Wolf Mountain Moon: The Battle of the Butte, 1877

Crazy Horse and Custer—The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors, by Stephen E. Ambrose

Death on the Prairie—The Thirty Years’ Struggle for the Western Plains, by Paul I. Wellman

A Dose of Soldiering—The Memoirs of Corporal E. A. Bode, Frontier Regular Infantry, 1877- 1882, edited by Thomas T. Smith

Faintly Sounds the War-Cry—The Story of the Fight at Battle Butte, by Fred H. Werner

The Fighting Cheyennes, by George Bird Grinnell

Frontier Regulars—The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1891, by Robert M. Utley

General George Crook, His Autobiography, edited by Martin F. Schmitt

“Historical Address of Brigadier General W. C. Brown,” Winners of the West, August 30, 1932

Indian-Fighting Army, by Fairfax Downey

Indian Fights and Fighters, by Cyrus Townsend Brady

Lakota and Cheyenne—Indian Views of the Great Sioux War, 1876-1877, by Jerome A. Greene

The Lance and the Shield—The Life and Times of Sitting Bull, by Robert M. Utley

Memoirs of a White Crow Indian (Thomas H LeForge), as told by Thomas B. Marquis

Nelson A. Miles—A Documentary Biography of his Military Career, 1861-1903, edited by Brian C. Pohanka

Nelson A. Miles and the Twilight of the Frontier Army, by Robert Wooster

People of the Sacred Mountain: A History of the Northern Cheyenne Chiefs and Warrior Societies, 1830–1879, by Peter J. Powell, S.J.

Personal Recollections and Observations of General Nehon A. Miles, introduction by Robert Wooster

The Plainsmen of the Yellowstone, by Mark H. Brown

Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem, by James C. Olson

Soldiers West—Biographies from the Military Frontier, edited by Paul Andrew Hutton

Spotted Tail’s Folk—A History of the Brule Sioux, by George E. Hyde

Stone Song—A Novel of the Life of Crazy Horse, by Winfred Blevins

Sweet Medicine: The Continuing Role of the Sacred Arrows, the Sun Dance, and the Sacred Buffalo Hat in Northern Cheyenne History, by Peter J. Powell, S.J.

The U.S. Army in the West, 1870-1880—Uniforms, Weapons, and Equipment, by Douglas C. McChristian

War Cries on Horseback—The Story of the Indian Wars of the Great Plains, by Stephen Longstreet

War in the West—The Indian Campaigns, by Don Rickey

Warpath and Council Fire—The Plains Indians’ Struggle for Survival in War and in Diplomacy, by Stanley Vestal

William Jackson, Indian Scout, as told by James Willard Schultz

Wolves for the Blue Soldiers—Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860- 1890, by Thomas W. Dunlay

Wooden Leg—A Warrior Who Fought Custer, interpreted by Thomas B. Marquis

Yellowstone Command—Colonel Nelson A. Miles and the Great Sioux War, 1876- 1877, by Jerome A. Greene

“Yellowstone Kelly”—the Memoirs of Luther S. Kelly, edited by Milo Milton Quaife

To the small-minded it seems that great battles must surely have horrendous death tolls. Such niggardly people point to the Alamo, the Fetterman fight, and the Custer battle—none of which had any immediate or lasting effect on the war of which it was a part.

On the other hand, the Battle of the Butte, this “Battle of Wolf Mountain,” was to seal the fate of the winter roamers, those warrior bands who for the better part of a year had stymied, defeated to fight another day, or completely crushed the finest outfits in the frontier army.

After 8 January 1877 the Cheyenne were done. What Mackenzie had begun at the Battle of the Red Fork in November was finished at Battle Butte by the Fifth Infantry. The richest tribe on the northern plains had suffered all they could. They would surrender to Miles or trudge into their agencies that spring … to begin a last and even more tragic chapter in their history at Fort Robinson (a story we will tell in a forthcoming volume).

With so little buffalo and game to feed the camps, with such extreme cold and the constant harrying by soldiers from both the north and the south, the Sioux bands splintered, fractured, never to coalesce again as they had in the spring and summer of 1876—the zenith of their greatness. As the camps fractured into bands, the bands split into clans, and the clans broke apart into family units, there seemed no longer to be any use in trying to stay together in the great camp circles that had greeted Reno’s charge that hot June day, the great confederation that had encircled and utterly crushed Custer’s five companies.

This terrible winter a man had to worry about his family—feeding them, keeping them warm, keeping them safe from the wolfish armies prowling their traditional hunting grounds.

After a while this matter of the unceded hunting grounds did not matter. There weren’t any buffalo left anyway. If a man could not be a hunter and provide for his family—of what use was he to his people?

The stormy fight at Battle Butte pierced these two great nations to the very heart of what they were as a culture. The bleeding had begun, drop by drop, that winter and continued into a cold, rainy spring. There would be no way to stop that bleeding.

The hoop was unraveling.

What once was would never be again.

Saddest of all—it was to be Crazy Horse’s last fight.

At Battle Butte he chose the ground where he would engage his antagonist, Nelson A. Miles. This was the fight that proved the Bear Coat good at his word. At the Cedar Creek parleys^* he had promised the Sioux he would not give them any rest that winter. Miles kept his vow. The winter roamers learned that the army could and would hunt them down, despite the most severe weather.

Day by day, moon by moon, it was becoming more and more clear that there would be no peace until they went in to their agencies.

This last battle for Crazy Horse was a fight that stripped the Northern Cheyenne of what little they still had left after close to a year of constant war.

This was a winter that proved to Crazy Horse that his people could not go on any longer.

After 8 January 1877, the choices were as clear as a high-country stream: follow Sitting Bull in fleeing to Canada … or limp into one of the agencies and hope for the mercy of those who have labored long and hard to defeat you.

For Crazy Horse, the greatest warrior of the Titunwan Lakota nation, the hardest thing for him to do was to consider giving up his war pony, handing over his weapons, and abandoning the path being a defender of his people. Harder still to leave the land that rested in his bones and ran in his blood.

If the Battle of the Butte accomplished nothing more, it convinced Crazy Horse that the war was over. The fight was done.

No longer was there any home on the face of his beloved land for a warrior.

Many winters before, his feet had been planted on the road that would hurtle him toward his youthful vision