But General Terry was no man to take a short answer. Immediately he ordered three expeditions to prepare themselves for the field, to move as soon as weather should permit, and to take the Indians early in the spring when their ponies would still be thin and unrecovered from the winter’s rigors. General Crook was to march north from Fort Fetterman, on the North Platte River; General John Gibbon was to move south and east from Fort Ellis, in Montana; and General Custer was to come west from Fort Lincoln. Unfortunately not only the Indians but the weather as well turned against General Terry, for with the thermometer standing most of the time at between twenty and forty below and the prairie covered with the glaze of incessant blizzards, neither Custer nor Gibbon was able to move out of camp. Crook, though, was able to best the winter when March rolled in and to locate one of the most dangerous of the rebel bands, Crazy Horse’s renegade Oglalas, deep in the Powder River Valley. This was on March 17, 1876. Had Crook’s men not made certain grave errors of tactics after a brilliant surprise, the battle might have solved the problem. As it turned out, the Indians galloped a few circles around the troops and made merrily off into the forest. Again the weather closed in. Three months later, when the summer weather made campaigning possible, Crook’s troops were able to take to the saddle again, and again Crazy Horse was located, this time encamped on the Tongue River, between Powder River and Rosebud Creek. Again the battle was inconclusive, for the troops seemed unable to press the advantage of their surprise discovery of the Indians. Eight days later, on June 17, the bewildered but indomitable Crook came a third time upon Crazy Horse, now on Rosebud Creek. On this occasion the troops were able to euchre the Indians into a pitched battle—and were thereupon so thoroughly trounced that Crook’s command was essentially immobilized where the bleeding remnant lay at the battle’s close. By the time the harassed cavalrymen had bound up their wounds and remounted, Crazy Horse had disappeared over the hills and down into the Big Horn Basin, where his cohorts joined a host of other bloodthirsty braves in a great Sioux encampment. Black Moon was there, Inkpaduta, Gall, and a major roster of other courageous Indian warriors. Counseling them and performing their good medicine was none other than Sitting Bull himself, who, it should be said, was not a warrior but a medicine man and tribal diplomat. Historians have never been able to agree upon the number of braves assembled under this battle flag, but all concur in the belief that the camp could have contained no less than three thousand warriors—in all probability the greatest single Indian army ever to be put into the field against the troops.