They supplemented the rations by living on horse and mule meat and a few wild onions which they could gather from time to time in spots which had escaped the universal baking of the summer. At last the command literally reached the end of its resources. The Indians were in bad condition, too, but their situation was not nearly so desperate as was that of Crook and his men. The Indians were worn out and exhausted by the energetic and relentless pursuit which had been hurled after them by the indomitable commander, but they still had plenty to eat, and they had managed to keep ahead of him, and to avoid various scouting columns. On the 7th of September, 1876, Crook realized that his men had reached the limit of their endurance, and that forage and food must be procured or they would all die in the wilderness. The Indians had swept the country bare of game, and the sun had swept it clean of fodder. One hundred and fifty of the best men—that is, those who showed the fewest signs of the hardships they had undergone—with the best horses and the last of the mules, were formed into an advance party under Captain Anson Mills, of the Third Cavalry. Mills had instructions to push on to Deadwood City, one of the new towns in the Black Hills, to get provisions, “Any kind of provisions, for God’s sake!” which he could bring back to the rest of the army, now in a destitute condition. Mills was not expected to hunt for, or to fight, Indians—primarily, that is. He was to go for food in order to keep the army from starving; but as he marched southward, his scouts discovered a large village of forty or fifty lodges at a place called Slim Buttes, in the northwest corner of South Dakota. The tepees had been pitched on a little rising from the banks of a small stream called Rabbit Creek. The place was inclosed on three sides by a series of tall cliffs, whose broken sides seemed here and there to have been cut in half-formed terraces, making the ascent easy. Little ravines and small cañons ran through the buttes, gradually ascending until they met the plateau on top.