xxxviii INTROD UCTION. 



beyond. It was in that valley that Ouster had fought, 

 and evidences of the struggle soon became visible to the 

 advance guard. The scouts saw they were approaching 

 an Indian village, and Terry received a message from 

 the front that the advance had come on the bodies of 

 190 troopers, and, judging from what had been seen, 

 there were as many more in the hills near by. As the 

 column proceeded, it came on the remains of an immense 

 and hastily- abandoned Indian village. Buffalo robes, elk- 

 skins, kettles, the camp utensils used by Indians covered 

 the ground. Wounded Indian ponies struggled here, and 

 dead ones lay there, mixed with the bodies of horses 

 branded 7th Cavalry. There, too, lay the head of a 

 white man, but nowhere the body, and close by, stretched, 

 face on ground, lay a trooper with an arrow in his back 

 the top of his skull crushed in. Two Indian lodges of 

 line white skins were next passed, around which, in 

 funeral array, were the bodies of the horses killed, for 

 inside were grouped a band of the slain warriors, in war 

 paint and costume, whose spirits had gone to the happy 

 hunting ground mounted on the spirits of the horses 

 outside. On a shirt deeply stained with blood was 

 written ' Lieutenant Sturgis, 7th Cavalry.' And now a 

 horseman was seen riding at speed down the valley. He 

 came to tell how Reno's command had been found on a 

 hill three or four miles farther up, with all that remained 

 of the 7th Cavalry. In traversing the ground the bodies 

 of the fallen soldiers and their horses were passed, 

 horribly mutilated, and offensive from the heat. Where 

 Eeno had fought the dead lay mingled together in the 

 wild confusion in which they had fallen in the melee, 

 and about three miles down the valley they had ascended, 

 on the other side of the river, was the scene of General 

 Custer's last defence, presenting an appearance even more 

 horrible. On one spot lay 115 soldiers of the 7th, and 



