the news published this morning of the terrible disaster in Indian country.
MISCELLANEOUS DISPATCHES
A list of officers killed—feeling over the disaster—a regiment of frontiersmen offered from Utah.
SALT LAKE, July 6—The citizens here are very much excited over the Custer Massacre, and several offers have been made to the Secretary of War to raise a regiment of frontiersmen in ten days for Indian service.
SAN FRANCISCO, July 6—A dispatch from Virginia City reports great excitement at Custer’s death. Ameeting has been called to organize a company.
TOLEDO, July 6—A special to the
Escorted by Captain James Egan’s hard-bitten K Company of the Second Cavalry, Bill Cody had accompanied the youthful, baby-faced Colonel Wesley Merritt on that ride north to take over field command of the Fifth Cavalry on the first day of July. Besides being an act of utter humiliation to Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Carr, Bill figured Merritt had no business taking over what had long been regarded as “Carr’s regiment” in the field.
Why, the “Old War Eagle” had led the Fighting Fifth since sixty-eight, for God’s sake!
No two ways about it—Merritt had been in the right place at the right time: already out west as lieutenant colonel of the Ninth Cavalry, and perhaps even more important, in the field acting as inspecting cavalry quartermaster for Sheridan’s Division of the Missouri when the lieutenant general decided to use the Fifth to block reinforcements to Sitting Bull’s hostiles.
Upon graduation from the U.S. Military Academy in 1860, Merritt was first assigned to the Second Dragoons. But as soon as Fort Sumter was fired upon less than a year later, his career began to parallel Custer’s closely: both had become brigadier generals at the same time, just prior to the Battle of Gettysburg, and both had commanded victorious cavalry divisions under Sheridan during the Shenandoah campaign in the final weeks of the Civil War.
Everybody wanted to have a crack at the Indians who had defeated the Seventh Cavalry, Cody figured. Even Wesley Merritt.
When the terrible news from Montana Territory caught up with Sheridan, he was visiting Camp Robinson, planning to do what his department could to stop the flow of warriors off the reservations at Red Cloud and Spotted Tail. Almost immediately the lieutenant general hurried back to Fort Laramie—where for days on end he remained angry, hurt, confused, and stunned as all get-out by the Custer disaster.
Still, Bill had learned one thing was certain about that little Irish general: he wasn’t going to sit around licking his wounds. Sheridan was the sort who would strike back— and strike back with everything he had.
“By God—those red sons of bitches will hear a trumpet’s clarion call on the land!” Sheridan vowed, slamming a fist down on Major E. F. Townsend’s desk at Laramie hard enough to stun every other officer into utter silence. “If it takes every man in my department, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse will pay dearly—and I’ll make sure they keep on paying until I think they’ve been brought to utter ruin!”
Cody had no doubt that Sheridan would make good on his word.
Accompanying Merritt from Laramie was another correspondent hurried into the field by an editor eager to beat the competition, another reporter chomping at the bit to snatch some new angle on the Sioux War suddenly exploding across the nation’s papers with banner headlines: Cuthbert Mills, who was sending copy back east to the New York
Cody recognized Mills as a tenderfoot from way off, but he did not join in “laying for” the reporters the way the rest of the entourage did, both soldiers and civilians. Nevertheless, Bill did have himself a few laughs at Mills’s expense, what with the way the others “stuffed the greenhorn.” What a caution that slicker from the East had turned out to be!
But it was not the prose of those tenderfooted reporters Bill figured he would long remember. Instead, the most lasting impression was made by the verse composed by his friend, the amiable John Wallace Crawford, widely known as the “poet scout” of the prairies. More of a nimble rhymester than a poet in the truest sense of the word, Crawford nonetheless entertained one and all every evening with his offhand recitations and impromptu circumlocutions involving the day’s march and the personalities along for the campaign.
Born in 1847 in County Donegal, Ireland, Crawford’s parents emigrated to America while Jack was still a boy. Almost immediately the youth went to work in the Pennsylvania coal mines. Bereft of any learning, totally illiterate, Jack was only fifteen when he enlisted in the Forty-eighth Pennsylvania Volunteers with his father. After young Crawford was wounded at the Battle of Spotsylvania, he convalesced at the Saterlee Hospital in West Philadelphia, where he was taught to read and write by a Sister of Charity.
A few years after the end of the war, both his parents died—causing Jack to decide he would start life anew out west. With the discovery of gold by Custer’s expedition in 1874, Crawford headed for the Black Hills, then the following year worked a mail contract between Red Cloud and the rail depot at Sidney, Nebraska. As one of the founders of Custer City in the Hills, he was selected to serve as chief of scouts for their volunteers with the outbreak of the Sioux War—a group called the Black Hills Rangers. It was at this time that Crawford acquired the title of “Captain Jack,” as well serving as the region’s correspondent for the Omaha
Time had come for the Fifth to get over its outward suspicion of its new colonel commanding and get back to business. On the second of July, Merritt marched his troops four miles to the east, so they could bivouac on better grass that much closer to the well-beaten Indian trail Little Bat had discovered. The men remained confident and their mounts well fed—not only on the grasses of those Central Plains, but on seventy-five thousand pounds of grain that had arrived from Laramie nine days earlier.
Then on the morning of 3 July a small war party was sighted by outlying pickets no more than a mile from the regiment’s South Cheyenne base camp. Captain Julius W. Mason’s veteran K Company was ordered in pursuit as they were beginning their breakfast.
“Saddle up, men! Lively, now!” was the shout from the company’s lieutenant, Charles King, as Cody leaped into the saddle with Jack Crawford at his side.
“Lead into line!” King ordered. “Count off by fours!”
“By fours, right!” Mason gave the command while Cody and Crawford galloped away, hoping to eat away at what lead the warriors already had.
The day before, Mason had been informed that he’d been promoted to the rank of major, with a transfer to the Third Cavalry, which was presently serving with Crook’s Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition. Yet Mason had told Colonel Merritt that he intended to stay with the Fifth until such a time as the present campaign was brought to a completion.
Down into the trees at creekside the two scouts led K Troop, through the deep sand, then finally a climb back up onto the grassy hillsides where the race could begin in earnest.
“Here comes Kellogg’s I Company, fellers!”
Cody heard a soldier from K make the announcement behind him as they tore after the distant horsemen. Merritt had ordered out a second troop for what was hoped would be the first action of the campaign.
But after a frustrating and circuitous chase of some thirty miles lasting several hours, all of it spent following nothing more tangible than a trail of unshod ponies, and then finding the war party splitting off onto diverse trails, all leading in the general direction of the Powder River country, Mason ordered Lieutenant King to take their company and return to camp at four o’clock, empty-handed. However, because Bill and Jack Crawford, riding far in advance of K Company, had managed to fire some shots at the fleeing horsemen in the early stages of the chase, the affair went down in the official record of the Fifth Cavalry as “the fight near the south branch of the Cheyenne River, Wyo.”
If the soldiers hadn’t killed any of the enemy or taken any prisoners, at least the Fifth was credited with forcing those fleeing Cheyenne warriors to abandon their slower pack-animals burdened beneath agency supplies plainly being carried to the hostiles in the north.
Still, by the time the troopers returned to Merritt’s camp, there were casualties to be tallied from the thirty- mile chase. A dozen horses were so badly used up that Carr decided it best to have them returned to Laramie. Worse yet, the mounts carrying two heavy troopers did not even make it back to camp, having dropped dead under
