Reap the Whirlwind (65 page)

When we start talking numbers about the Battle of the Rosebud, we immediately run into discrepancy, if not downright controversy, in two primary areas. Our first concern becomes the number of Indians involved in the fight.

After the better part of a year marked by incessant fighting, Crazy Horse finally came in and surrendered in 1877, at which time, so the story goes, the Hunkpatila war chief told George Crook that he had brought sixty-five hundred warriors to the battlefield the day he dueled with Three Stars. Mind you, this figure is made through an interpreter, translating a very specific number supposedly rendered from an Oglalla war chief, a member of a culture that makes little distinction between very large numbers. To them there was no difference between one hundred and one thousand!

On the face of it, this sixty-five hundred figure is so big
as to be ludicrous. Yet the number becomes all the more fantastic when you consider what the scholars have subsequently stated was the total warrior strength in the encampment at the time of the Rosebud fight: anywhere between nine hundred and four thousand (depending, at times, on whether a scholar is talking of veteran warriors or all men of fighting age—from fourteen to forty).

Just as important, one must remember that Crook fought the Lakota before some of the best and most populous warrior bands came to join the large encampment, notably the great war chief Gall (whose leadership would destroy the Calhoun and Keogh resistance on Massacre Ridge eight days later).

But there is one historian/scholar all of us can trust to separate myth from reality: author John S. Gray, whose excruciatingly minute time studies are a marvel to read in his reenactments of Custer’s final hours. Using the same dispassionate and scientific approach, Gray analyzes the agent’s records from the various reservations in question and tribal rolls, as well as intelligence reports from army scouts, half-breeds, and those bands hanging around the forts, etc., to come up with a week-by-week accounting that tracks the growing size of that great village as it migrated from valley to valley, gathering its real strength on the Rosebud.

With the finest of data in hand, scholar Gray takes exception not only to the outlandish Crazy Horse myth, but more so to contemporary historians who continue to state there were fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred warriors in the fight.

Gray unequivocally affirms a logical and most plausible argument for a much, much lower figure: seven hundred fifty.

Half
of the lowest estimate made by every other historian!

Gray’s number seems ridiculously low until one researches and studies the number of warriors who did not come in to the village until some time during the week following the Crook fight. When one consults the evidence, one can’t help but believe that less than a thousand were in those various war parties able to make the trip south from
the camp on Sundance Creek. Remember, the chiefs and headmen were still worried about other threats, so they left enough warriors in the village to protect against possible attack from not only the soldiers being watched daily along the Yellowstone, but also from any attack by Shoshone or Crow war parties.

Seven hundred fifty to fight for Crazy Horse. And Crook commanded almost twice that many when the duel began.

It becomes all the more remarkable when, having now completed the story, you sit back and ponder just what those seven hundred fifty warriors accomplished. Holding the greater numbers at bay, continually thwarting the attempts of the soldiers to hold them back, dividing the several soldier outfits into detail and continually flaunting the fact that they were surrounding the soldiers. For about five hours!

Seven hundred fifty. A truly heroic battle when one considers the reality of the odds against the Sioux and Cheyenne.

Then we come to the second matter of numbers—that of the total dead and wounded.

As we mentioned, after his surrender in 1877, Crazy Horse gave Crook information on their fight at the Rosebud. The war chief testified that thirty-nine warriors had been killed, and another sixty-three wounded. One of those wounded who was dragged away on the travois would later die, as did many who suffered death-dealing wounds. His family left the warrior’s body behind in the Wolf Mountains along the path Custer’s cavalry was following that Sunday morning the regiment descended to the banks of the Greasy Grass and rode into destiny.

These figures appear to be substantiated by Cheyenne historian John Stands in Timber, but as such, will readily seem high to any student of the Indian Wars era. Why? Because the Plains warrior had never before shown any desire to stay very long in a fight where he was being killed and wounded in such numbers. Heretofore, when a skirmish was going badly (i.e., a few warriors were suffering wounds), a war party would break off the fight and ride away, content to fight another day.

But at the Rosebud, Crazy Horse forced them to remain disciplined—following the commands of their war chiefs, flinging themselves again and again at the soldiers and allies. It was a new era in Indian fighting.

On the other side of the equation, the figures seem remarkable if for no other reason than for all the bullets the army and allies fired at the horsemen, they hit no more than a hundred warriors! Knowing what we do today of the nature of the army’s green recruits, of the lack of shooting practice, of the inability of the line soldier to keep his weapon clean under field conditions—maybe the low numbers are not remarkable at all When you take into account all the costs of Crook’s expedition to and from the fight, those few bullets that wounded or killed Indians became very expensive indeed. The government paid something on the order of one million dollars for every warrior killed at the Battle of the Rosebud!

In addition, there remains a little controversy in regard to the number of soldiers killed and wounded. While the character list provided in the front material shows the official military record, we have an entirely different set of figures offered by Frank Grouard—a character who much of the time has been found to give reliable testimony, but who might still embellish things on occasions. Because of that, all but one Indian Wars scholar has totally discounted Grouard’s assertions, simply because his figures more than double the army’s numbers.

In his autobiography, The Grabber stated twenty-eight soldiers were killed, and fifty-six had been wounded. Was he telling the truth and the army/Crook was not (downplaying the human cost of the ruinous expedition)?

One of the finest Indian Wars and military historians, Bob Utley, tends to agree with my assertion, writing: “… Grouard’s statement … is closer to the truth than Crook’s officially reported ten [killed] and twenty-one [wounded].”

Perhaps there’s no way we’ll ever know for sure since every other historian has repeatedly relied on the military’s figures, pulled from archival sources. Still, there are those of us who remember the daily body counts issued by those
“official government” or military sources during the Vietnam war, and how we did not know we were lied to until years later. The deceptive veil stretches across more than a century.

So in case you haven’t caught my drift: I have my sneaking suspicions that the number of soldiers killed and wounded was really greater than it appears at first blush in the military record.

Take a look for yourself to bring home the point of just how brutal the fighting was during Royall’s bloody retreats. You only have to comb the rosters to see that every last one of the dead came from that doomed battalion on the left. Although the Third Cavalry had less than half of its troopers engaged in the fighting, their total casualty loss was approaching four-fifths of the total loss—principally troops in Vroom’s, Henry’s, Van Vliet’s, and Andrews’s companies.

As for Captain Vroom’s L Company, which suffered five men killed and three others wounded as they went into rear guard to protect the retreat of the rest, those eight men account for almost
a third
of the total casualties for the entire engagement!

No matter where you come down on this controversy of how many killed and wounded, the fact remains that—considering the total number of men involved on both sides, knowing how long the combatants fought, and keeping in mind the total number of bullets fired in that “daylong” battle, I find it totally incredible that there weren’t heavier losses inflicted on both sides. Utterly amazing.

There is another hopeless conflict that will forever remain troubling to us who study the Indian Wars and seek to commemorate the hallowed ground where both white and red fell. Exactly where did Crook bury his dead?

Between the soldiers who left diaries or wrote letters home to wives, and those five newspapermen, things quickly got pretty muddled in this regard. Some reported that each company buried its men separately. Others stated that there was a mass, or common, grave for the dead.

Then there arises the matter of where. The young warrior Black Elk stated that he was with a group of Lakota who returned to the battlefield on the eighteenth and
found the graves of soldiers at the site of the white man’s encampment (on the night of the seventeenth). So while some Indians, soldiers, and civilians report that the grave(s) was (were) on the battlefield itself, other sources among Crook’s men say “buried beside the Rosebud,” and still more state that the soldiers were interred “in the streambed of the creek.” This might be confusing to those who do not know much about northern plains geography and how creeks carve out their banks and channels in the early spring, what with mountain runoff and torrential rains. While I have no guess on the subject, it is probable that the grave was in the streambed. Right where fires were burned all night to destroy scent, where the next morning Crook had his soldiers and stock pass over as they retreated from the valley.

To this day not one of those graves has been located, although various superintendents (and Neil Mangum, former Chief Historian) of the Custer Battlefield National Cemetery have made several official and unofficial attempts, hopeful that these battle dead could be disinterred and given a fitting burial with full military honors with their fallen comrades less than thirty miles away.

An interesting and quite intriguing aside to this tale is the story about the body of a white man being found on the battlefield after the Indians had withdrawn. In fact, the July 22, 1876, issue of the
Army and Navy Journal
even went so far as to state, “It is said the body of a white man was found who had been fighting with the Sioux.”

No mention of where he was found. Nor what he was wearing.

An old “squaw man” perhaps?

It becomes all the more interesting, and mystifying, in light of the reports given by several soldiers who were among Reno’s brigade nine days later who clearly heard good barracks swearing, in clear and understandable English, being yelled at them from beyond their lines in those terrible hours they were held under siege.

Not so hard, then, is it, to believe that the camps of Sioux and Cheyenne might have included at least one old trapper or hide hunter, having married into the tribe, who willingly joined in any battle fought by his adopted people.

History cracks open a few of these doors for us, but … nothing more than a tantalizing crack.

In mentioning the numbers of men involved in the battle on both sides, I would be remiss if I did not give you cause to think a bit more on the “odds” in the fight. Namely, the weapons used by both sides. While the troops, packers, and civilians, as well as their allies, were all well armed with breech-loading rifles, in actuality the warriors possessed few “modern” weapons. True, there were a few repeaters of Henry or Winchester manufacture—but the amateur historians who have combed the battlefield with metal detectors over the years have all come to the conclusion that not only did Crook have Crazy Horse out-manned, the army had the Indians outgunned as well.

It’s also curious to note that both J. W. Vaughn and Fred Werner (who combed the ground with their metal detectors more than twenty years apart) have repeatedly found errors in the maps of the battlefield drawn by the officers to accompany the articles they wrote for the military magazines of the day. On those old maps locations were highlighted showing where significant action took place. Problem was, neither of these historians were able to find cartridges on many of those positions.

Simply put, they were forced to look at the battle in a new and somewhat different light that took exception with how it was presented by the contemporary accounts. As Vaughn states: “I soon learned there was no action at a place unless shells could be found with the metal detector.”

On the matter of animals, man’s means of waging war against his fellowman at that time in the nineteenth century, I have to say that the advantage again goes to the soldiers. Their horses and mules had not been marched far that morning after resting the night before, and had been watered and were grazing at the time the first shots were fired.

The war ponies, on the other hand, had been given little if any rest since the evening of the sixteenth when the warriors set out from their villages on their march south. Crazy Horse had pushed their stock all night long before pausing to await word from those four scouts who bumped into the Crow trackers. All rest for the ponies was gone as
the warriors immediately made their last mad dash on the heels of the fleeing Crow who raced back to the soldier lines.

As far as this author sees things, I can give the warriors the decided advantage in only one of the factors making for this most interesting battle. By and large the troops Crook marched north from Fort Fetterman that June were not much seasoned to Indian warfare. True, some had skirmished with the hostiles even before the Reynolds’s Powder River fight. But the majority of those troopers and foot soldiers were green to this sort of conflict.

Meanwhile, the seven hundred and fifty warriors Crazy Horse led south from the great encampment either had participated in many years of internecine warfare against other tribes or had experience fighting the white man and soldiers. Or, at the least, they were eager young men whose blood ran hot to have a chance to kill soldiers and gain war honors. They made up for their lack of experience with an abundance of zeal.