Twice John G. Bourke had narrowly escaped death: once at the Reynolds’s fight, when he barely made the retreat, and again at the Rosebud fight, when he found himself alone during that horse charge and had to wheel and gallop back to safety just ahead of the enemy’s bullets—bullets that struck the soldier racing beside him.*
Perhaps we should slow down our twentieth-century rush and pay heed to such an experienced soldier when, after all that he had been through, John Bourke began in 1877 to question the struggle of which he had been such an integral part, the mindless machinery that had cost so many lives, both red and white.
From here on out, the lieutenant will lay down his carbine and pistol and pick up a far mightier weapon: his pen.
And while we’re on the subject of plunder, I often found among the literature much made of the Pawnee scouts’ abilities as talented plunderers. Luther North was quick to point out that his battalion of scouts ended up with less from the lodges than did the soldiers themselves. What the Pawnee did ride away with it seems they paid for in one way or another. What about those saddles they left behind at the East Gap that morning just moments before the attack? Perfectly natural for the North brothers to assume that the Sioux and Cheyenne scouts cut the cinches and straps—making the saddles all but unusable—if for no other reason than the Sioux and Cheyenne scouts had followed the Pawnee into the valley that morning.
But doesn’t it somehow seem just as reasonable to consider that one or more of Morning Star’s warriors took some revenge on that property they happened upon in wandering southeast across the difficult terrain—perhaps searching for an ideal sniping position? No one was ever charged with the crime, nor has any-person or band ever claimed responsibility for the act. It simply remains one of those nagging mysteries with which the Indian wars are so rife.
Before we leave the Pawnee, it might be interesting to note that Luther North very nearly missed that dawn charge!
So weary was he by the time they reached the point where Mackenzie had his men wait and form up for the charge, that North ordered one of the Pawnee to switch his saddle over to the strong Sioux pony he had captured in Red Cloud’s village. While that was being done, he trudged over to some nearby rocks where he could get out of the cold wind and sat down, immediately falling asleep.
When Mackenzie began to call for the men to mount up, Frank went looking for his brother, sending out some Pawnee, who returned unsuccessful. Lucky for Luther that he awoke himself with the growing clamor and happened to stumble out just in time to leap aboard his Sioux war pony at the very moment his brother Frank ordered the Pawnee to charge—the first horsemen into the valley.
After all the trouble Major Frank North was caused about his own captured Sioux pony by an indignant Three Bears and his Sioux scouts at Fort Fetterman, as well as on the march north—he finally elected to sell the horse to “a white scout who took him to the Shoshoni agency in the Wind River mountains, where he soon won the reputation of being the fastest runner in that section of the country.” Unfortunately, history does not tell us if that white scout was Tom Cosgrove or Yancy Eckles.
As had been the fate of the Sioux ponies, the captured Cheyenne ponies were later divided among the scouts, as I’ve told you, with the remainder being sold at auction. But the loss to the Cheyenne people cannot solely be measured in terms of ponies captured and lodges destroyed. The toll in human life was, as always, hardest to bear. Their casualties were never fully known until the tribe came in to surrender at Red Cloud Agency over the next year, when they ultimately submitted a list of forty warriors killed in the Dull Knife fight, but refused to speak of how many were wounded. Even sadder still, Cheyenne etiquette did not allow them to utter a word of the children and old people who froze to death escaping winter’s grip on the Big Horns. Only from what knowledgeable old soldiers and frontiersmen saw of the many gashed arms and legs of those mourning and grieving widows and orphan girls could they tell that the Cheyenne had paid a terrible price in Mackenzie’s victory. Especially in the cruel, hand-to-hand fighting at the deep ravine where the members of the tribe said at least twenty Cheyenne fell, the majority of the warrior dead.
What seems most significant to me about this campaign is that rather than merely pitting soldier against Indian—even more than pitting those longtime white allies like Shoshone and Crow and Pawnee against the Sioux and Cheyenne—this battle hurled Sioux and Cheyenne scouts from the Red Cloud Agency against the Cheyenne of Morning Star and Little Wolf. This Powder River Expedition therefore becomes as much an Indian tragedy as it is an Indian-wars tragedy.
Why would some men be induced to scout against their own people?
First of all, we might consider that these were men totally steeped in a warrior tradition. They were trained for battle, taught to regard ponies and rifles as the only legitimate displays of one’s manhood. When offered the chance to go riding off to war, even against the members of one’s own band, such a venture would likely seem much more preferable to endless days of boredom and confinement on the reservation.
Certainly there were others, especially among the Sioux scouts, who used the army’s need for their services as a wedge or lever to extract what they in turn wanted from the white man—in the way of pay, ponies, weapons, and so on.
But in the end, we must remember that while the white man saw the Sioux as Sioux, and the Cheyenne as Cheyenne, there were not only separate bands among each tribe, but separate kin-based clans and extended-family groupings as well. Loyalties went first to those family clans rather than some loose confederation of the Ohmeseheso, or the Oglalla, or the Hunkpapa. In addition, the record shows that some of the army scouts believed they were doing what they considered to be right by their people in going to help the soldiers drive their nomadic cousins back to their reservations. Such a life would be better for them in the end, they rationalized, better than being chased and harried, shot and impoverished, after all.
So the presence of those Sioux and Cheyenne scouts was vital not only to demoralize the Morning Star warriors, but the scouts had already played an important role in knowing how and where to locate the village. They were the ones who stayed behind among the rocks while the rest scampered down the backtrail to inform Mackenzie to hurry up. They were the ones who made possible the long-night march through the rugged mountain terrain. And they were the ones who played a prominent role in the day’s fighting: showing themselves to the Morning Star Cheyenne, thereby exacting a demoralizing effect hour after hour as the destruction of the village began.
For generations afterward there was bad blood between many of the Sioux and Cheyenne groups. Like Wooden Leg, many of the Cheyenne were highly critical of those who would come with the soldiers “to kill their friends.” For years many of the tribe did not allow stories to be told by those who had served as scouts for Crook and Mackenzie. Wooden Leg had himself lost a brother in the battle, and for years he often wondered if one of the Cheyenne scouts who had come with the ve-ho-e had killed him.
Forgiveness would come hard. Very, very hard.
Without a doubt, that winter campaign signaled the end of the great Sioux-Cheyenne coalition that had crushed Custer, twice held Crook at bay, and given Phil Sheridan one hell of an ulcer. No more would the warrior bands so readily trust one another.
The first of the Cheyenne limped into the Red Cloud Agency by January 1877. Dull Knife himself would surrender in April of that year, saying to Mackenzie, “You are the one I was afraid of when you came here [to Camp Robinson] last summer.”