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

After interviewing Sioux participants in the Battle of Slim Buttes, as well as some of their relatives, author Stanley Vestal reported that the Miniconjou losses were ten killed and two wounded. According to the Ricker Papers, Red Horse claimed seven were killed and four wounded, while a third Sioux reported the dead as three men, four women, and one infant—eight total.

What we can be even more certain of is the fact that the Sioux were fired up, furious beyond words when they returned to the site of their decimated, burned-out village after driving off the stragglers at the tail end of Crook’s column retreating to the south. Aware that the warriors in the hills—as well as Crook’s prisoners later to be released— had watched the soldiers bury their dead, we can have little doubt that the Sioux did in fact dig up the graves of White, Wenzel, and Kennedy, and so too the hole where the surgeons had buried Von Leuttwitz’s leg. The warriors and squaws in mourning would almost certainly have taken out their rage and grief not only on those dead bodies, but on that amputated limb.

Of great interest to me was the discovery of all that money and those articles taken from Custer’s dead at the Little Bighorn fight. In his reminiscences Frank Grouard declared that soldiers combing through the lodges prior to their destruction found more than eleven thousand dollars. This, most would agree, is simply too grand a figure. John Finerty reported to his readers that Crook’s troops recovered nine hundred dollars. The real amount is likely to be somewhere in between, a figure closer to that given by the Chicago newsman. Allowing for a bit of pilfering here and there, one might believe there was easily twelve hundred dollars or more to be recovered in that village.

But more so even than that cash, what piqued my interest was the discovery of those ghostly relics. Just as one writer of that time stated, to come across the letters written to and by the Custer dead must have been like hearing faint, eerie voices whispering from their shallow graves beside the Greasy Grass. A matter of weeks later Sergeant Jefferson Spooner recalled that when he had been going through the lodges, he came across several noteworthy articíes:a locket, a small cabinet photo of Captain Myles Keogh, two gold-mounted ivory-handled revolvers, and a Spencer sporting rifle. The cavalry sergeant went on to state, “The picture and locket I gave to an officer of the 3rd Cav., who claimed them as a relative of the officer killed with Custer, and a revolver I gave to Capt. Rodgers of ‘A’ Co. 5th Cav. The rifle I sold some days later for two loaves of bread.”

The emphasis there is all mine! Only to remind you that in less than a week of that victory over a village filled with dried meat, Crook’s troops were on the Belle Fourche and then the Whitewood, trading what little they had with the greedy merchants who came out from the Black Hills towns to charge the soldiers five, six, even seven times the going rate (already inflated due to transportation costs to the mining settlements) for the most basic of foodstuffs!

It seems from the discovery of the Keogh photograph and that locket, from the captain’s leather gauntlets, and especially from the “Wild I” company guidon, that whoever secured those souvenirs was among those who overwhelmed that tough band of cavalrymen who attempted to hold the east side of Massacre Ridge. One report states that the swallowtail flag was tied outside the lodge of American Horse, likely attached to the smoke-flap ropes. But Anson Mills states that it was discovered “in good condition, folded up in an Indian reticule with a pair of Colonel Keogh’s gauntlets marked with his name.”

Yet Mills wasn’t the one who discovered that guidon. Charging the Sioux village, Private W. J. McClinton sprinted in with his C Troop from the Third Cavalry, and that very day presented the flag to Captain Mills. Years later when McClinton received his discharge papers from the army, he found the face of the document emblazoned in bold red ink with a testament to the fact that he had captured the guidon. Upon his discharge McClinton remained in the West, soon to become a resident of Sheridan, Wyoming, where he enjoyed a long and successful business career. More than a decade later John Bourke wrote,“[McClinton] never tires of singing the praises of General Crook and the brave men who opened up the rich valleys of the Tongue and Goose Creek [near present-day Sheridan] to settlement.”