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

Slim Buttes was touted as a victory for the army, but it was a shabby victory at best and accomplished nothing beyond angering the Indians. The dawn attack had felled women and children, and when the tribesmen crept back into the village after the military withdrawal, they confronted heartrending scenes. Many of the groups in the vicinity of Slim Buttes, including the one struck by Mills, had intended to surrender at an agency. The sight of women and children maimed or slain by army bullets dampened that impulse.

—Robert M. Utley

The Lance and the Shield

Sitting Bull had warned his people not to take any spoils from the Little Big Horn battle[field], or the soldiers would crush them. The Slim Buttes battle was part of the prophecy which came true.

—Fred H. Werner

The Slim Buttes Battle

Foreword

At the beginning of some chapters and some scenes, you will read the same news stories devoured by the officers’ wives and the civilians employed at the posts or those in adjacent frontier settlements—just what Samantha Donegan herself would have read—taken from the front page of the daily newspapers that arrived as much as a week late (and sometimes more), that delay due to the wilderness distances to be traveled by freight carriers.

These newspaper stories are copied verbatim from the headlines and graphic accounts of the day. Remember as you read, that this was the only news available for those people who had a most personal stake in the army’s last great campaign—those people who had tearfully watched a loved one march off to war that summer of the Sioux in 1876.

What happened to George Armstrong Custer and five companies of his Seventh U.S. Cavalry on the afternoon of June 25—only eight days after George C. Crook was stalemated on Rosebud Creek—was to shock, stun, and ultimately outrage an entire nation. News of that disaster would all but eclipse every other event that summer, even the most wondrous advancements in science and industry at that moment on display at Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition.

By starting the chapters and scenes with an article taken right out of the day’s headlines, I hope that you will be struck with the immediacy of each day’s front page as you finish reading its news—just as Samantha Donegan would have been from the relative safety of Fort Laramie. But, unlike her, you will then find yourself thrust back into the action of an army on the march, an army intent on fulfilling General Philip Sheridan’s prophecy that the hostiles of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse who had destroyed Custer on the Greasy Grass would soon hear a trumpet on the land.

Prologue

20 June 1876

“I hear water’s better when you mix it with whiskey.”

Upon hearing the quiet interruption of that familiar voice, the Irishman raised his head from the cool grass that flourished along the bank of Little Goose Creek to watch Frank Grouard slide out of his saddle.

“I wouldn’t know,” Seamus Donegan replied, propped up on one elbow as he kicked his bare feet in the cold water. He had his canvas britches snugged in loose rolls all the way up to his knees to soak in the refreshing current. “You see, I never water down my whiskey.”

The half-breed with skin the hue of coffee-tanned leather tied off his army mount, then came over to settle in the shade of a huge cottonwood beside Donegan. “Much as you bellyache about missing your whiskey this trip out, you sure as hell done a lot of soaking in water.”

Seamus grinned, then nodded in agreement as he said, “This tends to take a man’s mind off his real thirst.”

“The sort a man gets when he has a whiskey hunger, eh?”

“Or the kind of hunger what hits a man when he’s gone without a woman for too long.” Donegan immediately felt bad for the thoughtless words that fell from his tongue. “I’m sorry, Frank. Didn’t mean nothing by it. Forgot, is all.”

Grouard waved it off with a lukewarm grin and a shrug of his shoulder. “Don’t make nothing of it, Irishman. Women been nothing but trouble for me. Whiskey too. Now, a fella like you, he can handle both, I’d wager: all he wants of both. But a man like me gets all buried in a woman, and that makes for trouble with that woman’s brother—so that’s when I go and get all fall-down and underfoot with some cheap Red River trader’s whiskey….”

He heard the head scout’s voice fade away while watching the wistful look come over the half-breed’s dusky, molasses-colored face. “I figure we ought to talk about what brung you to look me up—”

“It don’t matter no more, Seamus,” Grouard interrupted. “Something I can talk about now. Hurt for a while. Not so much no more.”

“Damn, but you’ve had your share of dark days. First the trouble with Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapas over them whiskey traders. Then you go and get yourself all but scalped and skewered over a woman with Crazy Horse’s band.”

“Didn’t mean for things to turn out so bad with He Dog, that woman’s brother, bad with the rest of them Hunkpatila that way.”