from the Little Bighorn dead would bring down the wrath of
Late in the summer of 1920 Frank Baldwin journeyed to the high plains of Montana to accompany Joseph Culbertson to the site of their December 1876 attack on Sitting Bull. By then a general retired from the army, Baldwin and the young scout, who was barely eighteen winters old at the time of the expedition, wandered over the site, sharing reminiscences together. It wasn’t long before a six-foot-high stone monument in the shape of a pyramid was erected on the site where Sitting Bull’s people had abandoned their village that cold winter day when Baldwin’s troops rumbled toward their camp in those noisy wagons.
Success at last against the leader of the “hostile” Sioux!
As Robert Utley describes in
In the perception of the white citizenry, Sitting Bull was the man to get, the archdemon of the Sioux holdouts, the architect of Custer’s defeat and death, the supreme monarch of all the savage legions arrayed against the forces of civilization. Newspapers vied with one another in profiling this all-powerful ruler, and no story was too silly for their readership.
Equally silly was General Sheridan’s effort to deflate Sitting Bull. He had no reason to believe, he declared, that such an individual as Sitting Bull even existed. “I have always understood ‘Sitting-bull’ to mean
… But precisely because he was a great leader, Sitting Bull had indeed come to mean, for Indians and whites alike,
If Phil Sheridan had trouble on this point—Nelson A. Miles sure knew Sitting Bull existed in the flesh. And make no mistake, so did Lieutenant Frank Baldwin.
This Ash Creek fight in Montana Territory is all but unknown, even among those who have a speaking acquaintance of the Great Sioux War. All too few understand just what a signal victory Baldwin and his small battalion accomplished by surprising the larger, stronger, confederated village and driving them into the wilderness with little more than what they had on their backs. They had no choice but to head south, hoping to find Crazy Horse, where they would be welcomed as they had welcomed him and the Cheyenne survivors the previous winter. Baldwin had turned the tables on the Lakota—and successfully shattered the myth of an all-powerful Hunkpapa-led coalition.
Considering the scale of this defeat at Ash Creek (and, once the Hunkpapa village reached the Crazy Horse camp, finding them so recently defeated by Miles at Battle Butte), it becomes all the more clear why it would take Sitting Bull and his chiefs only a matter of weeks to decide that their only course lay in fleeing across the line to Canada.
The army had the bands on the run, harried and harassed on the northern plains. So what do you think would have happened if the Lakota peace delegates from the Crazy Horse village had reached the cantonment to discuss terms of surrender with Miles?
So close—perhaps only a matter of several hundred yards—to have come on this journey with the blessings of Crazy Horse, Little Wolf, and Morning Star themselves … only to be set upon by the cowardly Crow auxiliaries Tom Leforge had recruited for Lieutenant Hargous.
Think of it: had not the Crow cold-bloodedly murdered those five brave men, within sight of a wavering Crazy Horse, such a surrender would have represented at least six hundred lodges—which meant more than some twelve hundred fighting men! Miles and the frontier army would have struck a powerful coup. Sitting Bull and his confederated chiefs would have been left completely isolated, alone, and vulnerable. Had not the Crow cowards committed those inexcusable murders against their ancient enemies, then escaped back to the safety of their reservation before they could be punished for their crimes … the Great Sioux War would have been over before Christmas!
Take a moment to consider it now: as things turned out, this cowardly act by Crow murderers caused the war to drag on at least another six months.
This half-day Battle of the Butte between Miles and Crazy Horse during a snowstorm in southeastern Montana is really not all that better known than Baldwin’s Ash Creek fight. In fact, it was so little known among Indian Wars’ historians that it was called the
Come up here and take one of my tours of the northern plains when we travel to this site, and you will readily see just how appropriate is that name.
One of the sources I relied upon before my very first trip up the Tongue River to Battle Butte was a small self-published book by the late Charles B. Erlanson. Having come to Montana in 1911 as a young wrangler, Erlanson went right to work for the Flying V Ranch, and later cowboyed for the Three Circle Ranch—both of which were on the Cheyenne Reservation. For better than fifty years Erlanson not only rode up and down the Tongue River, back and forth across the ground where this story took place, but also knew several of the old Cheyenne storytellers who spoke of the fight, and of the toll that terrible winter took upon the once-powerful Shahiyela people.
One of Erlanson’s closest informants was none other than John Stands In Timber, the Cheyenne tribal historian who collaborated with Margot Liberty on his book of Cheyenne culture and stories. On one trip the two old horsemen made to the battle site, Erlanson took a photograph of Stands in Timber beside the low pile of red rocks Wooden Leg had stacked up to mark the spot where Big Crow was shot. A stoic, but bright-eyed, Cheyenne historian looks back at the camera, pointing to that simple, but eloquent, marker with his wooden cane.
As the howling blizzard closed down upon the valley of the Tongue River, Miles ordered some of his unit to pursue the fleeing enemy—in hopes of learning just how close was the Crazy Horse camp. For many years a legend lived on that stated the soldiers chased the warriors for miles up the valley, passing through their hastily abandoned camp where they fought the rear guard protecting the village, and where the soldiers captured a huge store of dried meat.
Perhaps this historical error is what led no lesser an artist than Frederic Remington to paint one of his most famous works:
The painting would be better ascribed to Mackenzie’s attack on Morning Star’s village: the on-foot, lodge-to- lodge fight of it made on 25 November 1876.
Truth is, the Sioux and Cheyenne village was at least seventeen miles south of Battle Butte. A man who knows firsthand the nature of not only that terrain but a half century of Montana snowstorms, Charlie Erlanson himself, said of this controversy, “The last part of the battle was fought in a blizzard of such intensity that it … would have been futile for Miles’s foot soldiers to attempt to pursue the ‘finest light cavalry in the world’ through the deep snow.”
Having myself visited the site on a clear winter day, with close to a foot of snow on the level, I have to concur not only with William Jackson (the half-breed Blackfoot scout with Miles), but with the current thinking of historians: that the pursuing soldiers did not chase the Indians to and through their village. Instead, the infantry would have been lucky to follow those fleeing horsemen a matter of two, perhaps three, miles at most, on foot before they were forced to turn back beneath the onslaught of a Montana blizzard.
By considering only the record of casualties, one might infer that this was an inconsequential affair brought to an indecisive conclusion only by the extremities of severe weather. But even the casualty counts are conflicting for some reason.
William Jackson states that three soldiers were killed (although his recollection may be clouded by time and by witnessing Batty’s death earlier on their march upriver). He goes on to state that eight soldiers were wounded. Two other writers concur with these same figures, one of which was Captain Edmond Butler in his own brief account of the campaign.
