“I Am Looking to the North for My Life”: Sitting Bull, 18761881, by Joseph Manzione
Indian Fights and Fighters, by Cyrus Townsend Brady
Indian Fights: New Facts on Seven Encounters, by J. W. Vaughn
Indians, Infants and Infantry: Andrew and Elizabeth Burt on the Frontier, by Merrill J. Mattes
The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull, by Robert M. Utley
Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, by Joe DeBarthe
The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill, by Don Russell
My Sixty Years on the Plains, by W. T. Hamilton
My Story, by Anson Mills
Nelson A. Miles: A Documentary Biography of His Military Career, 1861-1903, edited by Brian C. Pohanka
On the Border with Crook, by John G. Bourke
Paper Medicine Man: John Gregory Bourke and His American West, by Joseph C. Porter
Personal Recollections and Observations, by General Nelson A. Miles
The Plainsmen of the Yellowstone, by Mark H. Brown
Rekindling Campfires, edited by Lewis F. Crawford
The Shoshonis: Sentinels of the Rockies, by Virginia Cole Trenholm and Maurine Carley
Sitting Bulclass="underline" Champion of the Sioux, by Stanley Vestal
The Slim Buttes Battle: September 9 and 10, 1876, by Fred H. Werner
Slim Buttes, 1876: An Episode of the Great Sioux War, by Jerome A. Greene
War Cries on Horseback: The Story of the Indian Wars of the Great Plains, by Stephen Longstreet
War Eagle: A Life of General Eugene A. Carr, by James T. King
Warpath: A True Story of the Fighting Sioux, by Stanley Vestal
War-Path and Bivouac: The Bighorn and Yellowstone Expedition, by John F. Finerty
Warpath and Council Fire: The Plains Indians’ Struggle for Survival in War and in Diplomacy, 1851-1891, by Stanley Vestal
Washakie: An Account of Indian Resistance, by Grace Raymond Hebard
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
There are some who place no confidence whatsoever in Frank Grouard’s recollections when he told Joe DeBarthe years later that he scouted north from Crook’s camp and ran across that piece of ground just east of the Little Bighorn that would come to be known as Massacre Ridge. But by carefully studying the maps of the terrain between Goose Creek and the Greasy Grass, by considering how fast (or how slow) a man on horseback might travel in hostile country after dark, and finally, by adjusting what the half-breed scout recounted by as little as one day—I was able to see just how feasible it would have been for Grouard and his skittish horse to have found themselves among those naked, mutilated, bloated bodies of the Custer dead.
So it seems to me more than reasonable to expect that Grouard could get his facts skewed by a day or so—seeing as how he dictated his Ufe story decades after the fact.
Yet when I’m given an opportunity to read an account fresher than Grouard’s, something written closer to the event—I’ll go with it every time.
For example, there isn’t all that much written on the harrowing adventures of those men who went for that scout with Lieutenant Frederick Sibley. And what is available often varies in the details. Here I have relied on four sources: Sibley’s own account, Frank Grouard’s recollections, those of John Finerty, and the dictated recollections of Baptiste “Big Bat” Pourier. Since Grouard, Pourier, and Sibley all related their stories many years later, for this novel I have primarily embraced the Chicago newsman’s version (with few, minor exceptions)—since I could draw what I believed was a fresher tale from the reporter’s dispatches written immediately after his return to Camp Cloud Peak.
I would imagine that for most readers of western history the Sibley scout comes as something new, perhaps just as new as the skirmish on the Warbonnet. While that military success was small (only one Indian killed), the impact of what Merritt’s Fifth Cavalry did would long reverberate across the northern plains. Perhaps as many as eight hundred Cheyenne were turned back to their agency, unable to bolster the numbers of those warrior bands recently victorious over Crook and Custer. Yet it was something far more intangible that made the Warbonnet significant that summer of Sheridan’s trumpet on the land.
No matter how small it was—it was the army’s first victory.
Except for a few tandem-wired telephone poles, that peaceful, rolling prairie grassland near present-day Montrose, Nebraska, seems unchanged in the last hundred-plus years. The place where Cody had his celebrated duel with a Cheyenne war chief was at the time called Indian Creek in regimental returns of the day, then War Bonnet Creek in later military records, but is today called Hat Creek.
There might well be a lot of confusion for those of you who go looking in the northwest corner of Nebraska for the site of that famous skirmish, simply because all three of those names appear for three separate creeks in that immediate area. While “Hat” and “War Bonnet” are two differing translations for the same Lakota term, the name of a tributary of the Cheyenne River (Mini Pusa to the Sioux), the creek called the War Bonnet on today’s maps is some forty miles south of what is today called Hat Creek, where the Fifth Cavalry successfully ambushed Little Wolfs Cheyenne.
The creek still rises with spring runoff and falls with autumnal drought, just as it has every year as white homesteaders and cattlemen moved in and pacified the land. For more than half a century no one knew for sure where the site was, nor did anyone seem to care.
By the mid-1880s the nearby town of Montrose had grown to boast a population of sixty-five! When the Sioux began to dance back the ghosts in the summer of 1890, the frightened citizenry constructed a stockade on the highest hill in the event the ghost dancers spilled off their reservation and came looking for white scalps—the very same hill used as a lookout post by King that morning of July 17, 1876.
It would take another thirty years before anyone got interested in marking the spot, and it was a group of Wyoming citizens who ended up doing it.
In 1929, while marking Wyoming’s historic sites, the Wyoming Landmark Commission discovered that the Warbonnet skirmish might well have taken place in their state. Four men promptly formed “The Amalgamated Association of Hunters of the Spot Where Buffalo Bill Killed Yellow Hand.” Attempting to use Charles King’s book, Campaigning with Crook, the association found itself empty-handed that first summer, having been sidetracked mostly by confusing geographical names. No success, until they finally followed still-visible wagon tracks of Lieutenant Hall’s supply train. Only then did the searchers discover that the site rested less than a quarter of a mile from the buildings of Montrose.
Still the commissioners felt they needed complete verification. In October of that year the four succeeded in convincing an aging Charles King to visit the site. Eighty-four at the time and in failing health, the retired general was unable to identify the battle site.
The “trees were too big,” King said.
In July of the following year King returned west to visit the four Wyoming residents, this time joined by Chris Madsen, the Fifth Cavalry signalman who had been near the site of Cody’s duel, an emigrant soldier who would later became a famous lawman in Oklahoma Territory and charge to the top of San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders.” Madsen had none of King’s doubts. Here and there the old cavalryman led the researchers across the site, relating who did what and where. King concurred.