I should like to have about five hundred horses, preferably the half breed horses raised on the Laramie plains or in the vicinity of Denver and already acclimated to this country.
I intend to carry out the programme mentioned in my last dispatch … and shall remain in the vicinity of Deadwood until the arrival of my wagon train.
George Crook
Brigadier General
W ith every painful southbound step of that Sunday’s march John Finerty wished with all his soul that he was back among the prostitutes and whiskey mills of old Chicago.
It mattered little to any of them anymore that the hostiles’ trails all appeared to be headed south, gradually inching off to the east in order to skirt around the Black Hills settlements, still seventy miles or more to the south, making for the agencies now that the weather had turned colder, gloomier, wetter. Crook’s infantry staggered along both flanks, and the horses plodded in loose formation all morning, pairs of men talking over the fight and dreaming back to that feast they had enjoyed. None of them sure just where they would find their next meal. Knowing only that what dried meat was left after the troops had gorged themselves had been packed on Tom Moore’s mules and ruled off limits.
“They’re keeping it safe for the wounded,” Bourke explained once the Fifty Cavalry caught up with the rear end of the march.
“And the rest of us?” Finerty asked.
“Why, Johnny,” Donegan cheered, his face grimed with gunpowder from that morning’s rear guard clash, “we’ll be dining on horse again tonight!”
The prospect failed to make the newsman’s mouth water.
For the better part of the forenoon more than fifty warriors dogged the retreat of the Fifth Cavalry, then harassed the rear of the column’s line of march, hoping to pick off stragglers and capture any horses the white men might abandon. But in the end even they turned back, and the hillsides eventually grew quiet.
Crook had his prize: a village captured and destroyed, as well as driving off repeated counterattacks. He had as spoils some two hundred ponies, representing half of the hostiles’ herd. What animals he hadn’t put into service for his cavalry he had his men kill. Of the seven captives three chose to march with the soldiers, saying they would remain with Three Stars until the soldier chief reached the agencies. With very little left of what was originally estimated as more than three tons of dried meat Mills had discovered in the enemy camp, the general had no other choice but to push on for the settlements. That, and brood on what he might do now to make his slim victory count for something.
It mattered nothing that Crook had his men build fires over the graves they left behind, then marched a thousand horses across that hallowed ground in an attempt to obliterate all trace of the burials. An empty effort, because the prisoners he set free and those warriors watching from the hills knew where the enemies’ bodies had been buried. Once the soldiers were gone from sight, the digging began.
In the continuing rain American Horse’s women cut down saplings with which to build their burial scaffold.
Shortly after noon the head of the army’s column discovered that the high, chalky ridge at the foot of which they’d been marching made a sharp angle to the east. About two P.M. Crook called a halt after making only fifteen miles. For much of the morning the surgeons repeatedly protested to the general how the march was taking a terrible toll on the wounded. Neither blanket nor gum poncho could turn the wind-driven rain that pelted those least able to protect themselves.
While most of the casualties were carried on travois pulled behind a single horse, the most seriously wounded were placed on litters. Constructed from a pair of lodgepoles lashed fore and aft by surcingles between a pair of Moore’s mules, the amputees were laid upon a piece of canvas or blanket tied around the poles to form a crude stretcher. For a man who had lost the greater portion of one of his legs, it was no cushioned ride in a royal coach.
“Goddamighty—goddamighty!” cried Adolphus Von Leuttwitz repeatedly in his excruciating pain. “Gimme a pistol, please, somebotty gimme a pistol!”
For most of the morning he had been begging, cajoling, even ordering soldiers to hand over their service revolvers to him so he could put himself out of his misery.
“Jus’ shtop and leaf me right here!” he would order in his thick accent once he realized no one had turned over their revolver to him. “Leaf me und go on so I can die on dis spot!”
As the column went into camp that afternoon, the surgeons tied an awning between some trees so they could begin to devote their attentions to changing dressings and checking for infection. As the canvas was going up, four packers volunteered to help unhitch the mule-borne litters and lower the patients to the ground. When one of the civilians walked past Von Leuttwitz’s stretcher, the lieutenant lunged for the packer’s pistol, managing to wrench it from the holster and get the muzzle pressed against his head before the civilian gripped the officer’s hand and wrist. The struggle was on. Only by jamming the meat of his thumb beneath the hammer did the packer keep the gun from going off before two other men rushed over to wrestle the pistol away from the distraught officer.
Whimpering in his defeat, Von Leuttwitz flung an arm over his face and groaned, “V’at diffrence it make to you, dommit! I no longer vant to live if I cannot be a fighting man. Not a soldier—life is not vorth living!”
It wasn’t only the condition of Crook’s wounded that caused the general to halt early in the day. Perhaps every bit as much was not knowing what lay on the other side of the ridge standing immediately in front of him. This seemed like a good place to make bivouac, so the battalions put out a strong guard, expecting the Sioux to put in another show.
Carr’s Fifth Cavalry rear guard straggled in as camp was being made beside a narrow, clear-running stream flowing northward out of the towering bluffs. Here at least there were good water and ample grass for their horses. Still, many of the men could think only that twenty-four hours before they had been dining on buffalo and wild fruits, while here they sat beneath a driving rain, once again supping on broiled pony steaks and their private miseries.
“It’s better than a broken-down cavalry nag,” Donegan observed as he chewed another mouthful of the tender and juicy red meat. “Far, far better than the best cut a man can butcher from one of Tom Moore’s wormy mules.”
“Horse,” John Finerty said with a shudder. “I don’t think I’ll ever climb into a hack, take myself a winter’s sleigh ride, much less sit on a saddle quite the same again.” Before his eyes he held a chunk of the roasted meat on the end of his knife blade and considered it. “Ah, such equestrian delight.” Then plopped it into his mouth with the relish of a starving man.
As the sun fell out of midsky, inching for the western horizon, a dozen men from Captain William H. Andrews’s I Troop of the Third Cavalry finished raising the sole buffalo-hide lodge Crook had not destroyed. In it Medical Director Clements and his surgeons could retreat from the rain with their wounded.
Here and there troopers moved through camp carrying on their shoulders great quarters of the butchered ponies like beef loins. It was a grim feast they had that night as every man filled his belly, not really caring so much what the morning would bring.
“You figure we can keep going much longer eating such meat?” Finerty asked a while later.
“Pray we don’t have to find out, Johnny.” Donegan wiped a sleeve across his mouth and beard, then held his hands over the fire, warming them as he said, “Not enough fat on a dozen of those Sioux ponies to season the gruel for a sick grasshopper.”
With their midday meal out of the way and enough wood laid in for the coming night, many of the soldiers used the rest of the afternoon to fashion crude leggings and moccasins from the tanned hides they had discovered in the Sioux village and saved from Powell’s destruction. Seamus cut thin slices from a piece of brain-tanned buckskin he had rescued and stuffed inside his shirt during Mills’s attack. Then he used his knife to hack off the stiff, hardened pieces of raw horsehide he had knotted around his boots many days back, when they had begun to fall apart with wear and the constant rain. Wrapping new strips of flexible buckskin around and around his lower foot and instep before knotting the ends, he could crudely hold the flapping sole to the upper part of his boot.
At their fire the Chicago newsman asked, “You hear that Jack Crawford ended up with the rifle American Horse handed Crook?”
