Distinctly Montana Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.distinctlymontana.com/i/1545322
47 w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m horse and use him for breastworks. Did fondness prevent him, or was he killed before he had the chance? It wouldn't have helped him anyway. By the time Bradley and Terry arrived, the wounded horses had been waiting for many hours. Most were suffering greatly, and the or- der was understandably given that the poor ani- mals be put out of their misery. Corporal Stanislas Roy was tasked with shooting twenty or so surviving horses. He led them to the river, allowing them to, in his words, "plunge their heads in the water up to their eyes and drink" before ending their suffering. Comanche was discovered by a member of Keogh's company who recognized the officer's mount. The soldier, named Francis Kennedy, rushed to obtain an order to stay Comanche's shoot- ing. He washed the horse's wounds out with water from a kettle. Kennedy remembered that the horse had "about twenty wounds, some flesh wounds and some more serious." Comanche was spared. The other horses were executed, with some accounts stating that the animals were skinned and their hides used as makeshift stretchers to carry wounded. Comanche traveled by wagon to the steamship Far West on the Little Bighorn River, part of a caravan that included between 30 and 52 wounded cavalrymen laid in crude litters, all carried over rocky, uneven terrain. The Far West set out for Bismarck on the evening of July 3, flying her flag at half mast. Comanche made that trip suspended between the rudders in a large sling. At Fort Abraham Lincoln, he was nursed back to health by a blacksmith named Gustav Korn. Eventually, he was well enough to support the young ladies staying at the fort, among whom Comanche proved a popular mount to take on af- ternoon perambulations. The tender ladies fought over the right to ride him. In 1878, Col. Samuel Sturgis pronounced that Comanche, the be- loved mascot and "only living representative of the bloody trag- edy of the Little Big Horn," should be the subject of only "kind