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

Most confusing are two minor inconsistencies found in otherwise scholarly books. Jerome Greene puts Finerty with Davenport as the two reporters who departed with Mills on the night of 7 September. But one has only to read John Finerty’s book to learn that he stayed behind and was with Crook when George Herman, Mills’s courier, showed up to announce the taking of the village. We know there were two reporters along from their subsequent accounts of the morning battle. So from my own research poring over the microfilm copies of old issues of the Rocky Mountain News, in which “Alter Ego’s” stories of Captain Mills’s morning “fight” would later appear, I believe I can trust John S. Gray’s account that it was indeed Robert Strahorn who was there at dawn.

In yet a second discrepancy Greene appears to be the correct party. Whereas Oliver Knight gives “Alfred Milner” as the name of the soldier killed by Sioux along the Belle Fourche during the return of Major Upham’s battalion from its fruitless patrol, Greene accurately reports the name from duty rosters in the military archives as Cyrus B. Milner of Company A.

Still, it is the confusion surrounding the identity of “Buffalo Chips” White that most befuddles me. Charles King states that the scout’s name was James White. John Finerty records him as “Charley, alias Frank White.” Then we find his gravestone at the Slim Buttes battle site is inscribed with the name Jonathan White. James and Jonathan, maybe—a discrepancy caused by the slightest error in someone’s memory—but where did Finerty ever come up with Frank?

It was likely easier for historians to locate and identify the Slim Buttes site than it was to determine the scout’s real first name!

Like so many other dramatic chapters of the Indian wars, the fight at Slim Buttes quickly faded from memory, thrust back into the shadows behind the more startling but no more consequential Little Bighorn battle. Thirty-one years would pass before amateur Indian wars’ historian Walter M. Camp, then editor for the “Railway Review,” would interview old Miniconjou warriors on the Standing Rock Reservation, thus learning of Crook’s attack on their village.

It took another seven years, in 1914, for Camp to convince two veterans of Crook’s campaign, Anson Mills and Charles Morton, to accompany him to South Dakota. In Belle Fourche they rented a car and drove north, but after spending several days searching along the eastern face of the buttes, neither could confirm the site of the Miniconjou village. The three returned east empty-handed.

But Camp would not be deterred. Undaunted, he pursued his quest for another three years, and finally, in June of 1917, with the help of a map drawn by Charles King as well as hours of research by Bill Rumbaugh, a ranch hand working for a local cattleman in South Dakota, Camp finally determined the battlefield site.

While working cattle across that ground year after year, Rumbaugh had discovered pieces of shattered iron cookware destroyed by Crook’s troops, spent .45/70 cases in the still-visible rifle pits, along with burned lodgepoles and the presence of human skeletal remains. Accompanied by Rumbaugh, in addition to six other local ranchers, an overjoyed Camp finally walked over that hallowed ground and verified the battle site located in the extreme northwestern corner of South Dakota. In his subsequent searches he found a variety of artifacts, including iron tea kettles, galvanized water buckets, broken butcher knives, iron hooks and handles, tin pans, basins, cups and cans, broken and melted glass bottles, broken earthware dishes, coffeepots, clothes buttons, and a stone pestle.

Still, it was the discovery of human skeletal remains that caused Camp the most excitement and speculation. One of the local ranchers took the researcher to the top of a little knoll less than a quarter of a mile from the south side of the creek. There Camp was shown a skeleton, complete but for the skull. Beneath the remains lay a burned and bent carbine barrel, as well as three spent cartridge cases.

On a knoll directly west of this first site, Camp later discovered a second skeleton in much the same condition. Not knowing at the time that Sitting Bull’s warriors had boasted of digging up the white man’s graves near the village, Camp nevertheless came to that exact conclusion years ahead of the publication of Stanley Vestal’s book.

In his own words Camp tells what he discovered:

I proposed that we look for evidence of opened graves, and this we soon found near the west edge of the village site on a low bench from the creek bottom, under a clump of buck brush that had grown up on the two mounds of earth that had been thrown out with the excavations. These two holes in the ground were three feet apart … The dirt thrown out had been weather-beaten down into flattened heaps, and enough of it had been washed back into the two trench-like openings to fill them within two feet of the general ground surface.