heir further progress
towards 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 Bla