was not Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa, but agency Yanktonais instead. So Miles sent Bruguier off to visit the various camps of agency Indians in the surrounding area, to tell them that their leaders must come the following morning for a meeting with the soldier chief.
On the eighteenth Miles held his audience with the Fort Peck bands, gleaning from them some idea of just where the soldiers might find Sitting Bull, as well as seeing for themselves the shabby condition of those winter roamers who once more clustered around the great chief instead of returning to their agencies. They told the Bear Coat that their horses were poor and they hadn’t had much time to hunt buffalo for meat and the hides needed to replace those lodges abandoned after the Fifth Infantry’s attack at Cedar Creek.
Kelly figured it would clearly be a long, hard winter for the hostile bands if Miles did indeed push and harry the Sioux as he had vowed he would do.
That Saturday night, after conferring with his officers, scouts, and Bruguier about dividing his command for the coming chase because of the vast amount of territory they would have to cover in the pursuit, Nelson A. Miles composed a letter to Sherman:
We have divided Sitting Bull’s people and … his strength and influence is fast breaking down…. Give me command of this whole region and I will soon end this Sioux War. … I would be very glad to govern [the hostile bands] afterwards.
In addition he once more boasted that he had done it all without the aid of cavalry—the horse soldiers that Terry and Crook had so unsuccessfully depended upon throughout the summer and into the fall.
I can hunt them down on foot…. [But] it is not easy for ten small Infy companies with broken down mules & four scouts to confine the whole Sioux nation.
And Miles was quick to tell his uncle-in-law that such an accomplishment as that would justifiably merit him either the command of a department of his own or perhaps even a stint at secretary of war in Washington City.
But he refrained from telling Sherman of the anger and disgust his men felt as they were forced to watch some of the very chiefs and warriors they had battled at Cedar Creek walking about the grounds of Fort Peck as smug and cocky as could be, carrying Henry and Winchester rifles in one hand, while in the other the Sioux clutched a ration card that guaranteed them food from the same government they had been fighting for the better part of a year. That irony wasn’t lost on many of Miles’s officers after the privations they had suffered in their cold march up from the mouth of the Tongue.
Essentially, the army knew there were three groups still out as winter closed its paw on the countryside: the Northern Cheyenne under Dull Knife and Little Wolf; the Southern Sioux, who banded with Crazy Horse and were said to be wintering south in the Powder River country; and these northern hostiles who loosely banded around Sitting Bull.
“If we don’t round them up and herd them in now, this very winter, Mary,” the colonel said quietly, speaking to his wife far, far away that night, “these same bastards will be out again come spring: resupplied, rearmed, with their ponies fattened on the government dole.”
As he went to sleep that night, Nelson A. Miles vowed he would do everything in his power to see that such a spring would never come for the Sioux.
The following morning, the nineteenth, Bruguier learned from some of the loose-lipped agency Indians that Sitting Bull’s lodges were camped about forty miles above Fort Peck in the Black Buttes region south of the Missouri. This exciting news caused Miles no small measure of pride, thinking that his presence had turned the Hunkpapa back, away from the march they first appeared to have started, heading for the Canadian border.
That afternoon the colonel split the Fifth Infantry into two battalions. He planned to ride out personally to the west at the head of six companies—A, B, E, G, H, and I—as well as taking along the Napoleon gun, a heavy fieldpiece firing a twelve-pound shell. He spent the better part of that day ferrying over the men in those six companies to the north bank of the river and distributing rations.
At the same time Miles deployed Captain Simon Snyder to command the other four companies—C, D, F, and K—along with a small party of civilian scouts and the Rodman ordnance gun on a countermarch to the southwest, back up Big Dry Creek, where he would expect to rendezvous with Miles at the Black Buttes in eight to ten days. After Luther Kelly’s party of scouts was done scouting downriver, Kelly was instructed to rejoin Snyder’s column near the Buttes.
“My sources tell me there’s only two ways into that rugged country, Captain.”
Snyder nodded with a grin beneath his shaggy mustache. “You’ll come in the front door … and I’ll come in the back.”
“Precisely,” Miles replied, closing his hands like the jaws of a trap. “With Sitting Bull caught napping between us.”
At dawn on the twentieth both battalions were off.
In the cold, chilling darkness Miles led his men up the high ridge behind the agency buildings and onto the freight road that would lead them up the Missouri to Carroll City. But before midmorning he had his scouts turn the column away from the road, leading his battalion south by west to follow Willow Creek upstream into a barren, windswept, austere country where nothing but greasewood and cactus could survive. Under granite skies time and again the soldiers had to chop and saw tree branches they used to corduroy the creek bottom so they could make themselves a ford suitable enough for their wagons.
Back and forth they repeatedly crossed the twisting Willow, splashing up to their knees in the icy slush and soupy, sandy quicksand more than twenty times in the next two days. Up one icy hillside they would scramble, then slip down the snowy, frozen far slope as the air turned colder.
Lieutenant Baldwin rode up and halted his mount near Miles as the column below them slowly slogged its way up the convolutions of Willow Creek. “I’ve seen some bad country down on the Staked Plain before, General,” he admitted. “But I’ve never encountered anything as desolate and godforsaken as this.”
Miles took the field glasses from his eyes and nodded. “About as barren as an abandoned barn’s floor, Mr. Baldwin.”
On Wednesday the battalion awoke to find a thick, cold fog shrouding the entire countryside. With their visibility cut to less than a quarter mile, William Jackson was reduced to leading the soldiers with the aid of his compass. Early in the afternoon near the headwaters of the Willow, Baldwin requested a brief leave from the column to climb a high and prominent butte, where he pulled out his penknife and scratched into the sandstone:
“What do the Sioux call this place, Bruguier?” Miles asked late that afternoon after his troops had put nineteen exhausting miles behind them and were going into bivouac in a place far from the protection of the cold wind.
“Not for sure,” Johnny answered. “Maybe this is the creek Sitting Bull’s people call The Creek Where the Women Were Killed.*
Robert Jackson inquired, “How’d it get its name?”
With a shrug the half-breed answered, “Story goes the Blackfeet killed some Sioux women here years back.”
The sun rose gloriously on the morning of the twenty-third, dispelling the last remnants of chilling fog and raising the men’s spirits. That day they pushed southwest into the lush, grassy valley of Fourchette Creek, long favored by buffalo and all manner of game including grouse, prairie chickens, and sage hens. From time to time that afternoon herds of antelope would halt atop a far hill and gaze for a moment at the column of soldiers—some of whom thought the four-legged pronghorns in the distance were Sioux horsemen preparing their ambush and attack.
That night the temperature dropped all the way to twelve degrees, but by midafternoon on the twenty-fourth the temperature had climbed to fifty-eight, causing the men to sweat as they marched along the grassy banks of the Fourchette. By four P.M. Miles had them establishing camp for the night after making another twelve miles in their chase.
At breakfast on the twenty-fifth, having struggled more than a hundred miles from Fort Peck, Miles called Andrew S. Bennett to his fire.
“Captain.”
“Good morning, General.”
