General George Crook's controversial "Horsemeat March"
culminating in the battle at Slim Buttes is considered the turning
point of the Sioux Wars. After Lieutenant General George A.
Custer's shocking defeat at the Little Big Horn River, Montana
Territory, in 1876, General Crook and the men of this Big Horn and
Yellowstone Expedition were given orders to pursue and subjugate
restive tribes of the Northern Cheyenne and Teton Sioux Indians in
the area.General Crook, an able and experienced Indian campaigner,
insisted that his men travel light and fast. This tactic nearly
proved disastrous. Provisions ran out, and, with the nearest
settlements still far away in the Black Hills, Crook's troops were
forced to abandon, and later to devour, their exhausted and stringy
mounts.
When a detachment under Captain Anson Mills was dispatched to
bring provisions from the settlements ahead, Mills accidentally
came across a large Indian village at Slim Buttes. Lured as much by
supplies of food in the village as by a desire to subjugate the
Indians, Mills attacked, Crook arrived with reinforcements, and by
the evening of the second day, September 9, 1876, the battle was
over.The climax of General Crook's career and of one of the most
arduous military expeditions in American history, this battle was
the first of a series of blows that ultimately broke the Indians'
resistance and forced their submission.
The victory was not without irony. Crook's starvation march, his
troops' nearly unanimous criticism of his command, Mill's account
of an Indian child's tears over her mother's corpse, and doubts
about whether the Indians involved had indeed had anything to do
with Custer's defeat combined to steal most of the glory from the
victor.
"Slim Buttes, 1876" presents in vivid detail the grisly
realities of the Indian Wars and the suffering experienced by both
sides. For the troops who campaigned in the lonely hinterlands of
America, it was bloody, dangerous, and exhausting warfare fought,
as General Crook said, "without favor or hope of reward."
General
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