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

A mile beyond the Cheyenne, at the base of some low bluffs to the north, King and Garnier found a basin where enough grass grew to please the animals they picketed and hobbled for the night. There was ample wood for the coffee fires they buried in the ground as these veteran horse soldiers stretched their legs and lit their pipes in this stolen moment of relaxation in a horse soldier’s day. Keyes deployed a dozen men as pickets to surround the camp, assigning a rotation throughout the moonlit night. As darkness squeezed on down upon the Cheyenne River patrol, in the distance they couldn’t help but see the faraway glow of signal fires at five different points.

“They’re talking about us, aren’t they, Major?” King asked Stanton.

“Damn right they are. And those red-bellies’d jump us if they had the nerve.”

“They won’t: we’ve got pickets out,” Keyes said.

“It’s not us they’re afraid of particularly, Lieutenant,” Stanton replied. “Trust me—them sonsabitches know Carr and the rest aren’t far behind us. No sense in making the jump on us since they figure we can hold ’em off till the rest of the boys make it up.”

The lieutenant’s eyes began to droop, what with a bellyful of coffee, hardtack, and fried bacon, as well as his aching muscles screaming for rest after the long day’s march. A grin cracked his bristling, dust-caked face as his head sank back onto his McClellan, tugged the saddle blanket over his shoulders, and listened to the quiet, rinsedcrystal-clear tenor of one of the cavalrymen singing nearby at one of the tiny fires.

“The ring of a bridle, the stamp of a hoof,

   Stars above and the wind in the tree;

A bush for a billet, a rock for a roof,

      Outpost duty’s the duty for me.

Listen! A stir in the valley below—

The valley below is with riflemen crammed,

   Cov’ring the column and watching the foe;

   Trumpet-Major! Sound and be damned!”

King was just sliding down into that warm place where the exhausted can flee when the nearby gunshot cracked his sleeping shell.

In a heartbeat the entire bivouac came alive, men thrashing out of their blankets, others kicking sprays of dirt into the deep fire pits, some scurrying toward the patch of grass where they had their horses picketed. Above the rumble of curses and warnings, Keyes and Stanton barked orders and hollered their anxious questions at the perplexed sergeant of the guard.

Down in a crouch the old file halted halfway between bivouac and his outlying pickets, grumbling loudly from his hands and knees. “What chucklehead fired that goddamned shot?”

“I-I did sir,” piped the youthful answer from the darkness.

The sergeant asked, “That you, Sullivan?”

“Yes … yes,…. sir.”

“What’d you see, soldier?” Keyes demanded.

“Something … something was crawling right up out of that holler over there, Lieutenant,” the soldier answered his company commander. “So I challenged—and he didn’t answer—that’s when I fired.”

“Did you hit him, by damned?” the sergeant asked.

“I think so … ah, hell! I don’t know, Sarge.”

“There!” King said suddenly, rising off his knees.

The others studied the moonlit nearness of the hollow the hapless picket had been watching. There for one and all to see a four-legged intruder loped up the side of the coulee to the top of the plain, where he halted to survey the men below him with no little disdain. After a moment the night visitor turned away in indignation and disappeared over the hill, rump, tail, and all.

Climbing out of the dirt, the sergeant bawled at his picket, “You walleyed guttersnipe! Your own grandmother would have known that was nothing but a goddamned coyote!”

With that loud and definitive declaration, the bivouac erupted with laughter and good-natured backslapping that accompanied the crude jokes at picket Sullivan’s expense.

“Hey, Sully,” bawled a voice out of the darkness, “if it was two coyotes, would you advance the senior or the junior with the countersign, eh?”

On and on, back and forth the joking went for close to half an hour before the troopers settled back in for their night beside the Cheyenne River.

No more coyotes were to visit the company’s bivouac as the sky lights whirled overhead.

Then just past moonset—three o’clock, as King noted on his turnip pocket watch when the alarm went up— pickets on the lieutenant’s side of camp heard the distant passing of many hoofbeats as they faded into the distance.

That eerie echo of unshod pony hooves galloping north in the dark—headed safely around C Troop and making for the last great hunting ground of the Sioux and the Cheyenne.

*Near present-day Lusk, Wyoming.

Chapter 5

Sunday 25 June 1876

Two hours later the Cheyenne River patrol arose in the cold darkness that greeted those who crossed the high plains even at the height of summer. There would be no breakfast this fateful Sunday morning for Company C, Fifth Cavalry.