Post by Beth on Mar 8, 2016 3:39:44 GMT
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ROSEBUD BATTLEFIELD STATE PARK – A week before the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the summer of 1876, a much larger and longer battle raged in the hilly country on the Rosebud River 40 miles away.
Somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 Sioux and Cheyenne challenged a U.S. Army column of 1,300 soldiers, scouts and civilians in a fight that lasted about six hours. In contrast, Lt. Col. George Custer’s battalion had only about 700 troopers in the June 25, 1876, Little Bighorn battle that probably lasted less than two hours.
Both sides claimed victory. The Sioux and Cheyenne, tired and hungry, eventually decided the fight was over and went back to their village on Reno Creek. Gen. George Crook held the field but left as soon as the dead were buried.
He’d left his supply camp on Goose Creek near Sheridan, Wyo., the day before, expecting a quick trip into Montana. His men brought only three days’ rations, a blanket and 100 rounds of ammunition each. During the fight they had expended 25,000 rounds. Crook decided he needed to go back to Wyoming and resupply.
That took a critical element out of the Army’s plan to form a three-pronged pincer with columns from Wyoming, Fort Ellis near Bozeman and Fort Abraham Lincoln near Bismarck, N.D. They planned to rendezvous somewhere between the Powder and Little Bighorn rivers and force the Sioux and Cheyenne onto reservations in the Dakotas. Custer and the 7th Cavalry were in the column marching from North Dakota.
Overshadowed by the disaster at Little Bighorn, the Rosebud fight, one of the biggest battles ever fought on the Northern Plains, slid more or less into obscurity.
***
But a clash that big had to leave its mark on the land. A University of Montana archaeology field school, now in its second summer, is scouring the landscape this week looking for clues to how that monumental clash on the Rosebud was fought.
“Our goal is to map out advances and retreats,” said Sara Scott, Heritage Resources program manager for Montana State Parks. “We want to be able to tell who was advancing on whom.”
The team of four UM and Montana State University students and UM professors Chris Merritt and Kelly Dixon will look for more than just battlefield relics, she said. They will search for 8,000 to 10,000 years of human history in the rolling country near the Northern Cheyenne Reservation.
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks teamed with UM to take a closer look at Rosebud Battlefield State Park in southeastern Big Horn County, hoping to confirm its value as a cultural and historic resource. Scott said that has become increasingly important as energy development rears its head. While the state acquired the battlefield in the 1970s, the land did not come with the mineral rights.
“That’s why we’re here, to show that it’s worth preserving,” Merritt said.
By working with UM, the state hopes to get a thorough survey of important parts of the battlefield without spending the millions it might cost to contract for a survey, Scott said. Students in the program get the chance for hands-on professional experience.
UM student Tom Milter will base his master’s thesis on the work at Rosebud. Bozeman teacher Courtney Agenten plans to design a battlefield archaeology program for high school students integrating all the physics, math, history and survey techniques she’s learning at the field school.
With high-end metal detectors, the students, also including UM’s Andy Early, sweep systematically through the tall grass, waiting for a bleep that pinpoints buried metal. Each hit is marked with an orange flag and UM graduate Marc Wallace, with a GPS in his backpack, records its exact location.
What they are primarily looking for are shell casings and bullets that can identify positions and who was doing the firing. Merritt explained that the soldiers were using standard-issue Springfield single-shot rifles with standard-issue ammunition. The Sioux and Cheyenne carried a variety of weapons from repeating rifles to muskets.
Merritt said that firing pin marks on the cartridges and barrel marks on bullets could identify individual weapons and show their movement on the field of battle. He hopes at some point to compare bullets and cartridges from Indian weapons used at the Rosebud battle with those found at Little Bighorn. The same alliance of Sioux and Cheyenne fought at both the Little Bighorn and the Rosebud.
The team already has identified several soldier and Indian positions and raised some doubts about a commander’s claim that he was under heavy fire.
Accounts of the battle survive from both sides and the field school is using them as points of reference. They have been able to confirm some aspects and question others.
***
The Rosebud battle was fairly well documented.
At 8 a.m. on June 17, 1876, Crook halted his weary column of 1,300 on Rosebud Creek and settled into a game of whist with other officers.
His force of cavalry, infantry, 260 Crow and Shoshone scouts and about 200 civilians had marched 35 miles the day before from Goose Creek. They slept only a few hours before the camp began to stir at 3 a.m. on the 17th.
The column traveled about three miles through the rolling terrain of the river valley before the general ordered a halt to give the command a chance to rest and enjoy the cool morning air. It had been a blistering summer with temperatures in the mid-90s and high humidity.
Crook believed that his forces’ march to the Rosebud had gone undetected by Sioux and Cheyenne warriors gathering in Montana, Merritt said.
But it was hard to hide a column that large from Sioux and Cheyenne, who already knew soldiers were in the vicinity. Wooden Leg, a young Cheyenne warrior, recalled later that he and 10 other buffalo hunters spotted Crook’s campfires on the night of June 16 and returned to their village to spread the alarm.
“Some Sioux were there and they carried the news to their people,” he told his biographer Thomas Marquis many years later.
Itching for a fight, young Sioux and Cheyenne warriors slipped away from their camp during the night.
“Warriors came from every camp circle,” Wooden Leg recalled. “We had our weapons, war clothing, paints and medicines. I had my six-shooter. We traveled all night.”
Merritt said an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 warriors had mobilized to meet the invading army. Plenty Coups, then a young Crow warrior serving as a scout for Crook, knew they were coming.
“All night long the enemy gathered,” he told his biographer, Frank Linderman. “Coyote yelps and wolf howls in the hills told me he (Crazy Horse) was closing in on us while I waited in my robe.”
While the soldiers relaxed, their uneasy scouts rode north, looking for signs of the Sioux and Cheyenne. They found them about 11 miles from camp. The Crow and Shoshone were driven back toward the Rosebud by growing numbers of enemy warriors.
About 8:30 a.m., the scouts came howling down from the north with the Sioux and Cheyenne on their tails.
“Lakota, Lakota,” the scouts shouted as they fled toward camp.
Maj. George Randall hastily organized the scouts still in camp into a skirmish line, which held off the enemy while Crook organized his response.
“The Crow and Shoshone scouts really saved Crook’s bacon,” Merritt said.
Through most of the morning and into the afternoon the battle raged, with each side advancing and falling back.
Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull estimated their losses at between 60 and 65 warriors, Merritt said. The Sioux believed that the soldiers took just as many casualties, though Crook reported a much smaller number.
On his way to the Little Bighorn, Custer rode through the battle site, Merritt said. The 7th Cavalry commander observed that a big fight had taken place, but he did not know that Crook was no longer in the field.
When Custer died at the Little Bighorn, Crook was hunting in the Bighorn Mountains, Merritt said.
ROSEBUD BATTLEFIELD STATE PARK – A week before the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the summer of 1876, a much larger and longer battle raged in the hilly country on the Rosebud River 40 miles away.
Somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 Sioux and Cheyenne challenged a U.S. Army column of 1,300 soldiers, scouts and civilians in a fight that lasted about six hours. In contrast, Lt. Col. George Custer’s battalion had only about 700 troopers in the June 25, 1876, Little Bighorn battle that probably lasted less than two hours.
Both sides claimed victory. The Sioux and Cheyenne, tired and hungry, eventually decided the fight was over and went back to their village on Reno Creek. Gen. George Crook held the field but left as soon as the dead were buried.
He’d left his supply camp on Goose Creek near Sheridan, Wyo., the day before, expecting a quick trip into Montana. His men brought only three days’ rations, a blanket and 100 rounds of ammunition each. During the fight they had expended 25,000 rounds. Crook decided he needed to go back to Wyoming and resupply.
That took a critical element out of the Army’s plan to form a three-pronged pincer with columns from Wyoming, Fort Ellis near Bozeman and Fort Abraham Lincoln near Bismarck, N.D. They planned to rendezvous somewhere between the Powder and Little Bighorn rivers and force the Sioux and Cheyenne onto reservations in the Dakotas. Custer and the 7th Cavalry were in the column marching from North Dakota.
Overshadowed by the disaster at Little Bighorn, the Rosebud fight, one of the biggest battles ever fought on the Northern Plains, slid more or less into obscurity.
***
But a clash that big had to leave its mark on the land. A University of Montana archaeology field school, now in its second summer, is scouring the landscape this week looking for clues to how that monumental clash on the Rosebud was fought.
“Our goal is to map out advances and retreats,” said Sara Scott, Heritage Resources program manager for Montana State Parks. “We want to be able to tell who was advancing on whom.”
The team of four UM and Montana State University students and UM professors Chris Merritt and Kelly Dixon will look for more than just battlefield relics, she said. They will search for 8,000 to 10,000 years of human history in the rolling country near the Northern Cheyenne Reservation.
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks teamed with UM to take a closer look at Rosebud Battlefield State Park in southeastern Big Horn County, hoping to confirm its value as a cultural and historic resource. Scott said that has become increasingly important as energy development rears its head. While the state acquired the battlefield in the 1970s, the land did not come with the mineral rights.
“That’s why we’re here, to show that it’s worth preserving,” Merritt said.
By working with UM, the state hopes to get a thorough survey of important parts of the battlefield without spending the millions it might cost to contract for a survey, Scott said. Students in the program get the chance for hands-on professional experience.
UM student Tom Milter will base his master’s thesis on the work at Rosebud. Bozeman teacher Courtney Agenten plans to design a battlefield archaeology program for high school students integrating all the physics, math, history and survey techniques she’s learning at the field school.
With high-end metal detectors, the students, also including UM’s Andy Early, sweep systematically through the tall grass, waiting for a bleep that pinpoints buried metal. Each hit is marked with an orange flag and UM graduate Marc Wallace, with a GPS in his backpack, records its exact location.
What they are primarily looking for are shell casings and bullets that can identify positions and who was doing the firing. Merritt explained that the soldiers were using standard-issue Springfield single-shot rifles with standard-issue ammunition. The Sioux and Cheyenne carried a variety of weapons from repeating rifles to muskets.
Merritt said that firing pin marks on the cartridges and barrel marks on bullets could identify individual weapons and show their movement on the field of battle. He hopes at some point to compare bullets and cartridges from Indian weapons used at the Rosebud battle with those found at Little Bighorn. The same alliance of Sioux and Cheyenne fought at both the Little Bighorn and the Rosebud.
The team already has identified several soldier and Indian positions and raised some doubts about a commander’s claim that he was under heavy fire.
Accounts of the battle survive from both sides and the field school is using them as points of reference. They have been able to confirm some aspects and question others.
***
The Rosebud battle was fairly well documented.
At 8 a.m. on June 17, 1876, Crook halted his weary column of 1,300 on Rosebud Creek and settled into a game of whist with other officers.
His force of cavalry, infantry, 260 Crow and Shoshone scouts and about 200 civilians had marched 35 miles the day before from Goose Creek. They slept only a few hours before the camp began to stir at 3 a.m. on the 17th.
The column traveled about three miles through the rolling terrain of the river valley before the general ordered a halt to give the command a chance to rest and enjoy the cool morning air. It had been a blistering summer with temperatures in the mid-90s and high humidity.
Crook believed that his forces’ march to the Rosebud had gone undetected by Sioux and Cheyenne warriors gathering in Montana, Merritt said.
But it was hard to hide a column that large from Sioux and Cheyenne, who already knew soldiers were in the vicinity. Wooden Leg, a young Cheyenne warrior, recalled later that he and 10 other buffalo hunters spotted Crook’s campfires on the night of June 16 and returned to their village to spread the alarm.
“Some Sioux were there and they carried the news to their people,” he told his biographer Thomas Marquis many years later.
Itching for a fight, young Sioux and Cheyenne warriors slipped away from their camp during the night.
“Warriors came from every camp circle,” Wooden Leg recalled. “We had our weapons, war clothing, paints and medicines. I had my six-shooter. We traveled all night.”
Merritt said an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 warriors had mobilized to meet the invading army. Plenty Coups, then a young Crow warrior serving as a scout for Crook, knew they were coming.
“All night long the enemy gathered,” he told his biographer, Frank Linderman. “Coyote yelps and wolf howls in the hills told me he (Crazy Horse) was closing in on us while I waited in my robe.”
While the soldiers relaxed, their uneasy scouts rode north, looking for signs of the Sioux and Cheyenne. They found them about 11 miles from camp. The Crow and Shoshone were driven back toward the Rosebud by growing numbers of enemy warriors.
About 8:30 a.m., the scouts came howling down from the north with the Sioux and Cheyenne on their tails.
“Lakota, Lakota,” the scouts shouted as they fled toward camp.
Maj. George Randall hastily organized the scouts still in camp into a skirmish line, which held off the enemy while Crook organized his response.
“The Crow and Shoshone scouts really saved Crook’s bacon,” Merritt said.
Through most of the morning and into the afternoon the battle raged, with each side advancing and falling back.
Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull estimated their losses at between 60 and 65 warriors, Merritt said. The Sioux believed that the soldiers took just as many casualties, though Crook reported a much smaller number.
On his way to the Little Bighorn, Custer rode through the battle site, Merritt said. The 7th Cavalry commander observed that a big fight had taken place, but he did not know that Crook was no longer in the field.
When Custer died at the Little Bighorn, Crook was hunting in the Bighorn Mountains, Merritt said.
