Pease Bottom Fight

Pease Bottom Fight. . Custer's first skirmishes with the Lakota occurred along the Yellowstone River during the summer of 1873. At this time the Seventh Cavalry was assigned to Colonel David Stanley command to protect Northern Pacific railroad surveyors operating on the north side of the river. , On August 11, 1873, Lieutenant Colonel Custer engaged the Lakota in response to an attack on the Seventh Cavalry's camp below the mouth of the Bighorn River. At dawn, the Lakota began firing their rifles into the troopers' camp from the safety of the of the cliffs on the south side the Yellowstone River. War parties of Lakota then crossed the river for a series of attacks and feints on the cavalry. Late in the afternoon, Colonel Stanley's infantry companies arrived including the artillery units. Cannon fire directed across the river finally chased off the Indians. , Although casualties were light with one man killed and several wounded, the Seventh Cavalry spent the better part of the day in a futile chase of the Lakota. The day's events probably confirmed what Custer and most of the officer corps already believed about their adversary - that Indians would flee in the face of any attack by the cavalry, an assumption with fatal consequences three years later. , One other skirmish between the Seventh and the Lakota occurred a few day later near Pompey's Pillar when the Lakota fired on Seventh Cavalry troopers swimming in the Yellowstone River. The ambush forced the naked men to take cover much to the amusement if the Indians. , Having reached Pompey's Pillar, the eastern terminus of the 1872 survey the entire command marched north and surveyed a section of the Musselshell River as a possible east-west railroad route before returning to the forts in the Dakotas.