Reap the Whirlwind (67 page)

Even Captain Henry waded into the melee when he subsequently stated that Royall hid during those repeated charges by the Sioux and Cheyenne. That was nothing less than heresy for a Third Cavalry officer to speak so openly in criticizing his commanding officer.

Bad feelings became raw poison as the regiment began to split down the middle over the affair. Anson Mills himself told Crook he thought the general should have shot some of the officers for their “mutinous language” the day of the battle.

A few of the officers who had served with Royall’s battalion on the left accused Crook in turn of poor judgment, that the general’s orders to rejoin him prevented them from dislodging the warriors from the bluffs on the western end of the battlefield. In substance, many saw Crook’s criticisms as nothing more than one more slur on the honor and good name of the Third Cavalry, nothing less than the continuation of the general’s attacks on their esprit d’corps that had begun with the court-martial of Joseph Reynolds.

It took a full decade for this very personal matter between Crook and Royall to come to a boil. For ten years Crook refused to publicly acknowledge the defeat while it continued to rankle the general, who insisted that, had the battle been fought according to his plan, that day the resistance of the Sioux would have been broken, the Custer
fight would not have taken place, and the need for the remainder of the Sioux Campaign of 1876-77 would have disappeared as the hostile bands made their way back to the reservations.

In the summer of 1886 Colonel Royall finally ended his silence and gave an interview with two Omaha papers while he was in town (headquarters of Crook’s Department of the Platte) on military business. The resulting articles became the source of the final explosion between the two men when on the night of 7 August at the home of General Crook several officers were gathered on the front steps of the house when Royall arrived for a dinner party. Among others, Captain Guy Henry was in attendance at the shouting match and argument that ensued.

Crook:
   “For ten years I have suffered silently the obloquy of having made a bad fight at Rosebud when the fault was in yourself and Nickerson. There was a good chance to make a charge but it couldn’t be done because of the condition of the cavalry. I sent word to you to ‘come in’ and waited two hours—nearer three before you obeyed. I sent Nickerson three times at least. I had the choice of assuming responsibility myself for the failure of my plans or of court-martialing you and Nickerson. I chose to bear the responsibility myself. The failure of my plan was due to your conduct.”

Royall:
   “I have never had any reason to think my conduct at the Rosebud was bad. Nickerson came to me but once and then I moved as soon as I received the order. Did I not move as soon as I could after Nickerson came, Colonel Henry?”

Henry:
   “Yes, I believe you did.”

Royall:
   “I was the leading battalion with Colonel Henry. It was the leading battalion—I went with it where the enemy was the thickest. I was not responsible for the scattered condition of the cavalry.”

What say you, reader?

Who won the Battle of the Rosebud? Who lost? Or do you think it was a draw?

I sympathize with George Crook for all those years left him following the fight at the Rosebud—because I can clearly feel the man having to grapple with the fact that he alone was the reason he lost that summer day to Crazy Horse.

Just days after the battle, on 30 June 1876, the Helena, Montana,
Daily Independent
published an article from one of the five unnamed correspondents, a person then writing of the battle from Fort Laramie:

Remember—this was being said in light of what the world was yet to learn of Custer’s defeat. They still did not know of the Seventh’s fate.

By the next week, the same Helena paper printed an editorial placing the blame as many of those on the frontier saw it: “It is now clearly evident that General Crook was not the man to be intrusted with the conduct of the military expeditions in the Powder River country. His disastrous defeat … left the general impression upon the country that a want of proper management was at the bottom of the result.”

Despite some of those statements the officers at Fort Laramie nonetheless passed a resolution in which they expressed
their approval of Crook’s strategy in the battle. He was, after all, their boss.

But to this amateur historian and student of the Indian Wars—there was no strategy. Or what strategy there was, was found wanting when confronted with the surprising discipline and unwavering resolve of Crazy Horse’s warriors.

The Sioux and the Cheyenne clearly won that day.

For years Crook continued to state that he had won a victory because his army held the field at the end of the day. Nowhere is his steadfast refusal to recognize the fight as the defeat it was more apparent than in his annual report of September 25, 1876, which was devoted, as scholar John S. Gray states, to the “grand illusion.” Gray’s corrections to Crook’s “record” are inserted in the text and italicized:

Historian Gray goes on to say:

Some among the army were beginning to look at things a little differently than did the leader of the expedition. Maybe they had reached a turning point in the history of the Indian Wars.

While General Sherman still believed Crook to be the best field commander he had to fight the Indians in the west, Crook’s immediate commander, Philip Sheridan, said in commenting on the battle, “The victory was barren of results. General Crook was unable to pursue the enemy … considering himself too weak to make any movement until additional troops reached him.”

But the battle was all too quickly forgotten by all except its aging participants. Custer’s defeat far overshadowed the bigger fight. Crook’s fight, having taken place eight days before the Little Bighorn fight, was usually mentioned only in passing, as a footnote to the tragedy that occurred on the Greasy Grass. Only the two published accounts by Finerty and Bourke kept the story of the Rosebud from a total death.

For almost fifty years the battlefield lay in obscurity, unmarked and abandoned—while thirty miles away the Custer Battlefield became a national symbol of the Indian Wars. In the meantime, the white man settled the region and raised his cattle.

Not until 1920 did anyone do anything about the battlefield. Walter M. Camp, a scholar of the period, finally identified the site and was instrumental in placing nine marble markers on the field to pay homage to the soldiers who died there in 1876.

Despite the efforts of a small and dedicated group of
locals, the seasons continued to ebb and flow across that high land until fourteen years later, in 1934, the Billings, Montana, Chapter of the Shining Mountains Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution unveiled a stone monument on the knoll at the east end of the Rosebud where fourteen years earlier Camp had placed his nine. What was different was that this time more than a thousand people braved the rutted ranch roads to reach the site.

What was even more important—this time the ceremony was attended by four wrinkled Cheyenne veterans of the fight: Louis Dog, Limpy, Weasel Bear, and Bear Heart.

Still, it wasn’t until the early fifties that anyone made a scholarly study of the fight. Colorado attorney J. W. Vaughn ran across the Finerty and Bourke references to the daylong fight and began to make regular pilgrimages to the battlefield, bringing with him his metal detector. It was in southeastern Montana that Vaughn met the rancher who owned the land where Crook and Crazy Horse had dueled.

Like the general and the war chief who met here that summer day long ago, these two men would change one another’s lives.

Born in 1892 in the Cherokee Strip of what is now the state of Oklahoma, Slim Kobold left home at barely seventeen and began making the rounds, as cowboys still do, working ranches and haying across Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas. By some good fortune for us who have a passion for history, that gritty cowhand made his way north to Montana in 1915 to file a homestead claim beside the beautiful Rosebud Creek. It wasn’t until many years later that Slim discovered he owned a sizable chunk of what had been a battlefield.

Once he found out just how little was known, what little had ever been printed about the battle, Kobold made contact with the folks at the nearby Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Having gone in search of help, Slim became friends with the tribal historian, John Stands in Timber, who acted as interpreter when three of the old battle veterans made their first of several visits to the site. As Kobold moved slowly over the hills and down the ravines with Limpy, Louis Dog, and Bear Heart, they pointed out where the soldiers were positioned, how the various companies
moved about, where the Crazy Horse charges originated—in exacting, anecdotal detail just how the battle was fought.

Kobold later said he was moved to tears, moved to realize that he just wasn’t standing on some cattle land. He was standing on an important piece of history.

So when Jesse W. Vaughn showed up from Colorado with his metal detector in hand, land owner Slim Kobold proved to be an eager amateur historian, accompanying Vaughn as the two prowled the hills across that massive site, sharing stories and identifying both soldier and Indian positions as they dug up concentrations of cartridges. After years of extensive work by the pair, Vaughn was able to reconstruct the battle’s major events, and in 1956 he finally published the first comprehensive work on the fight,
With Crook at the Rosebud.

Because of that little-known volume, a few more people made the rare trek to the battlefield across the next five years. Still, it remained for someone to preserve the battlefield itself, just as the Custer site had been set aside, preserved, visited by growing legions of scholars, writers, and the just plain curious.

Slim Kobold went on raising cattle, remaining the battlefield’s more ardent supporter. Then in 1961 he joined with a Miles City, Montana, archaeologist, and together they placed small concrete pyramids at key locations on the battlefield.

A decade later the battlefield was again “under attack.” Big and small coal companies were operating just south of Kobold’s land, digging out the rich veins of the black gold. Time and again developers came to the Kobold ranch house, offering increasing sums of money for his land. He could have sold. But he didn’t.

That’s how Slim Kobold became the hero of what I’d like to refer to as the “Second Battle of the Rosebud.”

Through letters and phone calls, by buttonholing state legislators, and keeping his unrelenting pressure on the bureaucrats—besides turning away every one of those seductive offers from the coal companies—Kobold’s efforts finally hit paydirt. Nineteen seventy-two saw the battlefield finally placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Still, the offers to buy the ground kept on coming, with
the dollars offered continuing to escalate—but Slim held out, offering only to sell the battlefield to the State of Montana for a fraction of what he could have sold it to one of the private firms. It took four more years for Kobold’s dream to come true: Montana finally agreed to buy the land and set it aside for future generations.

By that time Fred Werner, a man I’m proud to call my friend, had joined the cause. A western historian from Greeley, Colorado, Werner began to visit the site himself in 1975, metal detector in tow and with Vaughn’s book in hand, plotting sites on his own. Eight years later in 1983 he self-published his own study of the Crook fight, shedding more light on this little-known battle.

The years marched on and on, taking their toll on the Rosebud Battlefield’s greatest champion. While Slim Kobold had won his hardfought battle to preserve a small piece of western history for the people of Montana and this nation, he was losing his very personal battle against an enemy no one had ever defeated: cancer.