Reap the Whirlwind (66 page)

Seems to me that the odds were clearly in favor of the warriors, despite the numbers arrayed against them, and the weapons they would have to face. All in all, it remains a most remarkable victory for Crazy Horse and his fighters. So remarkable a victory that I’m given cause to speculate on what might have happened on that one hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill if the Lakota would have thrown two thousand or twenty-five hundred warriors into the fight (the number, as you will recall, some historians have asserted were battling the soldiers!). Even with only fifteen hundred warriors, the outcome would likely have been far different (seeing how even that low estimate would have
doubled
what Crazy Horse did have in the battle against Three Stars).

Or had they possessed better weapons—the sort of weaponry they acquired eight days later after the Reno fight in the valley and the slaughter of Custer’s five entire companies. All that ammunition and those Colt’s revolvers and Springfield carbines!

Or had the Crows not bumped into the scouts and had Crazy Horse elected to wait in ambush a little north of where he caught the soldiers, where his warriors were resting
ten or eleven miles north of Crook’s soldiers—there to wait out the better part of that Saturday, June 17, while allowing the soldiers to march that much closer toward the encampment—which would have allowed Crazy Horse to surprise and attack Crook’s troops at the break of dawn on June 18, with fresh ponies and Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa!

Remember, my reader—the Hunkpapa had not yet joined up at the moment Crazy Horse attacked those thirteen hundred men under Crook. The Hunkpatila war chief likely had something on the order of five hundred warriors to throw against more than twice as many soldiers, allies, and civilians. And Crazy Horse nearly seized the day before Sitting Bull even showed up!

Interesting to speculate on the possibility of a
far bigger
, and more earth-shattering, massacre than the massacre that did take place eight days later, and thirty miles to the north.

Make no mistake, the Crow and Shoshone saved the lives of the soldiers not only at the beginning of the battle while they held the warriors at bay, but during Royall’s retreat from the left as well. None of the military reports of the battle fully explain just how serious those first minutes of the fighting really were. It remained for Cheyenne historian John Stands in Timber as well as Crow chief Plenty Coups to corroborate one another when both stated that Crook’s soldiers were driven back to the banks of the Rosebud itself at the early stages of the battle. Grouard confirms this as well, saying: “I believe if it had not been for the Crows, the Sioux would have killed half of our command before the soldiers were in a position to meet the attack.”

Hours later the Crow and Shoshone again threw themselves into the breech and saved Royall’s men in frantic retreat. They, and the infantry of Burt and Burrowes. In the days to follow, Guy Henry himself gave the highest of praise to the infantry for saving his battalion. Some of Royall’s men even stated that there was little chance they would have made it out alive, had the infantry not rescued them from massacre.

What did those horse soldiers of the Third Cavalry who had laughed long and hard at Chambers’s “mule-brigade” have to say now?

An interesting footnote to the Battle of the Rosebud is this whole matter of the “dead canyon,” the “canyon of death,” or the “gorge of the Rosebud.” Nothing but myth. But it goes to show how strongly held myth can color clear judgment under the stress of battlefield conditions.

Truth of the matter is there is no “canyon,” nor a “gorge.” Any person who travels the road north of the battlefield to or from Busby and the Northern Cheyenne Reservation will drive on a state highway that follows the Rosebud. The hills on either side of the valley are no more than four hundred feet above the valley floor. No deep canyon or gorge here.

And while the valley itself does narrow at one point to a little more than half a mile wide, you have only to stand at that point and look around to see just how ridiculous the notion is that Crazy Horse’s warriors could have ambushed eight companies of mounted cavalry at that point, slaughtering them to a man.

“A veritable cul-de-sac,” is one contemporary description. “Vertical walls hemming in the sides,” wrote another. “A narrow defile,” and “sides a thousand feet high.” Not to mention the canyon being a “narrow gash overhung by continuous walls of rock.” Such grossly exaggerated descriptions written at that time by the participants have totally painted a false picture of the terrain for no other reason (I can determine) but to substantiate their unmitigated fears of ambush. Nothing more. They had to justify their inability to prod the Crow scouts and, more specifically, Frank Grouard himself, down that trail. Hence, the birth of the ambush or “death-trap” theory.

The only warriors Crazy Horse had who could have ambushed Captain Anson Mills’s battalion was that handful Sutorious scooted off the crest of the hill as Mills began his march toward the east bend of the Rosebud. No more Indians were spotted that day until the soldiers came busting back out of the north, in a dead gallop to rescue Royall’s besieged command.

But the damage had already been done to Crook’s ability to fight the sort of battle he had wanted at the outset. With half of his cavalry out of the fight on a wild-goose chase to find some phantom village, the expedition had
doomed itself to defeat. Crazy Horse needed to send no warriors to lay an ambush in that “canyon.”

The fertile and frightened imaginations of those scouts, guides, and soldiers did the rest. So by the time Mills’s battalion got back to the battlefield—the day was lost. And Crook’s men were lucky to get out alive.

Five of those who played one sort of role or another in our story need a brief bit of additional mention.

John Shingle, the sergeant who voluntarily left his post among Royall’s horse-holders in the Kollmar ravine and returned to the Vroom/Henry skirmish at the crest to rally the troops who were buckling and ready to bolt in unmitigated retreat, stands as a singular hero in the conflict—yelling, so the history texts relate the testimony of witnesses, “Face them, men! Face them!”

It is just that sort of heroism that brings a lump to my throat and tears to my eyes no matter how many times I read over this tale of courage while around him knees are buckling. If ever there was a man who deserved his due reward, the sergeant was one, likely due the credit for keeping those green soldiers alive, stirring them to fight back. For his heroism, his “decisive action in the face of the enemy,” John Shingle was awarded the Medal of Honor for bravery at the Battle of Rosebud Creek.

Another sort of deeply moral courage was evinced by Guy V. Henry.

But to begin, there remains some controversy over just who rescued the captain. Of course there was no Seamus Donegan on that battlefield that day beside the Rosebud. But who did stand over his body and fight off the Sioux and Cheyenne? Frank Grouard states that it was the Shoshone called Yute John. Trenholm and Carley’s book,
The Shoshones
, credits a Shoshone called Tigee. Then we find that they were likely one and the same person.

Reporter Reuben Davenport, with Royall on the left, states that two soldiers stood over the captain’s body and held off the enemy.

Henry R. Lemly, Royall’s adjutant, says that Henry was rescued from the battlefield by two Crow scouts.

I suppose it really doesn’t matter, does it? Because the
heroism that saved Henry was but the beginning of Henry’s own heroic story.

After the two painful mishaps in returning the captain to the Goose Creek base camp that I’ve already recounted for you, Henry was fortunate to survive a grueling two-hundred-mile wagon ride to Fort Fetterman. Day after day his escort was able to shoot some small birds along the trail. Boiled, the broth from these was the only thing his attendants could pour past the shattered jaws and down the captain’s throat to maintain some of the officer’s strength. Now and again he records that he was rewarded for his stoicism with a teaspoonful of brandy.

Then, mind you—having survived the Crazy Horse attack and Royall’s retreat, being kicked in the head by a mule and spilling from the mule litter, not to mention the horrid state of his wounds—Henry’s escort comes within sight of Fetterman itself and reaches the north bank of the North Platte … just as the ferryboat cable snaps and unfurls into the turbid river.

Henry calls this a “disappointment.”

Now only yards away from beds and roof, almost in reach of the fort’s hospital where he can receive succor, he is again confronted with having to stay another night in the open.

Minutes later an officer from the fort crosses the river in a wobbly, leaky skiff and tells Henry that he will take the captain over to the fort if Henry is willing to take the chance of capsizing.

Now, realize the Third Cavalry officer has already been dunked in crossing the Tongue. He has been bleeding slowly for the better part of a week with suppurating wounds. He’s totally blind in one eye and the other is swollen shut, filled with foul matter. If that skiff capsizes—the man is sure to drown.

So what does Guy Henry say to the offer?

You bet—“Let’s give it a try.”

With that officer cradling the wounded captain in his arms and two enlisted men paddling the ungainly craft, they pushed out into the current of the North Platte, hoping to cross the thousand feet of roiling water.

And made it across, thank God.

Still, they could really do little more for him at Fetterman than Surgeon Hartsuff was able to do in the field. He needed to get back to “civilization.” And that was another
three hundred miles yet to go!
The next morning his litter was placed in the back of an army ambulance (wonderful conveyances—no springs!) where he was jolted and rumbled south all the way to the Medicine Bow Station. There he could at last be put on the Union Pacific for a ride east.

But, wait. Not that day—because it is the Fourth of July!

There’s gunfire and fireworks, lemonade and whiskey, as well as plenty of raucous celebration for the nation’s centennial. At twilight a stray bullet whizzed through Henry’s tent near the station platform where he tried in vain to sleep.

You can imagine the captain lying there, blind and weak, wondering if he survived the very worst the Sioux could throw at him, only to die here at the hand of some drunk railroad worker reveling in the nation’s one hundredth birthday.

Upon reaching Fort D. A. Russell near Cheyenne City, army surgeons began work on the man, probing his wounds, reopening them, and forcing sulfur and medicines into the cavities.

But even they could not kill the indomitable Guy Henry!

By the middle of August, he regained the limited use of one eye and was given a leave of absence, whereupon he journeyed to southern California to recuperate. By the next spring the captain was back, learning to live with the only eye left him, nonetheless assigned to active duty at Fort Laramie, Wyoming Territory, as the “Great Sioux War” raged on.

Guy Henry stayed in active service until the end of the Indian Wars, earning himself another “brevet rank.” And during the Spanish-American War the redoubtable captain served as a cavalry general in Puerto Rico, where he contracted malaria and finally succumbed to the grim reaper—still on active duty. A horse soldier to the end.

One gets the impression that the man was much like an
owl—hard to kill because they are half head, and the rest is nothing but feather and bone! Indeed, Colonel Guy V. Henry of the Third Cavalry is the sort of man who, like Sergeant John Shingle, will long live in my memory.

Truth is many times more stirring than the fiction myth-makers manufacture.

The rescue of Chief Comes in Sight by his sister, Buffalo Calf Road Woman, lives to this day in Cheyenne oral legends. The Battle of the Rosebud was not the woman’s first, nor was it to be her last, fight against the white man. Eight days after she rescued her brother, Buffalo Calf Road Woman fought alongside her husband, Black Coyote, when the Northern Cheyenne surrounded Custer’s last holdouts at the northern crest of Massacre Hill.

Appealing to note that John Finerty, that whiskey-loving, woman-humping rounder of a newspaperman, later haunted the halls of the U.S. Congress as a representative from the State of Illinois. Ah, the checkered pasts of our elected officials!

Frederick Schwatka, lieutenant in Anson Mills’s M Company of the Third Cavalry, was, like Finerty, a native of Illinois. He continually studied. In fact, a year before the Rosebud fight he had been admitted to the Nebraska bar, and a year after the battle obtained a medical degree from the prestigious Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York City. Yet he was soon bitten by the bug to explore, and where better but the Arctic?

In the summer of 1878, Schwatka led a party of explorers that would take two years in crossing more than thirty-two hundred miles of frozen wilderness—showing the scientific world that man could live in arctic conditions for extended periods of time. He lived a fruitful, productive life until 1892, when he accidentally poisoned himself with an overdose of some remedy meant to relieve a painful stomach disorder.

Until the end of the Indian Wars, the Second and Third Cavalries, as well as the Fourth and Ninth Infantries, continued to serve among the outposts on the western frontier. Such duty was marked by long periods of excruciating boredom interspersed with brief interludes of terror. With so much time on their hands, it’s not hard for me to see
why the Battle of the Rosebud was fought again and again between the principal officers as well as the soldiers themselves. Petty differences became major causes.

Perhaps the worst of those conflicts was that waged between George Crook and William Royall, a longstanding fight that began the very afternoon of the battle itself.

Crook, and Bourke as well, blamed the colonel for not following orders to rejoin the infantry’s left, that failure preventing the reuniting of the general’s forces for (at the least) a counterattack on Crazy Horse’s warriors, or (at the most) a full-scale march down the Rosebud on the enemy village. Privately, to Bourke at least, the general confided his views that Royall was “an ingrate, treacherous, and cowardly to boot.”