Trumpet on the Land (84 page)

For the better part of seven years following the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, Congress had steadfastly refused to entertain any idea of taking back the territory it had
granted the tribes in that historic agreement—despite the growing clamor from various and powerful economic and political constituencies back east who were coming to agree that the Black Hills, rich in gold that could be found at the grass roots, should be settled and mined. In a turn of the biblical phrase: it was the duty of white Christians to subdue that portion of the earth and make it fruitful.

It simply would not do to leave so fruitful a region in the hands of savages who were doing nothing to reap the harvest from that land.

But now that Reynolds had been driven off the Powder, now that Crook had been forced back to Goose Creek to lick his wounds, now that half of Custer's Seventh Cavalry had been rubbed out, forcing General Alfred Terry back to tend to his own psychic wounds on the Yellowstone—now that the army had suffered so many setbacks, Congress was suddenly of a new mind. Washington's conscience was a'changing.

Yet it wasn't just the nation's representatives who clamored for results. Reeling from the startling banner headlines that second week of July in their very own Centennial summer, the body politic, the public itself, raised a strident demand for action. Raised their own call to arms!

As John S. Gray puts it:

Cameron's report went on to read like nothing more than perfect bureaucratic doublespeak:

Citizens back east knew their government had been feeding, clothing, educating the Sioux and Cheyenne at their agencies. And now those ungrateful Indians had bitten the hand that fed them! Shocked and dismayed, the public cried out that simple justice required stern punishment.

So Sherman and Sheridan wouldn't find it at all hard to get what they wanted by midsummer, within days of the disastrous news from the Little Bighorn reaching the East. Suddenly after three years of balking at General Sheridan's request for money to build two forts in the heart of Sioux country, Congress promptly appropriated the funds to begin construction at a pair of sites on the Yellowstone: one at the mouth of the Big Horn and the other at the mouth of the Tongue.

A few weeks later—after a delay caused only by some heated, vitriolic debate over the relative merits of Volunteers versus Regulars—Congress additionally raised the ceiling on army strength, a move that allowed recruiting another twenty-five hundred privates for a sorely tried U.S. cavalry. By railcar and riverboat steamer, these new privates were uniformed and outfitted and were being rushed to the land of the Sioux by late summer.

On the last day of July, Congress authorized the President to take all necessary steps to prevent metallic cartridges from reaching Sioux country. Two weeks later Grant signed into law a bill that raised the strength of Enlisted Indian Scouts to one thousand. And only three days later he put his name on a bill raising the manpower strength of
all cavalry companies to one hundred men for each company.

Sherman and Sheridan now had their “total war,” just the same sort of scorched-earth warfare they had waged so successfully through Georgia and the Shenandoah. In their minds there were no noncombatants. Any woman or child, any Indian sick or old, was deemed the enemy by virtue of not huddling close to the agencies. As far as General Sheridan was concerned, it wasn't just a matter of using his troops to drive the roamers back to their reservations. This was a war of vengeance against an enemy who had embarrassed, even humiliated, his army.

The last, but by no means the least, of the pieces to their plan, was that Sheridan was finally to get what he had wanted ever since he had come west at the end of the Civil War.

With war fever infecting Washington by the end of that July, Secretary of the Interior Chandler turned over to the army “control over all the agencies in the Sioux country.” Both the agents at Red Cloud and Spotted Tail were to be removed without cause and their duties assumed by the commanders of the nearby Camp Robinson (at Red Cloud) and Camp Sheridan (at Spotted Tail). The army would soon begin to demand the “unconditional surrender” of every Indian who returned to the reservations in the wake of the army's big push. No matter that they might be coming in from a hunt, all Indians on the agencies had to surrender their weapons and ponies. They were considered prisoners of war.

So what of those who had remained on the reservations?

It made no difference to the army now in control of the agencies. Not a single penny of their appropriations, not one mouthful of flour or rancid ounce of bacon would be given out until the Sioux had first relinquished all claim to their unceded lands.

“Give back the Black Hills or starve!”

Only 40 of the 2,267 adult males required by the Fort
Laramie Treaty of 1868 to sell their Paha Sapa eventually signed the agreement the government commissioners foisted upon them.

But by then the Battle of Slim Buttes had already taken place. And Slim Buttes was clearly the beginning of the end.

The Sioux and Cheyenne had already ridden the meteor's tail to the zenith of their success at Rosebud Creek and the Greasy Grass. Yet within eleven weeks of their stunning victories, their demise and ultimate defeat were already sealed at what was an otherwise inconsequential fight at Slim Buttes. In a matter of months Crazy Horse would surrender in the south, and Sitting Bull would limp across the Medicine Line into the Land of the Grandmother with the last of his holdouts.

Both of them giving up the good fight.

To learn more about what took place during that dramatic summer among both the warrior villages and the army camps in the territory surrounding the Little Bighorn River country, I offer the following suggested titles I have used to write my story of this Summer of the Sioux:

Across the Continent with the Fifth Cavalry
, by George F. Price

Battles and Skirmishes of the Great Sioux War, 1876-1877, the Military View
, edited by Jerome A. Greene

Blood on the Moon: Valentine McGillycuddy and the Sioux
, by Julia B. McGillycuddy

Campaigning with Crook
, by Captain Charles King, U.S.A.

Campaigning with King: Charles King, Chronicler of the Old Army
, edited by Paul L. Hedren

Centennial Campaign: The Sioux War of 1876
, by John S. Gray

The Chronicles of the Yellowstone
, by E. S. Topping

Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors
, by Stephen E. Ambrose

Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas
, by Mari Sandoz

Death on the Prairie: The Thirty Years' Struggle for the Western Plains
, by Paul I. Wellman

First Scalp for Custer: The Skirmish at Warbonnet Creek
, by Paul L. Hedren

Following the Indian Wars: The Story of Newspaper Correspondents among the Indian Campaigners
, by Oliver Knight

Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay: The Enlisted Soldier Fighting the Indian Wars
, by Don Rickey, Jr.

Frank Grouard, Army Scout
, edited by Margaret Brock Hanson

Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1891
, by Robert M. Utley

General George Crook: His Autobiography
, edited by Martin F. Schmitt

The Great Sioux War, 1876-77
, edited by Paul L. Hedren

“I
Am Looking to the North for My Life”: Sitting Bull, 18761881
, by Joseph Manzione

Indian Fights and Fighters
, by Cyrus Townsend Brady

Indian Fights: New Facts on Seven Encounters
, by J. W. Vaughn

Indians, Infants and Infantry: Andrew and Elizabeth Burt on the Frontier
, by Merrill J. Mattes

The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull
, by Robert M. Utley

Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard
, by Joe DeBarthe

The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill
, by Don Russell

My Sixty Years on the Plains
, by W. T. Hamilton

My Story
, by Anson Mills

Nelson A. Miles: A Documentary Biography of His Military Career, 1861-1903
, edited by Brian C. Pohanka

On the Border with Crook
, by John G. Bourke

Paper Medicine Man: John Gregory Bourke and His American West
, by Joseph C. Porter

Personal Recollections and Observations
, by General Nelson A. Miles

The Plainsmen of the Yellowstone
, by Mark H. Brown

Rekindling Campfires
, edited by Lewis F. Crawford

The Shoshonis: Sentinels of the Rockies
, by Virginia Cole Trenholm and Maurine Carley

Sitting Bull: Champion of the Sioux
, by Stanley Vestal

The Slim Buttes Battle: September 9 and 10, 1876
, by Fred H. Werner

Slim Buttes, 1876: An Episode of the Great Sioux War
, by Jerome A. Greene

War Cries on Horseback: The Story of the Indian Wars of the Great Plains
, by Stephen Longstreet

War Eagle: A Life of General Eugene A. Carr
, by James T. King

Warpath: A True Story of the Fighting Sioux
, by Stanley Vestal

War-Path and Bivouac: The Bighorn and Yellowstone Expedition
, by John F. Finerty

Warpath and Council Fire: The Plains Indians' Struggle for Survival in War and in Diplomacy, 1851-1891
, by Stanley Vestal

Washakie: An Account of Indian Resistance, by
Grace Raymond Hebard

Wooden Leg: A Warrior Who Fought Custer
, interpreted by Thomas B. Marquis

Yellowstone Command: Colonel Nelson A. Miles and the Great Sioux War, 1876-1877
, by Jerome A. Greene

There are some who place no confidence whatsoever in Frank Grouard's recollections when he told Joe DeBarthe years later that he scouted north from Crook's camp and ran across that piece of ground just east of the Little Bighorn that would come to be known as Massacre Ridge. But by carefully studying the maps of the terrain between Goose Creek and the Greasy Grass, by considering how fast (or how slow) a man on horseback might travel in hostile country after dark, and finally, by adjusting what the half-breed scout recounted by as little as one day—I was able to see just how feasible it would have been for Grouard and his skittish horse to have found themselves among those naked, mutilated, bloated bodies of the Custer dead.

So it seems to me more than reasonable to expect that Grouard could get his facts skewed by a day or so—seeing as how he dictated his Ufe story decades after the fact.

Yet when I'm given an opportunity to read an account fresher than Grouard's, something written closer to the event—I'll go with it every time.

For example, there isn't all that much written on the harrowing adventures of those men who went for that scout with Lieutenant Frederick Sibley. And what is available often varies in the details. Here I have relied on four sources: Sibley's own account, Frank Grouard's recollections, those of John Finerty, and the dictated recollections of Baptiste “Big Bat” Pourier. Since Grouard, Pourier, and Sibley all related their stories many years later, for this novel I have primarily embraced the Chicago newsman's version (with few, minor exceptions)—since I could draw
what I believed was a fresher tale from the reporter's dispatches written immediately after his return to Camp Cloud Peak.

I would imagine that for most readers of western history the Sibley scout comes as something new, perhaps just as new as the skirmish on the Warbonnet. While that military success was small (only one Indian killed), the impact of what Merritt's Fifth Cavalry did would long reverberate across the northern plains. Perhaps as many as eight hundred Cheyenne were turned back to their agency, unable to bolster the numbers of those warrior bands recently victorious over Crook and Custer. Yet it was something far more intangible that made the Warbonnet significant that summer of Sheridan's trumpet on the land.

No matter how small it was—it was the army's first victory.

Except for a few tandem-wired telephone poles, that peaceful, rolling prairie grassland near present-day Montrose, Nebraska, seems unchanged in the last hundred-plus years. The place where Cody had his celebrated duel with a Cheyenne war chief was at the time called Indian Creek in regimental returns of the day, then War Bonnet Creek in later military records, but is today called Hat Creek.

There might well be a lot of confusion for those of you who go looking in the northwest corner of Nebraska for the site of that famous skirmish, simply because all three of those names appear for three separate creeks in that immediate area. While “Hat” and “War Bonnet” are two differing translations for the same Lakota term, the name of a tributary of the Cheyenne River (Mini Pusa to the Sioux), the creek called the War Bonnet on today's maps is some forty miles south of what is today called Hat Creek, where the Fifth Cavalry successfully ambushed Little Wolfs Cheyenne.

The creek still rises with spring runoff and falls with autumnal drought, just as it has every year as white homesteaders and cattlemen moved in and pacified the land. For
more than half a century no one knew for sure where the site was, nor did anyone seem to care.