Wolf Mountain Moon (68 page)

The fact that Crook had received the winter clothing
he
ordered for
his
campaign would continue to nettle Miles as he prepared to march north. In a letter to his wife Miles privately confided that an army investigation into the matter would likely ruin not only Crook himself, but the venal army quartermaster staff as well.

All the meteorological reports of the day state that the winter of 1876-77 was one of the most severe on record, especially across the Montana, Dakota, and Wyoming territories. Subzero cold and snow came early that year, and rarely did the snow disappear long enough to see bare ground before a new storm brought even more. Not only did the cold and the snow make waging war an even tougher proposition, the weather that winter killed off much of what game wasn't driven south. In the villages of the winter roamers, bellies went hungry because the buffalo and big-game animals simply were not available.

What those sunken cheeks and hollow eyes, those whimpers and cries from the Lakota and Cheyenne people, would surely have done to touch the hearts of their leaders—convincing them that little hope remained in following the old life. It seemed as if the weather itself had conspired to
do all in its power to convince the winter roamers that they could no longer survive off their reservations.

For those troops Miles left behind to garrison the post while he was off on both campaigns, the daily fatigue work continued. More walls were raised and roof joists laid on. The insides of exterior walls were plastered to eliminate what they could of the howling Montana winds. One of the cabins that was entirely finished by the time the men returned from the Missouri River region was that used by the contract sutler. It was a place that would soon cause Miles some serious problems of morale and discipline.

As mentioned in the story, not only did the government sutler sell intoxicating spirits to the soldiers, but two or three other enterprising civilians showed up from downriver with some “high wines,” brandies, and a potent whiskey. This liquor was sold to the soldiers without proper regulation in mid-December and the number of men locked up in the guardhouse multiplied until one officer observed, “the Guard House was always full to overflowing & Genl Miles said the whiskey caused him more trouble than the Indians.”

After attempting several different solutions, the colonel finally closed down the sutler's saloon for good in the early spring of 1877. At that point the traders simply moved beyond the eastern border of the military reservation to set up shop. It infuriated Miles that one of the unscrupulous traders was selling a lethal moonshine concoction that left several of his soldiers dead. An unnamed band of angry soldiers soon took care of the problem themselves: either they ran the trader out of the country or they killed him, for the man was never seen in Montana Territory again, and nary a trace was found of the scalawag.

During the next year a civilian community slowly blossomed around the shantytown of whiskey traders' log cabins. First known as Milesburg, then called Milestown, and now known as Miles City, Montana—the place was never so notorious as it was back then. By 1879, however, the modest community could boast its own courthouse, a one-room school, several cafés to accompany its saloons, along with those shops where many industrious carpenters, painters, blacksmiths, and coopers plied their trades, totally dependent upon the post for their livelihood.

We are fortunate to have more than the military record when it comes to the Fort Peck Expedition and the wanderings of its three battalions in November-December of 1876. Three soldiers left us their observations of one another, the weather, and the day-to-day life on the campaign trail. Whereas the first is an account written by an unnamed soldier, which Jerry Greene found printed in the Leavenworth
Daily Times
(what must surely have been the soldier's hometown paper), the second-most valuable is that written by First Lieutenant George W. Baird (who served as regimental adjutant).

But by far the most enlightening is the daily field notes taken by Lieutenant Frank D. Baldwin himself. He faithfully recorded his observations in a pocket-sized notebook, which he later expanded into a ledger. It is this undated manuscript that rests in the William Carey Brown collection of the Western History Collections at the Norlin Library, University of Colorado, in Boulder.

Baldwin's minute remembrances add immensely to the historical record of the continued contact between the army and the Sitting Bull camps in the autumn and winter of 1876–77 as the army harried the Sioux and chased them about the country north of the Yellowstone. None of the Lakota participants in either the skirmish at Bark Creek or the fight at Ash Creek left any record with interpreters during the “reservation period,” as they would leave accounts of other battles and conflicts with the soldiers. One wonders if it was merely too embarrassing for those veteran warriors to make mention of those two defeats, or if they simply determined it would be best to stay quiet, since those two encounters with the army only served further to prove Sitting Bull's admonition that to take spoils from the Little Bighorn dead would bring down the wrath of
Wakan Tanka
upon their people.

Late in the summer of 1920 Frank Baldwin journeyed to the high plains of Montana to accompany Joseph Culbertson to the site of their December 1876 attack on Sitting Bull. By then a general retired from the army, Baldwin and the young scout, who was barely eighteen winters old at the time of the expedition, wandered over the site, sharing reminiscences together. It wasn't long before a six-foot-high stone monument in the shape of a pyramid was erected on the site where Sitting Bull's people had abandoned their village that cold winter day
when Baldwin's troops rumbled toward their camp in those noisy wagons.

Success at last against the leader of the “hostile” Sioux!

As Robert Utley describes in
The Lance and the Shield,
his master work about Sitting Bull:

If Phil Sheridan had trouble on this point—Nelson A. Miles sure knew Sitting Bull existed in the flesh. And make no mistake, so did Lieutenant Frank Baldwin.

This Ash Creek fight in Montana Territory is all but unknown, even among those who have a speaking acquaintance of the Great Sioux War. All too few understand just what a signal victory Baldwin and his small battalion accomplished by surprising the larger, stronger, confederated village and driving them into the wilderness with little more than what they had on their backs. They had no choice but to head south, hoping to find Crazy Horse, where they would be welcomed as they had welcomed him and the Cheyenne survivors the previous winter. Baldwin had turned the tables on the Lakota—and successfully shattered the myth of an all-powerful Hunkpapa-led coalition.

Considering the scale of this defeat at Ash Creek (and, once the Hunkpapa village reached the Crazy Horse camp, finding them so recently defeated by Miles at Battle Butte), it becomes all the more clear why it would take Sitting Bull and
his chiefs only a matter of weeks to decide that their only course lay in fleeing across the line to Canada.

The army had the bands on the run, harried and harassed on the northern plains. So what do you think would have happened if the Lakota peace delegates from the Crazy Horse village had reached the cantonment to discuss terms of surrender with Miles?

So close—perhaps only a matter of several hundred yards—to have come on this journey with the blessings of Crazy Horse, Little Wolf, and Morning Star themselves … only to be set upon by the cowardly Crow auxiliaries Tom Leforge had recruited for Lieutenant Hargous.

Think of it: had not the Crow cold-bloodedly murdered those five brave men, within sight of a wavering Crazy Horse, such a surrender would have represented at least six hundred lodges—which meant more than some twelve hundred fighting men! Miles and the frontier army would have struck a powerful coup. Sitting Bull and his confederated chiefs would have been left completely isolated, alone, and vulnerable. Had not the Crow cowards committed those inexcusable murders against their ancient enemies, then escaped back to the safety of their reservation before they could be punished for their crimes … the Great Sioux War would have been over before Christmas!

Take a moment to consider it now: as things turned out, this cowardly act by Crow murderers caused the war to drag on at least another six months.

This half-day Battle of the Butte between Miles and Crazy Horse during a snowstorm in southeastern Montana is really not all that better known than Baldwin's Ash Creek fight. In fact, it was so little known among Indian Wars' historians that it was called the
Battle of Wolf Mountain.
Yet all one has to do is look at a good map of that part of Montana, and you will see that the Wolf Mountains are many miles from the site—the very same range crossed by Custer's Seventh Cavalry as they marched west from the Rosebud, past the Crow's Nest, on to the valley of the Little Bighorn. So what the academics might call the Battle of Wolf Mountain is better known in these parts as the Battle of the Butte.

Come up here and take one of my tours of the northern
plains when we travel to this site, and you will readily see just how appropriate is that name.

One of the sources I relied upon before my very first trip up the Tongue River to Battle Butte was a small self-published book by the late Charles B. Erlanson. Having come to Montana in 1911 as a young wrangler, Erlanson went right to work for the Flying V Ranch, and later cowboyed for the Three Circle Ranch—both of which were on the Cheyenne Reservation. For better than fifty years Erlanson not only rode up and down the Tongue River, back and forth across the ground where this story took place, but also knew several of the old Cheyenne storytellers who spoke of the fight, and of the toll that terrible winter took upon the once-powerful Shahiyela people.

One of Erlanson's closest informants was none other than John Stands In Timber, the Cheyenne tribal historian who collaborated with Margot Liberty on his book of Cheyenne culture and stories. On one trip the two old horsemen made to the battle site, Erlanson took a photograph of Stands in Timber beside the low pile of red rocks Wooden Leg had stacked up to mark the spot where Big Crow was shot. A stoic, but bright-eyed, Cheyenne historian looks back at the camera, pointing to that simple, but eloquent, marker with his wooden cane.

As the howling blizzard closed down upon the valley of the Tongue River, Miles ordered some of his unit to pursue the fleeing enemy—in hopes of learning just how close was the Crazy Horse camp. For many years a legend lived on that stated the soldiers chased the warriors for miles up the valley, passing through their hastily abandoned camp where they fought the rear guard protecting the village, and where the soldiers captured a huge store of dried meat.

Perhaps this historical error is what led no lesser an artist than Frederic Remington to paint one of his most famous works:
Miles Strikes the Village of Crazy Horse.
Although it does give the viewer a clear conception of the blowing snow, the bitter cold, the gusty wind, and the shoot-and-advance / shoot-and-advance nature of such battles, along with the drama of soldiers kneeling to fire in the foreground, with an officer and an Indian scout behind them (who might clearly
be the Bannock called Buffalo Horn), Remington's painting is nonetheless nothing more than a work of the imagination.

The painting would be better ascribed to Mackenzie's attack on Morning Star's village: the on-foot, lodge-to-lodge fight of it made on 25 November 1876.

Truth is, the Sioux and Cheyenne village was at least seventeen miles south of Battle Butte. A man who knows firsthand the nature of not only that terrain but a half century of Montana snowstorms, Charlie Erlanson himself, said of this controversy, “The last part of the battle was fought in a blizzard of such intensity that it … would have been futile for Miles's foot soldiers to attempt to pursue the ‘finest light cavalry in the world' through the deep snow.”

Having myself visited the site on a clear winter day, with close to a foot of snow on the level, I have to concur not only with William Jackson (the half-breed Blackfoot scout with Miles), but with the current thinking of historians: that the pursuing soldiers did not chase the Indians to and through their village. Instead, the infantry would have been lucky to follow those fleeing horsemen a matter of two, perhaps three, miles at most, on foot before they were forced to turn back beneath the onslaught of a Montana blizzard.

By considering only the record of casualties, one might infer that this was an inconsequential affair brought to an indecisive conclusion only by the extremities of severe weather. But even the casualty counts are conflicting for some reason.

William Jackson states that three soldiers were killed (although his recollection may be clouded by time and by witnessing Batty's death earlier on their march upriver). He goes on to state that eight soldiers were wounded. Two other writers concur with these same figures, one of which was Captain Edmond Butler in his own brief account of the campaign.

So why, I ask myself, did Miles officially report one man killed and nine wounded during the battle? Because of the soldier who died on the northbound march, I think I can understand a discrepancy of one fatality—but this still does not account for the other death.