"By early July 1876, the sore and weary troopers of Colonel Wesley Merritt's 5th Cavalry were cursing the heat, the dust and their own hard luck. For a month they had plodded the wastelands of Wyoming and Nebraska, living on hard crackers and muddy water, all the while searching for hostile Indians rumored to be streaming north in bloodthirsty hordes, eager to join the Sioux and Cheyenne under a Hunkpapa medicine man named Sitting Bull.
But the 5th had found no Indians, and certainly no glory–only an endless succession of sand buttes, prickly pear and sagebrush, all hidden in a swirl of alkali ‘thick as cream.' As far as Merritt's soldiers were concerned, they had been sent on another useless ‘water haul,' chasing phantoms across a wilderness that stretched on forever.
Then, on July 7, a courier in a lurid red shirt galloped breakneck into camp. His dispatches carried an incredible report, news that made more than one trooper's heart sink right down into his boots…."
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