Chapter 2
4-17 November 1876
I congratulate you and all concerned on the prospect of closing this Sioux war…. Genl Miles has displayed his usual earnestness & energy and I hope he will crown his success by capturing or killing Sitting Bull and his remnant of outlaws.
—General William T. Sherman,
telegram to General Philip H. Sheridan
If army command thought they had their war all but won, they would soon learn just how overoptimistic they could be.
Dismissing their earlier plans to remove all the Sioux hostiles to Indian Territory as impractical, Sherman and Sheridan were now at work planning to corral the defeated warrior bands on a tiny tract of land between Standing Rock Agency and Fort Randall along the west bank of the Missouri River. There they believed the army could keep an eye on the dismounted and disarmed Sioux as they were turned into Christian farmers.
But first the army had to catch the winter roamers.
During the two days following his arrival at Tongue River Cantonment, Frank Baldwin, Miles’s newly appointed adjutant for the campaign, joined the other officers readying their command to take to the field. Miles purchased a small herd of cattle from a private contractor upriver—enough beef to supply ten thousand rations for his troops on the coming march. Two civilian wranglers were hired to watch over the herd. In the meantime a supply train of Bozeman vegetables arrived from the mouth of the Bighorn, escorted by elements of Lieutenant Colonel Elwell S. Otis’s Twenty-second Infantry.
Otis himself was on his way downriver, replaced back on the twenty-eighth of October by Major Alfred L. Hough as commander of the Glendive Cantonment, charged with protecting the wagon trains that supplied Tongue River. An old war veteran himself, Hough was galled to find the horrid conditions his men suffered at their outpost as the season turned cold. The paltry number of crude huts Otis expected to protect the soldiers from the coming winter were woefully inadequate. With no cots nor mattresses at Glendive, the Seventeenth were forced to sleep on a corduroy of poles and sagebrush to keep their bodies off the cold ground. In those last few days of October, Hough’s men immediately began to construct more dugouts while others labored to lay in more firewood once they learned from army command that they would not be abandoning the upper river for the approaching winter.
Miles wanted the Seventeenth to remain active and alert, guarding the country along the Yellowstone east of the Tongue while he himself went in search of Sitting Bull.
On the fourth of November the quartermaster at Tongue River issued the Fifth Infantry some of that special clothing Miles had ordered sent upriver so that his regiment could conduct their continued campaign.
“I am satisfied that if the Indians can live here on the northern plains in the winter,” Miles told his officer corps, “white men can also—if properly equipped with all the advantages we can give our troops, which are certainly superior to those obtainable by the Indians.”
Baldwin and many of the others agreed. They and their men had suffered during the winter campaign against the Southern Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche during the Buffalo Wars. Still, as cold as the weather had been in the panhandle of Texas, it in no way prepared the Fifth Infantry for what they were about to be asked to endure on the plains of Montana Territory.
Even Sherman himself had written to Miles, “Winter on the Yellowstone is another matter from winter on the Red River.”
While General Terry did not actually expect Miles to conduct a campaign under the frigid conditions known to batter the northern prairie, the colonel had never been the sort to sit on his hands. North of the Yellowstone, where Miles planned to pursue the hostiles of Sitting Bull, the capricious weather could one day be pleasant and sunny, whereas the next could find a man fighting a blizzard as temperatures plummeted far enough to freeze the mercury at the bottom of a surgeon’s thermometer. And then there was the much-feared factor of windchill. An ambient temperature of ten degrees below zero—which was the daily high documented time and again by the written record of the Fifth Infantry over the next month—would with any sort of wind behind it have the brutal effect of anywhere between fifty-eight to sixty-eight below.
As the Fifth had already learned about being stationed in Montana Territory, the wind is a constant companion.
Already the colonel had requested the Quartermaster Corps to ship him arctic clothing from the closest supply depot, as well as asking that buffalo coats and leggings be constructed for his men. But that equipment, along with the Sibley tents he had begged for, had yet to arrive. Miles remained undeterred—his regiment would march in the best they could muster for the moment: layers of army wool draped them from head to toe, as well as some burlap feed sacks the men wrapped around their feet to do what they could to prevent frostbite.
At dawn on Sunday, 5 November, the Fifth Infantry began muscling the ropes lashed to their crude ferries, cordelling those ungainly craft across the Yellowstone to the north bank. Back and forth the ferries plied the frothy current, every trip burdened with two of the campaign’s thirty-eight supply wagons all loaded with a month’s rations, each wagon to be pulled by a six-mule hitch. Already the river’s surface was beginning to slake with ice and the wind was blustering down the valley. It was destined to be an early, and long, winter on the northern plains.
Plowing through three additional inches of new snow the following morning, the entire command eventually marched away from the north bank to begin their search for Sitting Bull. While two companies of Hough’s Twenty- second Infantry stayed behind to garrison the post, Miles rode at the head of 15 officers and more than 430 foot soldiers. Joining the infantry were 10 civilians and 2 Indian scouts. With them came the twelve-pound Napoleon gun and three-inch Rodman ordnance rifle, both of which had proved so successful in putting the Sioux village to flight at Cedar Creek. In addition to his wagon train—which carried 250 rounds of rifle ammunition for each man—Miles brought along two ambulances, an assortment of pack mules, and that small beef herd.
After reaching Sunday Creek the scouts led the command roughly north across a rugged piece of country, where many times the men were required to construct crude bridges or corduroy the sides of ravines for their wagons. After making no more than nine grueling miles, the Fifth went into camp late that first afternoon as the sun began to set.
“It’s election day, General,” Baldwin cheered the morning of the seventh as Miles stomped up to the fire in the gray light of dawn.
“Let’s hope the folks back east get us a president who won’t let the army shrink any more than Congress has done to us already.”
The sun came out, eventually warming the air and turning the snow to slush beneath every hoof, wagon wheel, and waterlogged boot. Through a countryside dotted with greasewood and cactus the men trudged and shivered, forced to cross and recross Sunday Creek more than a dozen times in less than five hours. At twilight many of the weary men gathered around hasty fires, wolfed down their rations, and curled into their two blankets with a bunkie.
Setting off before dawn beneath a bright moon, they made nineteen miles that eighth day of November, following the tributaries of Sunday Creek as the command climbed the barren divide that would eventually drop them into the drainage of the alkali-laced Little Dry Creek. Here they began to see more in the way of buffalo and antelope along their route.
Frank Baldwin spotted the long-haired civilian scout appear on the hilltop ahead, loping back to rejoin Miles at the head of the column.
“The Jackson brothers agree with me, General.”
“How’s that, Kelly?”
“This country east of the Musselshell and south of the Missouri just happens to be some of the prime feeding
