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

“And especially your hair—for you leading sojurs down on them twice now.” Donegan brooded a moment, then asked, “What all do you think the Lakota are up to, if them camps really are out to hunt like you say?”

“Figure they have scouts keeping an eye on them other columns too.”

“How is it Gibbon’s Montana sojurs, or Terry’s Dakota column from over at Fort Lincoln, haven’t run onto a village that size yet?”

“You asking about Terry’s column—that bunch what Crook says is pushing this way with Custer’s cavalry riding right out front?”

“Yeah, them. Why hasn’t Terry’s sojurs run up against that big camp what jumped us three days back?”

Grouard shrugged. “Just lucky, I suppose.”

“Naw. It ain’t just luck, Frank. Way I see it—them warriors will keep right on doing their best to keep their women and children out of the army’s way. Reason they rode south to jump us was they didn’t want Crook’s army getting anywhere near their village. They’ll go and do the same thing with that bunch up north: keep well out of the way of Gibbon and Terry.”

He studied Donegan a moment. “Don’t think so, Irishman. Way it lays out to me is this: a village that big won’t be worried about a damned thing but finding enough grass to feed all their ponies.”

“So—what about them sojurs up north of us? You’re saying that war camp hit us on the Rosebud just don’t give a damn about the three columns closing in on ’em?”

His face a mask of disgust, Grouard slowly brought his two hands together. “Only two columns still closing in now, Irishman.”

“So either of them other two expeditions. Why you figure neither of them bumped into that goddamned big village themselves yet?”

With a slow wag of his head Grouard said, “Can’t say, Seamus. Only … I know one thing’s certain as rain: it’s just a matter of time before Custer and his men run smack up against more’n they can handle.”

^*The Plainsmen Series, Vol. 8, Blood Song

Chapter 1

21 June 1876

[The Indian attack on our column] showed that they anticipated that they were strong enough to thoroughly defeat the command during the engagement. I tried to throw a strong force through the canyon, but I was obliged to use it elsewhere before it had gotten to the supposed location of the village. The command finally drove the Indians back in great confusion … We remained on the field that night, and having but what each man could carry himself, we were obliged to return to the train to properly care for the wounded … I expect to find those Indians in rough places all the time, and so have ordered five companies of infantry, and shall not probably make any extended movement until they arrive.

George Crook

Brig. Gen.

John Bourke finished the second of two copies he had made that morning of Crook’s letter to General Philip Sheridan. While one would remain in Bourke’s records, as Crook’s longtime aide-de-camp, the original and the second copy would go with two civilian couriers who would ride south separately to Fort Fetterman on the North Platte. There this first report of the Battle of the Rosebud would soon be telegraphed by leapfrog down that string of tiny key stations connected by a thin strand of wire, southeast all the way to Fort Laramie.

From there the electrifying news of Crook’s decision to wait at Goose Creek would cause the keys to click and the wires to hum all the way to department headquarters in Omaha, and beyond. Within hours of the letter’s arrival at Fetterman, Sheridan would be reading the scrawl of some private’s handwriting on the pages of yellow flimsy at Division HQ in Chicago. It wouldn’t take that much longer for William Tecumseh Sherman to be studying every one of Crook’s carefully chosen words at the War Department in Washington City.

An Irishman himself like Sheridan, Bourke pictured how the bandy-legged hero of the Shenandoah campaign would flush and roar when he read that Crook was electing to sit tight. He would be angry. Nay, furious! After all, no less than Sheridan and Sherman themselves had developed the concept of “total war” waged against an enemy population in those final months of the Civil War.

John had to agree with them. In what he had seen of man’s bloodiest sport, war was serious business. If the West was to be won, then he found himself in sympathy with Sherman’s views: “Let’s be about finishing this matter of the Indians.”

While the Confederate officers had practiced a genteel combat against the Union armies, pitting only soldier against soldier, Sherman and Sheridan—as U. S. Grant’s right and left arms—refined the concept that mandated an army make war on the entire enemy population, women and children and noncombatants alike. Depriving the enemy of livestock, burning fields and destroying forage, laying waste not only to the enemy’s lines of supply, but by making total war on those loved ones the Confederate armies left behind at home, the Union could wreak great spiritual damage to the fighting men of the rebellious South.