On September 5 Terry disbanded his expedition, sent Gibbon’s infantry and Brisbin’s Second Cavalry back west to Fort Ellis and Fort Shaw, then went with the Seventh Cavalry itself as it limped home to a somber Fort Abraham Lincoln draped in mourning.
If anything was to be done now, it would be up to George Crook and his Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition to do it. But first they had to find the Sioux.
As the soldiers came trudging along through the mud, weeks behind them, the warrior bands had already reached the traditional camping grounds they had been visiting for generations. Here beside the Mashtincha Putin (what they called Rabbit Lip Creek), they raised their lodges at the foot of those long gray bluffs dappled with jackpine. The Sioux term for the geographic feature, Paha Zizipela, translates to “thin (or “horizontal”) butte”—as a snake is thin and moves horizontally, in the sense of the buttes running north-south. These buttes are indeed long (fifty miles) and very thin (less than four miles in width).
The exact number of Miniconjou in that village has long remained a source of controversy. At the time of the battles Frank Grouard told Mills and Crook the village contained two hundred occupants. Anson Mills later stated that he learned from the captives that the village comprised “two hundred souls, one hundred of whom were warriors.” Yet this ratio of warriors to other occupants seems unusually high.
However, when we apply the 1855 Thomas Twiss method of counting (whereby it was determined there were two men of fighting age for every lodge—“fighting age” determined as men from their midteens to their late thirties), we find a much more likely figure of seventy-four warriors in that camp that Mills attacked at dawn.
Still, that figure might seem a little high to those knowledgeable in the Plains Indian culture. By applying Harry H. Anderson’s computations (7 Indians per normal-sized lodge, of which 1.29 are warriors), we come up with a village population of some 260 Miniconjou and 48 warriors. When you add to those 48 any boys eager to defend their families, as well as older men and a few women who would stay behind to fight—one can see how Captain Mills just might arrive at an estimate of 100 combatants he faced on the morning of September 9.
While we can verify that Crook’s combined forces numbered just shy of 2,000 men, historians have disagreed as to the number of warriors Sitting Bull led against what the Sioux believed would be only 150 pony soldiers—those who attacked at dawn with Anson Mills. Estimates range anywhere between 600 to 800, although a few winters later Sitting Bull himself would say that he had led a thousand warriors back to attack Three Stars. No matter if he did have that many—the Sioux were still up against two-to-one odds when they tried to make it tough on Crook’s retreating army.
Rumors had long existed that the soldiers had killed their warrior captives before pulling away from the village. Four years after the battle Charles King himself made note of those rumors in his Campaigning with Crook, as did Don Rickey, Jr., in Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay. But National Park Service research historian Jerome A. Greene maintains that, “There is no substantiating evidence for the charge made fifty-nine years later by a deserter from Crook’s expedition that the captured warriors were shot to death by the troops before the command left the battlefield.”
After interviewing Sioux participants in the Battle of Slim Buttes, as well as some of their relatives, author Stanley Vestal reported that the Miniconjou losses were ten killed and two wounded. According to the Ricker Papers, Red Horse claimed seven were killed and four wounded, while a third Sioux reported the dead as three men, four women, and one infant—eight total.
What we can be even more certain of is the fact that the Sioux were fired up, furious beyond words when they returned to the site of their decimated, burned-out village after driving off the stragglers at the tail end of Crook’s column retreating to the south. Aware that the warriors in the hills—as well as Crook’s prisoners later to be released— had watched the soldiers bury their dead, we can have little doubt that the Sioux did in fact dig up the graves of White, Wenzel, and Kennedy, and so too the hole where the surgeons had buried Von Leuttwitz’s leg. The warriors and squaws in mourning would almost certainly have taken out their rage and grief not only on those dead bodies, but on that amputated limb.
Of great interest to me was the discovery of all that money and those articles taken from Custer’s dead at the Little Bighorn fight. In his reminiscences Frank Grouard declared that soldiers combing through the lodges prior to their destruction found more than eleven thousand dollars. This, most would agree, is simply too grand a figure. John Finerty reported to his readers that Crook’s troops recovered nine hundred dollars. The real amount is likely to be somewhere in between, a figure closer to that given by the Chicago newsman. Allowing for a bit of pilfering here and there, one might believe there was easily twelve hundred dollars or more to be recovered in that village.
But more so even than that cash, what piqued my interest was the discovery of those ghostly relics. Just as one writer of that time stated, to come across the letters written to and by the Custer dead must have been like hearing faint, eerie voices whispering from their shallow graves beside the Greasy Grass. A matter of weeks later Sergeant Jefferson Spooner recalled that when he had been going through the lodges, he came across several noteworthy articíes:a locket, a small cabinet photo of Captain Myles Keogh, two gold-mounted ivory-handled revolvers, and a Spencer sporting rifle. The cavalry sergeant went on to state, “The picture and locket I gave to an officer of the 3rd Cav., who claimed them as a relative of the officer killed with Custer, and a revolver I gave to Capt. Rodgers of ‘A’ Co. 5th Cav. The rifle I sold some days later for two loaves of bread.”
The emphasis there is all mine! Only to remind you that in less than a week of that victory over a village filled with dried meat, Crook’s troops were on the Belle Fourche and then the Whitewood, trading what little they had with the greedy merchants who came out from the Black Hills towns to charge the soldiers five, six, even seven times the going rate (already inflated due to transportation costs to the mining settlements) for the most basic of foodstuffs!
It seems from the discovery of the Keogh photograph and that locket, from the captain’s leather gauntlets, and especially from the “Wild I” company guidon, that whoever secured those souvenirs was among those who overwhelmed that tough band of cavalrymen who attempted to hold the east side of Massacre Ridge. One report states that the swallowtail flag was tied outside the lodge of American Horse, likely attached to the smoke-flap ropes. But Anson Mills states that it was discovered “in good condition, folded up in an Indian reticule with a pair of Colonel Keogh’s gauntlets marked with his name.”
Yet Mills wasn’t the one who discovered that guidon. Charging the Sioux village, Private W. J. McClinton sprinted in with his C Troop from the Third Cavalry, and that very day presented the flag to Captain Mills. Years later when McClinton received his discharge papers from the army, he found the face of the document emblazoned in bold red ink with a testament to the fact that he had captured the guidon. Upon his discharge McClinton remained in the West, soon to become a resident of Sheridan, Wyoming, where he enjoyed a long and successful business career. More than a decade later John Bourke wrote,“[McClinton] never tires of singing the praises of General Crook and the brave men who opened up the rich valleys of the Tongue and Goose Creek [near present-day Sheridan] to settlement.”