progress
toward Sitting Bull and to lead us back to the reservation. It was here,
too, we heard how Crazy Horse had pounced on Crook's columns on the
bluffs of the Rosebud that sultry morning of the 17th of June and showed
the Gray Fox that he and his people were too weak in numbers to cope
with them. It was here, too, worse luck, we got the tidings of the dread
disaster of the Sunday one week later, and listened in awed silence to
the story of Custer's mad attack on ten times his weight in foes--and
the natural result. Then came our orders to hasten to the support of
Crook, and so it happened that July found us marching for the storied
range of the Big Horn, and the first week in August landed us, blistered
and burned with sun-glare and stifling alkali-dust, in the welcoming
camp of Crook.

Then followed the memorable campaign of 1876. I do not mean to tell its
story here. We set out with ten days' rations on a chase that lasted ten
weeks. We roamed some eighteen hundred miles over range and prairie,
over "bad lands" and worse waters. We wore out some Indians, a good many
soldiers, and a great many horses. We sometimes caught the Indians, and
sometimes they caught us. It was hot, dry summer weather when we left
our wagons, tents, and extra clothing; it was sharp and freezing before
we saw them again; and meantime, without a rag of canvas or any covering
to our backs except what summer-clothing we had when we started, we had
tramped through the valleys of the Rosebud, Tongue, and Powder Rivers,
had loosened the teeth of some men with scurvy before we struck the
Yellowstone, had weeded out the wounded and ineffective there and sent
them to the East by river, had taken a fresh start and gone rapidly on
in pursuit of the scattering bands, had forded the Little Missouri near
where the Northern Pacific now spans the stream, run out of rations
entirely at the head of Heart River, and still stuck to the trail and
the chase, headed southward over rolling, treeless prairies, and for
eleven days and nights of pelting, pitiless rain dragged our way through
the bad-lands, meeting and fighting the Sioux two lively days among the
rocks of Slim Buttes, subsisting meantime partly on what game we could
pick up, but mainly upon our poor, famished, worn-out, staggering
horses. It is hard truth for cavalryman to tell, but the choice lay
between them and our boots; and most of us had no boots left by the time
we sighted the Black Hills. On