Ashes of Heaven (53 page)

Prayed there would be someone to sprinkle some tobacco on his grave, someone to say a prayer over his resting place, maybe even sing a hymn, perhaps a drinking song or two. But mostly he prayed he would never again have to die on such a lonely, forgotten patch of ground as he was leaving behind. And then he prayed he would never again have to point his weapons at another Indian.

Begging God above that he would find himself a little peace for his family in this wild, unsettled, and tortured land.

Afterword

It had to gall Nelson A. Miles something fierce as the seasons turned to discover how the Lakota and Cheyenne were detouring away from him and choosing instead to surrender into the arms of George C. Crook.

The lion's share of those
Ohmeseheso
bands, not to mention the Lakota who Spotted Tail found in the Little Missouri country, and especially that camp of the famed “Crazy Horse people,” had all rebuffed Miles's straight-talk. While he refused to play Crook's game of promising what he could not guarantee, the end result of coming out second-best in that undeclared war of nerves with his gray-bearded nemesis must have irked Miles no end, as winter whimpered to a close on the high plains and spring began to flourish.

Compared to what numbers were surrendering almost daily down at the Red Cloud Agency, very few put their trust in the unvarnished truth the colonel spoke at the Tongue River Cantonment. He could promise them only one thing for certain: if they did not go in to surrender, he would continue to make war on them.

As events turned out by late spring, all of Miles's direct, eye-to-eye negotiations with both the Cheyenne and Lakota delegates at his post—in addition to his unheralded efforts at second-party peace feelers by sending Johnny Bruguier and Old Wool Woman to the combined
Ohmeseheso
/Crazy Horse village—essentially reaped little reward when compared to Crook's expert sleight-of-hand. Not only did Crook poise his handpicked subordinate, William Philo Clark, at center stage that crucial spring, but with even greater effect the gray-bearded general played the strongest ace in his deck: Spotted Tail.

Miles didn't stand a chance.

There was no way he was going to convince the village that Crook could not guarantee all that he was promising if the bands surrendered to him in the south, especially when Crook's pitch was made by the revered Spotted Tail. While Miles told the bands the truth rather than what they wanted to hear, Crook's political posturing through Spotted Tail meant that Miles lost the honor of bringing in the hostiles, while Crook's dishonest duplicity won the day.

You have to give old gray beard credit for coming up with his highly successful initiative to send Crazy Horse's uncle to deliver that package of pie-in-the-sky promises. By the fourteenth of April, those
Mnikowoju
and Sans Arc bands Spotted Tail had visited in the Little Missouri country, before marching west in search of the Crazy Horse village on the Powder, were already straggling into both the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies. Some two weeks later the Little Wolf contingent of the Northern Cheyenne appeared at the White Rock Agency. In short order Morning Star's and Spotted Elk's camps trickled in to Camp Robinson.

To his credit, Miles doggedly forged on with his plans for the campaign against those bitter-enders who refused all entreaties from north and south. Perhaps it was his grizzly-sized ego, if not his all-consuming desire to salvage something out of those herculean efforts he had made to induce the hostiles' surrender, which compelled the colonel to push on in the face of such a humiliating personal and professional defeat at the hands of the double-dealing Crook.

Miles is to be admired, while Crook should be despised for joining the ranks of those “peace-makers” who lied to the warrior bands down through history. Crook's actions in the spring of 1877 become all the more despicable when one takes into account the admirable efforts he had made in recent years to get to know his enemy, the lengths he went to in dealing honestly with his foes.

Another great source of aggravation for Miles had to be the fact that the eastern press—savvily kept by Crook in his hip pocket—was busy that spring reporting how Crook's successes were eclipsing those of Miles. Back east journalists were reporting and re-reporting that the reason for that spring's success in securing the surrender of so many of the Cheyenne, not to mention the impending surrender of Crazy Horse himself, was no less than Crook's defeat of the Dull Knife Cheyenne. Nearly all of the eastern papers failed to factually report that the Dull Knife defeat was due to the field commander who actually made the attack on the Red Fork village: Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie of the Fourth U.S. Cavalry.

This extremely politicized and slanted coverage had to put the intemperate Miles at a slow burn since he already regarded the press as conspirators who refused to put the credit for the surrenders where the credit was due—the tenacious war efforts of the Fifth U.S. Infantry and its commander.

It must be remembered that Crook did nothing but bring in the camps that had been recently defeated by the Fifth at Battle Butte (see
Wolf Mountain Moon—
vol. 12, The Plainsmen Series). It was Miles's relentless winter campaign that had given a rebirth to the peace faction in the villages, convincing tribal leaders that their best route lay in suing for the best possible terms of surrender. In my estimation, it was Miles's promise that he would continue to bring war to their doorstep that eventually convinced the headmen that they should negotiate with the Bear Coat rather than continue their fight-and-run tradition.

To counter all the good that Miles had accomplished in the field that bitter winter, it would take what this writer considers was no less than underhanded chicanery on the part of Crook and his subordinates.

What Miles had worked long and hard to accomplish, it took no time for Crook to undo. The Indians Crook brought in were in actuality seduced away from the lower Tongue, where they had been poised to give themselves over to the Bear Coat. Even with his success in stealing most of the hostiles away from Miles, Crook would not wait patiently for history to take its course with the rest of the warrior bands. Anxious, undoubtedly worried that something with his nefarious plan might yet go awry to turn Crazy Horse back into the arms of Colonel Miles, Crook sent none other than Red Cloud himself to smooth over any last minute hitches that might deter the Oglalla war chief from completing his sad journey to Camp Robinson.

The final miles of that surrender march, especially the final months of Crazy Horse's life, once he turned himself over to “White Hat” Clark and began to suffer the jealousy and indignities of the other Lakota chiefs, I will tell in a forthcoming volume in this Plainsmen Series:
The Broken Hoop.

In the end, history would wait close to a decade before it took its retribution on George Crook, before history finally rewarded Nelson Miles for what he accomplished not only with the last of the warrior bands in that spring of 1877, but with the surrender of Geronimo's Chiricahua Apache in Arizona. But that too is a story I will leave for another time, another adventure for Seamus Donegan.

While the commander of the Fifth Cavalry was consumed with pressuring the Northern Cheyenne and the Crazy Horse Lakota to surrender to him on the Yellowstone as spring began to flower on the northern prairies, Miles did not neglect his other arch-rival, Sitting Bull. Throughout the waning of that long winter he continued to do his best to gather intelligence on the mood and movements of the Hunkpapa leader's hostiles clinging to the Missouri River country.

Late in April, in fact, when resupply from downriver made renewed campaigning possible, just prior to departing for the Rosebud, Miles dispatched two companies of the Fifth Infantry under Second Lieutenant Hobart K. Bailey to scout north of the cantonment from the Sunday Creek area to the headwaters of the Big Porcupine (east of Fort Peck), circling back to the Yellowstone opposite the mouth of the Rosebud. Unable to locate any sign of the Sitting Bull village, Bailey's battalion returned to their post on the sixth of May.

That same day, Crazy Horse led his people in to Camp Robinson.

The following morning Miles had his fight with the last of the holdouts under Lame Deer.

And sometime in that first week of May 1877, Sitting Bull took his people across the
chanku wakan
—the medicine line—into the Land of the Grandmother.

There was good reason Bailey's battalion was unable to find recent sign of the Hunkpapa village in that last sweep of the Missouri River badlands. Sitting Bull had abandoned the fight and fled the United States.

The Great Sioux War was all but over.

In constructing our map of the May seventh fight to accompany this book, like historian Jerry Greene, I have consulted an invaluable resource in the map drawn the morning after the battle by Sergeant Charles Grillon. A member of H Company, Second Cavalry, Grillon served as battalion topographer, performing various cartographic duties while on campaign. The sergeant's map is astounding in its detail, including the night route of the advance down Muddy Creek to begin their attack at dawn; the locations where two of the cavalry soldiers were killed; the point where the pony herd was located near camp and the point across the river where that herd was finally halted and corralled by Lieutenant Casey's men; as well as the exact dispositions of the individual cavalry companies as they went in pursuit of the fleeing Lakota in their chase that lasted some eight miles, all the way to the Rosebud.

For the inveterate researchers among you, this map can be found among the papers of General Frank D. Baldwin, housed in the William Carey Brown Collection in the library at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Among the few accounts we have of the Lame Deer fight there exists some minor variations in the number of lodges that comprised the village. In his count made at the edge of the village late on the afternoon before the battle, White Bull showed William Rowland his tally of only thirty-eight lodges. The only way I am able to explain this too-small, incorrect number is that the Cheyenne holy man did not see the entire camp from where he was in hiding as he made his count. From Sergeant Charles Grillon's map of the village, as well as my own roadside visits to the area, I can logically deduce that with the twists and bends in Muddy Creek (now renamed Lame Deer Creek), as well as the knotting of willow and undergrowth clotting those twists, that White Bull simply was unable to see the entire village.

Beyond the holy man's tally of thirty-eight, there were two other incorrect counts recorded for history. One record gave the number of lodges as fifty-one, while another listed sixty-three, somewhat minor inconsistencies one must admit when considering the
sixty-one
lodges most historians generally accept as the number of “tepees” in the camp. At the same time you must remember that this figure did not include those brush bowers the bachelor warriors used for sleeping—young fighting men who had forsaken their south-bound families in giving allegiance to Lame Deer.

The site where the village stood that spring day in 1877 is now all but obliterated, covered by a hodgepodge of mobile homes on the south edge of the Cheyenne community, fittingly named Lame Deer.

Here along what is now BIA Route 4, Cheyenne historian George Bird Grinnell tells us that the hillside where Lame Deer fell is some fifty to sixty yards up the slope from (that is, to the southeast of) a shallow coulee that scars this narrow creek valley. Today, as on the day of the fight, one can gaze up the slope to locate a little red knoll above the coulee. Just beyond that, to the south-southeast, rises a taller knoll strewn with dark rocks lying among some stunted trees. It was on this higher point where Lame Deer was buried.

Twenty summers after the fight, Grinnell himself visited the site, watching as Lame Deer's daughter mourned beside his final resting place. National Park historian Jerry Greene confirms that Lame Deer's remains were later interred at that site Grinnell described: a sandstone cave on the heights overlooking the village site, close to the place where he fell.

No more than forty yards farther up that ravine lies a slight prominence dotted with some taller trees. Reports have it that this slope is where Lame Deer fell, just south of that coulee, collapsing sideways in death across a pine sapling. Greene records that at a point just west of where the chief was killed, there is that sandstone rock formation referred to by the Cheyenne locals as “Lame Deer's Tomb.”

Robert Jackson, the half-breed Blackfoot scout, was among the first to examine Lame Deer's corpse that fateful day, counting seventeen bullet holes in the Lakota chief's body from that devastating barrage fired at him as he sought to escape.

Another half-breed army scout, Joseph Culbertson—although not near the scene when Lame Deer was killed—later maintained that the chief was finished by a shot from fellow scout Robert Jackson. But a contemporary account in the
New York Herald,
dated June 11, 1877, confused matters all the more by ascribing Lame Deer's killing to Private Henry L. Davis of L Company, Second Cavalry. Muddying the discrepancies all the more, the newspaper account states that Davis reportedly presented the chief's headdress to Miles later that day. Additionally, Private Anthony Gavin, who declared he was one of the first to reach the body, recalled for the same
Herald
article that it was Robert Jackson, and not White Bull, who scalped Lame Deer, declaring that Jackson took “ears and all,” and kept the war chief's scalp on his bridle “for over a week after the fight.”

Just as we noted in the killing of Dog Soldier chief Tall Bull at Summit Springs in 1869
(Black Sun—
vol. 4, The Plainsmen Series), there is no little argument on who might have fired the shot that killed Lame Deer's nephew, Iron Star. Intriguing too is that we have two separate accounts among Indian recollections recounting the Lame Deer–Miles episode that state the agitated nephew on the scene was actually named Big Ankle (or Big Ankles) instead of Iron Star.