It was likely easier for historians to locate and identify the Slim Buttes site than it was to determine the scout’s real first name!
Like so many other dramatic chapters of the Indian wars, the fight at Slim Buttes quickly faded from memory, thrust back into the shadows behind the more startling but no more consequential Little Bighorn battle. Thirty-one years would pass before amateur Indian wars’ historian Walter M. Camp, then editor for the “Railway Review,” would interview old Miniconjou warriors on the Standing Rock Reservation, thus learning of Crook’s attack on their village.
It took another seven years, in 1914, for Camp to convince two veterans of Crook’s campaign, Anson Mills and Charles Morton, to accompany him to South Dakota. In Belle Fourche they rented a car and drove north, but after spending several days searching along the eastern face of the buttes, neither could confirm the site of the Miniconjou village. The three returned east empty-handed.
But Camp would not be deterred. Undaunted, he pursued his quest for another three years, and finally, in June of 1917, with the help of a map drawn by Charles King as well as hours of research by Bill Rumbaugh, a ranch hand working for a local cattleman in South Dakota, Camp finally determined the battlefield site.
While working cattle across that ground year after year, Rumbaugh had discovered pieces of shattered iron cookware destroyed by Crook’s troops, spent .45/70 cases in the still-visible rifle pits, along with burned lodgepoles and the presence of human skeletal remains. Accompanied by Rumbaugh, in addition to six other local ranchers, an overjoyed Camp finally walked over that hallowed ground and verified the battle site located in the extreme northwestern corner of South Dakota. In his subsequent searches he found a variety of artifacts, including iron tea kettles, galvanized water buckets, broken butcher knives, iron hooks and handles, tin pans, basins, cups and cans, broken and melted glass bottles, broken earthware dishes, coffeepots, clothes buttons, and a stone pestle.
Still, it was the discovery of human skeletal remains that caused Camp the most excitement and speculation. One of the local ranchers took the researcher to the top of a little knoll less than a quarter of a mile from the south side of the creek. There Camp was shown a skeleton, complete but for the skull. Beneath the remains lay a burned and bent carbine barrel, as well as three spent cartridge cases.
On a knoll directly west of this first site, Camp later discovered a second skeleton in much the same condition. Not knowing at the time that Sitting Bull’s warriors had boasted of digging up the white man’s graves near the village, Camp nevertheless came to that exact conclusion years ahead of the publication of Stanley Vestal’s book.
In his own words Camp tells what he discovered:
I proposed that we look for evidence of opened graves, and this we soon found near the west edge of the village site on a low bench from the creek bottom, under a clump of buck brush that had grown up on the two mounds of earth that had been thrown out with the excavations. These two holes in the ground were three feet apart … The dirt thrown out had been weather-beaten down into flattened heaps, and enough of it had been washed back into the two trench-like openings to fill them within two feet of the general ground surface.
From subsequent inquiries of survivors of the battle I have learned that the location of these excavations is about at the place where were buried the bodies of the two soldiers (John Wenzel and Edward Kennedy) and of the scout (Charles White) killed in the fight … I am, from the evidence, led to inquire whether the Indians, who returned to the village to look for their own dead, might not have dug up these bodies, dragged them up to the two little hills, and had dances around them … Can it be, therefore, that the bones of the killed on the victorious side have been bleaching in the sunlight all these years?
Today a visitor can drive east from the small town of Buffalo for twenty-one miles, crossing over the Slim Buttes themselves. Approximately two miles west of the hamlet of Reva on the south side of the highway you will find a bronze-plaque roadside marker and the eight-foot-tall shaft of a stone monument erected on a small patch of state ground a half mile from the actual site of the village. Beyond the nearby fence the rest of the site is land owned by the family of George Lermeny, whom I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with on the phone but whom I have not had the honor of meeting in person. Lermeny’s grandfather came from Canada to settle on that ground in late 1886.
Former Sergeant John A. Kirkwood helped place the stone pylon monument that was financed by Anson Mills after Walter M. Camp confirmed the site. But, despite Camp’s protests, Mills elected to place the tall spire a half mile from the village site and close beside the highway, where the old general wanted it to be seen by the cars that passed by on that narrow east-west route. In August of 1920, three years after the ground had been identified, the markers were dedicated, complete with three separate headstones commemorating those white men who fell at Slim Buttes, all enclosed inside a tall wrought-iron fence.
Those two markers are as close as you will get to the battlefield. The passerby, tourist, amateur historian, and researcher are not allowed onto Lermeny’s property, where a third marker stands at the mouth of the ravine, indicating where Wenzel and White were killed. Erected in 1956 by the South Dakota State Historical Society, it reads:
Siege of the Ravine
American Horse, family
and six warriors ran here
at dawn attack. By noon
four warriors were dead.
American Horse, fatally
wounded, surrendered with
those left. Here Jonathan
White, “Chips,” civilian
scout, was killed.
In my phone conversations with George Lermeny, the rancher remained adamant that he wanted no further attention given to the site. “It’s been too much trouble for us already,” he said to me, then went on to tell how in recent years several researchers had come to him seeking permission to go over the village site and the surrounding hillsides with their metal detectors, and to complete analytical terrain surveys. Because those researchers subsequently wrote books on the Slim Buttes battle, Lermeny feels there’s been too much of a rising tide of publicity surrounding his family’s home.
The Reva, South Dakota, rancher told me, “We’ve had too much attention given us. I’m hoping things’ll eventually quiet down and we can go back to making a living here. This is our family business. Six generations have worked this ground. We just want to be left alone now.”
In fact, the home George Lermeny shares with his wife rests in the draw where on that rainy night of September 8, 1876, Anson Mills waited for the gray light of dawn with 150 troopers, located to the northeast (and across the present highway) from the Sioux village.
As much as I was personally disappointed in not getting a chance to meet George Lermeny and to walk that creek bottom, climb those knolls and hills south and west of the village site, look myself for the rifle pits used by Chambers’s infantry on the afternoon of September 9, then follow the path of the Fifth Cavalry’s retreat on the morning of the tenth—I can nonetheless understand his possessiveness of that beautiful piece of ground.
I can sympathize with it entirely in light of what I see done by visitors at Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, visitors to the battlefields that dot the western plains.
Shamefully, all too few American citizens are truly respectful of our past or do they truly honor the historical and spiritual significance of that sacred ground. As much as I am sorry that this is one piece of hallowed soil I did not get to walk across, much less have the opportunity to sit and listen to the ghosts whisper through the branches of the buffalo-berry bushes heavy with their bright-red fruit— I find myself in total sympathy with George Lermeny.