want you to turn back from here. If you don’t I will fight you again. I want you to leave what you have got here and turn back from here.
I am your friend,
Sitting Bull
I mean all the rations you have got and some powder. Wish you would write as soon as you can.27
About a week later, Colonel Miles with the entire Fifth Infantry overtook Sitting Bull near Cedar Creek, Montana, north of the Yellowstone River. Over the course of two days, Miles met in council with Sitting Bull and other Lakota leaders: Pretty Bear, Bull Eagle, Standing Bear, Gall, and White Bear. Bent on provisioning their people for the winter and alarmed by the incursion of soldiers into their hunting country, the chiefs sought a truce for the winter. Sitting Bull made clear to Miles that their objective in the territory was to hunt buffalo and trade for ammunition. He did not want rations or annuities, but rather to live free and hunt in the open country. In return he offered that their side would not fire on the soldiers if they were left to hunt unmolested. Miles later reported that the Hunkpapa chief had asked him “why the soldiers did not go to winter quarters.” Miles rejected what he termed “an old-fashioned peace for the winter.”28 He informed Sitting Bull and the other principal men who had met in council with him that this offer was not acceptable to the government. Nothing short of his surrender at an agency and submission of his people to U.S. authority could stave off a war through the winter. Miles later expressed his view that “it was amusement for them to raid and make war during summer, but when constant relentless war was made upon them in the severest of winter campaigns it became serious and most destructive.”29
Determined to follow the Indians wherever they went, Miles fitted his men out with improvised winter gear, including leggings and mittens as well as face masks cut from woolen blankets.30 As the winter and the relentless raiding of Indian camps by the soldiers wore on, additional warm clothing was fashioned out of some of the hundreds of buffalo robes that were looted from the sacked encampments of the Lakota. A raid on Sitting Bull’s camp led by Frank D. Baldwin near the Milk River in December captured several hundred buffalo robes, which were fashioned into pants, overcoats, and caps by Cheyenne women who had capitulated. These were worn by Miles’s troops as they launched a January offensive up the Tongue River, where the Lakotas had gone in pursuit of the buffalo. This was the winter they gave Miles the name “Man-with-the-bear-coat.” Since the soldiers had looted or destroyed their lodges, utensils, tons of dried meat, and many horses and mules, they were both in need of fresh sup plies and demoralized by the constant harrying presence of the soldiers.31
In November Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie had also dealt a devastating blow to the Cheyennes, raiding the village of Dull Knife (Morning Star) and Little Wolf, which consisted of about two hundred lodges in a canyon on the Red Fork of the Powder River. Thirty Cheyennes were killed in the raid. Those who survived were left with only what they could carry away. The soldiers burned the village and everything in it: meat, clothing, and all the tribe’s finery and art work. Seven hundred ponies were confiscated by the army. As the survivors fled north to seek refuge with Crazy Horse on the Tongue River, temperatures fell to thirty below zero. Eleven babies froze to death.32
Throughout the winter, the army’s campaigners pursued their quarry through the snow, across the frozen Missouri River. Facing starvation, killing cold, and the perpetual threat of the “long knives” of the U.S. Army wreaking havoc on their villages and threatening their families, many leaders made the decision to surrender to their agencies, where they were forced to give up their guns and thousands of horses. Red Horse explained the pressures that led him to surrender at the Cheyenne River Agency in February 1877. “I am tired of being always on the watch for troops. My desire is to get my family where they can sleep without being continually in the expectation of an attack.”33
By March only about fifteen lodges remained with Sitting Bull. Others had already crossed into Canada and Sitting Bull was considering this as an alternative to surrender or to continued harassment by the bluecoats. In May, around the time Scott was heading west with the Seventh Cavalry, Sitting Bull crossed the border with 135 Lakota lodges, totaling about a thousand people.
The anniversary of Custer’s defeat the previous year found Scott on the Big Horn battlefield, where his troop was assigned the task of recovering the bones of Custer and the other officers who had died there for reburial elsewhere as well as reburying the best they could the remains of others, which had been exposed by erosion in the intervening year. Following this detail, Scott and the rest of his troop reunited with their regiment near Fort Keogh on the Yellowstone. “The whole of the Northwest seemed very peaceable and the talk of the Seventh was that we should soon go back to Fort Lincoln. Everybody built sunshades over their tents and generally made themselves comfortable,” Scott recalled.34
Soon, however, word of hostilities erupting between the army and several Nez Percé tribal groups, who were being forced from their lands in Eastern Oregon, reached the command on the Yellowstone. As a Nez Percé group of some 250 warriors and 500 women and children along with thousands of horses and other livestock began an arduous trek through some of the wildest and most challenging terrain in the country, the Seventh Cavalry was split up and sent in various directions in an attempt to stop Chief Joseph and his dispossessed people from reaching sanctuary, like Sitting Bull, with the Canadian “Grandmother” across the border.
During the summer of 1877, Scott deepened his experience of working with scouts. He also developed an abiding interest in the way of life and customs of the indigenous nations with which the army brought him in contact. In July Miles sent him out to search for a Sioux war party on the Musselshell rumored to have come down from Canada. Scott accompanied some Northern Cheyenne scouts who had fought against Custer the previous summer and had only recently surrendered. The party included Two Moons, Little Chief, Hump, Black Wolf, Ice (or White Bull), Brave Wolf, and White Bear. Scott’s friends warned him against accompanying them, saying they would kill him and escape across the border to Canada, but Scott did not share these fears. Instead, he admired and learned from the Cheyenne warriors: “They were all keen, athletic young men, tall and lean and brave, and I admired them as real specimens of manhood more than any body of men I have ever seen before or since. They were perfectly adapted to their environment and knew just what to do in every emergency and when to do it, without any confusion or lost motion. Their poise and dignity were superb; no royal person ever had more assured manners. I watched their every movement and learned lessons from them that later saved my life many times on the prairie.”35
Scott also spent a lot of time with Crow scouts and observing life in the large Crow villages. On one occasion, exposure to the heat and insects of a Montana summer, against which his army issue tent provided insufficient protection, led him to seek hospitality in the lodge of Iron Bull. Seeking respite from sun, dust, and flies, Scott presented himself at the entrance of the huge buffalo-hide lodge of the Crow chief. The hide lodge cover, which was made in two pieces from the hides of twenty-five buffalo, was well smoked from the fire, so that the sun did not penetrate. Scott estimated the poles supporting the covering to be twenty-five feet long and five inches in diameter. It took six horses to transport them. Entering the lodge, Scott wrote, was like “passing at once into a new world.” Inside, it was cool and there were no flies. “Beds of buffalo robes were all around the wall, and the floor was swept clean as the palm of one’s hand.” Addressing Iron Bull, who was lying on his back in bed wearing only a breechclout, Scott said, “Brother, I want to come and stay in here with you until we leave.” Ac cordingly, Scott abandoned the porous white canvas of his “bit of a tent,” and instead was made “most welcome” in the lodge of the Crow chief and his wife.36
On this and other occasions, Scott paid close attention to the village life taking place around him. Besides providing ethnographic information and military intelligence, Indian village life on the prairie was a source of intense interest and often delight. During the summer of 1877, he traveled with a large village of Crow Indians near
