But all that was forgotten when the Sioux rode down on Rabbit Lip Creek to continue the Battle of Slim Buttes.
“This has to be them three hundred lodges of Oglalla the prisoners told us about!” Baptiste Pourier huffed as he rushed up, joining Donegan.
They dashed past Captain William H. Powell and his G Company, Fourth Infantry, under Crook’s orders to begin the burning of the lodges, and of everything else not already salvaged for food or souvenirs. In the midst of the growing battle, towers of oily black smoke began to rise into the leaden, heavy air.
“This bunch won’t have no problem turning back a few warriors,” Seamus replied in the noisy clamor of dogs barking, men shouting orders, the keening of women prisoners mingled with the cries of their children.
All around them men scampered up from their blankets where they had been napping, or snatched up their weapons as they leaped to their feet beside cookfires where they had been feasting on the spoils of the captured village. At long last Chambers’s infantry and the rest of Merritt’s cavalry would get a crack at the enemy. For the moment all hunger and fatigue were forgotten. This was, after all, exactly what they had marched and starved and frozen for.
“Them prisoners said there was other camps nearby too,” Bat added. “Not just the camps of Crazy Horse, He Dog, and Kicking Bear.”
Above them mirrors flashed in the hills that surrounded the natural amphitheater. To the south some among the milling horsemen signaled their answer. In a matter of minutes the entire southern perimeter seemed to crawl with hostiles as the warriors swarmed over the rolling hillside, intent on retaking the village in one fell swoop. Just beyond the soldier lines atop a trio of low ridges that stood southwest of the camp, many warriors dismounted and began a long-range duel with soldiers of the Ninth and Fourth infantries.
Crook’s first orders to his battalion commanders was to protect their stock. For days they had abandoned or shot their horses, forced to go afoot. There wasn’t a cavalryman on the battle lines now who wanted to give up what ponies they had just captured, much less lose any more of their own horses and mules to the screaming horsemen pressing in from nearly all points of the compass.
“Sound to arms, Bradley!” Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Carr bellowed to his chief trumpeter. “I won’t let the red bastards have a one of my animals!”
But just as some of Carr’s troopers reached what was left of their herd, a half-dozen Sioux horsemen on fresh, well-fed ponies rushed through their midst, stampeding more than half of the big, bone-lean, and leg-weary American horses. Reacting quickly, Corporal J. S. Clanton of Captain Montgomery’s B Troop snagged a halter and flung himself bareback aboard one of the grays, kicking furiously to catch up to the lead horse as a half-dozen other men followed in the corporal’s wake to lend a hand.
When almost among the screeching, painted enemy, Clanton drew beside the first escaping mount, leaning over to latch on to the horse’s dangling halter. He succeeded in turning it and the rest who followed just short of some thirty onrushing Sioux, making a wide five-hundred-yard circle as Lieutenant Colonel Carr watched the rescue in awestruck admiration. Returning with all of Montgomery’s grays, the men and officers of the Fifth Cavalry raised their cheers and gave Clanton a stirring round of applause.
But off to the southeast on the other side of camp, about ten Sioux horsemen had better luck, managing to break through the infantry’s lines to spook a few cavalry mounts being held in the creek bottom near the heart of the captured village.
Now in control of most of his stock, Crook ordered Major Chambers to have his infantry retake the high ground just seized by the enemy southwest of the village. Chambers directed Captain Andrew Burt to take two companies of the Fourth, along with one of the Ninth and one of the Fourteenth regiments, to move out on the double from their bivouac at the north side of the camp, rushing straight through the smoking village and across the stream to climb the cutbank, where they began to push back the sudden and fierce attack.
On the nearby slopes the Sioux taunted, yelled insults, exposed themselves, and patted their rumps to show their contempt for their enemy.
“Steady, men!” shouted the officers scampering up and down that line of infantry. “Keep your proper intervals!”
“Don’t fire until you get in range!” ordered a sergeant to his platoon as they crossed the creek to join in the fray. “C’mon, now. Forward at double time!”
After a volley the sergeant growled, “Dammit, Sparks, are you firing at the Black Hills? Never waste a shot, boys!”
Throwing the heat of his very own H Company of the Ninth under Lieutenants Charles M. Rockefeller and Edgar B. Robertson, along with Captain Gerhard L. Luhn’s F Company of the Fourth and the Fourteenth’s C under the command of Captain Daniel W. Burke, Captain Burt temporarily held Lieutenant Henry Seton’s D Company of the Fourth in reserve. At the same time Burt called up three additional companies to hold the cutbank itself, then leapfrogged ahead, pushing his battalion forward, attempting to wrench the momentum away from the enemy. There on the slopes of those southwestern hills most of this second fight in the Battle of Slim Buttes was to rage until nightfall.
It did not take long for more of the Sioux to realize where the soldiers had herded most of the cavalry horses. Rushing in a wide arc around the eastern perimeter of the village, the warriors put great pressure on what few troops Merritt had left behind to watch over the herds. As soon as he saw the sweeping blur of the enemy rushing past him, Major Alexander Chambers, recognizing the move for what it was, ordered two companies of the Ninth Infantry to move out at double time north of the village site, charged with holding the ridges against the threat to flank the soldiers.
At the same time that Merritt was ordering Lieutenant Frederick Sibley’s E Company to station themselves as a rear guard to drive in all stragglers and used-up horses still coming in, he also ordered Major Henry E. Noyes forward with a mounted I Troop of the Second Cavalry to set up a skirmish line east of the village. They were the only troopers to fight on horseback. The rest of the horse soldiers from the Second, Third, and Fifth regiments inched forward on foot, making dismounted foragers’ charges in conjunction with the infantry.
Throughout the late-afternoon battle Crook’s destruction of the camp continued uninterrupted.
Moving from hilltop to hilltop above the jagged soldier skirmish lines rode a war chief atop a white horse. He first appeared near the bottom southeast of camp, then he was seen leading warriors to attempt to capture some horses, then minutes later he was spotted rallying warriors on the three hills southwest of the dismounted cavalry. Because of what American Horse and the other prisoners had warned the soldiers, Crook’s men believed this warrior was Crazy Horse.
However, old Sioux veterans of the battle would one day attest to the fact that it was instead Sitting Bull who made himself the most visible and taunting target of the afternoon.
Right in the heart of the fray stood Captain Julius Mason’s battalion of Fifth Cavalry, where the Sioux hurled their first massed charge, screaming down the slopes, against the soldier lines. Yard by yard as the troopers pushed back against the horsemen, Sergeant Edmund Schreiber of Charles King’s own K Company fell. Less than a minute later a bullet tumbled Private August Dorn of D Troop.