THE BLACK HILLS.
It was on Wednesday evening that our good friends, the pioneers of
Deadwood and Crook City, reached us with their wagons, plethoric with
all manner of provender, and the next day, as though in congratulation,
the bright sunshine streamed in upon us, and so did rations. The only
hard-worked men were the cooks, and from before dawn to late at evening
not an hour's respite did they enjoy. Towards sundown we caught sight of
Upham's battalion, coming in from its weary scout down stream. They had
not seen an Indian, yet one poor fellow, Milner of Company "A," riding
half a mile ahead of them in eager pursuit of an antelope, was found ten
minutes after, stripped, scalped, and frightfully gashed and mutilated
with knives, stone dead, of course, though still warm. Pony tracks were
fresh in the springy sod all around him, but ponies and riders had
vanished. Pursuit was impossible. Upham had not a horse that could more
than stagger a few yards at a time. The maddest man about it was our
Sergeant-Major, Humme, an admirable shot and a man of superhuman nerve
and courage; yet only a few months ago you read how he, with Lieutenant
Weir, met a similar fate at the hands of the Utes. He fought a
half-score of them single-handed, and sent one of them to his final
account before he himself succumbed to the missiles they poured upon him
from their shelter in the rocks. A better soldier never lived, and there
was grim humor in the statement of the eleven surviving Ute warriors,
that they didn't want to fight Weir and Humme, but were obliged to kill
them in self-defence. Weir was shot dead before he really saw the
adversary, and those twelve unfortunate warriors, armed with their
repeaters, would undoubtedly have suffered severely at the hands of
Humme and his single shooter if they hadn't killed him too.
This is digressing, but it is so exquisitely characteristic of the
Indian Bureau's way of doing things that, now that the peace
commissioners have triumphantly announced that the attack on Thornburg's
command was all an accident, and have allowed the Indians to bully,
temporize, and hoodwink them into weeks of fruitless delay (the rascals
never meant to surrender the Meeker murderers so long as they had only
peace commissioners to deal with), and now that, after all, the army has
probably got to do over again what it started to do last October, and
could readily have accomplished long ere this had they not been hauled
off by the Bureau, the question naturally suggests itself, how often is
this sort of thing to be repeated? Year after year it has been done. A
small force of soldiers sent to punish a large band of Indian murderers
or marauders. The small band has been well-nigh annihilated in many
instances. Then the country wakes up, a large force concentrates at vast
expense, and the day of retribution has come, when, sure as shooting,
the Bureau has stepped in with restraining hand. No end of silk-hatted
functionaries have hurried out from Washington, shaken hands and smoked
a pipe with a score of big Indians; there has been a vast amount of
cheap oratory and buncombe talk about the Great Father and guileless red
men, at the end of which we are told to go back to camp and bury our
dead, and our late antagonists, laughing in their sleeves, link arms
with their aldermanic friends, are "dead-headed" off to Washington,
where they are lionized at the White House, and sent the rounds of the
great cities, and finally return to their reservations laden down with
new and improved rifles and ammunition, stove-pipe hats, and Saratoga
trunks, more than ever convinced that the one way to get what they want
out of Uncle Sam is to slap his face every spring and shake hands in the
fall. The apparent theory of the Bureau is that the soldier is made to
be killed, the Indian to be coddled.
However, deeply as my comrades and myself may feel on this subject, it
does not properly enter into a narrative article. Let us get back to
Upham's battalion, who reached us late on the afternoon of the
fourteenth, desperately tired and hungry. We lost no time in ministering
to their wants, though we still had no grain for our horses, but the men
made merry over abundant coffee, bacon and beans, and bread and
molasses, and were unspeakably happy.
That evening the general decided to send back to the crossings of the
swollen streams that had impeded our march on the 12th, and in which
many horses and mules and boxes of rifle ammunition had been lost.
Indians prowling along our trail would come upon that ammunition as the
stream subsided, and reap a rich harvest.
The detail fell upon the Fifth Cavalry. One officer and thirty men to
take the back track, dig up the boxes thirty miles away, and bring them
in. With every prospect of meeting hundreds of the Sioux following our
trail for abandoned horses, the duty promised to be trying and perilous,
and when the colonel received the orders from headquarters, and, turning
to me, said, "Detail a lieutenant," I looked at the roster with no
little interest. Of ten companies of the Fifth Cavalry present, each was
commanded by its captain, but subalterns were scarce, and with us such
duties were assigned in turn, and the officer "longest in" from scout or
detachment service was Lieutenant Keyes. So that young gentleman, being
hunted up and notified of his selection, girded up his loins and was
about ready to start alone on his perilous trip, when there came
swinging up to me an officer of infantry--an old West Point comrade who
had obtained permission to make the campaign with the Fifth Cavalry
and had been assigned to Company "I" for duty, but who was not
detailable, strictly speaking, for such service as Keyes's, from our
roster. "Look here, King, you haven't given me half a chance this last
month, and if I'm not to have this detail, I want to go with Keyes, as
subordinate, or anything; I don't care, only I want to go." The result
was that he did go, and when a few days since we read in the _Sentinel_
that Satterlee Plummer, a native of Wisconsin and a graduate of West
Point, had been reinstated in the army on the special recommendation of
General Crook, for gallantry in Indian campaign, I remembered this
instance of the Sioux war of 1876, and, looking back to my note-book,
there I found the record and result of their experience on the back
track--they brought in fourteen horses and all the ammunition without
losing a man.
[Illustration: DEADWOOD CITY, BLACK HILLS OF DAKOTA.]
Now our whole attention was given to the recuperation of our horses--the
cavalryman's first thought. Each day we moved camp a few miles up the
lovely Whitewood valley, seeking fresh grass for the animals, and on
September 18th we marched through the little hamlet of Crook City, and
bivouacked again in a beautiful amphitheatre of the hills, called
Centennial Park. From here, dozens of the officers and men wandered off
to visit the mining gulches and settlements in the neighborhood, and
numbers were taken prisoners by the denizens of Deadwood and royally
entertained. General Crook and his staff, with a small escort, had left
us early on the morning of the 16th, to push ahead to Fort Laramie and
set about the organization of a force for immediate resumption of
business. This threw General Merritt in command of the expedition, and
meant that our horses should become the objects of the utmost thought
and care. Leaving Centennial Park on the 19th, we marched southward
through the Hills, and that afternoon came upon a pretty stream named,
as many another is throughout the Northwest, the Box Elder, and there we
met a train of wagons, guarded by spruce artillerymen fresh from their
casemates on the seaboard, who looked upon our rags with undisguised
astonishment, not unmixed with suspicion. But they were eagerly greeted,
and that night, for the first time in four long weeks, small measures of
oats and corn were dealt out to our emaciated animals. It was touching
to see how carefully and tenderly the rough-looking men spread the
precious morsels before their steeds, petting them the while, and
talking as fond nonsense to their faithful friends as ever mother
crooned to sleeping child. It was only a bite for the poor creatures,
and their eyes begged wistfully for more. We gave them two nights' rest,
and then, having consumed all the grass to be had, pushed on to Rapid
Creek, thence again to the southern limits of the Hills, passing through
many a mining camp or little town with a name suggestive of the wealth
and population of London. We found Custer City a deserted village--many
a store and dozens of houses utterly untenanted. No forage to be had for
love or money. Our horses could go no farther, so for weeks we lay along
French Creek, moving camp every day or two a mile or more for fresh
grass. It was dull work, but the men enjoyed it; they were revelling in
plenty to eat and no drills, and every evening would gather in crowds
around the camp-fires, listening to some favorite vocalist or
yarn-spinner. Once in a while letters began to reach us from anxious
ones at home, and make us long to see them; and yet no orders came, no
definite prospects of relief from our exile. At last, the second week in
October started us out on a welcome raid down the valley of the South
Cheyenne, but not an Indian was caught napping, and finally, on the 23d
of October, we were all concentrated in the vicinity of the Red Cloud
Agency to take part in the closing scene of the campaign and assist in
the disarming and unhorsing of all the reservation Indians.
General MacKenzie, with the Fourth Cavalry and a strong force of
artillery and infantry, was already there, and as we marched southward
to surround the Indian camps and villages from the direction of Hat
Creek our array was not unimposing, numerically. The infantry, with the
"weak-horsed" cavalry, moved along the prairie road. Colonel Royall's
command (Third Cavalry and Noyes's Battalion of the Second) was away
over to the eastward, and well advanced, so as to envelope the doomed
villages from that direction. We of the Fifth spread out over the
rolling plain to the west, and in this order all moved towards Red
Cloud, twenty odd miles away. It was prettily planned, but scores of
wary, savage eyes had watched all Crook's preparations at the agency.
The wily Indian was quick to divine that his arms and ponies were
threatened, and by noon we had the dismal news by courier that they had
stampeded in vast numbers. We enjoyed the further satisfaction of
sighting with our glasses the distant clouds of dust kicked up by their
scurrying ponies. A few hundred warriors, old men and "blanket Indians,"
surrendered to MacKenzie, but we of the Big Horn were empty-handed when
once more we met our brigadier upon the following day.