Looking over the scorched countryside they entered that August morning as the column followed Prairie Dog Creek down to its junction with the Tongue, King worried over Crook’s decision not to increase the size of his pack-train, using extra animals to haul forage for the horses. As far as the eye could see to the north and east, the blackened, sooty land lay devastated by prairie fire. Truth was, in order to pack even those fifteen days of rations, the command was required to strip itself down to the lightest of marching order.
If they made good time, and the fates were with them, Charles tried to cheer himself as the sun grew hot and the sooty cinders rose in dark clouds under every scuffling foot and plodding hoof—then Crook’s men would be eating from Terry’s stores at the Rosebud depot. But that hope meant Crook was clearly relying on the other columns having enough in their larder to share with the Wyoming expedition.
No two ways about it, the young lieutenant decided, the general was gambling against the house on this one: entrusting the lives of twenty-three hundred men and nearly three thousand animals to no more than their prayers for good weather, good grass, and just plain good luck.
*Site of present-day Sheridan, Wyoming.
Chapter 26
8-10 August 1876
Gen. Miles to the Front—Strength and
Purpose of the Hostiles
BISMARCK, D.T., July 25—The six companies of infantry under Gen. Miles arrived yesterday, and left for the Yellowstone this morning, taking on board here one hundred and sixty recruits, two three-inch Rodman guns, forces and supplies. Army officers generally blame Crook for a failure to cooperate with Terry, believing that he was anxious to win laurels without assistance or interference. One gentleman, but little inferior in rank, insists that Crook knows little of the plans of the enemy, and lacks the experience desireable in one commanding an army operating against a wily and savage foe. All agree that one of the greatest mistakes in the campaign is the under estimate of the number of the Sioux, and of their disposition to fight. General Miles says he is satisfied that nearly all the fighting men from Standing Rock are out. He stopped there long enough to look the ground over; and the agent at Lower Brule adds that his Indians are all out, and those from the Cheyenne agency, not to speak of Spotted Tail and Red Cloud are certainly with them. The hostiles have been largely reinforced since the battle … A Sioux scout in the employ of the government at Fort Rice, after the recent battle said he always knew the Sioux outnumbered the whites, and that he believed they would conquer in the end. The idea prevails to a great extent among the warriors who go into the campaign, that they are better armed than the whites, with a knowledge of every ravine in the country, and almost every tree from behind which an Indian can shoot a cavalry man and they are confident that they will win. Well informed river and frontiersmen insist that the Indians have an effective fighting force of at least 10,000 well armed and abundantly supplied.
With Nelson A. Miles in the lead and the regimental band playing the rousing, patriotic air “Sherman’s March to the Sea,” six companies of the Fifth Infantry had boarded sixteen stuffy Missouri Pacific freight cars at Leavenworth, Kansas, early on the evening of 12 July and rumbled north by rail through towns heavily draped in black bunting to mourn the Little Bighorn dead. All the way to Yankton, South Dakota, they rode, where to the cheers of an immense throng of well-wishers at the dock the colonel’s foot soldiers marched two by two up the gangplank and crowded onto the decks of the E. H. Durfee, a steampowered stern-wheeler that would take them up the Missouri to Fort Buford at the mouth of the Yellowstone, then to the Rosebud Landing where, early on the afternoon of 2 August, nearly four hundred men of the Fifth marched down the gangplank onto the soil of Montana Territory, reinforcing General Alfred Terry’s battered, butchered, and demoralized command.
On their crawl north against the Missouri’s current, Miles had been overjoyed to see the citizens of those riverside communities turn out to wave handkerchiefs, hold up banners of good wishes, and raise their voices as the steamer chugged its way into Dakota Territory. But upon passing the Standing Rock Agency, the colonel grew angry when he learned that the agent there had recently delivered nearly one hundred thousand rounds of ammunition to nonagency Indians.
Possessors of a proud and honored tradition of battle readiness that dated back to the earliest days of the Republic, the Fifth Infantry had been organized in 1798. Over the next fourteen years the regiment was periodically disbanded; reactivated, then ultimately consolidated with other units during the War of 1812. From that point on, however, the Fifth stood proud and alone through the Black Hawk war of 1841-42, then marched courageously across the border to fight the Mexican War of 1845-48. No less a hero than the redoubtable Major General Zachary Taylor had commanded the Fifth at the battles of Resaca de la Palma and on to Monterrey. Later placed under the leadership of Major General Winfield Scott, the regiment distinguished itself at Churubusco and Molino del Rey, as well as when storming the walls of the palace at Chapultepec, which finally brought about the surrender of Mexico City.
For the next few years the Fifth was posted in Indian Territory, then briefly used in fifty-seven to quell a Seminole uprising in Florida. Before long the regiment proudly marched beneath its banners back to the opening frontier, part of the government’s war against the uprising of Brigham Young’s Mormons in Utah Territory. During the long and bloody conflict of the Civil War back east, the Fifth remained in New Mexico Territory, capably holding the thin blue line against Confederate incursions from Texas, principally at Peralta and Apache Canyon.
In the days of the army’s reorganization following the treaty at Appomattox, the Fifth was included in the Department of the Missouri, assigned to garrison the Kansas Forts Riley, Hays, and Wallace, as well as Fort Lyon in Colorado Territory. After seeing extensive service during the Cheyenne outbreak in sixty-eight, the regiment was consolidated with the old Thirty-seventh Infantry when it acquired a new commander, Nelson A. Miles.
Through his leadership the colonel had proudly seen the Fifth become one of the finest Indian-fighting outfits on the plains—tested by the Kiowa, Southern Cheyenne, and the powerful Comanche in the Red River War of 1874-75. So grew his reputation as a hard-bitten, no-nonsense officer, yet a soldier at times unashamedly sentimental, as when his men rescued two young white girls, the German sisters, held captive by the Cheyenne.*
Standing now on the deck of the Far West, at the door to the room General Terry was using as his office, Nelson remembered that Sunday morning of the twenty-third of July when the E. H. Durfee reached the landing across the river from Bismarck, Dakota Territory. He had quickly disembarked ahead of his troops and hurried up the slope to Fort Abraham Lincoln to pay his respects to Custer’s widow. How he had struggled to find words to express himself, looking into Libbie’s face, reading the anguish in those red-rimmed eyes … and scolding himself for thinking almost exclusively of his own wife, Mary. Would she survive so great a tragedy? he asked himself again.