Dakota Diary - 8- More On the Far West

“Well, as I said,” Captain Marsh continued, “she began the campaign as a supply vessel for the command of General Terry, of which Custer's cavalry was a part. We were hired by General Sheridan at the vast cost of $360 a day for the duration of the expedition. Terry's troops had marched out from Fort Lincoln at Bismarck to rendezvous with General Gibbons' command on the Yellowstone at the mouth of the Powder River. As soon as the ice permitted, I brought the Far West up to Fort Lincoln, loaded her with 200 tons of supplies, and set out for the camp on the Yellowstone.

“As to why they hired us, well, I was a was a renowned pilot, the only man who had ever taken a steamboat well up the Yellowstone River.”

“I did some correspondence with Mrs. Custer a few years ago,” I said, “and she said that she had hoped to travel with your boat up to be with her husband at the Little Big Horn.”

“She did try. After I was commissioned to supply the troops, my first stop was Fort Abraham Lincoln, where the 7th Cavalry was posted and I was to pick up supplies, and I learned they had left 10 days before. Those who were left put on a celebration like it was the fourth of July, which was customary when a boat arrived at these frontier posts. I was, with difficulty, persuaded to put aside my hurried work for a luncheon with Mrs. Custer and the wife of another officer. They revealed that they had their husbands' permission to travel up with me to join them in the field. Well, this was a reason I chose the Far West this time instead of my usual Josephine. It wasn't just that the shallower draft was better suited to those narrow waters, but it had almost no space to accommodate passengers, who would be in great danger on this campaign and thus become a
constant concern for me. Their accommodations would be the roughest kind, and I suspected I might be carrying wounded soldiers. Nonetheless they were hard to dissuade, and they tried every argument to convince me to carry them, but I am glad I did not yield on this point.”

“What happened next?” asked Cora Sue.

“When I reached the rendezvous point at the mouth of the Powder River, I found Gibbons' command on one side of the Yellowstone and Terry and Custer on the other. We unloaded her supplies, returned downstream for more, and then became Terry's headquarters. In her cabin, on the
eve of July 21st, Major Reno, Captain Tom Custer (George's brother) and Captain Keogh,
and First Lieutenant Calhoun and I stayed up all night drinking and playing cards. Your dad was there for awhile too.

“After Custer marched out with twelve troops of the Seventh Cavalry we ferried Gibbons' troops across the river, then followed them upstream to the mouth of the Big Horn River, where eight days  rations were issued from the supplies on the boat. Then Terry ordered the vessel to proceed up the Big Horn, if possible to the mouth of the Little Big Horn, to establish a forward supply base. This turned out to be a formidable task; in some areas the troops had to carry cables ashore on both banks, and both port and starboard capstans were used to pull the boat up the middle of the river. While the men were sweating at this work they watched tall columns of smoke in the sky farther up the valley, caused, they believed, by the burning of Indian tepees by the victorious white troops. She was tied for safety's sake to an island in midstream rather than the shore, to guard against attack, for Crazy Horse and his Sioux were known to be somewhere around.

“To pass the time while waiting, we fished in the Little Big Horn. One morning while fishing we saw a mounted Indian burst through the brush on the water's edge. He pulled up his sweating pony, signaled with his carbine that he was friendly. He was Curley, one of the 7th Cavalry's Crow scouts. He forded the river and came on board, where he threw himself on the medicine chest on deck and rocked to and fro, crying inconsolably. When we calmed him, he informed us of what happened. He spoke no English and we spoke no Crow, so he communicated by diagrams and hand signals. He drew one circle, and then another around it, and in between the circles he made marks and cried "Sioux, Sioux!" He marked the inner circle and said "absaroka," which I happened to know meant "soldiers." When he saw I understood, he poked his chest with his fingers and said "poof, poof, absaroka." We finally understood. Curley set himself in a corner of the deck, refused all food, and mourned in the manner of his tribe.

“Later we found out what happened. Custer, hoping to envelop Crazy Horse, had split his regiment into three parts. But there had been a sad and terrible mix-up. One part of the 7th had been attacked before the others joined it. It had been annihilated. The other two had then been heavily engaged, until the Sioux broke off and retreated victoriously toward the Big Horn Mountains.”

We were spell-bound by his tale and didn't want to miss a word of it.

“The next day an exhausted white courier arrived with the news from the infantry column that reached the battlefield to find the scalped and mutilated bodies of Custer and five troops of the Seventh Cavalry; Major Reno, Custer's subordinate, and the remaining seven troops had fought another action a few miles from the massacre site and held the Indians off for two days until relieved by the infantry. We were then told to prepare to receive Major Reno's wounded and take dispatches
back to civilization. We took off all the extra supplies, as we knew we needed space for the wounded, and covered the main deck with swathes of freshly cut grass.

“About two o'clock in the morning the sad column stumbled through the flickering firelight to lay 52 groaning wounded on the open deck aft of the boilers.

“As I was preparing to pull out, a lieutenant of the Seventh Cavalry who had been detached with Terry appeared on the bank with the sole survivor of the Custer massacre, the horse Comanche, the usual mount of Captain Keogh, with seven arrows in his body. A grass-carpeted stall was hastily constructed at the stern of the vessel and the wounded animal was tenderly led aboard.

“The sixteen members of the band were spared, as Custer had left orders with the  band leader that it was not to engage in battle but to remain with us. The band members assisted in the transporting and loading of the wounded on the boat. They served as medics as the Far West turned around.”

“So how many did you actually have to transport?” I asked.

“By the time the Far West was ready to start down the river, fourteen of the wounded men were so far recovered as to be able to remain at camp. They went ashore as did General Terry and Major Bisbin, and at 5 o’clock on the afternoon of July 3rd, followed by the cheers and fervent good swishes of the assembled tropes, we backed away from the bank and started our paddles for Bismarck. Thirty-eight sorely wounded soldiers were still in her deck hospital, and the captain
sent Captain EW Smith, aid-de-camp to General Terry, on his way with dispatches for Division Headquarters at Chicago and carrying besides, a bag full of letters from the members of the expedition and a great number of messages to be put on the wire for distant friends.

“The boat had scarcely left the bank before I ordered my engineer to get up a full head of steam, and drove my vessel from the mouth of the Big Horn to Bismarck, Dakota Territory, 710 miles in 54 hours - at the unprecedented speed of 13 miles an hour. We traveled night and day. My orders were to reach Bismarck in the shortest possible time and I took that literally. Every man on board was steeled to do his utmost and nobly each performed his part. The river was fortunately high, but
even so, it was perilous work driving a steamboat at top speed down such a channel. My mates, Fould and John Hardy, crowding on the steam until a glance at the gauge turned them dizzy. Me and my mate Campbell in four hour relieves on the roof, holding the wheel with iron grip as we trained our eyes over the narrow channel ahead and spun the boat in and out between islands and rocks. There weren’t many on that boat who thought about the significance of that day - July 4th. Surely nowhere beneath the shadow of the Stars and Stripes were men engaged in a more patriotic duty than those who trod the decks of the Far West. From bow to stern her timbers were quivering to the incessant clang and cough of the machinery as shirtless fireman, sweating and grimy, stood before the furnaces, cramming fuel into the hungry flames.

“Now and then the hoarse bellow of a whistle sent its echoes reverberating along the bald cliff side, startling the grazing herds of buffalo and elk to wild stampede from the fiery monster that came towards them, like a demon of destruction, into their solitudes. Now and then the keel scraped along a projecting bar and sheered off violently, throwing the men to the deck like tenpins. A hundred times it seemed as if she would be dashed to pieces, but each time the skill of the pilots saved her and she sped on with her message of disaster to a waiting nation and her burden of suffering humankind groaning for relief. At Ft. Stevenson, during the afternoon of the 5th she halted and leaving the garrison convulsed with unsatisfied anxiety she leaped out on the last lap, to Bismarck. After leaving Stevenson, I draped the derrick and jack-staff on the boat in black and hoisted her flag at
half-mast in honor of the dead and wounded.

“That was the fastest trip ever made by a steamboat on the Missouri, despite the ever-shifting sandbars and the numerous snags that made navigation on the Missouri River extremely hazardous.”

“And what happened when you got to Bismarck?” asked Cora Sue.

“Well it was late, at least 11 p.m. and we knew we had to wake up the people who would be relating this news to the world. The boat had barely touched its bank when her men and officers were off running up the streets and rousing the sleeping town. Men ran from their houses half-dressed and disheveled, in every direction lights flashed at the windows. The first men routed from their beds were Colonel Lounsberry and John Carnahan, the telegrapher operator. They together with me, Doctor Porter, who had come on the boat with me, and Captain Smith and a number of others hurried to the telegraph office, and Carnahan took his seat at the key, from which he scarcely raised himself for
22 hours.

“None of them thought of tiring, for it was the most thrilling work they had ever done. The words they were sending would soon be flashing around the world. And come to think of it, your dad was mentioned in that first paragraph. It said that the Bismarck Daily Tribune special correspondent was with the expedition and was killed.

“There were 28 widows in stricken Fort Lincoln, and I never witnessed a scene as followed the announcement of the awful tidings.

Everyone in the post was frantic, and men, women and children came running to the boat, sobbing and moaning and they begged for news. Some of the poor, frightened families of the men in three ranks received the blessed assurance that their dear ones were safe, but to many the only answer could be a sad confirmation of their fears, from which they turned away with breaking hearts. Two days after the arrival of the Far West, when the wounded had been made comfortable in the post
hospital, Mrs. Custer sent for me in her carriage to the boat landing with the request that I come up and see her and the other bereaved women. But I could not bear the thought of witnessing their grief,
and declined. I never saw one of them after that bright May morning when they had lunched with me in the cabin of the Far West, as we set off, little anticipating the sorrow which was so soon to be
theirs.”