The night before the regiment left Fort Laramie, Bill posted a letter to his wife, Louisa, expressing his first misgivings about the prospect of more Indian fighting. ‘I have always been horrified at the idea of killing Indian women and children,’ he wrote. ‘Poor things, I do not blame them for fighting for their husbands and fathers, right or wrong–many white women would do the same.’

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The 5th left Fort Laramie at dawn on June 22, riding toward Custer City. The force consisted of Companies A, B, C, D, G, I, K and M, totaling some 350 officers and men.

Company C, with Little Bat as scout, roamed in advance of the main force, searching for signs of Indians. Two days after starting out, a large trail was struck. First Lieutenant Charles King remembered, ‘It looked like a great highway, deserted and silent, and it led from the thick timber on the Cheyenne Valley…and disappeared over the dim, misty range of hills in the direction of the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail reservations.’

The regiment camped near the South Cheyenne River, hoping to ambush any tribesmen using the trail to travel north. For nine days the 5th waited and waited, but saw only small bands of Indians whose nimble little ponies were easily able to outrun the 5th’s plodding patrols.

While in this camp on July 1, the troopers were surprised to learn that Carr was no longer their commanding officer. Brevet Major General Wesley Merritt had been appointed to take over command of the 5th. That same day, Merritt and his staff arrived in camp. Cody echoed the sentiments of many soldiers when he wrote Louisa, ‘I was sorry that the command was taken from General Carr, because under him it had made its fighting reputation.’

Like Custer, Merritt had been a successful Union cavalry leader during the Civil War and had become a brevet major general. After the war, he had commanded cavalry in Texas, where he had fought Comanche, and when he was promoted to colonel of the 5th Cavalry on July 1, 1876, he was quite prepared to fight again. But Merritt and his men were in for a shock just two days later. At dawn on July 3, as sleepy troopers were just stirring from their bedrolls, a dozen or more painted Cheyenne warriors rode their ponies almost into the middle of the soldiers’ camp before realizing their peril and dashing hellbent back across the prairie to safety. Cody led two companies of the 5th in pursuit, but a fruitless daylong ride only left Merritt’s men even more spent and discouraged.

Realizing that every hostile in Nebraska must by now know of the Army’s presence, Merritt finally broke camp and dispersed his command into separate companies in order to make a wide sweep of the countryside. By July 6, the 5th had reassembled near a small Army stockade at the head of Sage Creek. Early the next morning, Cody came pounding into camp bearing ghastly news. General Crook’s column had struck the Sioux and Cheyenne over two weeks before at Rosebud Creek and in a fierce fight had been stopped cold. Then, on June 25, George Armstrong Custer and half of the 7th Cavalry had been wiped out at the Little Bighorn in Montana. Gibbon’s tiny column now had its hands full just burying the dead. Sheridan’s whole plan had gone down to complete disaster. The northern Plains Indians were proving to be a far more effective fighting unit than almost any blue-coated soldier had imagined. And if the reputation of the U.S. Army was to be saved, the worn-out regulars of the 5th were the last force left in the field to do it. As for Cody personally, the ‘massacre’ of the 7th and Custer’s shocking death may have indeed inspired a desire for revenge. Cody and Custer had come to know each other fairly well during the Indian Wars.

On July 14 came yet more bad news. The commander at Camp Robinson claimed that hundreds of Cheyenne–perhaps as many as 1,000–were preparing to flee the Red Cloud Agency and join up with Sitting Bull. Merritt immediately turned back toward Rawhide Creek crossing on the trail between Fort Laramie and Camp Robinson. It would take a long forced march to head off the Cheyenne, and the 5th’s supply wagons, under the command of a Lieutenant Hall, were ordered to follow along as best they could.

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