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.