Trumpet on the Land (87 page)

About a week after reaching Fort Laramie, John Finerty returned to Chicago, reporting to his editor, Clint Snowden, and the paper's owner, Wilbur Storey. After a series of in-depth articles on Crook's campaign, Finerty's final article appeared on October 6 in the Chicago
Times:

On the second of December, 1876, the U.S. Army awarded the medal of honor to those three couriers who courageously carried General Terry's letter south through
territory believed to be teeming with hostiles, destined for Crook at his Camp Cloud Peak: Privates William Evans, Benjamin F. Stewart, and James Bell—all of E Company, Seventh U.S. Infantry.

Anson Mills would eventually secure another brevet rank of colonel for his meritorious service in launching the charge on the village at Slim Buttes. Then forty-five years later in 1921, some twenty-four years after he had retired from the army with the rank of brigadier general, and thirty-one years after Crook died, Mills applied through former commanding general of the army General Nelson A. Miles for a Medal of Honor. Those fellow officers who joined Miles in supporting the award read like a Who's Who of officers who served with Crook's Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition in that terrible march: Major General Samuel S. Sumner, Brigadier General Charles King, Brigadier General William P. Hall, Brigadier General Peter D. Vroom.

But, sadly, Mills had applied too long after the fact, according to the army's regulations. Some historians believe he waited so long because his application would have been denied by Crook, who might still voice his criticism of Mills's “precipitous” attack. If this appraisal is correct, then why did Mills wait a full thirty-one years after his old antagonist's death?

Most confusing are two minor inconsistencies found in otherwise scholarly books. Jerome Greene puts Finerty with Davenport as the two reporters who departed with Mills on the night of 7 September. But one has only to read John Finerty's book to learn that he stayed behind and was with Crook when George Herman, Mills's courier, showed up to announce the taking of the village. We know there were two reporters along from their subsequent accounts of the morning battle. So from my own research poring over the microfilm copies of old issues of the Rocky Mountain
News
, in which “Alter Ego's” stories of Captain Mills's morning “fight” would later appear, I believe I can trust
John S. Gray's account that it was indeed Robert Strahorn who was there at dawn.

In yet a second discrepancy Greene appears to be the correct party. Whereas Oliver Knight gives “Alfred Milner” as the name of the soldier killed by Sioux along the Belle Fourche during the return of Major Upham's battalion from its fruitless patrol, Greene accurately reports the name from duty rosters in the military archives as Cyrus B. Milner of Company A.

Still, it is the confusion surrounding the identity of “Buffalo Chips” White that most befuddles me. Charles King states that the scout's name was
James
White. John Finerty records him as
“Charley
, alias
Frank
White.” Then we find his gravestone at the Slim Buttes battle site is inscribed with the name
Jonathan
White. James and Jonathan, maybe—a discrepancy caused by the slightest error in someone's memory—but where did Finerty ever come up with Frank?

It was likely easier for historians to locate and identify the Slim Buttes site than it was to determine the scout's real first name!

Like so many other dramatic chapters of the Indian wars, the fight at Slim Buttes quickly faded from memory, thrust back into the shadows behind the more startling but no more consequential Little Bighorn battle. Thirty-one years would pass before amateur Indian wars' historian Walter M. Camp, then editor for the “Railway Review,” would interview old Miniconjou warriors on the Standing Rock Reservation, thus learning of Crook's attack on their village.

It took another seven years, in 1914, for Camp to convince two veterans of Crook's campaign, Anson Mills and Charles Morton, to accompany him to South Dakota. In Belle Fourche they rented a car and drove north, but after spending several days searching along the eastern face of the buttes, neither could confirm the site of the Miniconjou village. The three returned east empty-handed.

But Camp would not be deterred. Undaunted, he pursued
his quest for another three years, and finally, in June of 1917, with the help of a map drawn by Charles King as well as hours of research by Bill Rumbaugh, a ranch hand working for a local cattleman
in
South Dakota, Camp finally determined the battlefield site.

While working cattle across that ground year after year, Rumbaugh had discovered pieces of shattered iron cookware destroyed by Crook's troops, spent .45/70 cases in the still-visible rifle pits, along with burned lodgepoles and the presence of human skeletal remains. Accompanied by Rumbaugh, in addition to six other local ranchers, an overjoyed Camp finally walked over that hallowed ground and verified the battle site located in the extreme northwestern corner of South Dakota. In his subsequent searches he found a variety of artifacts, including iron tea kettles, galvanized water buckets, broken butcher knives, iron hooks and handles, tin pans, basins, cups and cans, broken and melted glass bottles, broken earthware dishes, coffeepots, clothes buttons, and a stone pestle.

Still, it was the discovery of human skeletal remains that caused Camp the most excitement and speculation. One of the local ranchers took the researcher to the top of a little knoll less than a quarter of a mile from the south side of the creek. There Camp was shown a skeleton, complete but for the skull. Beneath the remains lay a burned and bent carbine barrel, as well as three spent cartridge cases.

On a knoll directly west of this first site, Camp later discovered a second skeleton in much the same condition. Not knowing at the time that Sitting Bull's warriors had boasted of digging up the white man's graves near the village, Camp nevertheless came to that exact conclusion years ahead of the publication of Stanley Vestal's book.

Today a visitor can drive east from the small town of Buffalo for twenty-one miles, crossing over the Slim Buttes themselves. Approximately two miles west of the hamlet of Reva on the south side of the highway you will find a bronze-plaque roadside marker and the eight-foot-tall shaft of a stone monument erected on a small patch of state ground a half mile from the actual site of the village. Beyond the nearby fence the rest of the site is land owned by the family of George Lermeny, whom I've had the pleasure of speaking with on the phone but whom I have not had the honor of meeting in person. Lermeny's grandfather came from Canada to settle on that ground in late 1886.

Former Sergeant John A. Kirkwood helped place the stone pylon monument that was financed by Anson Mills
after Walter M. Camp confirmed the site. But, despite Camp's protests, Mills elected to place the tall spire a half mile from the village site and close beside the highway, where the old general wanted it to be seen by the cars that passed by on that narrow east-west route. In August of 1920, three years after the ground had been identified, the markers were dedicated, complete with three separate headstones commemorating those white men who fell at Slim Buttes, all enclosed inside a tall wrought-iron fence.

Those two markers are as close as you will get to the battlefield. The passerby, tourist, amateur historian, and researcher are not allowed onto Lermeny's property, where a third marker stands at the mouth of the ravine, indicating where Wenzel and White were killed. Erected in 1956 by the South Dakota State Historical Society, it reads:

Siege of the Ravine
American Horse, family
and six warriors ran here
at dawn attack. By noon
four warriors were dead.
American Horse, fatally
wounded, surrendered with
those left. Here Jonathan
White, “Chips,” civilian
scout, was killed.

In my phone conversations with George Lermeny, the rancher remained adamant that he wanted no further attention given to the site. “It's been too much trouble for us already,” he said to me, then went on to tell how in recent years several researchers had come to him seeking permission to go over the village site and the surrounding hillsides with their metal detectors, and to complete analytical terrain surveys. Because those researchers subsequently wrote books on the Slim Buttes battle, Lermeny feels there's been too much of a rising tide of publicity surrounding his family's home.

The Reva, South Dakota, rancher told me, “We've had too much attention given us. I'm hoping things'll eventually quiet down and we can go back to making a living here. This is our family business. Six generations have worked this ground. We just want to be left alone now.”

In fact, the home George Lermeny shares with his wife rests in the draw where on that rainy night of September 8, 1876, Anson Mills waited for the gray light of dawn with 150 troopers, located to the northeast (and across the present highway) from the Sioux village.

As much as I was personally disappointed in not getting a chance to meet George Lermeny and to walk that creek bottom, climb those knolls and hills south and west of the village site, look myself for the rifle pits used by Chambers's infantry on the afternoon of September 9, then follow the path of the Fifth Cavalry's retreat on the morning of the tenth—I can nonetheless understand his possessiveness of that beautiful piece of ground.

I can sympathize with it entirely in light of what I see done by visitors at Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, visitors to the battlefields that dot the western plains.

Shamefully, all too few American citizens are truly respectful of our past or do they truly honor the historical and spiritual significance of that sacred ground. As much as I am sorry that this is one piece of hallowed soil I did not get to walk across, much less have the opportunity to sit and listen to the ghosts whisper through the branches of the buffalo-berry bushes heavy with their bright-red fruit— I find myself in total sympathy with George Lermeny.

At the time of Crook's Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition, Lieutenant Charles Morton served as regimental adjutant to Lieutenant Colonel William B. Royall, Third Cavalry. By 1914, when he was frequently corresponding with researcher Walter M. Camp, Morton had risen to the rank of brigadier general. In a letter the old soldier wrote to Camp on August 19, 1914, Morton included a poem composed shortly after the Battle of Slim Buttes which he
credited to an unidentified officer of the Fifth Cavalry, a bit of rhyme that shows how some of Crook's soldiers steadfastly despised their general, no matter the march of time.

On the twenty-fourth of October, 1876, upon officially disbanding the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition, General George Crook—the target of so much derision and outright hatred from his soldiers, the object of so much admiration among those he led into battle and forced to keep going until the end of their “horse-meat march”—
addressed himself to his officers and men in General Orders No. 8: