Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/353

 laid in a row, covered with stones, mud, and earth packed down, and a great fire kindled on top and allowed to burn all night. When we broke camp the next morning the entire command marched over the graves, so as to obliterate every trace and prevent prowling savages from exhuming the corpses and scalping them.

A rough shelter of boughs and branches had been erected for the wounded, and our medical officers, Hartsuff, Patzki, and Stevens, labored all night, assisted by Lieutenant Schwatka, who had taken a course of lectures at Bellevue Hospital, New York. The Shoshones crept out during the night and cut to pieces the two Sioux bodies within reach; this was in revenge for their own dead, and because the enemy had cut one of our men to pieces during the fight, in which they made free use of their lances, and of a kind of tomahawk, with a handle eight feet long, which they used on horseback.

June 18, 1876, we were turned out of our blankets at three o'clock in the morning, and sat down to eat on the ground a breakfast of hard-tack, coffee, and fried bacon. The sky was an immaculate blue, and the ground was covered with a hard frost, which made every one shiver. The animals had rested, and the wounded were reported by Surgeon Hartsuff to be doing as well "as could be expected." "Travois" were constructed of Cottonwood and willow branches, held together by ropes and rawhide, and to care for each of these six men were detailed. As we were moving off, our scouts discerned three or four Sioux riding down to the battle-field, upon reaching which they dismounted, sat down, and bowed their heads; we could not tell through glasses what they were doing, but the Shoshones and Crows said that they were weeping for their dead. They were not fired upon or molested in any way. We pushed up the Rosebud, keeping mainly on its western bank, and doing our best to select a good trail along which the wounded might be dragged with least jolting. Crook wished to keep well to the south so as to get farther into the Big Horn range, and avoid much of the deep water of the streams flowing into Tongue River, which might prove too swift and dangerous for the wounded men in the "travois." In avoiding Scylla, we ran upon Charybdis: we escaped much of the deep water, although not all of it, but encountered much trouble from the countless ravines and gullies which cut the flanks of the range in every direction.