In an attempt to capture some of that grueling privation, as depicted in a closing scene of this novel, a photographer rode out from Deadwood with his cameras and his portable, wagon-borne darkroom to record for history through staged photographs some of what Crook’s troops managed to live through. For this alone we are indebted to photographer Stanley J. Morrow. With the assistance of Bantam Books and through the courtesy of folks at the Little Bighorn National Battlefield who searched through their photographic archives, we have in this book reproduced a few of Morrow’s momentous photos.
Perhaps the most evocative picture for me is the one showing the famous hide lodge salvaged from the captured village and used as Dr. Clements’s “hospital” for the next several days. The photo, taken after the column had reached the Black Hills, also shows the captured I Troop guidon on display. Standing left to right are scout Frank Grouard, Private W. J. McClinton (who captured the flag), and Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka. Seated left to right are Lieutenant Colonel William B. Royall (who commanded a battalion at the Battle of the Rosebud), Captain William H. Andrews (prominent for his gallantry on Royall’s flank during the Rosebud fight), Captain Anson Mills, and Lieutenant Joseph Lawson.
This last officer was generally known as a “character” among his comrades in the Third Cavalry. A native of Seamus Donegan’s Ireland, Lawson emigrated to the Ohio River country of Kentucky, where he ran a grocery store, married, and fathered five children before joining the Union Army with the outbreak of the Civil War—at the age of forty! In his remarkable career during the Indian wars, this unassuming soldier never asked any handicap of troopers half his age, being able to stay in the saddle and outride all but a handful of younger men in the Third Cavalry. Six feet tall and thin as a rail, with tobacco juice perpetually staining his scraggly red beard, Lawson had remained behind with Crook and the pack-train at the time of Reynolds’s Powder River fight, March 17, 1876. Three months later, after having displayed conspicuous courage during the Rosebud battle, the lieutenant was finally promoted to captain while Crook’s column was still recouping in the Black Hills, September 25, 1876. He would go on to distinguish himself at the Thornburg fight against Ute warriors on Colorado’s Milk River in 1879 … but there will be more on that to come in a future volume of this long-running series.
This buffalo-hide lodge was to remain the personal property of Captain Mills. Knowing that the captain did not return to the Belle Fourche with Lieutenant Bubb and the wagons loaded with supplies, choosing instead to remain behind for a day or so to recoup his strength, we can therefore determine with some accuracy that Morrow took this photo sometime after Mills rejoined the column at one of its Whitewood Creek camps.
By that time Crook and his entourage of officers and reporters were speeding back to Fort Laramie. Yet correspondent Reuben Davenport had already offered five hundred dollars to scout Jack Crawford to break away from Frank Grouard and Captain Anson Mills—and race to the dosest telegraph key. At the same time, Grouard carried dispatches for the three other reporters. In our next volume, A Cold Day in Hell you will be treated to the amusing adventures of that cross-country race between the two army scouts.
After reaching Laramie, correspondent Davenport limped on to Cheyenne, where he finally collapsed as a result of his exertions following the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition. On his sickbed the newsman completed a fifteen-thousand-word story that was promptly printed in its entirety by the New York Herald—an article in which Davenport declared that Crook should be court-martialed for his conduct on the trail. He believed the campaign from thereon out would be remembered with the same historical disgust as was Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow during a cruel Russian winter, despite the fact that “a freak of fortune” had allowed the discovery of a small village and its “inglorious” capture.
About a week after reaching Fort Laramie, John Finerty returned to Chicago, reporting to his editor, Clint Snowden, and the paper’s owner, Wilbur Storey. After a series of in-depth articles on Crook’s campaign, Finerty’s final article appeared on October 6 in the Chicago Times:
Since my return I have had to endure the usual boredom shoved upon an ephemeral human curiosity … The constitutional, inevitable, universal “damphool” has asked me a dozen times: “You weren’t in earnest when you said you lived on horse meat? Didn’t you make that up?” This species of biped jackass flourishes in every community, and can hardly be expected to be absent from Chicago.
On the second of December, 1876, the U.S. Army awarded the medal of honor to those three couriers who courageously carried General Terry’s letter south through territory believed to be teeming with hostiles, destined for Crook at his Camp Cloud Peak: Privates William Evans, Benjamin F. Stewart, and James Bell—all of E Company, Seventh U.S. Infantry.
Anson Mills would eventually secure another brevet rank of colonel for his meritorious service in launching the charge on the village at Slim Buttes. Then forty-five years later in 1921, some twenty-four years after he had retired from the army with the rank of brigadier general, and thirty-one years after Crook died, Mills applied through former commanding general of the army General Nelson A. Miles for a Medal of Honor. Those fellow officers who joined Miles in supporting the award read like a Who’s Who of officers who served with Crook’s Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition in that terrible march: Major General Samuel S. Sumner, Brigadier General Charles King, Brigadier General William P. Hall, Brigadier General Peter D. Vroom.
But, sadly, Mills had applied too long after the fact, according to the army’s regulations. Some historians believe he waited so long because his application would have been denied by Crook, who might still voice his criticism of Mills’s “precipitous” attack. If this appraisal is correct, then why did Mills wait a full thirty-one years after his old antagonist’s death?
Most confusing are two minor inconsistencies found in otherwise scholarly books. Jerome Greene puts Finerty with Davenport as the two reporters who departed with Mills on the night of 7 September. But one has only to read John Finerty’s book to learn that he stayed behind and was with Crook when George Herman, Mills’s courier, showed up to announce the taking of the village. We know there were two reporters along from their subsequent accounts of the morning battle. So from my own research poring over the microfilm copies of old issues of the Rocky Mountain News, in which “Alter Ego’s” stories of Captain Mills’s morning “fight” would later appear, I believe I can trust John S. Gray’s account that it was indeed Robert Strahorn who was there at dawn.
In yet a second discrepancy Greene appears to be the correct party. Whereas Oliver Knight gives “Alfred Milner” as the name of the soldier killed by Sioux along the Belle Fourche during the return of Major Upham’s battalion from its fruitless patrol, Greene accurately reports the name from duty rosters in the military archives as Cyrus B. Milner of Company A.
Still, it is the confusion surrounding the identity of “Buffalo Chips” White that most befuddles me. Charles King states that the scout’s name was James White. John Finerty records him as “Charley, alias Frank White.” Then we find his gravestone at the Slim Buttes battle site is inscribed with the name Jonathan White. James and Jonathan, maybe—a discrepancy caused by the slightest error in someone’s memory—but where did Finerty ever come up with Frank?