Trumpet on the Land (68 page)

When almost among the screeching, painted enemy, Clanton drew beside the first escaping mount, leaning over to latch on to the horse's dangling halter. He succeeded in turning it and the rest who followed just short of some thirty onrushing Sioux, making a wide five-hundred-yard circle as Lieutenant Colonel Carr watched the rescue in awestruck admiration. Returning with all of Montgomery's grays, the men and officers of the Fifth Cavalry raised their cheers and gave Clanton a stirring round of applause.

But off to the southeast on the other side of camp, about ten Sioux horsemen had better luck, managing to break through the infantry's lines to spook a few cavalry mounts being held in the creek bottom near the heart of the captured village.

Now in control of most of his stock, Crook ordered Major Chambers to have his infantry retake the high ground just seized by the enemy southwest of the village. Chambers directed Captain Andrew Burt to take two companies of the Fourth, along with one of the Ninth and one of the Fourteenth regiments, to move out on the double from their bivouac at the north side of the camp, rushing straight through the smoking village and across the stream to climb the cutbank, where they began to push back the sudden and fierce attack.

On the nearby slopes the Sioux taunted, yelled insults, exposed themselves, and patted their rumps to show their contempt for their enemy.

“Steady, men!” shouted the officers scampering up and down that line of infantry. “Keep your proper intervals!”

“Don't fire until you get in range!” ordered a sergeant to his platoon as they crossed the creek to join in the fray. “C'mon, now. Forward at double time!”

After a volley the sergeant growled, “Dammit, Sparks, are you firing at the Black Hills? Never waste a shot, boys!”

Throwing the heat of his very own H Company of the Ninth under Lieutenants Charles M. Rockefeller and Edgar B. Robertson, along with Captain Gerhard L. Luhn's F Company of the Fourth and the Fourteenth's C under the command of Captain Daniel W. Burke, Captain Burt temporarily held Lieutenant Henry Seton's D Company of the Fourth in reserve. At the same time Burt called up three additional companies to hold the cutbank itself, then leapfrogged ahead, pushing his battalion forward, attempting to wrench the momentum away from the enemy. There on the slopes of those southwestern hills most of this second fight in the Battle of Slim Buttes was to rage until nightfall.

It did not take long for more of the Sioux to realize where the soldiers had herded most of the cavalry horses. Rushing in a wide arc around the eastern perimeter of the village, the warriors put great pressure on what few troops Merritt had left behind to watch over the herds. As soon as he saw the sweeping blur of the enemy rushing past him, Major Alexander Chambers, recognizing the move for what it was, ordered two companies of the Ninth Infantry to move out at double time north of the village site, charged with holding the ridges against the threat to flank the soldiers.

At the same time that Merritt was ordering Lieutenant Frederick Sibley's E Company to station themselves as a rear guard to drive in all stragglers and used-up horses still coming in, he also ordered Major Henry E. Noyes forward with a mounted I Troop of the Second Cavalry to set up a skirmish line east of the village. They were the only troopers to fight on horseback. The rest of the horse soldiers
from the Second, Third, and Fifth regiments inched forward on foot, making dismounted foragers' charges in conjunction with the infantry.

Throughout the late-afternoon battle Crook's destruction of the camp continued uninterrupted.

Moving from hilltop to hilltop above the jagged soldier skirmish lines rode a war chief atop a white horse. He first appeared near the bottom southeast of camp, then he was seen leading warriors to attempt to capture some horses, then minutes later he was spotted rallying warriors on the three hills southwest of the dismounted cavalry. Because of what American Horse and the other prisoners had warned the soldiers, Crook's men believed this warrior was Crazy Horse.

However, old Sioux veterans of the battle would one day attest to the fact that it was instead Sitting Bull who made himself the most visible and taunting target of the afternoon.

Right in the heart of the fray stood Captain Julius Mason's battalion of Fifth Cavalry, where the Sioux hurled their first massed charge, screaming down the slopes, against the soldier lines. Yard by yard as the troopers pushed back against the horsemen, Sergeant Edmund Schreiber of Charles King's own K Company fell. Less than a minute later a bullet tumbled Private August Dorn of D Troop.

While Major John J. Upham's battalion of the Fifth surged forward to take some of the pressure off the left flank of Mason's line, it was William B. Royall and his scarred Third Cavalry veterans of the Rosebud fight who flushed the Sioux from the rugged heights both northwest and immediately west of the village. How many of those men who followed the lieutenant colonel into that skirmish rallied their comrades-in-arms by asking them to remember the nightmare of their fight beside the Rosebud, history did not record.

After waiting nearly three months to avenge that day, the Third did not just hold the line—they pushed back,
and pushed hard, driving the flood of retreating warriors down the slopes onto the backs of Eugene Carr's surprised battalion of Fifth Cavalry, who had just begun to attack those Sioux sniping from the crests of the southwestern hills.

For a half hour, frightening confusion rumbled over the heights and spilled down through the ravines and coulees as the warriors poured around the ranks of Carr's dismounted skirmishers like a foaming cascade bypassing a floodgate. Through it all, in the midst of that snarling hail of bullets whining through the trees and slapping against the rocks, Lieutenant Colonel Carr sat astride his gray stallion, buoying his Fifth.

“See there, men! They can't even hit me—what damned wretched shots they are!”

Meanwhile to the east the action began to drag out for much of the next hour as Burt's infantry inched forward, pushing the enemy back, back, back through each narrow draw and tangle of brush—the deep, reverberating booms of their Long Toms contrasting with the sharper cracks of the cavalry carbines. In a whirl of color the retreating warriors regathered and concentrated, firing back on infantry without inflicting any damage, then scurried off a few more yards before turning to fire on the soldiers once again, seeking all the time to find some point of weakness in the soldier lines. Always the Sioux kept at least five to eight hundred yards between their position and Burt's oncoming footmen.

Just behind the infantry scampered newsman John Finerty, straggling along in his big, clumsy brogans—writing down bits of action, the names of soldiers, and snippets of orders. In these final minutes of the afternoon's battle, another soldier suffered a minor wound, and the officers watched a warrior topple from a horse, his body quickly scooped up by his companions and raced to the rear.

“Look at that, will you?” hollered one old Irish soldier near Finerty. “I sure softened the wax in that boy's ears!”

Seeking to put an end to that long-range skirmishing,
Major Upham's battalion of the Fifth succeeded in driving the Sioux from the three low hills southwest of the village by sweeping in on the enemy's right flank—scattering the warriors in confusion and fear as other units pressed in from behind to reinforce Upham's troops. Most of the fleeing Sioux escaped to the west, scaling the rugged chalky ridges and terraces where they could hide among the dark pines, there to overlook the campsite from afar. It had been that way for almost an hour: the Sioux driven from one place, dashing away to pop up attacking another spot along the soldiers' skirmish line.

Despite Upham's success, Crook was not content merely to flush the enemy from the hills. He hungered to make them stand and fight. As the sun began its final fall, he therefore ordered his dismounted cavalry to attack the western bluffs themselves.
As
a cloudy dusk began to swallow the land, the troops pushed into the hills at the base of the bluffs. Below them in the sodden air hung the thick, moist smudges of gray gun smoke and oily black columns rising above each one of the burning lodges, all of it tumbling together to create a fog clinging to every nearby ravine.

Pushed north along the jagged shelves of those gray heights, the warriors suddenly swept down, attempting to rout some units of the Third Cavalry situated northwest of the village. But in a steady rattle of gunfire the dismounted troopers held their ground and within fifteen harrowing minutes were pushing the enemy back, the muzzle flashes of the guns on both sides lighting up the pale hue of the buttes.

Dusk soon gave way to darkness, and with the arrival of night's secure cloak away slipped the warriors, leaving the soldiers in control of the bluffs, the hills, and the full perimeter of the village itself. It was a clear victory for Crook. Although he likely outgunned the warriors, estimated by his officers to number between six and eight hundred, he could claim, nonetheless, a victory. Sitting Bull had attacked a Three Stars twice stronger than Crook had
been on the Rosebud, leading his warriors into battle this day against a soldier force three times stronger than that of Custer's five companies destroyed along the Little Bighorn.

In the first confusing moments of attack the warriors had captured the high ground—but with able officers and diligent soldiers, the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition had regained the battle's momentum, retaken the heights, and eventually driven off the enemy as night fell.

John Bourke took a quick tally early that evening, reporting to the general that the units counted a total of eight soldiers wounded. For most of the battle the warriors had been firing down upon the soldiers, and that “factor of terrain” had caused most of the Sioux bullets to sail harmlessly over the heads of the white men. As was normally the case, enemy casualties were entirely unknown, but Carr estimated that they had killed or wounded as many as seven or eight of the Sioux. Another officer reported off the record that fourteen warrior bodies were found on the battlefield, while another four had been carried off—nothing more than an educated guess made from an examination of the pools of blood found on many of the rocky ledges where the Sioux had made their stand.

“That Reuben Davenport needs someone to take him down a notch or two,” Crook's young adjutant complained as he came up to kneel at the captives' campfire beside Donegan.

“What's that pain-in-the-ass reporter saying now?”

“The wag is saying Crook's soldiers missed a grand opportunity by not following up and capturing the warriors.”

“With this bunch of worn-out men and what we've got left of horses?” Seamus asked, incredulous. He snorted a sour laugh. “You're serious? He wanted us to traipse after them Sioux and squash 'em, eh?”

“I bet ol' Crazy Horse figured he would find just Mills's men here,” the lieutenant said.

“He and the rest got themselves a good surprise, then, didn't they?” Seamus replied.

“Those Sioux were wise to retreat when they did after running into more soldiers than they counted on.”

“Wasn't but an hour's scrap, was it?” Donegan asked, trying to coax a young child to his knee with the offer of a hard cracker.

“She's a tough one, Irishman,” Bourke replied. “A real screamer. You get anywhere close to her, she'll shriek your ears off.”

“You wanna try?” Donegan asked, holding the cracker to the lieutenant.

“Maybe I have something that'll help.” Bourke pulled his field haversack off his shoulder and fished around inside until he pulled out the small tin of fruit preserves. “Lemme see your belt knife.”

With Donegan's knife the lieutenant spread the wild-currant jam atop the hardtack, then held it out for the young girl, who could be no more than five years old.

“Take it, it's
washtay. Wauwataycha,”
Bourke told the youngster in her own tongue.

No matter—at first she refused even to consider the offered treat, but eventually crept forward, snatched the cracker out of the soldier's hand, then darted back to her place among the other captives. There she squatted in the smoke of the fire and took her first bite of the sweet. Her eyes lit up, and her tongue swirled across her lips so that she wouldn't miss a morsel. Seamus chuckled at just how fast the youngster devoured that cracker.

As she stuffed the last crumbs into her mouth, the girl crawled right over to Bourke's knee and squatted as if completely unafraid, looking up at the lieutenant with imploring eyes, her hand held out.

“Looks like you've made you a friend at last, Johnny!”

“It does, at that,” Bourke replied. “Have you any more tacks?”

“This is my last,” Donegan replied, pulling the cracker from his mackinaw pocket.

“We don't have to take your last.”

“Go ahead. I'll rustle up some more of that pony meat
for supper tonight. Hate to admit it, but I'm beginning to grow quite fond of four-legged riding stock.”

Fitting that a crimson sunset flared for but an astonishingly beautiful moment over those pale-gray buttes dotted with emerald evergreens: an appropriate requiem, perhaps, for a people who had already witnessed the zenith of their greatness.

Below the chalky terraces glowed the remains of some three dozen bonfires, each one what had once been a Sioux lodge. Across the hillsides flickered much smaller dots of reddish embers where gathered the battle-weary soldiers once more wolfing down the dried meat and berries they had captured and held on to as victors. On the heights as well as down across the eastern flats Crook posted a strong line of pickets while silence crept in once more to rule this wilderness. As a soft rain returned to patter on blankets, coats, and gum ponchos, some of the camp guards heard strange noises and cried out their challenges, only to find they had captured a riderless enemy pony abandoned in the Sioux retreat and now wandering in to the sound of humans.