his command took up positions on a hill near the native encampment known as Battle Ridge. Under the leadership of Crazy Horse, the native warriors decimated Custer's soldiers, forcing a small remnant of his command to defend themselves at a spot now known as Last Stand Hill. Custer and his men were massacred by the combined Sioux and Cheyenne force in what has become known as one of the worst defeats in American military history. Following the battle, the United States increased the size of its army and began a campaign to chase the large force of native warriors that had succeeded against Custer. The Horsemeat March Following the Battle of the Little Bighorn, most of the native warriors fled the area and were not pursued for nearly two months. The U.S. Army spent much of those two months trying to recruit and train a force capable of fighting the tribes. General George Crook, who commanded over one thousand cavalry and infantry soldiers together with numerous Native American scouts, eventually took the helm of a punitive military campaign against the Sioux. Despite an extreme shortage of rations for his troops, Crook pushed forward to the Black Hills. The resulting march, variably known as the "Mud March" because of the conditions created by heavy rainfall at the time, and also the "Starvation March" because of the lack of food and supplies, is most commonly labeled the "Horsemeat March" because of the particular food on which the troops subsisted: their own horses. Dr. Clements' Diary Bennett A. Clements was a surgeon in the United States Army who, by the late 1860s, had achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel. In December 1876, Dr. Clements filed a report on General Crook's campaign against the Sioux, detailing the Horsemeat March and the Battle of Slim Buttes. His report, which takes the form of a daily diary of the campaign, describes a difficult time of near-starvation. One entry, on August 31, 1876, illustrates the intense difficulties encountered by Crook's troops: Long marches in the most frequent of rain-storms, with cold nights and heavy dews, and the prospect of achieving satisfactory results, always so encouraging to the soldier, was not apparent. There were about five-and-a-half days' rations of coffee, and less than two days of bread and salt left; the distance to the Black Hills was definitely not known, and the Ree Indian scouts, who alone knew