Battle of Honsinger Bluff

Along the banks of the Yellowstone River, close to what is now Miles City, Montana, soldiers of the United States Army clashed with the Lakota people on August 4, 1873, in what became known as the Battle of Honsinger Bluff. On one side stood detachments of the U.S. 7th Cavalry, led by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, while opposing them were Native Americans from a Hunkpapa village. Notably, a number of these same warriors would meet Custer once more roughly three years afterward, this time at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, fought within the bounds of the Crow Indian Reservation.

Background

The land that would later hold this battlefield first entered treaty history in 1851, when the Fort Laramie agreement marked it out as Crow Indian territory, a designation the Lakota themselves acknowledged. Fighting between the army and the Dakota, or Lakota, throughout much of the 1860s and into the 1870s largely unfolded on ground those Indians had seized from other tribes since 1851. That changed on May 7, 1868, when the Crows agreed to move onto a reduced reservation, and with their consent all the Crow land north of the Yellowstone granted in 1851, including what would become Honsinger Bluff, passed into United States hands.

Geography

The clash near Honsinger Bluff unfolded roughly a mile east of where the Tongue River empties into the Yellowstone. Spread across a floodplain of the Yellowstone, the ground was overshadowed by an enormous gravel-covered rise to the northeast, a landmark historians often call the "Big Hill," though residents in the area know it simply as "Yellowstone Hill." This ridge stretches nearly 13 miles in length, measures between 1 and 3 miles across, and drops away in steep faces ranging from 200 to 300 feet. Today the Miles City Airport occupies its summit. The Yellowstone River borders the area to the east and south. Running west from there, the floodplain keeps a width of 1 to 3 miles for close to 13 miles before reaching Locke Bluff, near the town of Hathaway, Montana. Among the notable features of the engagement were Honsinger Bluff itself, set against the southwestern side of Yellowstone Hill, along with two sizable stands of cottonwoods growing on former channels of the river, one sitting about 2 miles to the west of the hill and the other roughly 4 miles further on.

Participants

Colonel David S. Stanley led a military column that included Custer and elements of the 7th Cavalry, tasked with escorting the 1873 survey expedition for the Northern Pacific Railway. This survey party worked its way along the northern bank of the Yellowstone River, moving west from the Powder River through the eastern reaches of Montana. Stanley's command numbered some 1,300 men drawn from cavalry and infantry ranks, bolstered by a pair of artillery pieces, specifically 3 inch rifled Rodman guns. Alongside the troops moved 275 wagons pulled by mules and a civilian contingent of 353 people connected to the survey work. Twenty seven scouts, either Native American or of mixed heritage, lent their support to the expedition.

On the opposing side stood Lakota fighters drawn from Sitting Bull's own camp, which lay to the west near Locke Bluff and held anywhere between 400 and 500 lodges by most estimates. Among these forces were Hunkpapa Sioux led by Gall, joined by the warchief Rain in the Face, as well as Oglala Sioux following Crazy Horse, along with Miniconjou and Cheyenne fighters.

Aftermath

Rain in the Face kept Honsinger's gold watch as a trophy and could not resist boasting afterward that he had killed both Honsinger and Balitran. Word of these boasts reached Custer, who sent his brother Tom to Standing Rock Reservation with orders to bring him in for the two killings. The arrest came on December 13, 1874, and Rain in the Face was locked up, only to break free from custody within a few months. Furious, he swore that he would one day cut out Tom Custer's heart and eat it.

A week after the earlier fight, on August 11, 1873, Lt. Braden suffered a critical wound during another confrontation with Sitting Bull's warriors farther upriver near where the Big Horn River meets the Yellowstone. A Lakota bullet tore through his thigh, leaving him on indefinite sick leave until the Army finally let him retire in 1878. Custer himself, along with Tom Custer, James Calhoun, and Capt. George Yates, would not survive past June 25, 1876, all dying together at the Little Big Horn. Myles Moylan and Charles Varnum, by contrast, lived through that fight while stationed on Reno Hill. Four years afterward, Moylan received the Congressional Medal of Honor for the bravery he showed at the Battle of Bear Paw on September 30, 1877, where Lt. Col. Nelson A. Miles led the force that cornered Chief Joseph's band of Nez Perce at Snake Creek, close to Havre, Montana. Among those who fought at Little Big Horn were Sitting Bull, Gall, Crazy Horse, and Rain in the Face, the last of whom would later insist that he had torn Tom Custer's heart from his chest during the battle and taken a bite from it.

As for the veterinarian John Honsinger, his body was laid to rest along the Yellowstone at the foot of what is now called Honsinger Bluff. Some accounts hold that Father Pierre-Jean De Smet happened to pass through that evening and presided over the burial, and rumor also credited him with having baptized Sitting Bull at some earlier point. Yet these claims cannot be true, since Fr. De Smet had already died in St. Louis on May 23, 1873, more than two months before this encounter took place.

Nearly three years later, on June 6 and 7, 1876, the same stretch of land saw U.S. Army troops pass through again, this time in the days leading up to the fight at Little Big Horn. The Montana column, made up of the 2nd Cavalry and 7th Infantry under Col. John Gibbon, set up camp within a cottonwood grove described as beautiful and standing on splendid sod, just a few miles west of Honsinger Bluff. That very grove may well have been the one where Sitting Bull's warriors later lay in wait to ambush, or perhaps the one where Custer's own men made camp during the battle itself.