“You have no idea of the gloom that overhangs that post with twenty-seven widows,” he had written home to Leavenworth, trying to explain to Mary the air he sensed about Fort Lincoln, perhaps even trying to sort it out for himself. “I never saw anything like it. Mrs. Custer is not strong, and I would not be surprised if she did not improve. She seemed so depressed and in such despair.”
And now he was here, a matter of miles from the dusty hillside where Custer had fallen. Only a hard two day’s ride from where the real Autie had died, where the mythic and immortal George Armstrong had been given birth at the hand of the vengeful Lakota.
God, how he resented Custer for the way he had died! How he hated the man’s memory more than he had ever loved the man himself.
Even though Nelson had decided he would find the Seventh Cavalry demoralized from its devastating loss, he hadn’t been ready for the shock he received upon arriving at the Terry-Gibbon camp that second day of August.
“I never saw a command so completely stampeded as this, either in the volunteer or regular service, and I believe entirely without reason,” he had confided in a letter to Mary. “Terry does not seem very enthusiastic or to have much heart in the enterprise.”
To Miles’s way of thinking, General Terry clearly had been bested by events, if not by the likes of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. And Colonel John Gibbon—why, he was slow and plodding at best, overly cautious and downright scared at worst. Someone needed to seize affairs in Montana Territory, with a firm grip. But Terry and Gibbon refused to move in those first weeks after the disaster on the Little Horn, waiting for more than merely reinforcements and supplies, perhaps waiting on the indecisive Crook somewhere in the shadow of the Big Horns, three days’ ride to the south. As much as he might rail about his superiors here on the frontier, Miles found much to complain about when it came to the eastern brass as welclass="underline" he despised Sheridan for his excessive reliance on cavalry and even criticized his wife’s uncle, William Tecumseh Sherman, for his lack of attention to organizational matters.
“The more I see of movements here,” the energetic and outspoken Miles wrote his wife from the mouth of the Rosebud, “the more admiration I have for Custer, and I am satisfied his like will not be found very soon again.”
Then after five windy, rainy days of indecision, vacillation, and heated argument in that camp Terry’s soldiers had disparagingly named “Fort Beans,” a delay during which Nelson wrote home that “the campaign thus far would not have been creditable to a militia organization,” Terry was finally moved to put his command on the march, planning to head south so they could effect a union with Crook’s command known to be somewhere beyond both the headwaters of the Rosebud and the Chetish Mountains. Even though they were about to go into action, Miles nonetheless remained disgusted: the enemy plainly was no longer to the south. The Sioux were fleeing to the east.
The following morning at three A.M., 8 August, bugles blew reveille, and at five the combined Dakota and Montana tolumns, some 1,700 strong in horse and foot, along with 75 white, Arikara, and Crow scouts, all marched away from the mouth of Rosebud Creek. Terry was bringing along 240 heavily laden freight wagons, stuffed to the gunwales with forage and rations to last thirty-five days, leaving behind 120 dismounted cavalry troops and Company G under Captain Louis H. Sanger of the Seventeenth Infantry to post a guard around the supply depot. Gibbon, a former artillery instructor at the U.S. Military Academy who was known to the Indians as the “Limping Soldier,” commanded a brigade composed of four infantry battalions from not only Miles’s Fifth, but the Sixth, Seventh, and Twenty-second regiments. Major James S. “Grasshopper Jim” Brisbin was given leadership of both his own four troops of the Second Cavalry out of Forts Ellis and Shaw in Montana Territory, as well as command over Major Marcus Reno’s remnants of the Seventh Cavalry, a regiment reorganized in recent weeks into eight troops.
For two days that column of infantry, cavalry, wagons, ambulances, and beef herd crawled beneath a torrid, cloudless sky at something worse than a snail’s pace, suffering galling temperatures that reached 105 degrees. The anxious Terry and the nervous Gibbon put their Crow scouts out far ahead and flung wide on both flanks. It wasn’t lost on Nelson Miles that Reno’s Seventh was retracing the steps it had taken marching to the regiment’s destiny at the Little Bighorn. Gloom and fear hung like a murky pall over the column as Miles grew all the more impatient.
At two o’clock that first afternoon some of the farranging Crow scouts returned to the column with a report of sighting the Sioux about forty miles ahead. About five P.M. another band of Crow who had gone to make contact with Crook’s column rode in to tell of sighting a large body of Sioux making for the Rosebud from the Tongue River. After covering only eleven miles in a twelve-hour march, a halt was ordered in a wooded area that in June had served as a campsite for the enemy village that destroyed Custer’s five companies. In the misty twilight Terry’s Arikara and Crow scouts discovered the tree burial of an infant.
It revolted Nelson’s stomach to see the trackers drag the little body out of its resting place, hack it to pieces, and defile the scaffold.
Now more than ever he felt convinced he had to find some way to shed himself of Terry and Gibbon, just the way Custer had detached himself. Through that chilly and drizzly Wednesday evening of the ninth, Miles brooded on the trap that snared him, brooded on how to extricate the Fifth Infantry. He needed a miracle and he needed it now.
This plodding behemoth of a column would never catch the Sioux, much less bring the warriors to a decisive battle. And if Terry should ever succeed in uniting with Crook’s column—why, this nightmare campaign would be as good as over. They’d both suck each other dry as they lumbered along the enemy’s old trails, wearing out men and breaking down the horses.
And in the end neither column would have a single warrior, much less a decisive battle, to show for it when the season dosed down the high plains for the coming of winter.
“It looks like an organization for a walk-around,” he wrote Mary by firelight that evening. “If this kind of campaigning is continual, it will last a year or two without much credit to the army.”
Setting his pencil aside, Miles snorted. “A stern chase,” he muttered to himself sourly, recalling Phil Sheridan’s words in prodding both Terry and Crook to get up off their numbing rumps and go after the enemy that had murdered Sheridan’s fair-haired boy. Nelson wagged his head, muttering, “A stern chase, my ass.”
The very next afternoon Nelson Miles stared south into the distance—watching as his worst fears took shape out of the shimmering, heat-baked plain of southern Montana Territory.
Prospect of an Early Fight
CHEYENNE, July 26—Advised from General Crook’s command in camp on South Fork of Tongue river, July 23, via Fort Fetterman, July 26, are of importance. The main body of Sioux are believed to have taken to the Big Horn mountains where game is more plenty and grass fresher. The Indian efforts to burn the grass of the valley make it almost imperative on Crook to follow them up at once. His force musters about 1,200 regular soldiers and citizen volunteers, besides 200 Snake allies, and he feels he can at least hold his own on any ground that emergency may select. It is expected that the wagons will be parted with on the main Tongue river, near the mountains, and with a pack-train loaded with from fifteen to twenty days rations, a vigorous but careful advance will immediately follow. It is not deemed advisable for Crook’s force and Terry’s force to join previous to a move under one or other of the commanders. It is thought that the Indians would make a stand against one of the columns, and that by engaging them and having the other column reserved to either fight or follow up with, something decisive may be expected during the summer campaign. The enemy is believed to be on the headwaters of Ash creek and Little Big Horn, not far from the Montana and Wyoming line, and from thirty to forty miles from Crook’s present camp. General Merritt left Fetterman this morning with eight companies of the Fifth cavalry. Two more on the way to Fetterman will take a hundred and fifty recruits and follow in a few days.