Sitting Bull's War, page 31
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In the days and weeks following the fight in the Slim Buttes the focus of the northern camps turned solely to survival, driven by ceaseless quests for buffalo. Aside from the many soldiers and steamboats crowding the Yellowstone and its traditional river crossings into the Big Open country, blue coats were notably absent from other waterways and hunting grounds beyond that valley. The summer soldiers seemed to have gone home. The people in the camps had no way of understanding the government’s strategic shift in waging this war, nor could they possibly comprehend that those river soldiers, mostly hated infantry now largely encamped at the mouth of the Tongue, constituted the greatest threat yet to their freedom. Those soldiers operated under a new mandate to create not one but soon two massive forts on the Yellowstone, plus a third on the Middle Powder, further allowing the army to continue this war and ensure an inevitable new order on the buffalo prairie. The people in the camps simply turned their attention to buffalo. Time was of the essence. Normal hunting and gathering cycles had been disrupted throughout the summer, and the long seasons of cold and snow were coming soon.20
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Sitting Bull learned of the Slim Buttes fight within days of its occurrence when refugees found their way to his camp. After a pause in the Killdeer Mountain country, he began making his way westward again, toward the Big Open, variously intent on hunting, securing munitions if possible at Fort Peck, and apparently nearing himself to Canada, should he opt for that greatest of escapes. It was well remembered among his people that the Santees had fled to Canada after their war in Minnesota in 1862, and the Canadians had welcomed them. Sitting Bull’s own followers had traded with the Métis in Canada’s Wood Mountains almost continuously since the winter of 1870–71, and in the years since he had maintained a casual but often productive relationship with those mixed-bloods. Sitting Bull presumed that Long Dog’s band of traditionals, having split from his camp in August, were already there.21
Word of the Great Chief’s movement was well known in the Upper Missouri Country in late September when Little Buck Elk, a Hunkpapa, and three others appeared at Fort Peck on September 23, having come directly from the chief’s camp. In conversation with the local agent, Little Buck Elk told among other things of ammunition being supplied by the southern trader Francis Boucher in the Burning Grounds in the southeastern Black Hills country. But the Hunkpapa had come foremost with a query from Sitting Bull, who wondered whether ammunition might be available at Fort Peck? The agent was aghast, reporting to his superiors that he immediately dispatched a runner to Sitting Bull informing him that no munitions were available at that place or anywhere on the reservation. He did allow that if the chief wished to come in and surrender arms and government property he would be treated kindly. Little Buck Elk told, too, of the Custer fight, admitting to being present but adeptly avoided confessing that he had any role in the affair. “Indians were as thick as bees at that fight,” he allowed, and “there were so many of them they could not all take part in it.”22
Of equal interest, Little Buck Elk also provided particulars on Sitting Bull’s movements in mid-September. Barely a few days earlier when the Hunkpapa departed the camp, the chief was on Beaver Creek, southeast of the mouth of the Powder. Another camp of Hunkpapas was nearby in the Blue Earth Hills, the vast forested tract in the southeastern corner of Montana. That band may in fact have been united Miniconjou and Sans Arc refugees, loosely aligning with other Hunkpapas. By now those scattered places were familiar landmarks in the saga of this war, the creek a standard pathway between the Little Missouri drainage and the Yellowstone, and the Blue Earth Hills a favorite sanctuary for these traditionals. Word of this movement spread widely. In army spheres, it triggered an alert that the great chief was again approaching the Yellowstone and searching for ammunition, a report that quickly reached the soldiers hutted at the mouth of the Tongue.23
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Somewhere along Sitting Bull’s trail from the Killdeer Mountains, likely in the Little Missouri country, he was joined by twenty-seven-year-old Johnnie Bruguier, an unlikely but not unknown Missouri River mixed-blood. Bruguier was among the messengers dispatched by the Standing Rock agent the previous January to deliver a final warning to the Northerners to submit or face a war. The year before he had interpreted for that same agent during the first of the Black Hills negotiations. Bruguier was fluent in the Lakota language, his mother’s tongue, and routinely interpreted at Grand River and Standing Rock. He was also well educated. His father, a successful French-Canadian trader on the Middle Missouri, had providing each of his male children with an education at the Christian Brothers College in Saint Louis. But Johnnie was complicit in a recent killing at Standing Rock, and rather than defend himself and clear his name, he had fled. Lawmen believed he intended to disappear in the flotsam of the Black Hills mining camps. Others thought he was headed to Minnesota to be among Red River mixed-bloods. Instead, he sought obscurity in a not-so-distant Northern Indian camp, and apparently chanced onto the very camp belonging to Sitting Bull. It was a bold move, but Bruguier’s familiarity with the Hunkpapas and their language saved him.24
While most Hunkpapas knew Bruguier a few were suspicious. They questioned why a man in White man’s clothing might ride into an Indian camp so brazenly. Some even threatened to kill him, but Sitting Bull intervened and welcomed him to his lodge. The venerable chief again showered favor on such a self-assured and gregarious middleman. Bruguier talked frankly about the war, of forces circling and in the field presently, all aiming to defeat the Northern Indians. And he talked of the fates of those surrendering at an agency. It was Bruguier who allegedly told Sitting Bull and these Hunkpapas that it was Custer leading the soldiers they killed at the Little Big Horn. Spotted Bear, a Hunkpapa in the camp, claimed it was the first they had heard of this. Perhaps so, even if Cheyenne women had identified Custer late in the day of the battle. The Oglala He Dog remembered learning the soldier’s identity some two weeks after the fight “when a Missouri River Sioux brought out the news.” Whatever the case, Bruguier was welcomed and befriended. As a fugitive, the safety and isolation of the Hunkpapa camp served him well. His presence would also soon serve Indian interests.25
As Sitting Bull’s people crossed the Yellowstone on October 10, having descended Cabin Creek, a small tributary downstream of the mouth of the Powder opposite Bad Route Creek, his wolves reported the movement of army wagons east of them. The Indian camp was headed northward for the Big Dry, following Bad Route Creek. Big Dry Creek, across the northern divide, was a broad watercourse leading to the Missouri River and Fort Peck. It was a landscape almost always heavy with buffalo. But the wagon soldiers were in the way. Sitting Bull’s wolves wanted to fight, but the chief, innately cautious, counseled against interfering. Still, young men, emboldened by the successes of the summer and incensed by the army’s attack at Slim Buttes, rushed off.26
Late that evening warriors struck the soldiers at their overnight camp at the Spring Creek crossing (today’s Sand Creek), some fourteen miles west of their Glendive supply camp, capturing forty-seven government mules from the westbound train. The raiders lingered and the next morning again harassed the train as it pressed on for the fledgling Tongue River post. At the Clear Creek crossing seven miles further along, Indian gunfire grew so persistent and sometimes vigorous, the government train and its mix of civilians and foot soldiers turned back. One recalled having to “fight our way through to Glendive.” Several days later, refitted and accompanied by a measurably strengthened escort, the wagons again took the trail. As before, warriors harassed the train. In this exchange, Sitting Bull’s nephew, White Bull, so brave and heroic at the Little Big Horn, was wounded in the left arm, a bullet breaking the bone. “It was a hot fight,” White Bull recalled. “Four soldiers were wounded that day.” White Bull was helped back to camp where his wounds were tended. “They gave me medicine for four days, and made me well again,” he remembered. “I was almost dead.”27
Sitting Bull had no role in those clashes. If anything, he consistently pressed his people to disengage and continue to the Big Dry. But he also acknowledged there was a point to be made, and perhaps even something to be gained. On the morning of October 16 as the troops and wagons continued westward, they encountered a note scrawled on a piece of white cloth tied to a stick, the handiwork of the chief’s newfound literate middleman friend, Johnnie Bruguier. As Johnnie explained later, what occurred was unique and distinctly of the chief’s inspiration.
Yellowstone
I want to know what you are doing traveling on this road. You scare all the buffalo away. I want to hunt on the place. I want you to turn back from here. If you don’t, I will fight you again. I want you to leave what you have got here, and turn back from here.
I am your friend,
Sitting Bull
I mean all the rations you have got and some powder. Wish you would write as soon as you can.28
Shortly thereafter, two riders from the Indian camp, Bear Face and Long Feather, appeared. Both were Standing Rock Lakotas who the agent recently sent to encourage Sitting Bull to end the war. They approached the column under a white flag and were led to the commander. Their pleading on the chief’s behalf was no different than the essence of the note. The trains were scaring the buffalo, but Sitting Bull was tired of fighting and his people were hungry. He was willing to make peace but wanted now only to hunt, and for that he needed ammunition. The army commander told the couriers that he was in no position to negotiate and certainly would not provide ammunition. The couriers asserted that Sitting Bull then would merely continue to Fort Peck to trade. The exchange was brief and seemingly innocuous, although when the soldiers continued on, they left beside their trail two sides of bacon and 150 pounds of hard bread, small tokens of a continuing hope to end the conflict, if only on the government’s terms. The Indians harassing the train to this point disappeared altogether, even as Sitting Bull led his people northward up Bad Route Creek and into the forked headlands of Cedar Creek where buffalo had been spotted.29
Meanwhile, a column of soldiers led by Colonel Nelson A. Miles of the Fifth Infantry joined the wagon train. Alarmed when the Glendive train had not appeared as anticipated, they had come hastily from the Tongue River camp. At thirty-seven years of age, Miles was a complex man. An aggressive, seasoned Indian campaigner, he had brought his regiment to Montana from Kansas in the wake of the Little Big Horn disaster, arriving on one of the many steamboats plying the river that season. He was dually charged now to establish the Tongue River post, one of the new army garrisons intended to be permanent in the heart of the buffalo country, and to take the war to Sitting Bull. Apprised of the apparent nearness of the chief’s camp, he immediately determined to intercept him and either oblige his surrender or destroy his camp. Few of the people comprehended just then that a new reality had set in. In Miles, they now faced a determined, unbending agent of the government, an officer as resolute in effecting a new order in the buffalo country as Sitting Bull was in clinging steadfastly to the vestiges of yesterday. Miles would dog the great chief to the end.30
As the wagon train continued to the Tongue River camp, Miles’s column of foot soldiers and a lumbering artillery piece pivoted to the north and ascended Cedar Creek, a shallow, nearly treeless drainage reaching to the far horizon. Some eight or ten miles up the stretch they were again confronted by the two Standing Rock Indians, Bear Face and Long Feather, who once again advanced under a white flag. Behind them in the distance, a crowd of onlookers, perhaps as many as 150 warriors, were visible on the skyline. Taken to Miles, the two couriers told him that Sitting Bull was willing to have a meeting and discuss surrendering his people. This suited the colonel immensely, and the two riders returned to the watchful audience on the horizon, this time accompanied by one of Miles’s officers. There, with Bruguier interpreting, arrangements were made for a council of a few necessary participants drawn from each side. They would meet between the lines. 31
The stage was set. What occurred on the afternoon of October 20, 1876, was an episode distinct in an already distinctive, convulsive saga, a moment when the Great Chief looked face-to-face at his enemy and made his case for a life in the buffalo country.
The day was sunny but bitterly cold. Onto the broad, treeless stage Sitting Bull and Miles each rode forward accompanied by small retinues of counselors and interpreters. They pulled up on the prairie thirty yards apart, dismounted, and stepped forward. The leading figures were each suitably attired for the season but made no grand spectacle. The chief, swaddled in a thick buffalo robe, was in plain dress. Miles wore a unique fur cap and a long, caped, dark blue overcoat trimmed with bear fur. Indians ever after referred to him as “Man with the Bear Coat,” or simply “Bear Coat” Miles. Sitting Bull wore no feathers or ornamentation but, as always, clutched his pipe bag. No one was armed, at least visibly. Among those at Sitting Bull’s side was Big Leggins Bruguier, his trusted new interpreter.32
Sitting Bull spread a buffalo robe between them and urged that they sit. Miles consented to kneel but refused to sit. Bruguier sat between them. Sitting Bull first conducted a pipe ceremony, ritualistically invoking the supreme powers in the prospect of peace. Miles opened the exchange, circling his driving point with small matters, particularly the return of the mules taken a week earlier. Then he reached the issue of consequence, telling the chief bluntly that he meant to deliver the Sioux to the reservation, peacefully he hoped, but forcibly if necessary. Sitting Bull bristled. “Give us back the buffalo your soldiers scared away from us,” he retorted. If Whites had not come into his country there would be no war. He wanted peace, he conceded, but on the old terms, with arms, the ability to trade, and the liberty to hunt and roam at will on the Plains. Miles later characterized Sitting Bull’s demands as an “old fashioned peace.” Bear Coat was inflexible, and their differences irreconcilable. Miles broke off the council near sunset and the parties returned to respective onlookers far behind. Sitting Bull and his warriors quickly disappeared, returning to their camp in the headlands. Before parting, however, he and Miles agreed to talk again in the morning.33
In the Indian camp that evening, the contentiousness of the day boiled over, and a number of chiefs and head men confronted Sitting Bull. Some wished to attack the soldiers outright, but that ardor was calmed. Others wished to accede to Bear Coat’s demands, Bear Face and Long Feather particularly espousing such a view. Conditions were dire, the wavering ones noted, and they were ready to yield, even if it meant surrendering firearms and ponies. But mostly the people needed to eat. Sitting Bull struggled to retain his resolve but managed to calm the dissenters.34
Next morning the people were alarmed to see the soldiers advancing up the east fork of Cedar Creek toward them as if ready to strike the camp, and when the chiefs and warriors departed for the talk the women and children struck the lodges and prepared to flee. The meeting with Bear Coat Miles that morning was even more tumultuous than the one the day before. Sitting Bull surrounded himself with a greater delegation of counselors, eight or ten now, including Gall, Black Eagle, Bull Eagle, and Red Skirt. The chief dominated the exchange, repeating his demands for unfettered freedom in the buffalo country. Miles zealously repeated his demands from the day before. Fearing the soldiers might be wiped out right then, Bruguier sometimes delicately avoided translating some of the officer’s intemperate remarks. In utter frustration, Sitting Bull told Bear Coat that there could never be a peace between the peoples. “God Almighty made him an Indian and did not make him an agency Indian either, and he did not intend to be one.” As the council dispersed, Miles warned Sitting Bull that to reject the government’s terms would be considered a hostile act, and he would attack immediately.35
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Bear Coat Miles’s attack on Sitting Bull’s Cedar Creek village on the late morning of October 21 only served to harden the chief’s view of a duplicitous government, and of Whites, daring to speak of peace, but only on government terms. Barely had he and his entourage returned to the camp when shrill cannon fire announced the commencement of Miles’s assault. Bullets from infantry rifles soon pelted what remained of this buffalo hunting enclave, the fragile remnant of a once-mighty alliance of Hunkpapas, Miniconjous, and Sans Arcs. Miles never tallied the size of the camp aside from declaring, speculatively, that it held “about a thousand warriors.” Bear Coat’s attack achieved the scattering of the inhabitants and the complete destruction of hastily abandoned property, the all too frequent consequence of yet another hurried flight. One White scout among the attackers was struck by the richness of the Indian property—lodge covers often taken but not always the poles, tons of carefully dried buffalo meat and backfat, hundreds of parfleches stuffed with dried berries, plus cooking utensils, furs, and skins of all sorts. This was the fourth such brazen attack on traditionals this year, and the first directed consciously and specifically at Sitting Bull. He and those same kin allies were in the immediate cross fire at Little Big Horn, too, but the nature of that fight saved the village. Not here.36
For a short while, warriors put up a gallant defense. They burned the grass between the soldiers and the camp, even as some seized the advantageous ridge defining the scene’s northern horizon and shooting from there, all to cover fleeing dependents. At one point White Bull, his shattered arm in a sling, attempted to rally followers, yelling out, “Come on, let’s go and rub them out.” But Sitting Bull restrained him and urged that he shield the vulnerable ones instead. Casualty tallies varied—one, maybe five Indians killed, and an untold number of ponies, American horses, and mules lost. Two soldiers were wounded. Most of the people fled in a southeasterly direction, opposite the blue coat’s charge. They crossed the shallow divide onto the headlands of Bad Route Creek in the direction of the Yellowstone, with slow-paced foot soldiers on their heels after first ensuring the complete destruction of the camp.37
