Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/407

 prove a serious loss to the savages rather than a gain to ourselves. Two hundred ponies—many of them fine animals—not quite one-half the herd, fell into our hands. A cavalry guidon, nearly new and torn from the staff; an army officer's overcoat; a non-commissioned officer's blouse; cavalry saddles of the McClellan model, covered with black leather after the latest pattern of the ordnance bureau; a glove marked with the name of Captain Keogh; a letter addressed to a private soldier in the Seventh Cavalry; horses branded U. S. and 7 C.—one was branded D 7 C: were proofs that the members of this band had taken part, and a conspicuous part, in the Custer massacre. General Crook ordered all the meat and other supplies to be taken from the village and piled up so that it could be issued or packed upon our mules. Next, he ordered the wounded to receive every care; this had already been done, as far as he was able, by Mills, who had pitched one of the captured lodges in a cool, shady spot, near the stream, and safe from the annoyance of random shots which the scattered Sioux still fired from the distant hills.

A still more important task was that of dislodging a small party who had run into a gulch fifty or sixty yards outside of the line of the lodges, from which they made it dangerous for any of Mills's command to enter the village, and had already killed several of the pack-mules whose carcasses lay among the lodges. Frank Gruard and "Big Bat" were sent forward, crawling on hands and feet from shelter to shelter, to get within easy talking distance of the defiant prisoners in the gulch, who refused to accede to any terms and determined to fight it out, confident that "Crazy Horse," to whom they had despatched runners, would soon hasten to their assistance. Lieutenant William P. Clarke was directed to take charge of a picked body of volunteers and get the Indians out of that gulch; the firing attracted a large crowd of idlers and others, who pressed so closely upon Clarke and his party as to seriously embarrass their work. Our men were so crowded that it was a wonder to me that the shots of the beleaguered did not kill them by the half-dozen; but the truth was, the Sioux did not care to waste a shot: they were busy digging rifle-pits in the soft marly soil of the ravine, which was a perfect ditch, not more than ten to fifteen feet wide, and fifteen to twenty deep, with a growth of box elder that aided in concealing their doings from