[The Indian attack on our column] showed that they anticipated that they were strong enough to thoroughly defeat the command during the engagement. I tried to throw a strong force through the canyon, but I was obliged to use it elsewhere before it had gotten to the supposed location of the village. The command finally drove the Indians back in great confusion … We remained on the field that night, and having but what each man could carry himself, we were obliged to return to the train to properly care for the wounded … I expect to find those Indians in rough places all the time, and so have ordered five companies of infantry, and shall not probably make any extended movement until they arrive.
George Crook
Brig. Gen.
John Bourke finished the second of two copies he had made that morning of Crook’s letter to General Philip Sheridan. While one would remain in Bourke’s records, as Crook’s longtime aide-de-camp, the original and the second copy would go with two civilian couriers who would ride south separately to Fort Fetterman on the North Platte. There this first report of the Battle of the Rosebud would soon be telegraphed by leapfrog down that string of tiny key stations connected by a thin strand of wire, southeast all the way to Fort Laramie.
From there the electrifying news of Crook’s decision to wait at Goose Creek would cause the keys to click and the wires to hum all the way to department headquarters in Omaha, and beyond. Within hours of the letter’s arrival at Fetterman, Sheridan would be reading the scrawl of some private’s handwriting on the pages of yellow flimsy at Division HQ in Chicago. It wouldn’t take that much longer for William Tecumseh Sherman to be studying every one of Crook’s carefully chosen words at the War Department in Washington City.
An Irishman himself like Sheridan, Bourke pictured how the bandy-legged hero of the Shenandoah campaign would flush and roar when he read that Crook was electing to sit tight. He would be angry. Nay, furious! After all, no less than Sheridan and Sherman themselves had developed the concept of “total war” waged against an enemy population in those final months of the Civil War.
John had to agree with them. In what he had seen of man’s bloodiest sport, war was serious business. If the West was to be won, then he found himself in sympathy with Sherman’s views: “Let’s be about finishing this matter of the Indians.”
While the Confederate officers had practiced a genteel combat against the Union armies, pitting only soldier against soldier, Sherman and Sheridan—as U. S. Grant’s right and left arms—refined the concept that mandated an army make war on the entire enemy population, women and children and noncombatants alike. Depriving the enemy of livestock, burning fields and destroying forage, laying waste not only to the enemy’s lines of supply, but by making total war on those loved ones the Confederate armies left behind at home, the Union could wreak great spiritual damage to the fighting men of the rebellious South.
“This is taking too long,” Bourke said, agreeing with Sherman’s impatience over the progress of things out west.
But, then again, that’s what this whole Sioux campaign was about, wasn’t it? To get the matter settled once and for all?
But instead of clear victories, the army had instead two major engagements that were certainly less than defeats for the enemy. Reynolds had retreated from the Powder River, his men freezing, tormented by empty bellies. And now Crook and the rest had to content themselves with a hollow victory once Crazy Horse retreated with his warriors at the end of that long summer’s day of bloody and fierce hand-to-hand fighting across four miles of rolling, rocky hills bordering Rosebud Creek.*
Crook’s army held the field at sunset. And buried its dead in the creek bottom that night under cover of darkness. Then started to limp back to Goose Creek the following morning. If the Battle of the Rosebud was ever to live on to Crook’s credit, John figured, then either the general would have to follow up with a more stunning victory somewhere in the weeks to come … or one of the other columns would have to suffer a more stunning defeat in this summer of the Sioux.
Either way, it would serve to take the dim sheen off what was clearly a dubious victory for Crook’s Wyoming column.
Already the newsmen were creating their own slant to that day-long battle. John knew each one of them wrote from his own narrow view of a horrendously complex battle that had raged along a four-mile front. For two days after the fight they had scratched out their stories, the rich ante climbing almost hourly as the reporters bartered for the services of any courier who would dare to carry word of the Rosebud Battle to the nearest telegraph, eventually to end up in the hands of expectant readers both east and west of this Wyoming wilderness.
Along with the wounded loaded in wagons, and an infantry escort Crook was sending south to Fetterman tomorrow morning, would also go T. B. MacMillan, reporter for Chicago’s
“After all,” John Finerty said at this morning’s fire, “you heard Crook himself say he’s planning on sitting pretty right here till he gets him his reinforcements of infantry and cavalry.”
“Finerty’s right,” Robert Strahorn of Denver’s
“The summer’s going to be all but gone before we move again, Mac,” Bourke tried cheering the sickly reporter over strong coffee.
“I’ll envy you, I will,” Finerty replied with an impish grin. “Knowing you’re back in Chicago well ahead of me. While I’m still out here, sitting on my thumbs with nothing to do but fish these creeks, hunt the groves of timber, and eat my fill from the fruit of the land every day. Pretty boring stuff.”
“The best place a man could be—Chicago,” Bourke chimed in to help nudge the newsman to relent and head home. “The Indian camps are surely breaking up after the whipping we gave them, so this campaign is all but over, Mac. Only thing left for us to do is eat, sleep, and chase some nonexistent warriors.”
“You heard it from the mouth of the general’s aide,” Finerty said. “The war’s over: nothing to do but eat and sleep. Seriously, Mac—I doubt we’ll have any more chances to chase warriors.”
It would take until the end of summer, but by then all that Bourke and Finerty and the rest of Crook’s crippled Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition would have to eat would be their broken-down, played-out horses as the animals dropped one by one by one into the mud of the northern plains.
That, and Crook’s men could always eat their words.
They had a great victory on their shoulders.
So it was that Miniconjou war chief American Horse danced with all the rest in this Moon of Ripening Berries, Wipazuka Waste Wi. At times the Lakota called this the Moon of Making Fat.
Truly, this was a time of great feasting, of living off the fat of the land for the people of American Horse.
“Now the soldiers will stay away!” Dog Necklace growled every bit as tremulously as any grizzly boar as they gathered near one of the many leaping bonfires fed throughout that second night following the great battle against the soldiers, Snake, and Sparrowhawk People. “Surely they know we will never again wait for them to attack our camps of little ones and women.”
Red Horse echoed, “They now know we will hunt them down!”
“Yet—what of the great mystic’s vision?” asked Iron Thunder.
“Yes,” agreed Antelope Tail, worry cracking his voice. “What of Sitting Bull’s talk with Wakan Tanka?”
American Horse smiled. He had fought these white men many, many summers. Even winters too. In fact, thirty winters before his own father, Smoke, had met the famous white man Francis Parkman there beside the white man’s Holy Road that paralleled the Buffalo Dung River.*
“The soldiers will return,” he told them confidently.
