protected. The powerful mystics: Black Hairy Dog; Coal Bear; Box Elder.
And then there was Sergeant Thomas M. Forsyth who, although wounded, stayed with the body of his company commander, the dying John A. McKinney. More than any other officer, noncoms such as he were the “bone and the sinew” of the frontier army.
Forsyth’s bravery in the face of overwhelming odds and almost sure defeat did not go unnoticed. Five days after the battle Lieutenant Harrison Otis, now in command of M Troop, went to Mackenzie to personally recommend Forsyth (along with Sergeant Frank Murray and Corporal William J. Linn) for honorable mention. Private Thomas Ryan, who of his own volition stood at Forsyth’s side over McKinney’s bullet-riddled body, was eventually awarded a Certificate of Merit, an honor reserved for privates who had distinguished themselves in combat.
While Mackenzie did approve Forsyth’s promotion to regimental sergeant major the following summer, it was not until the end of the great Indian wars that the old, white-headed sergeant finally received what he had been long deserving.
Nearing the end of his career, Forsyth wrote to Captain J. H. Dorst, former adjutant to the deceased Mackenzie, discussing the propriety of his applying for a Certificate of Merit himself at that late date after going a decade and a half without any sort of recognition. Congress had just recently passed a law that would allow noncommissioned officers to receive the award previously reserved for privates. Ever a modest, but highly sentimental, man, the sergeant wrote Dorst:
I would like to leave my children something besides my name when I answer the last roll-call and anything that could bear testimony to bravery and gallantry on the part of their father in action, would be the best and noblest remembrance, that a soldier’s children could have.
It should go without saying that Dorst was extremely moved. So moved that the captain went one step further: he began the laborious process of approving the old sergeant for the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Only months before that day when Forsyth stood ramrod straight on the parade at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Sitting Bull had been killed by his own police. Within two weeks of that murder Big Foot’s Miniconjou had been slaughtered by the remnants of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Knee. Finally, late in 1891, the Medal of Honor was approved for his heroic, selfless action that horribly cold day in the valley of the Red Fork Canyon some fifteen years before.
Sergeant Thomas H. Forsyth stood in the last rays of sunset before the assembled troops and officers, there among his wife Lizzie and what they called their “tribe” of five children, as this nation’s highest award for bravery was placed around his neck.
He had offered his life to protect a fellow soldier, and now in the final days of his long army career, Thomas H. Forsyth had finally given his children an intangible inheritance no soldier’s pension could ever match.
There are other small glimpses of bravery that history has penciled in the margins from this tragic campaign. The lone Indian scout wounded in the fight, that Shoshone named Anzi, sought to ride like a warrior as long as he could, although suffering greatly (having been shot through the abdomen). He remained in the post hospital at Reno Cantonment for nearly three weeks, then with two companions rode back home to Chief Washakie’s Wind River Reservation—more than two hundred miles away. John Bourke saw Anzi the following year at the time of the Nez Perce war.
“[Anzi] was still living,” Bourke wrote, “although by no means, so his friends told me, the man he had been before being so terribly wounded.”
A year or so after that, other Shoshone reported that Anzi was shot on a horse-stealing raid.
Captain John M. Hamilton led his troops in to rescue the remnants of McKinney’s butchered men. An extremely courageous soldier, he himself would not fall in battle until July 1, 1898, when as the lieutenant colonel of the First Cavalry, a bullet found him as he was leading his men in a charge up the side of San Juan Hill.
In our story we have mentioned that Sergeant James H. McClellan was credited with having killed the warrior named Bull Head in close-quarters combat in that struggle Wessels’s company had of it near the head of the deep ravine where McKinney’s men were ambushed. In our story of the battle, we also recount the tale of McClellan taking from the body a cartridge belt bearing a buckle engraved with the name Little Wolf. Because Bull Head for some reason had grabbed up Little Wolf’s pistol and cartridge belt at the moment of attack, it was long believed by the soldiers that they had indeed killed the Sweet Medicine Chief of the Cheyenne. Just another piece of circumstantial evidence that history allows us to chuckle over after the fact.
As you have learned in our story, there were many items pulled from the lodges that caused a great deal of anger among Mackenzie’s troops, just as there had been when souvenirs from the Custer battle dead were found among the lodges of American Horse’s Miniconjou after the day-long fight at Slim Buttes, a tale we told you in Volume Ten,
Clearly one of the most interesting of these is the roster book, the sort taken into the field, this one carried by First Sergeant Alexander Brown, G Troop, Seventh Cavalry, commanded by Lieutenant Donald Mcintosh, into the valley of the Little Bighorn. The roster was started on 19 April 1876 at which time the troop was leaving Louisiana, ordered back to Fort Abraham Lincoln for the summer campaign.
Its next-to-last entry is quite prophetic:
McEgan lost his carbine on the march while on duty with pack train, June 24, 1876.
From summer into fall, across the next five months, the pages in that roster book were filled with pictures by High Bear, its new owner, a warrior who was himself killed in the Dull Knife battle. One of the pages shows High Bear lancing a soldier clearly wearing the chevrons of a sergeant major. In the months and years to come, the officers who examined the warrior’s crude drawing, and its chronological placement among his career of those coups depicted within the book, later came to believe High Bear was the one who killed Sergeant Major Walter Kennedy, the man who attempted to ride for help once Major Joel H. Elliott’s company was completely surrounded during the Seventh Cavalry’s attack on Black Kettle’s camp along the Washita in 1868.*
I am in hopes of receiving permission to reproduce in this novel a page from Lieutenant Donald Mcintosh’s memoranda book so that the reader can see where the lieutenant has listed the “best shots” in his company, starting with Sergeant Brown himself. Unlike the Brown roster book, which is in private custody, Mcintosh’s was for a long time displayed at the little Bighorn Battlefield Visitor Center, complete with its single bullet hole perforating the entire book. Then some two years ago it was stolen, its protective case ripped from the wall. Only recently has the thief admitted that he burned this priceless, dramatic relic. What a senseless tragedy! At times I would like to believe the thief merely told federal prosecutors that it was destroyed, and that it has really been sold to some wealthy collector who, like far too many others, hasn’t the slightest desire to share his or her precious relics with the rest of us.
Unlike the stingy, niggardly kind, Lieutenant John Bourke gave to posterity those grisly trophies he collected in the Cheyenne village. Pictured in his book on Mackenzie’s last fight are the two relics not meant for the faint of heart. First, there is a beaded necklace from which is suspended at least eight complete human fingers; between their array are sections of other human fingers, as well as teeth and iron arrow points. The second necklace appears to be made of trade wool sewn to a long strip of leather, much in the fashion of a soldier’s cartridge belt, constructed in such a way as to be worn around the neck with a narrow thong. But instead of the leather loops to hold the bullets, there are beaded loops holding twenty short fingers, from the fingertips down to the first joint.
These, the amateur ethnologist Bourke reported, in addition to a bag made from a human scrotum, were once the property of High Wolf, whom the lieutenant mistakenly called “the chief medicine man” of the Cheyenne. In 1877 he presented these war trophies to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., as specimens of “aboriginal religious art.”
While such relics might appear ghoulish and offend white sensibilities, Sherry Smith explains:
To be sure, the Northern Cheyenne did not see matters the same way. The saddles and canteens branded with Seventh Cavalry insignia, the scalps, the necklace of fingers—all represented Cheyenne victories over constant enemies who had, on other occasions, done the same to them.
It is with no small regret that we now bid Lieutenant John Bourke farewell for some time to come in this
