But while that guidon went to Mills’s care, the story is yet incomplete. Not long after the arduous campaigns of the great Sioux War, Anson Mills loaned the relic, among other “trophies,” to the Museum of the Military Service Institution on Governor’s Island, New York. Years later upon its return he was dismayed at how the museum curators had allowed moths to have their way with the flag. He promptly had it encased in glass, and after the old soldier’s death, the Mills family donated it to the Custer Battlefield National Monument (now renamed the Little Bighorn Battlefield). There visitors can see that very same guidon that flew over the heads of Myles W. Keogh’s I Company as they stood their ground along Massacre Ridge, then fell into the dust when the standard-bearer died on that hillside, and finally traveled with the victorious Sioux to Dakota Territory—there to be recaptured by the U.S. Cavalry.
There is still something of a controversy regarding these relics. Are they, in fact, a “smoking gun” proving that this band of Miniconjou were indeed at the Little Bighorn battle? Years afterward Indians on the Standing Rock Reservation claimed that Iron Plume (as American Horse was better known among his people) had not been at the Greasy Grass fight at all. They testified that the Seventh Cavalry relics were instead brought into American Horse’s camp by visiting Oglalla in those eleven weeks after the soldiers were wiped out.
Nonetheless, Jerome Greene has stated there is sufficient evidence to believe that some of the warriors who were in that camp on the morning of 9 September had also been camped beside the Little Bighorn on the afternoon of 25 June. Perhaps most compelling are the words of Miniconjou Red Horse given to Judge Eli Ricker in his statement testifying that he was at both fights.
It seems conceivable to me that both sides in this controversy are correct. It is not hard at all to believe that in American Horse’s village that September morning there were both those who had fought the Seventh Cavalry on that hot summer day eleven weeks before, and those who had joined up with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse only in the days immediately following their great victory. The Indian populations of various warrior bands and clan groupings underwent growth and shrinkage throughout that spring, summer, and into the fall, with much coming and going as the seven great circles finally merged in the days before crushing Custer, then almost immediately began to slowly disperse and mosey off to the four winds as Crook and Terry sat on their thumbs—not knowing what to do.
Despite their hunger for a victory of some kind over the Sioux who had defeated the Seventh Cavalry, there was considerable disagreement, and outright argument, over Captain Mills’s attacking a village of unknown strength without first alerting Crook. The general himself criticized Mills for not having sent a courier back during the long night of the eighth, upon Grouard’s discovering the enemy camp. This, Crook attested, would have given him time to bring up the whole column, surrounding the camp and preventing the escape of all those “two hundred” Sioux into the nearby hills and bluffs.
Another source of heated discussion among Crook’s officers was the fact that Mills had opened up the battle with a dangerously limited supply of ammunition. All this criticism quickly made its way into the press of the day. Robert Strahorn wrote in his dispatches to the Rocky Mountain News:
Crook was very much disappointed because Mills didn’t report his discovery last night, and there was plenty of time to have got the entire command there and so effectually surrounded the village that nothing would have escaped; but the General is also pleased, all things considered.
Reuben Davenport of the New York Herald, never a fan of Crook, nonetheless took this opportunity to rebuke Mills:
All the circumstances lead to the inevitable conclusion that had Col. [Mills] reported the discovery to headquarters, instead of attempting to steal a march on the camp himself, the whole column could easily have reached and effectually surrounded the entire village before daylight … instead of this village of over 250 to 300 hostile savages getting off with whole skins, they could easily have been swooped down upon and annihilated.
How unfortunate that none of those contemporaries of Captain Anson Mills appear to have asked one simple question: what was the best information Mills operated with at the time of his discovery of the village? When he departed from the main column, pushing on with Lieutenant Bubb to secure provisions from the Black Hills settlements, Crook informed Mills and his lieutenants that he would be remaining in bivouac that next day and not moving south on Mills’s trail until the morning of the ninth.
So when Grouard discovered the hunters, then the pony herd, and finally the village late on that rainy afternoon of the eighth—Anson Mills had nothing to indicate that George Crook and the rest of the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition were anywhere but a minimum of thirty-five miles or more to their rear, right back where his battalion had left them. To send a courier on that backtrail wouldn’t have made much sense, at least to me—because given the condition of Crook’s men and animals, no courier could have conceivably crossed thirty-five miles of that treacherous, muddy country to reach Crook, and no column could have then marched another thirty-five miles across the same gumbo prairie, in time to launch a concerted attack at dawn!
Everything considered—the distant position of reinforcements from Crook’s column, and Mills’s dangerously low supply of ammunition—I believe the captain made the only decision he could, and all arguments then and now are nothing more than niggling, meaningless carping.
Still, it isn’t hard for me to understand the conditions that would make such heated debates arise: great, passionate welling of sentiment from those who continued to suffer the terrible privations of that campaign, two harrowing days of battle, and the additional horrors of their horse-meat march between Owl and Willow creeks. Simply put, we must remember that those soldiers had been in the wilderness for four and a half months without leave or relief.
In the Huntington Library collections we find the papers of Lieutenant Walter S. Schuyler, who wrote to his father upon Crook’s return to Fort Laramie:
It has been a march through the heart of the enemy’s country, almost wholly unexplored by white men, and thoroughly misunderstood by them, a march which has tried men’s souls as well as their constitutions, a march which will live in our history as the hardest ever undertaken by our army, and on which the privation and hardship were equaled only by the astonishing health of the command while accomplishing it.
Years after that grueling march of survival and sheer willpower, Lieutenant John Bourke found his own health failing. In writing his book, On the Border With Crook, he asked his public to study the roster of those soldiers who had suffered terribly through twenty-two days of constant hunger, cold, and rain.
If any of my readers imagines that the march from the head of Heart River down to the Belle Fourche was a picnic, let him examine the roster of the command and tell of the scores and scores of men, then hearty and rugged, who now fill premature graves or drag out an existence with constitutions wrecked and enfeebled by such privations and vicissitudes.
Fourteen years later in his short story about the campaign, which he titled “Van,” Charles King wrote:
We set out with ten days’ rations on a chase that lasted ten weeks … We wore out some Indians, a good many soldiers, and a great many horses. We sometimes caught the Indians, and sometimes they caught us. It was hot, dry summer weather when we left our wagons, tents, and extra clothing; it was sharp and freezing before we saw them again.