CHAPTER XVIII.
THE COLUMN IN MOTION—RUNNING INTO A GREAT HERD OF BUFFALOES—THE SIGNAL CRY OF THE SCOUTS—THE FIGHT ON THE ROSEBUD—HOW THE KILLED WERE BURIED—SCALP DANCE—BUTCHERING A CHEYENNE—LIEUTENANT SCHUYLER ARRIVES—SENDING BACK THE WOUNDED.
On the 16th of June, by five o’clock in the morning, our whole command had broken camp and was on its way westward; we crossed Tongue River, finding a swift stream, rather muddy from recent rains, with a current twenty-five yards wide, and four feet deep; the bottom of hard-pan, but the banks on one side muddy and slippery.
The valley, as we saw it from the bluffs amid which we marched, presented a most beautiful appearance—green with juicy grasses, and dark with the foliage of cottonwood and willow. Its sinuosities encircled many park-like areas of meadow, bounded on the land side by bluffs of drift. The Indians at first marched on the flank, but soon passed the column and took the lead, the “medicine men” in front; one of the head “medicine men” of the Crows kept up a piteous chant, reciting the cruelties of their enemies and stimulating the young men to deeds of martial valor. In every possible way these savages reminded me of the descriptions I had read of the Bedouins.
Our course turned gradually to the northwest, and led us across several of the tributaries of the Tongue, or “Deje-ajie” as the Crows called it, each of these of good dimensions, and carrying the unusual flow due to the rapid melting of snow in the higher elevations. The fine grass seen close to the Tongue disappeared, and the country was rather more barren, with many prairie-dog villages. The soil was made up of sandstones, with a great amount of both clay and lime, shales and lignite, the latter burnt out. Some of the sandstone had been filled with pyrites, which had decomposed and left it in a vesicular state. There were agreat many scrub pines in the recesses of the bluffs. The cause for the sudden disappearance of the grass was soon apparent: the scouts ran in upon a herd of buffaloes whose cast-off bulls had been the principal factor in our meat supply for more than a week; the trails ran in every direction, and the grass had been nipped off more closely than if cut by a scythe. There was much more cactus than we had seen for some time, and a reappearance of the sage-brush common nearer to Fort Fetterman.
In the afternoon, messengers from our extreme advance came as fast as ponies would carry them, with the information that we were upon the trail of a very great village of the enemy. The cavalry dismounted and unsaddled, seeking the shelter of all the ravines to await the results of the examination to be made by a picked detail from the Crows and Shoshones. The remaining Indians joined in a wild, strange war-dance, the younger warriors becoming almost frenzied before the exercises terminated. The young men who had been sent out to spy the land rejoined us on a full run; from the tops of the hills they yelled like wolves, the conventional signal among the plains tribes that the enemy has been sighted. Excitement, among the Indians at least, was at fever heat; many of the younger members of the party re-echoed the ululation of the incoming scouts; many others spurred out to meet them and escort them in with becoming honors. The old chiefs held their bridles while they dismounted, and the less prominent warriors deferentially formed in a circle to listen to their narrative. It did not convey much information to my mind, unaccustomed to the indications so familiar to them. It simply amounted to this, that the buffaloes were in very large herds directly ahead of us, and were running away from a Sioux hunting party.
Knowing the unfaltering accuracy of an Indian’s judgment in matters of this kind, General Crook told the chiefs to arrange their plan of march according to their own ideas. On occasions like this, as I was told by our scouts and others, the young men of the Assiniboines and Northern Sioux were required to hold in each hand a piece of buffalo chip as a sign that they were telling the truth; nothing of that kind occurred on the occasion in question. While the above was going on, the Indians were charging about on their hardy little ponies, to put them out of breath, so that, when they regained their wind, they would notfail to sustain a whole day’s battle. A little herb is carried along, to be given to the ponies in such emergencies, but what virtues are attributed to this medicine I was unable to ascertain. Much solemnity is attached to the medicine arrows of the “medicine men,” who seem to possess the power of arbitrarily stopping a march at almost any moment. As I kept with them, I had opportunity to observe all that they did, except when every one was directed to keep well to the rear, as happened upon approaching a tree—juniper or cedar—in the fork of whose lower branches there was a buffalo head, before which the principal “medicine man” and his assistant halted and smoked from their long pipes.
Noon had passed, and the march was resumed to gain the Rosebud, one of the tributaries of the Yellowstone, marking the ultimate western limit of our campaign during the previous winter. We moved along over an elevated, undulating, grassy tableland. Without possessing any very marked beauty, there was a certain picturesqueness in the country which was really pleasing. Every few rods a petty rivulet coursed down the hill-sides to pay its tribute to the Tongue; there was no timber, except an occasional small cottonwood or willow, to be seen along the banks of these little water-courses, but wild roses by the thousand laid their delicate beauties at our feet; a species of phlox, daintily blue in tint, was there also in great profusion, while in the bushes multitudes of joyous-voiced singing-birds piped their welcome as the troops filed by. Yet this lovely country was abandoned to the domination of the thriftless savage, the buffalo, and the rattlesnake; we could see the last-named winding along through the tall grass, rattling defiance as they sneaked away. Buffalo spotted the landscape in every direction, in squads of ten and twelve and “bunches” of sixty and seventy. These were not old bulls banished from the society of their mates, to be attacked and devoured by coyotes, but fine fat cows with calves ambling close behind them. One young bull calf trotted down close to the column, his eyes beaming with curiosity and wonder. He was allowed to approach within a few feet, when our prosaic Crow guides took his life as the penalty of his temerity. Thirty buffaloes were killed that afternoon, and the choice pieces—hump, tenderloin, tongue, heart, and rib steaks—packed upon our horses. The flesh was roasted in the ashes, a pinch of salt sprinkled over it, and a very savory and juicy addition made toour scanty supplies. The Indians ate the buffalo liver raw, sometimes sprinkling a pinch of gall upon it; the warm raw liver alone is not bad for a hungry man, tasting very much like a raw oyster. The entrails are also much in favor with the aborigines; they are cleaned, wound round a ramrod, or something akin to it if a ramrod be not available, and held in the hot ashes until cooked through; they make a palatable dish; the buffalo has an intestine shaped like an apple, which is filled with chyle, and is thebonne boucheof the savages when prepared in the same manner as the other intestines, excepting that the contents are left untouched.
While riding alongside of one of our Crow scouts I noticed tears flowing down his cheeks, and very soon he started a wail or chant of the most lugubrious tone; I respected his grief until he had wept to his heart’s content, and then ventured to ask the cause of such deep distress; he answered that his uncle had been killed a number of years before by the Sioux, and he was crying for him now and wishing that he might come back to life to get some of the ponies of the Sioux and Cheyennes. Two minutes after having discharged the sad duty of wailing for his dead relative, the young Crow was as lively as any one else in the column.
We bivouacked on the extreme head-waters of the Rosebud, which was at that point a feeble rivulet of snow water, sweet and palatable enough when the muddy ooze was not stirred up from the bottom. Wood was found in plenty for the slight wants of the command, which made small fires for a few moments to boil coffee, while the animals, pretty well tired out by the day’s rough march of nearly forty miles, rolled and rolled again in the matted bunches of succulent pasturage growing at their feet. Our lines were formed in hollow square, animals inside, and each man sleeping with his saddle for a pillow and with arms by his side. Pickets were posted on the bluffs near camp, and, after making what collation we could, sleep was sought at the same moment the black clouds above us had begun to patter down rain. A party of scouts returned late at night, reporting having come across a small gulch in which was a still burning fire of a band of Sioux hunters, who in the precipitancy of their flight had left behind a blanket of India-rubber. We came near having a casualty in the accidental discharge of the revolver ofMr. John F. Finerty, the bullet burning the saddle and breaking it, but, fortunately, doing no damage to the rider. By daylight of the next day, June 17, 1876, we were marching down the Rosebud.
The Crow scouts with whom I was had gone but a short distance when shots were heard down the valley to the north, followed by the ululation proclaiming from the hill-tops that the enemy was in force and that we were in for a fight. Shot after shot followed on the left, and by the time that two of the Crows reached us, one of them severely wounded and both crying, “Sioux! Sioux!” it was plain that something out of the common was to be expected. There was a strong line of pickets out on the hills on that flank, and this was immediately strengthened by a respectable force of skirmishers to cover the cavalry horses, which were down at the bottom of the amphitheatre through which the Rosebud at that point ran. The Shoshones promptly took position in the hills to the left, and alongside of them were the companies of the Fourth Infantry, under Major A. B. Cain, and one or two of the cavalry companies, dismounted.
The Sioux advanced boldly and in overwhelming force, covering the hills to the north, and seemingly confident that our command would prove an easy prey. In one word, the battle of the Rosebud was a trap, and “Crazy Horse,” the leader in command here as at the Custer massacre a week later, was satisfied he was going to have everything his own way. He stated afterwards, when he had surrendered to General Crook at the agency, that he had no less than six thousand five hundred men in the fight, and that the first attack was made with fifteen hundred, the others being concealed behind the bluffs and hills. His plan of battle was either to lead detachments in pursuit of his people, and turning quickly cut them to pieces in detail, or draw the whole of Crook’s forces down into the cañon of the Rosebud, where escape would have been impossible, as it formed a veritablecul de sac, the vertical walls hemming in the sides, the front being closed by a dam and abatis of broken timber which gave a depth of ten feet of water and mud, the rear, of course, to be shut off by thousands of yelling, murderous Sioux and Cheyennes. That was the Sioux programme as learned that day, or afterwards at the agencies from the surrendered hostiles in the spring of the following year.
While this attack was going on on our left and front, a determined demonstration was made by a large body of the enemy on our right and rear, to repel which Colonel Royall, Third Cavalry, was sent with a number of companies, mounted, to charge and drive back. I will restrict my observations to what I saw, as the battle of the Rosebud has been several times described in books and any number of times in the correspondence sent from the command to the journals of those years. The Sioux and Cheyennes, the latter especially, were extremely bold and fierce, and showed a disposition to come up and have it out hand to hand; in all this they were gratified by our troops, both red and white, who were fully as anxious to meet them face to face and see which were the better men. At that part of the line the enemy were disconcerted at a very early hour by the deadly fire of the infantry with their long rifles. As the hostiles advanced at a full run, they saw nothing in their front, and imagined that it would be an easy thing for them to sweep down through the long ravine leading to the amphitheatre, where they could see numbers of our cavalry horses clumped together. They advanced in excellent style, yelling and whooping, and glad of the opportunity of wiping us off the face of the earth. When Cain’s men and the detachments of the Second Cavalry which were lying down behind a low range of knolls rose up and delivered a withering fire at less than a hundred and fifty yards, the Sioux turned and fled as fast as “quirt” and heel could persuade their ponies to get out of there.
But, in their turn, they re-formed behind a low range not much over three hundred yards distant, and from that position kept up an annoying fire upon our men and horses. Becoming bolder, probably on account of re-enforcements, they again charged, this time upon a weak spot in our lines a little to Cain’s left; this second advance was gallantly met by a counter-charge of the Shoshones, who, under their chief “Luishaw,” took the Sioux and Cheyennes in flank and scattered them before them. I went in with this charge, and was enabled to see how such things were conducted by the American savages, fighting according to their own notions. There was a headlong rush for about two hundred yards, which drove the enemy back in confusion; then was a sudden halt, and very many of the Shoshones jumped down from their ponies and began firing fromthe ground; the others who remained mounted threw themselves alongside of their horses’ necks, so that there would be few good marks presented to the aim of the enemy. Then, in response to some signal or cry which, of course, I did not understand, we were off again, this time for good, and right into the midst of the hostiles, who had been halted by a steep hill directly in their front. Why we did not kill more of them than we did was because they were dressed so like our own Crows that even our Shoshones were afraid of mistakes, and in the confusion many of the Sioux and Cheyennes made their way down the face of the bluffs unharmed.
From this high point there could be seen on Crook’s right and rear a force of cavalry, some mounted, others dismounted, apparently in the clutches of the enemy; that is to say, a body of hostiles was engaging attention in front and at the same time a large mass, numbering not less than five hundred, was getting ready to pounce upon the rear and flank of the unsuspecting Americans. I should not forget to say that while the Shoshones were charging the enemy on one flank, the Crows, led by Major George M. Randall, were briskly attacking them on the other; the latter movement had been ordered by Crook in person and executed in such a bold and decisive manner as to convince the enemy that, no matter what their numbers were, our troops and scouts were anxious to come to hand-to-hand encounters with them. This was really the turning-point of the Rosebud fight for a number of reasons: the main attack had been met and broken, and we had gained a key-point enabling the holder to survey the whole field and realize the strength and intentions of the enemy. The loss of the Sioux at this place was considerable both in warriors and ponies; we were at one moment close enough to them to hit them with clubs or “coup” sticks, and to inflict considerable damage, but not strong enough to keep them from getting away with their dead and wounded. A number of our own men were also hurt, some of them quite seriously. I may mention a young trumpeter—Elmer A. Snow, of Company M, Third Cavalry—who went in on the charge with the Shoshones, one of the few white men with them; he displayed noticeable gallantry, and was desperately wounded in both arms, which were crippled for life; his escape from the midst of the enemy was a remarkable thing.
I did not learn until nightfall that at the same time they made the charge just spoken of; the enemy had also rushed down through a ravine on our left and rear, reaching the spring alongside of which I had been seated with General Crook at the moment the first shots were heard, and where I had jotted down the first lines of the notes from which the above condensed account of the fight has been taken. At that spring they came upon a young Shoshone boy, not yet attained to years of manhood, and shot him through the back and killed him, taking his scalp from the nape of the neck to the forehead, leaving his entire skull ghastly and white. It was the boy’s first battle, and when the skirmishing began in earnest he asked permission of his chief to go back to the spring and decorate himself with face-paint, which was already plastered over one cheek, and his medicine song was half done, when he received the fatal shot.
Crook sent orders for all troops to fall back until the line should be complete; some of the detachments had ventured out too far, and our extended line was too weak to withstand a determined attack in force. Burt and Burroughs were sent with their companies of the Ninth Infantry to drive back the force which was congregating in the rear of Royall’s command, which was the body of troops seen from the hill crest almost surrounded by the foe. Tom Moore with his sharpshooters from the pack-train, and several of the Montana miners who had kept along with the troops for the sake of a row of some kind with the natives, were ordered to get into a shelf of rocks four hundred yards out on our front and pick off as many of the hostile chiefs as possible and also to make the best impression upon the flanks of any charging parties which might attempt to pass on either side of that promontory. Moore worried the Indians so much that they tried to cut off him and his insignificant band. It was one of the ridiculous episodes of the day to watch those well-meaning young warriors charging at full speed across the open space commanded by Moore’s position; not a shot was fired, and beyond taking an extra chew of tobacco, I do not remember that any of the party did anything to show that he cared a continental whether the enemy came or stayed. When those deadly rifles, sighted by men who had no idea what the word “nerves” meant, belched their storm of lead in among the braves andtheir ponies, it did not take more than seven seconds for the former to conclude that home, sweet home was a good enough place for them.
While the infantry were moving down to close the gap on Royall’s right, and Tom Moore was amusing himself in the rocks, Crook ordered Mills with five companies to move out on our right and make a demonstration down stream, intending to get ready for a forward movement with the whole command. Mills moved out promptly, the enemy falling back on all sides and keeping just out of fair range. I went with Mills, having returned from seeing how Tom Moore was getting along, and can recall how deeply impressed we all were by what we then took to be trails made by buffaloes going down stream, but which we afterwards learned had been made by the thousands of ponies belonging to the immense force of the enemy here assembled. We descended into a measly-looking place: a cañon with straight walls of sandstone, having on projecting knobs an occasional scrub pine or cedar; it was the locality where the savages had planned to entrap the troops, or a large part of them, and wipe them out by closing in upon their rear. At the head of that column rode two men who have since made their mark in far different spheres: John F. Finerty, who has represented one of the Illinois districts in Congress; and Frederick Schwatka, noted as a bold and successful Arctic explorer.
Crook recalled our party from the cañon before we had gone too far, but not before Mills had detected the massing of forces to cut him off. Our return was by another route, across the high hills and rocky places, which would enable us to hold our own against any numbers until assistance came. Crook next ordered an advance of our whole line, and the Sioux fell back and left us in undisputed possession of the field. Our total loss was fifty-seven, killed or wounded—some of the latter only slightly. The heaviest punishment had been inflicted upon the Third Cavalry, in Royall’s column, that regiment meeting with a total loss of nine killed and fifteen wounded, while the Second Cavalry had two wounded, and the Fourth Infantry three wounded. In addition to this were the killed and wounded among the scouts, and a number of wounds which the men cared for themselves, as they saw that the medical staff was taxed to the utmost. One of our worst wounded was Colonel Guy V. Henry, Third Cavalry,who was at first believed to have lost both eyes and to have been marked for death; but, thanks to good nursing, a wiry frame, and strong vitality, he has since recovered vision and some part of his former physical powers. The officers who served on Crook’s staff that day had close calls, and among others Bubb and Nickerson came very near falling into the hands of the enemy. Colonel Royall’s staff officers, Lemly and Foster, were greatly exposed, as were Henry Vroom, Reynolds, and others of that part of the command. General Crook’s horse was shot from under him, and there were few, if any, officers or soldiers, facing the strength of the Sioux and Cheyennes at the Rosebud, who did not have some incident of a personal nature by which to impress the affair upon their memories for the rest of their lives.
The enemy’s loss was never known. Our scouts got thirteen scalps, but the warriors, the moment they were badly wounded, would ride back from the line or be led away by comrades, so that we then believed that their total loss was much more severe. The behavior of Shoshones and Crows was excellent. The chief of the Shoshones appeared to great advantage, mounted on a fiery pony, he himself naked to the waist and wearing one of the gorgeous head-dresses of eagle feathers sweeping far along the ground behind his pony’s tail. The Crow chief, “Medicine Crow,” looked like a devil in his war-bonnet of feathers, fur, and buffalo horns.
We had pursued the enemy for seven miles, and had held the field of battle, without the slightest resistance on the side of the Sioux and Cheyennes. It had been a field of their own choosing, and the attack had been intended as a surprise and, if possible, to lead into an ambuscade also; but in all they had been frustrated and driven off, and did not attempt to return or to annoy us during the night. As we had nothing but the clothing each wore and the remains of the four days’ rations with which we had started, we had no other resource but to make our way back to the wagon trains with the wounded. That night was an unquiet and busy time for everybody. The Shoshones caterwauled and lamented the death of the young warrior whose life had been ended and whose bare skull still gleamed from the side of the spring where he fell. About midnight they buried him, along with our own dead, for whose sepulture a deep trench was dug in the bank of the Rosebud near the water line, the bodieslaid in a row, covered with stones, mud, and earth packed down, and a great fire kindled on top and allowed to burn all night. When we broke camp the next morning the entire command marched over the graves, so as to obliterate every trace and prevent prowling savages from exhuming the corpses and scalping them.
A rough shelter of boughs and branches had been erected for the wounded, and our medical officers, Hartsuff, Patzki, and Stevens, labored all night, assisted by Lieutenant Schwatka, who had taken a course of lectures at Bellevue Hospital, New York. The Shoshones crept out during the night and cut to pieces the two Sioux bodies within reach; this was in revenge for their own dead, and because the enemy had cut one of our men to pieces during the fight, in which they made free use of their lances, and of a kind of tomahawk, with a handle eight feet long, which they used on horseback.
June 18, 1876, we were turned out of our blankets at three o’clock in the morning, and sat down to eat on the ground a breakfast of hard-tack, coffee, and fried bacon. The sky was an immaculate blue, and the ground was covered with a hard frost, which made every one shiver. The animals had rested, and the wounded were reported by Surgeon Hartsuff to be doing as well “as could be expected.”“Travois”were constructed of Cottonwood and willow branches, held together by ropes and rawhide, and to care for each of these six men were detailed. As we were moving off, our scouts discerned three or four Sioux riding down to the battle-field, upon reaching which they dismounted, sat down, and bowed their heads; we could not tell through glasses what they were doing, but the Shoshones and Crows said that they were weeping for their dead. They were not fired upon or molested in any way. We pushed up the Rosebud, keeping mainly on its western bank, and doing our best to select a good trail along which the wounded might be dragged with least jolting. Crook wished to keep well to the south so as to get farther into the Big Horn range, and avoid much of the deep water of the streams flowing into Tongue River, which might prove too swift and dangerous for the wounded men in the“travois.”In avoiding Scylla, we ran upon Charybdis: we escaped much of the deep water, although not all of it, but encountered much trouble from the countless ravines and gullies which cut the flanks of the range in every direction.
The column halted for an hour at the conical hill, crested with pine, which marks the divide between the Rosebud and the Greasy Grass,—a tributary of the Little Big Horn,—the spot where our Crow guides claimed that their tribe had whipped and almost exterminated a band of the Blackfeet Sioux. Our horses were allowed to graze until the rear-guard had caught up, with the wounded men under its care. The Crows had a scalp dance, holding aloft on poles and lances the lank, black locks of the Sioux and Cheyennes killed in the fight of the day before, and one killed that very morning. It seems that as the Crows were riding along the trail off to the right of the command, they heard some one calling, “Mini! Mini!” which is the Dakota term for water; it was a Cheyenne whose eyes had been shot out in the beginning of the battle, and who had crawled to a place of concealment in the rocks, and now hearing the Crows talk as they rode along addressed them in Sioux, thinking them to be the latter. The Crows cut him limb from limb and ripped off his scalp. The rear-guard reported having had a hard time getting along with the wounded on account of the great number of gullies already mentioned; great assistance had been rendered in this severe duty by Sergeant Warfield, Troop “F,” Third Cavalry, an old Arizona veteran, as well as by Tom Moore and his band of packers. So far as scenery was concerned, the most critical would have been pleased with that section of our national domain, the elysium of the hunter, the home of the bear, the elk, deer, antelope, mountain sheep, and buffalo; the carcasses of the last-named lined the trail, and the skulls and bones whitened the hill-sides. The march of the day was a little over twenty-two miles, and ended upon one of the tributaries of the Tongue, where we bivouacked and passed the night in some discomfort on account of the excessive cold which drove us from our scanty covering shortly after midnight. The Crows left during the night, promising to resume the campaign with others of their tribe, and to meet us somewhere on the Tongue or Goose Creek.
June 19 found us back at our wagon-train, which Major Furey had converted into a fortress, placed on a tongue of land, surrounded on three sides by deep, swift-flowing water, and on the neck by a line of breastworks commanding all approaches. Ropes and chains had been stretched from wheel to wheel, sothat even if any of the enemy did succeed in slipping inside, the stock could not be run out. Furey had not allowed his little garrison to remain inside the intrenchments: he had insisted upon some of them going out daily to scrutinize the country and to hunt for fresh meat; the carcasses of six buffaloes and three elk attested the execution of his orders. Furey’s force consisted of no less than eighty packers and one hundred and ten teamsters, besides sick and disabled left behind. One of his assistants was Mr. John Mott MacMahon, the same man who as a sergeant in the Third Cavalry had been by the side of Lieutenant Cushing at the moment he was killed by the Chiricahua Apaches in Arizona. After caring for the wounded and the animals, every one splashed in the refreshing current; the heat of the afternoon became almost unbearable, the thermometer indicating 103° Fahrenheit. Lemons, limes, lime juice, and citric acid, of each of which there was a small supply, were hunted up and used for making a glass of lemonade for the people in the rustic hospital.
June 21, Crook sent the wounded back to Fort Fetterman, placing them in wagons spread with fresh grass; Major Furey was sent back to obtain additional supplies; the escort, consisting of one company from the Ninth and one from the Fourth Infantry, was commanded by Colonel Chambers, with whom were the following officers: Munson and Capron of the Ninth, Luhn and Seton of the Fourth. Mr. MacMillan, the correspondent of theInter-Oceanof Chicago, also accompanied the party; he had been especially energetic in obtaining all data referring to the campaign, and had shown that he had as much pluck as any officer or soldier in the column, but his strength was not equal to the hard marching and climbing, coupled with the violent alternations of heat and cold, rain and shine, to which we were subjected. The Shoshones also left for their own country, going across the Big Horn range due west; after having a big scalp dance with their own people they would return; for the same reason, the Crows had rejoined their tribe. Five of the Shoshones remained in camp, to act in any needed capacity until the return of their warriors. The care taken of the Shoshone wounded pleased me very much, and I saw that the “medicine men” knew how to make a fair article of splint from the twigs of the willow, and that they depended upon such appliances in cases of fracture fully as much as they did upon the singingwhich took up so much of their time, and was so obnoxious to the unfortunate whites whose tents were nearest.
In going home across the mountains to the Wind River the Crows took one of their number who had been badly wounded in the thigh. Why he insisted upon going back to his own home I do not know; perhaps the sufferer really did not know himself, but disliked being separated from his comrades. A splint was adjusted to the fractured limb, and the patient was seated upon an easy cushion instead of a saddle. Everything went well until after crossing the Big Horn Mountains, when the party ran in upon a band of Sioux raiders or spies in strong force. The Crows were hailed by some of the Sioux, but managed to answer a few words in that language, and then struck out as fast as ponies would carry them to get beyond reach of their enemies. They were afraid of leaving a trail, and for that reason followed along the current of all the mountain streams, swollen at that season by rains and melting snows, fretting into foam against impeding boulders and crossed and recrossed by interlacing branches of fallen timber. Through and over or under, as the case might be, the frightened Crows made their way, indifferent to the agony of the wounded companion, for whose safety only they cared, but to whose moans they were utterly irresponsive. This story we learned upon the return of the Shoshones.
To be obliged to await the train with supplies was a serious annoyance, but nothing better could be done. We had ceded to the Sioux by the treaty of 1867 all the country from the Missouri to the Big Horn, destroying the posts which had afforded protection to the overland route into Montana, and were now feeling the loss of just such depots of supply as those posts would have been. It was patent to every one that not hundreds, as had been reported, but thousands of Sioux and Cheyennes were in hostility and absent from the agencies, and that, if the war was to be prosecuted with vigor, some depots must be established at an eligible location like the head of Tongue River, old Fort Reno, or other point in that vicinity; another in the Black Hills; and still another at some favorable point on the Yellowstone, preferably the mouth of Tongue River. Such, at least, was the recommendation made by General Crook, and posts at or near all the sites indicated were in time established and are still maintained. The merits of Tongue River and its tributaries asgreat trout streams were not long without proper recognition at the hands of our anglers. Under the influence of the warm weather the fish had begun to bite voraciously, in spite of the fact that there were always squads of men bathing in the limpid waters, or mules slaking their thirst. The first afternoon ninety-five were caught and brought into camp, where they were soon broiling on the coals or frying in pans. None of them were large, but all were “pan” fish, delicious to the taste. While the sun was shining we were annoyed by swarms of green and black flies, which disappeared with the coming of night and its refreshingly cool breezes.
June 23, Lieutenant Schuyler, Fifth Cavalry, reported at headquarters for duty as aide-de-camp to General Crook. He had been four days making the trip out from Fort Fetterman, travelling with the two couriers who brought our mail. At old Fort Reno they had stumbled upon a war party of Sioux, but were not discovered, and hid in the rocks until the darkness of night enabled them to resume their journey at a gallop, which never stopped for more than forty miles. They brought news that the Fifth Cavalry was at Red Cloud Agency; that five commissioners were to be appointed to confer with the Sioux; and that Rutherford B. Hayes, of Ohio, had been nominated by the Republicans for the Presidency. General Hayes had commanded a brigade under General Crook in the Army of West Virginia during the War of the Rebellion. Crook spoke of his former subordinate in the warmest and most affectionate manner, instancing several battles in which Hayes had displayed exceptional courage, and proved himself to be, to use Crook’s words, “as brave a man as ever wore a shoulder-strap.”
My note-books about this time seem to be almost the chronicle of a sporting club, so filled are they with the numbers of trout brought by different fishermen into camp; all fishers did not stop at my tent, and I do not pretend to have preserved accurate figures, much being left unrecorded. Mills started in with a record of over one hundred caught by himself and two soldiers in one short afternoon. On the 28th of June the same party has another record of one hundred and forty-six. On the 29th of same month Bubb is credited with fifty-five during the afternoon, while the total brought into camp during the 28th ran over five hundred. General Crook started out to catch a mess, butmet with poor luck. He saw bear tracks and followed them, bringing in a good-sized “cinnamon,” so it was agreed not to refer to his small number of trout. Buffalo and elk meat were both plenty, and with the trout kept the men well fed.
The cavalry companies each morning were exercised at a walk, trot, and gallop. In the afternoon the soldiers were allowed to roam about the country in small parties, hunting and seeing what they could see. They were all the better for the exercise, and acted as so many additional videttes. The packers organized a mule race, which absorbed all interest. It was estimated by conservative judges that fully five dollars had changed hands in ten-cent bets. Up to the end of June no news of any kind, from any source excepting Crow Indians, had been received of General Terry and his command, and much comment, not unmixed with uneasiness, was occasioned thereby.