After the Rosebud and Little Bighorn battles, Generals Terry and Crook withdrew to separate base camps to await additional troops and supplies, and although their commands were only about 100 miles apart, communication was limited because few volunteers would undertake dangerous courier duty in the face of Lakota and Cheyenne strength. Reinforced and resupplied, both commands returned to the field in early August 1876, following month-old Indian trails, and unexpectedly met by accident along Rosebud Creek a few miles north of the Greenleaf Creek confluence. On August 10, 1876, Crow scouts ahead of Terry's command raced back to report an enormous cloud of dust to the south along Rosebud Creek, which seemed to signal a warrior force, but as Terry prepared for battle, a lone rider emerged waving a white hat: William F. Cody, a quartermaster scout attached to Colonel Wesley Merrit's Fifth Cavalry, who told Terry that Crook was bivouacked a few miles up the creek awaiting his arrival. For the next couple of weeks, the combined command, now numbering more than 1000 troopers, moved east to the Tongue and Powder Rivers before returning to the Yellowstone. Concerned that the hostiles might ford the Yellowstone and escape north, Terry deployed infantry companies under Colonel Nelson Miles along the lower Yellowstone at favored Indian crossing sites and aboard the supply steamer. Meanwhile, on August 24, Crook marched his poorly supplied command up the Powder River Valley following a faint trail to the southeast, engaged about thirty lodges of Lakota at Slim Buttes in present South Dakota, and, unable to hold the field, eventually reached the Belle Fourche River in mid-September during what became known as the Starvation March. The Seventh Cavalry finally reached Fort Abraham Lincoln on September 26, 1876, without again engaging the Lakota and Cheyenne after the Little Bighorn defeat.