News From the Front—Crook and Terry Together and Advancing.
ST. PAUL, August 18—Captain Collins, of the Seventeenth infantry, arrived at Bismarck from Fort Buford last night. He fails to confirm the squaw reports of a recent battle between the Indians and Terry’s force. Scouts from Terry’s column, two days out, arrived at Buford on Monday evening. A courier who arrived at the supply depot at the mouth of the Rosebud on the 11th inst., report that Terry’s command met the head of General Crook’s command early on the 10th.
Crook’s men were following a large Indian trail in the direction of the Powder river. On a short consultation of Generals Terry and Crook, the commands were united and proceeded on the trail Crook was following. The Fifth Infantry was detached from Terry’s column and ordered back to the stockade … In the meantime Terry will come down upon them with the combined commands,and force a battle. It is not positively known whether the Indians are on Tongue river or Powder river.
True to his word, Crook swung the column directly to the east on the third of September after spending the night in bivouac directly opposite Sentinel Buttes.
Some of the Ree had come in at dusk the night before to report finding a sizable trail heading south from the Yellowstone, which showed the hostiles angling off to the east, all the more proof to convince Crook that his quarry wasn’t running north for Canada. But what was most important was the trackers’ news that the big trail was splitting again. This time the freshest sign in the country showed that the enemy was heading east.
On that very trail Grouard kept the column marching throughout the third, a Sunday. Later that morning the soldiers passed two burning coal ledges, in all probability ignited by the recent lightning storms. Officers kept their commands moving along quickly through those rugged uplands as Crook grew anxious to reach the Little Missouri, where he was certain the hostiles were heading. Late in the afternoon the general ordered a halt along the clear and narrow Andrews Creek.
Near dusk a handful of the Ree scouts who had been perusing the next day’s trail halted two miles from the column to have their supper. They had no sooner started to eat when a dozen horsemen appeared on a nearby ridge and hailed them—asking if they were Sioux. The Ree answered with their army-issue rifles, driving off the war party.
Later that evening, long after moonset, the pickets on the east side of camp fired at a handful of warriors spying on the soldiers, but there was no general alarm. The Sioux had not attempted to run off the hobbled and sidelined stock. Instead of rolling out at the first shots, most of the men stayed huddled beneath their wool coats and thin blankets on the cold ground right on through the rest of that miserable night.
In the morning they awoke to find a thick layer of frost covering those blankets, the sage, and the ground.
At two o’clock on that afternoon of the fourth the column entered a region where the hills continued to rise higher on either side of them until the men eventually emerged from a long and tortuous canyon to reach the Little Missouri, a sullen and muddy river like its larger namesake, near the point Terry and Custer had encamped in May on their way west to the Yellowstone. The grain Terry’s soldiers spilled while feeding their horses had already taken volunteer root in the damp soil and, nourished by the constant rains, the cornstalks had grown some ten to twelve feet high, each with four or five ears still in the milk. Since Crook already had the men on half rations, the crop was quickly harvested, the off-yellow ears distributed among the men as far as it would stretch, adding a brief taste of something different to their dwindling food supply.
On that riverbank the infantry once again stripped off everything below their belts, lashing it up in their blankets, which they carried over their shoulders, and marched by units across the ford Grouard’s scouts had located for a crossing. On the far side Chambers’s shivering foot soldiers needed no urging to fall out and scamper back into their warm clothing.
Once everyone was across and into the timber on the east side, Crook called a halt, allowing the men a chance to pick some of the profusion of bright-red buffalo berries, ripening plums, and crimson-tinged wild cherries that grew up and down both sides of the river. Even the fruit of the ever-present cactus was tried, requiring a man to burn off the spines before peeling back the thick skin so that he could roast the inner pulp. Compared to the berries and half-ripe plums, the men found the cactus fruit tasted like a slimy glue. In the midst of all that eating and celebration,simple joys for a soldier, it began to rain again just before the column resumed its march.
Later that afternoon Donegan heard sporadic gunfire coming from the south of east. It lasted for less than ten minutes. A half hour later the Ree rode in to inform Crook they had themselves a long-range duel with a Sioux war party, claiming they had wounded one warrior and unhorsed another by killing his pony before the enemy scattered.
“The next time I come with Crook,” John Finerty complained that evening in camp as he held his cracked brogans near the flames dancing in a chill north wind, “I’ll know better to bring along more soap and a couple extra pair of stockings. The general would do well to allow the same for his men.”
That night the wind brought on its back another spate of sleet to pelt Crook’s encampment. The men sat beneath what brush they could find along the banks of the Little Missouri, huddled out of the storm doing its best to rip their blankets from them. Despite the discovery of the corn and the wild fruit earlier in the afternoon, gloom once more descended over the command. They found themselves with less than two days’ rations in the middle of a virtual desert. No one, not even the officers, knew for certain just where they were heading, because Crook kept to his own counsel.
On the following frosty, drizzly morning of the fifth, to the maddening confusion and utter bewilderment of his men, Crook had the scouts take them east from the Little Missouri along Terry’s road, away from the Indian trail that pointed south. Out of the canyon they climbed along Davis Creek to reach the divide that led them toward the headwaters of the Heart River, where, after passing between Rosebud Butte and the Camel’s Hump, they went into bivouac for the night.
It was dusk when Baptiste Pourier and some of Major Thaddeus Stanton’s Ree came in from a day of riding along the column’s right flank with a report that they had bumped into a southbound war party and had had themselves a short running fight of it. When Big Bat’s horse had given out during their retreat, he’d dismounted and prepared to sell his life dearly. Discovering that Pourier was not among their retreat, Baptiste Garnier had wheeled around with a white scout, “Buckskin Jack” Russell, and both had galloped back to make a stand with Pourier. In a brief but hot skirmish Big Bat spilled one of the Sioux, whose body was plucked from the prairie by his companions before they all disappeared into the thickening fog as the sun fell.
About that same time the fleeing Stanton had decided to turn about and find out for himself where the three scouts had disappeared. Upon reaching the trio, he ordered that the whole group pursue the retreating war party.
“If you wanna go,” Big Bat had snarled, “go ahead. I’m not.”
When his scouts eventually reached camp that evening, a sour-faced Stanton reported the incident to Crook, ridiculing Pourier for what he claimed was cowardice.
Crook asked, “What have you got to say about it, Bat?”
“That son of a bitch over there deserted me,” Big Bat snarled, pointing at Stanton. “My horse was down and done for. And I was all but done for. I rode in here this evening on the back of Russell’s horse. So if anyone’s the coward—it’s that lying bastard there!”
The general turned to the officer, asking, “Major—did you leave Big Bat behind?”
“I didn’t know he was in trouble,” Stanton replied with a shrug.
“You knew he was soon as I did, because I told you myself,” Garnier protested. “You knew when I told you me and Russell was heading back to help him.”
Crook glared at Stanton. “Major?”
Stanton could only say, “Yes, sir. I’ll grant you that it looks that way—”
“Very well, then,” Crook interrupted. “We’ll hear no more about Bat’s cowardice, Major—unless we want to have fingers pointed all around. What I’m most angry about is that I wasn’t immediately informed of the presence of a body of hostiles.”
“They slipped off in the fog,” Stanton explained.
“Yes, well,” Crook said, stroking one tail of his braided beard, “from now on I want to know immediately when any of my command makes any contact with the enemy.”
Twilight came, and without the cheery warmth of fires the men gathered in angry knots to argue their wretched lot. Only those officers and enlisted alike who hadn’t served very long with Crook expressed some self-
