THE CONQUEST OF THE MISSOURI (458)—Joseph Mills Hanson—Murray Hill ($3.50).
This brisk, colorful history, first published in 1909 and now reissued, has been so long out of print that it will seem new to most readers. It will remind others of the part played by a flat-bottomed river steamer in the bloodiest little land battle in U.S. annals.
The master and pilot of the steamer Far West was oldtime Missouri Riverman Grant Marsh, contemporary and sometime shipmate of Mississippi Riverman Mark Twain. Author Joseph Mills Hanson, now 70, knew Marsh in his latter years, talked to him at length about his adventures, wrote The Conquest of the Missouri as a Marsh biography. But in effect it is a history of Missouri steam-boating—notably of the wood-burning sternwheelers that hauled passengers and freight along the empty distances of that "rainwater creek," the Upper Missouri, in the 1860s, '70s and '80s.
Sandbars & Sioux. The typical upper-river sternwheeler, displacing perhaps 300 tons, drew a mere 20-to-30 inches of water, burned some 25 cords of hard wood a day. In emergencies, it could lift itself over shallows by means of special stilt-like spars poised on its bow. In the '70s, military as well as civilian passengers were carried, for there was increasing Indian trouble, much of it traceable to Chief Crazy Horse and his Ogalalla Sioux.
The Sioux disliked the steady pressure on their western hunting lands. They showed their dislike by killing boatmen, miners, surveyors, or whoever else happened to be handy. In 1876 General Phil Sheridan dispatched three converging U.S. Army columns to teach them manners. As supply ship for one of these columns he hired the Far West, Captain Grant Marsh, at a rent of $360 a day.
Up the Yellowstone. By then Marsh was a renowned pilot, the only man who had ever taken a steamboat well up the Yellowstone River. Marsh ran the 400-ton Far West up the Yellowstone to the Big Horn River, then up to the Little Big Horn. There the Far West tied for safety's sake to an island in midstream rather than the shore, for Crazy Horse and his Sioux were known to be somewhere around. The 7th U.S. Cavalry drew fresh supplies from the hold of the Far West, galloped off under command of a dashing, handsome 37-year-old brevet major general who wore a flowing red tie and had distinguished himself at Gettysburg.
To pass the time while waiting, Pilot Marsh and members of his crew fished in the Little Big Horn. One morning while fishing they saw a mounted Indian burst through the brush on the water's edge. He pulled up his sweating pony, signaled with his carbine that he was friendly. They looked again and saw that he was a Crow known as Curley, one of the 7th Cavalry's native scouts. Curley hurried aboard the Far West, immediately gave way to "the most violent demonstrations" of woe.
The Annihilation. His message was soon clear enough. The dashing young general, hoping to envelop Crazy Horse, had split his regiment into three parts. But there had been a "sad and terrible" mixup. One part of the 7th had been attacked before the others joined it. It had been annihilated. The other two had then been heavily engaged, until the Sioux broke off and retreated victoriously toward the Big Horn Mountains.