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

For a moment more John stared down at Donegan, the tall scout stretched out in a respectable piece of shade that Saturday morning, his ankles crossed and flicking a finger now and then at an annoying deerfly.

One last time the newsman asked, “Maybe you’ll want to tell me by the time I get back, eh?”

“Good-bye, Finerty.”

“Only gonna be gone just a few days with Crook.”

“You already told me,” Donegan said, his words muffled beneath the crown of the wide-brimmed hat pulled fully over his face. “So be off with you.”

“Hunting’s said to be good up there. Sure you don’t want to join us and enjoy yourself after your harrowing experiences?”

“I’ll skin you myself if you don’t leave me be,” Seamus grumped.

“Suit yourself, Seamus.”

When the Irishman did not reply, Finerty turned and strode back through the cavalry camp toward Crook’s headquarters, leading his mount, all packed and ready for the general’s hunt into the recesses of the Big Horn Mountains. He wasn’t the only correspondent making the sojourn: Joe Wasson, correspondent not only for the New York Tribune but for the Philadelphia Press and the San Francisco Alta California, along with Robert Strahorn of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, and Reuben Davenport of the New York Herald were going along as well, all four of them invited by Crook to join him and a party of officers on their leisurely excursion. As curious as any man could be, but cursed because he was more prone to boredom than most, the restive reporter for the Chicago Times jumped at the chance to flee the army’s camp and do something, anything.

Anything after a week and a half of lounging about in a place with so many men and not a single woman—not even that dish-faced Calamity Jane Cannary—not to mention that out of a thousand soldiers there was very, very little money to be won at cards. Why, the officers were down to wagering tins of peaches or tomatoes on horse-and footraces, perhaps even placing bets on who would catch the most or the biggest fish each day. Fishing was a pleasant enough sport, as long as a man could practice its fine arts from a patch of shade. While the evenings were delightfully cool, the days had a stifling sameness to them: by eleven o’clock the heat had become unbearable, lasting until well past five. In those same hours of torment, horseflies, deerflies, all sorts of biting, buzzing, winged torture— including the omnipresent mosquitoes—drove the men and animals mad with their incessant cruelty.

At long last came the respite of each evening, times when Finerty repeatedly pressed John Bourke to regale them all with tales of his adventures with Crook in the Arizona campaigns, at least when the newsman couldn’t lay his hands on one of those well-traveled paperback books so many were borrowing from the small personal library of Captain Peter D. Vroom or Lieutenant Augustus C. Paul, both of the Third Cavalry. Oh, to have even a dime novel to read! A poem by Walt Whitman! Even a reading tract of a temperance lecture delivered by Deacon Bross or one of Brother Moody’s uplifting speeches on his spiritual hope for mankind!

Driven to collecting gossip and what bits of news he could glean from those thirty Montana miners who had wandered into camp from over on the Tongue River before the Rosebud fight—none of it kept Finerty interested for all that long. It damned well all had a way of wearing pretty thin on a young, outgoing fellow from the sociable streets of Chicago. Why, in that lazy camp there wasn’t so much as a glass of warm beer to be had, much less the numbing taste of strong whiskey—not so much as a cigar! A man had to content himself with government tobacco, sold by the plug or pouch.

Even Sundays no longer held their special significance for him: his one day off back in Chicago. Here by the Big Horns, Sunday was just one of the seven every one of them had to endure, one after another until Crook decided they would march again. Deep in the cold of last winter he figured he would be home by spring—the Sioux campaign over and the hostiles driven back to their agencies. After Reynolds’s debacle on the Powder, Finerty revised his thinking and figured that it might take one more campaign—this time with more killing and less driving. But after their fight on the Rosebud, Crook limped back here to lick his wounds.

And now, by God—it looked like this was going to be a summer campaign. If not longer!

Came the times when John wished he had packed it in with the cough-racked MacMillan, who’d gone south with the wagons for resupply at Fetterman. If nothing else, Finerty figured he could fight boredom by spending a few hours at Kid Slaymaker’s Hog Ranch across the river from the post before the teamsters would have everything loaded and be turning about for a return trip to the camp at Goose Creek. Ah, just a little heady potheen to drink and the sweet fragrance of a moist, fleshy woman.