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

So when Grouard discovered the hunters, then the pony herd, and finally the village late on that rainy afternoon of the eighth—Anson Mills had nothing to indicate that George Crook and the rest of the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition were anywhere but a minimum of thirty-five miles or more to their rear, right back where his battalion had left them. To send a courier on that backtrail wouldn’t have made much sense, at least to me—because given the condition of Crook’s men and animals, no courier could have conceivably crossed thirty-five miles of that treacherous, muddy country to reach Crook, and no column could have then marched another thirty-five miles across the same gumbo prairie, in time to launch a concerted attack at dawn!

Everything considered—the distant position of reinforcements from Crook’s column, and Mills’s dangerously low supply of ammunition—I believe the captain made the only decision he could, and all arguments then and now are nothing more than niggling, meaningless carping.

Still, it isn’t hard for me to understand the conditions that would make such heated debates arise: great, passionate welling of sentiment from those who continued to suffer the terrible privations of that campaign, two harrowing days of battle, and the additional horrors of their horse-meat march between Owl and Willow creeks. Simply put, we must remember that those soldiers had been in the wilderness for four and a half months without leave or relief.

In the Huntington Library collections we find the papers of Lieutenant Walter S. Schuyler, who wrote to his father upon Crook’s return to Fort Laramie:

It has been a march through the heart of the enemy’s country, almost wholly unexplored by white men, and thoroughly misunderstood by them, a march which has tried men’s souls as well as their constitutions, a march which will live in our history as the hardest ever undertaken by our army, and on which the privation and hardship were equaled only by the astonishing health of the command while accomplishing it.

Years after that grueling march of survival and sheer willpower, Lieutenant John Bourke found his own health failing. In writing his book, On the Border With Crook, he asked his public to study the roster of those soldiers who had suffered terribly through twenty-two days of constant hunger, cold, and rain.

If any of my readers imagines that the march from the head of Heart River down to the Belle Fourche was a picnic, let him examine the roster of the command and tell of the scores and scores of men, then hearty and rugged, who now fill premature graves or drag out an existence with constitutions wrecked and enfeebled by such privations and vicissitudes.

Fourteen years later in his short story about the campaign, which he titled “Van,” Charles King wrote:

We set out with ten days’ rations on a chase that lasted ten weeks … We wore out some Indians, a good many soldiers, and a great many horses. We sometimes caught the Indians, and sometimes they caught us. It was hot, dry summer weather when we left our wagons, tents, and extra clothing; it was sharp and freezing before we saw them again.

In an attempt to capture some of that grueling privation, as depicted in a closing scene of this novel, a photographer rode out from Deadwood with his cameras and his portable, wagon-borne darkroom to record for history through staged photographs some of what Crook’s troops managed to live through. For this alone we are indebted to photographer Stanley J. Morrow. With the assistance of Bantam Books and through the courtesy of folks at the Little Bighorn National Battlefield who searched through their photographic archives, we have in this book reproduced a few of Morrow’s momentous photos.

Perhaps the most evocative picture for me is the one showing the famous hide lodge salvaged from the captured village and used as Dr. Clements’s “hospital” for the next several days. The photo, taken after the column had reached the Black Hills, also shows the captured I Troop guidon on display. Standing left to right are scout Frank Grouard, Private W. J. McClinton (who captured the flag), and Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka. Seated left to right are Lieutenant Colonel William B. Royall (who commanded a battalion at the Battle of the Rosebud), Captain William H. Andrews (prominent for his gallantry on Royall’s flank during the Rosebud fight), Captain Anson Mills, and Lieutenant Joseph Lawson.