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

“This is taking too long,” Bourke said, agreeing with Sherman’s impatience over the progress of things out west.

But, then again, that’s what this whole Sioux campaign was about, wasn’t it? To get the matter settled once and for all?

But instead of clear victories, the army had instead two major engagements that were certainly less than defeats for the enemy. Reynolds had retreated from the Powder River, his men freezing, tormented by empty bellies. And now Crook and the rest had to content themselves with a hollow victory once Crazy Horse retreated with his warriors at the end of that long summer’s day of bloody and fierce hand-to-hand fighting across four miles of rolling, rocky hills bordering Rosebud Creek.^*

Crook’s army held the field at sunset. And buried its dead in the creek bottom that night under cover of darkness. Then started to limp back to Goose Creek the following morning. If the Battle of the Rosebud was ever to live on to Crook’s credit, John figured, then either the general would have to follow up with a more stunning victory somewhere in the weeks to come … or one of the other columns would have to suffer a more stunning defeat in this summer of the Sioux.

Either way, it would serve to take the dim sheen off what was clearly a dubious victory for Crook’s Wyoming column.

Already the newsmen were creating their own slant to that day-long battle. John knew each one of them wrote from his own narrow view of a horrendously complex battle that had raged along a four-mile front. For two days after the fight they had scratched out their stories, the rich ante climbing almost hourly as the reporters bartered for the services of any courier who would dare to carry word of the Rosebud Battle to the nearest telegraph, eventually to end up in the hands of expectant readers both east and west of this Wyoming wilderness.

Along with the wounded loaded in wagons, and an infantry escort Crook was sending south to Fetterman tomorrow morning, would also go T. B. MacMillan, reporter for Chicago’s Inter-Ocean, a cross-town rival of John Finerty’s Tribune. Day by day, for weeks now, MacMillan’s health had slipped away beneath the onslaught of cold and heat, rain and privation, until even Surgeon Albert Hartsuff had ordered him out of Indian country. Try as the newsman might, valiantly dipping into what reserves the bravest could muster, MacMillan simply did not have what it took to stand up beneath the rigors of the campaign trail. Though he was taking his leave of the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition, not one man dared make light of the reporter’s pluck and courage during the hottest of the fighting at the Rosebud. Bourke was one of those who had finally convinced “Mac” that he had no business staying on.

“After all,” John Finerty said at this morning’s fire, “you heard Crook himself say he’s planning on sitting pretty right here till he gets him his reinforcements of infantry and cavalry.”

“Finerty’s right,” Robert Strahorn of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News agreed. “We’re going to sit things out until we get more bullets and bacon before we can go chasing after Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull again.”

“The summer’s going to be all but gone before we move again, Mac,” Bourke tried cheering the sickly reporter over strong coffee.

“I’ll envy you, I will,” Finerty replied with an impish grin. “Knowing you’re back in Chicago well ahead of me. While I’m still out here, sitting on my thumbs with nothing to do but fish these creeks, hunt the groves of timber, and eat my fill from the fruit of the land every day. Pretty boring stuff.”

“The best place a man could be—Chicago,” Bourke chimed in to help nudge the newsman to relent and head home. “The Indian camps are surely breaking up after the whipping we gave them, so this campaign is all but over, Mac. Only thing left for us to do is eat, sleep, and chase some nonexistent warriors.”

“You heard it from the mouth of the general’s aide,” Finerty said. “The war’s over: nothing to do but eat and sleep. Seriously, Mac—I doubt we’ll have any more chances to chase warriors.”

It would take until the end of summer, but by then all that Bourke and Finerty and the rest of Crook’s crippled Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition would have to eat would be their broken-down, played-out horses as the animals dropped one by one by one into the mud of the northern plains.

That, and Crook’s men could always eat their words.

They had a great victory on their shoulders.

So it was that Miniconjou war chief American Horse danced with all the rest in this Moon of Ripening Berries, Wipazuka Waste Wi. At times the Lakota called this the Moon of Making Fat.

Truly, this was a time of great feasting, of living off the fat of the land for the people of American Horse.