Trumpet on the Land: The Aftermath of Custer's Massacre, 1876

marching soldiers.

Never before had they so soundly defeated the white man. Perhaps it was true that these were their finest days. But, he thought, if this was indeed their finest season, then it could mean only one thing: that from here on life would only get worse for the Lakota.

The wind shifted again, a strange sound carried on it.

American Horse looked back to the north, smelling that wind a moment, wondering. Then peered to the west. No, not from the west. Only from the north. If they ever came at all, he convinced himself, they would come out of the north.

Then he pulled the buffalo fur over his ears and trudged down the sodden hillside to that small gathering of lodges. Thinking, hoping, and praying to the Great Mystery that His people had not yet seen their zenith.

Knowing in the pit of him that perhaps they had already visited the last of those finest days.

^*The Big Horn Mountains.

^† The Little Missouri River.

^*The Yellowstone River.

^† The Moreau River.

^‡ Baptiste Garnier, Frank Grouard, and Baptiste Pourier.

^* Slim Buttes

^† Rabbit Lip or Hairy Lip Creek, present-day Gap Creek, a tributary of Rabbit Creek, itself a tributary of the nearby Moreau River

Chapter 38

9 September 1876

His nose felt like it was as big as his boot. Dribbling, Seamus wiped it on the sleeve of his canvas mackinaw.

God, did that hurt!

Raw and angry, sore beyond belief. His nose itself was as red as these buffalo berries clinging to the nearby bushes.

But at least he wasn’t so sick that he couldn’t climb into the saddle. Not so immobilized with pain that the only way he could move was to lie on a travois pulled along by one of Tom Moore’s mules.

“Ready, boys!” whispered Lieutenant Schwatka as he rode along their front.

Atop a sloping ridge formed by two shallow coulees that eventually united at the north edge of the village, the cavalry horses pawed the earth. Weary, all but done in—the animals wanted to move, or get the damned weight off their backs. One or the other. The animals had waited out most of the night grazing. They should have enough bottom in them to make this short charge through the village.

“Coming light, Lieutenant!” some trooper said down to Donegan’s right.

“Steady now! Steady!”

He watched Schwatka look to the east. Von Leuttwitz was in position somewhere over there, somewhere still out of sight in the murky light. Over where the dawn was just beginning to balloon around them. Then the lieutenant glanced to the west, as if he expected to catch a glimpse of Crawford’s men.

Minutes ago all three units of Mills’s attack had come to a halt after using up more than an hour to grope their way out of the deep ravine and quietly inch forward together across the sticky, muddy prairie beginning at the foot of Slim Buttes, a long, craggy ridge that dominated and towered over the entire landscape. Frank Grouard led them through the frosty darkness toward the village he had scouted, where he had stolen two ponies. When the half-breed had Lieutenant Schwatka halt his twenty-five, the scout disappeared for a few minutes before he reappeared with another half-dozen Sioux ponies.

“More of ’em up there,” Frank said in a low hush as he drove the six ponies to the rear right through the midst of Schwatka’s mounted troopers. “You go on, Lieutenant. I’ll be back soon as I hide these away in a coulee for safekeeping.”

With the coming light Seamus recognized the outlines of more ponies grazing here and there in their front. Still some distance off, the bulk of the herd cropped the wet grass, completely indifferent to the soldiers. Raising his face into the cold breeze that tortured his nose, he found the wind was still in their favor.

They moved up a bit more, halted again, nearing the fringe of the herd now. Beyond, farther still, rose the tops of the first lodges. Silent. Hulking. Only the barest wisps of firesmoke stealing from the upper swirl of lodgepoles. Schwatka deployed his twenty-five about the time Grouard reappeared. He rode up and stopped somewhere on the far left flank. From where Donegan sat atop his horse at the right end of the formation, he wasn’t sure he could pick out the half-breed in the dim light.

Up ahead, no more than a matter of yards, really, a horse snorted. One of the Sioux ponies.

Then another one whickered, and one of the cavalry horses answered with a whinny of its own.

“Dear Mither of God,” Seamus swore under his breath, “get your hands on his nostrils.” He prayed the other outfits were in position.

Of a sudden the grassy rise before them erupted in a swirling movement and deafening noise: the cries of ponies, the surprising hammer of more than fifteen hundred hooves. Just as they would if a bolt of lightning had cracked its fiery tongue into their midst, the pony herd exploded into action.

“Stampede!”

At Donegan’s shrill warning, Schwatka yanked his horse about and stood in the stirrups.

Another soldier hollered, “G’won, Lieutenant! Give the order!”

“Charge!” Schwatka yelled, his mouth a black hole within his neatly trimmed mustache and pointed goatee, waving the pistol in his hand as he kicked heels into his horse, which bolted off beneath him with a shocking burst of energy.

Raggedly the twenty-five tore themselves from motionlessness to a furious gallop in the space of two heartbeats, strung out as they were across some sixty yards. Over the unknown ground they raced, sweeping the frantic herd before them across the brow of the hill and down into the narrow, three-fingered depression.

Out of the gray light of false dawn loomed the hide lodges.

With a shudder Donegan remembered their attack on Powder River. Many of these men had been there. He wondered if they remembered, as he remembered it.

He saw the first lodge as he shot past it—the door flap securely lashed down against the wind and rain. At the rear a long gash suddenly erupted in the wet hide. From it bubbled three children, then a woman with a babe in her arms. She stopped, looked at him as he rode past.

Then Seamus was among the rest of the village.

All around him the Sioux were hacking their way out of their lodges. Warriors fell to one knee, firing rifles and pistols, then rose to run again, stopping after a few yards to fire another round. On either side of the Irishman the troopers’ pistols popped in a steady rattle. All about him the bullets slapped against the taut, wet buffalo hides, sounding like the arrhythmic fall of icy hailstones. The air stung his cold cheeks, and he knew his nose must be dribbling in his mustache again. Swiping at it with his left arm as he sighted a warrior, Seamus immediately wished he hadn’t touched the nose. The tender tissues screamed in pain.

Angry at himself, he brought the pistol out at the end of his arm and snapped off the shot by instinct, without really aiming. The warrior pitched backward, arms and legs akimbo, falling behind a lodge.

Within seconds the Sioux were streaming from the village, the first of them beginning to reach the pony herd. Children screeched and women cried out, hurrying the little ones along. At the rear tottered the old and the lame, the sick and the wounded lumbering behind in their midst. On the far side of the village stood a line of low bluffs. Racing across the creek to the southwest, most of the Sioux were escaping around the end of those bluffs, fleeing onto the rolling prairie. The rest of those in the village splashed across the narrow creek, up the south bank, and