The Slim Buttes run north and south for some forty miles across Harding County, a broken line of white clay cliffs topped with ponderosa pine standing up out of the shortgrass plains, much of it now a unit of the Custer Gallatin National Forest. In late summer 1876 the army column under General George Crook that had been chasing the Lakota since the Little Bighorn came this way out of rations, soaked by weeks of rain, its men killing and eating their worn-out horses. They called it the Horsemeat March.
Crook sent Captain Anson Mills ahead with about 150 men to reach the Black Hills settlements for food. On the evening of September 8 Mills's scouts found a village of some thirty-seven lodges in the buttes, and at dawn on the 9th he attacked it. The people scattered into the ravines, and some held out in a cave-like gully until Crook's main column came up. In the lodges the soldiers found things taken at the Little Bighorn, among them a Seventh Cavalry guidon fastened to American Horse's lodge, and they burned the village. A Lakota boy was found alive among the lodges, having slept through the first shooting. That afternoon Crazy Horse arrived with warriors from camps nearby and attacked, and the fighting went on until dark.
Two soldiers and the scout Charles White died, and at least ten Lakota. Crook's men went on to the Black Hills harried by warriors for days. The battlefield is private land with no public access, and the buttes are seen best from SD-20 between Buffalo and Reva.
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