alfred Terry had eventually given up all thought of working in concert with the loner Crook. For a week he worked Bill Cody and his forces north but found nothing of the wild bands. On September 3 Terry received word from Crook, then on Beaver Creek, an affluent of the Little Missouri, that the Indian trail he had been following had petered out. To Terry there was little more his men could accomplish without using up the supplies Colonel Nelson Miles’s men would need for the coming winter as they manned the Tongue River Cantonment from which they were to patrol the lower Yellowstone.

On September 5 Terry disbanded his expedition, sent Gibbon’s infantry and Brisbin’s Second Cavalry back west to Fort Ellis and Fort Shaw, then went with the Seventh Cavalry itself as it limped home to a somber Fort Abraham Lincoln draped in mourning.

If anything was to be done now, it would be up to George Crook and his Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition to do it. But first they had to find the Sioux.

As the soldiers came trudging along through the mud, weeks behind them, the warrior bands had already reached the traditional camping grounds they had been visiting for generations. Here beside the Mashtincha Putin (what they called Rabbit Lip Creek), they raised their lodges at the foot of those long gray bluffs dappled with jackpine. The Sioux term for the geographic feature, Paha Zizipela, translates to “thin (or “horizontal”) butte”—as a snake is thin and moves horizontally, in the sense of the buttes running north-south. These buttes are indeed long (fifty miles) and very thin (less than four miles in width).

The exact number of Miniconjou in that village has long remained a source of controversy. At the time of the battles Frank Grouard told Mills and Crook the village contained two hundred occupants. Anson Mills later stated that he learned from the captives that the village comprised “two hundred souls, one hundred of whom were warriors.” Yet this ratio of warriors to other occupants seems unusually high.

However, when we apply the 1855 Thomas Twiss method of counting (whereby it was determined there were two men of fighting age for every lodge—“fighting age” determined as men from their midteens to their late thirties), we find a much more likely figure of seventy-four warriors in that camp that Mills attacked at dawn.

Still, that figure might seem a little high to those knowledgeable in the Plains Indian culture. By applying Harry H. Anderson’s computations (7 Indians per normal-sized lodge, of which 1.29 are warriors), we come up with a village population of some 260 Miniconjou and 48 warriors. When you add to those 48 any boys eager to defend their families, as well as older men and a few women who would stay behind to fight—one can see how Captain Mills just might arrive at an estimate of 100 combatants he faced on the morning of September 9.

While we can verify that Crook’s combined forces numbered just shy of 2,000 men, historians have disagreed as to the number of warriors Sitting Bull led against what the Sioux believed would be only 150 pony soldiers—those who attacked at dawn with Anson Mills. Estimates range anywhere between 600 to 800, although a few winters later Sitting Bull himself would say that he had led a thousand warriors back to attack Three Stars. No matter if he did have that many—the Sioux were still up against two-to-one odds when they tried to make it tough on Crook’s retreating army.

Rumors had long existed that the soldiers had killed their warrior captives before pulling away from the village. Four years after the battle Charles King himself made note of those rumors in his Campaigning with Crook, as did Don Rickey, Jr., in Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay. But National Park Service research historian Jerome A. Greene maintains that, “There is no substantiating evidence for the charge made fifty-nine years later by a deserter from Crook’s expedition that the captured warriors were shot to death by the troops before the command left the battlefield.”