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

Clint Snowden—city editor, Chicago Times

Thomas Moore—Chief of Pack Train

Richard “Uncle Dick” Closter

Grant Marsh—captain, Far West steamboat

Dave Campbell—pilot, Far West steamboat

^†James B. Glover—packer

E. B. Farnum—Mayor of Deadwood

Martha Luhn—officer’s wife at Fort Laramie

Elizabeth Burt—officer’s wife at Fort Laramie

Robert Strahorn—correspondent, Denver Rocky Mountain News, Chicago Tribune, Cheyenne Sun, and the Omaha Republican

John F. Finerty—correspondent, Chicago Times

Joe Wasson—correspondent, New York Tribune, Philadelphia Press, and San Francisco Alta California

Reuben B. Davenport—correspondent, New York Herald

T. B. MacMillan—correspondent, Chicago Inter-Ocean

J. J. Talbot—correspondent, New York Graphic

Barbour Lathrop—correspondent, San Francisco Evening Bulletin

Cuthbert Mills—New York Times

Tom Cosgrove—civilian leader of the Shoshone battalion

Nelson Yarnell—Cosgrove’s lieutenant

Yancy Eckles—Cosgrove’s sergeant

^*killed in the battle of Slim Buttes

^†wounded at the Battle of Slim Buttes

At Laramie I told the commissioners that I had seen the Sioux commit a massacre; they killed many white men. But the Sioux are still here, and still kill white men. When you whites whip the Sioux come and tell us of it. You are afraid of the Sioux. Two years ago I went with the soldiers; they talked very brave. They said they were going through the Sioux country to Powder River and Tongue River. We got to Pryor Creek, just below here in the Crow country. I wanted to go ahead, but the soldiers got scared and turned back. The soldiers were the whirlwind, but the whirlwind turned back. Last summer the soldiers went to Pryor Creek again; again the whirlwind was going through Sioux country, but again the whirlwind turned back. We Crows are not the whirlwind, but we go to the Sioux; we go to their country; we meet them and fight; we do not turn back. But then we are not the whirlwind! … The Sioux are on the way, and you are afraid of them; they will turn the whirlwind back.

—Blackfoot

Crow war chief

The people must be left with nothing but their eyes to weep with.

—Lieutenant General Philip H. Sheridan

The “Sibley Scout” is famous among Indian fighters as being one of the narrowest escapes from savages now on record.

—Editorial

The New York Tribune

Toward the end of the perilous march [of the Sibley patrol], we all became so weakened that we marched for ten minutes and then would lie down and rest. Several of the most robust men became insane, and one or two never regained their wits.

—Lieutenant Frederick W. Sibley

[The skirmish at Warbonnet Creek] is one of few cases where a large party of Indians was successfully ambushed by troops.

—Don Russell

Campaigning with King

For the Indians who had gloried in the victory of Little Big Horn, Slim Buttes heralded the retaliatory blows that ultimately broke their resistance and forced their submission … the actions of September 9 and 10, 1876, commenced the relentless punitive warfare that was to be waged over the next eight months, until the tribesmen either had died or had gone peaceably to the agencies.

—Jerome A. Green

Slim Buttes, 1876

… many a suffering stomach gladdened with a welcome change from horse meat, tough and stringy, to rib roasts of pony, grass-fed, sweet, and succulent. There is no such sauce as starvation.

—Lieutenant Charles King

Campaigning with Crook

The terrible persistence with which [Crook] urged his faint, starving, foot-sore, tattered soldiers along the trail, to which he clung with a resolution and determination that nothing could shake, entitles him to the respect and admiration of his countrymen—a respect and admiration, by the way, which was fully accorded him by his gallant and equally desperate foes.

—Cyrus Townsend Brady

Indian Fights and Fighters

Only the brave and fearless can be just.

—Old Lakota proverb

For acting to stop the Cheyennes, [Merritt] was commended by General Sheridan; for delaying the march of the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition for a week, he was blamed by General Crook.

—Don Russell

The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill

The battle [of Slim Buttes] was one of the most picturesque ever fought in the West. Crook and his officers stood in the camp, the center of a vast amphitheater ringed with fire, up the sides of which the soldiers steadily climbed to get at the Indians, silhouetted in all their war finery against the sky.

—Cyrus Townsend Brady

Indian Fights and Fighters