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

This last officer was generally known as a “character” among his comrades in the Third Cavalry. A native of Seamus Donegan’s Ireland, Lawson emigrated to the Ohio River country of Kentucky, where he ran a grocery store, married, and fathered five children before joining the Union Army with the outbreak of the Civil War—at the age of forty! In his remarkable career during the Indian wars, this unassuming soldier never asked any handicap of troopers half his age, being able to stay in the saddle and outride all but a handful of younger men in the Third Cavalry. Six feet tall and thin as a rail, with tobacco juice perpetually staining his scraggly red beard, Lawson had remained behind with Crook and the pack-train at the time of Reynolds’s Powder River fight, March 17, 1876. Three months later, after having displayed conspicuous courage during the Rosebud battle, the lieutenant was finally promoted to captain while Crook’s column was still recouping in the Black Hills, September 25, 1876. He would go on to distinguish himself at the Thornburg fight against Ute warriors on Colorado’s Milk River in 1879 … but there will be more on that to come in a future volume of this long-running series.

This buffalo-hide lodge was to remain the personal property of Captain Mills. Knowing that the captain did not return to the Belle Fourche with Lieutenant Bubb and the wagons loaded with supplies, choosing instead to remain behind for a day or so to recoup his strength, we can therefore determine with some accuracy that Morrow took this photo sometime after Mills rejoined the column at one of its Whitewood Creek camps.

By that time Crook and his entourage of officers and reporters were speeding back to Fort Laramie. Yet correspondent Reuben Davenport had already offered five hundred dollars to scout Jack Crawford to break away from Frank Grouard and Captain Anson Mills—and race to the dosest telegraph key. At the same time, Grouard carried dispatches for the three other reporters. In our next volume, A Cold Day in Hell you will be treated to the amusing adventures of that cross-country race between the two army scouts.

After reaching Laramie, correspondent Davenport limped on to Cheyenne, where he finally collapsed as a result of his exertions following the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition. On his sickbed the newsman completed a fifteen-thousand-word story that was promptly printed in its entirety by the New York Herald—an article in which Davenport declared that Crook should be court-martialed for his conduct on the trail. He believed the campaign from thereon out would be remembered with the same historical disgust as was Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow during a cruel Russian winter, despite the fact that “a freak of fortune” had allowed the discovery of a small village and its “inglorious” capture.

About a week after reaching Fort Laramie, John Finerty returned to Chicago, reporting to his editor, Clint Snowden, and the paper’s owner, Wilbur Storey. After a series of in-depth articles on Crook’s campaign, Finerty’s final article appeared on October 6 in the Chicago Times:

Since my return I have had to endure the usual boredom shoved upon an ephemeral human curiosity … The constitutional, inevitable, universal “damphool” has asked me a dozen times: “You weren’t in earnest when you said you lived on horse meat? Didn’t you make that up?” This species of biped jackass flourishes in every community, and can hardly be expected to be absent from Chicago.

On the second of December, 1876, the U.S. Army awarded the medal of honor to those three couriers who courageously carried General Terry’s letter south through territory believed to be teeming with hostiles, destined for Crook at his Camp Cloud Peak: Privates William Evans, Benjamin F. Stewart, and James Bell—all of E Company, Seventh U.S. Infantry.

Anson Mills would eventually secure another brevet rank of colonel for his meritorious service in launching the charge on the village at Slim Buttes. Then forty-five years later in 1921, some twenty-four years after he had retired from the army with the rank of brigadier general, and thirty-one years after Crook died, Mills applied through former commanding general of the army General Nelson A. Miles for a Medal of Honor. Those fellow officers who joined Miles in supporting the award read like a Who’s Who of officers who served with Crook’s Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition in that terrible march: Major General Samuel S. Sumner, Brigadier General Charles King, Brigadier General William P. Hall, Brigadier General Peter D. Vroom.

But, sadly, Mills had applied too long after the fact, according to the army’s regulations. Some historians believe he waited so long because his application would have been denied by Crook, who might still voice his criticism of Mills’s “precipitous” attack. If this appraisal is correct, then why did Mills wait a full thirty-one years after his old antagonist’s death?