By early July 1876, the sore and weary troopers of Colonel Wesley Merritt’s 5th Cavalry were cursing the heat, the dust and their own hard luck. For a month they had plodded the wastelands of Wyoming and Nebraska, living on hard crackers and muddy water, all the while searching for hostile Indians rumored to be streaming north in bloodthirsty hordes, eager to join the Sioux and Cheyenne under a Hunkpapa medicine man named Sitting Bull.

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But the 5th had found no Indians, and certainly no glory–only an endless succession of sand buttes, prickly pear and sagebrush, all hidden in a swirl of alkali ‘thick as cream.’ As far as Merritt’s soldiers were concerned, they had been sent on another useless ‘water haul,’ chasing phantoms across a wilderness that stretched on forever.

Then, on July 7, a courier in a lurid red shirt galloped breakneck into camp. His dispatches carried an incredible report, news that made more than one trooper’s heart sink right down into his boots.

Both the message and the man who bore it were destined to be enshrined in American history. The message spoke of the worst disaster the U.S. Cavalry would ever see; the messenger was 30-year-old William Frederick Cody, already celebrated across the continent as ‘Buffalo Bill.’ And just 10 days later, when the 5th Cavalry met the Indians at last, Buffalo Bill Cody would seal his fame for all time on a lonely plain near a sluggish little stream in northwestern Nebraska known as Warbonnet Creek.

The real story of the fight at Warbonnet Creek began years before, when geologists found traces of gold in Dakota’s Black Hills. Immediately, rumors buzzed East, claiming the Black Hills were literally mountains of gold, where anyone with a pocketknife could carve out the precious ore like butter. The administration of Ulysses S. Grant, rocked by scandals and facing an economy flat on its back, saw in the Black Hills gold a possible political salvation.

There was, of course, one small problem. The Black Hills were on land originally set aside by the U.S. government for those members of the Sioux tribe who chose to follow the old lifestyle of roving hunters. Still, no one in Washington was about to let a few Indians and some buffalo stand in the way of economic paradise. The Sioux would simply have to go, one way or the other.

So it was, in 1875, that the commissioner of Indian Affairs issued an edict barring the use of the Black Hills by the Indians, and demanding that all tribes now encamped there should return immediately to the confines of the Great Sioux Reservation in present-day South Dakota. The response of the Sioux and their Cheyenne allies was immediate–they gathered weapons and fled the reservation, determined to make a last stand for their people in the beloved Black Hills. To the U.S. Army went the thankless task of rooting them out.

General Phil Sheridan, commanding the Division of the Missouri, had a plan to do just that. A reiteration of the successful 1874 campaign against the Comanche, the plan involved sending a number of troop columns into country where the hostiles were known to be hiding, then having the columns slowly converge, all the while sending out scouts to make sure the Indians did not slip away before the net closed tight. Since each separate column was kept strong enough to defeat the enemy all by itself, it seemed certain the Sioux would eventually be driven into a corner and hammered into submission.

By 1876, a column under Brig. Gen. Alfred Terry, including the 7th Cavalry under Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, began marching west from Fort Abraham Lincoln in the Dakotas; General George Crook moved north from Fort Fetterman, Wyo.; and Colonel John Gibbon’s small infantry force, strengthened by a battery of Gatling guns, headed east from Fort Ellis in western Montana.

These were the main thrusts. Farther south, other forces were on the move. Sheridan knew of a large feeder trail snaking from Nebraska’s Red Cloud and Spotted Tail Indian agencies; warriors, guns and ammunition flowed north over this trail, trickling a steady stream of reinforcements to the Black Hills hostiles.

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