The Indians stripped and mutilated the soldiers' bodies before leaving in an apparent mirror of the Sand Creek Massacre of two years before. In his report to his superiors, Carrington listed what was discovered at the battlefield the next day: eyes torn out and laid on rocks, noses and ears cut off, teeth chopped out, brains taken out and placed on rocks, hands and feet cut off, and private parts severed. The two civilians, Wheatley and Fisher, had their faces smashed into bloody pulp, and Wheatley had been pierced by more than a hundred arrows. The last trooper to die in the battle may have been Adolph Metzger, a bugler who used his instrument as a weapon until it was battered shapeless. Metzger was the only soldier whose dead body was not mutilated. The Indians covered him with a buffalo hide. Some historians interpreted that as a tribute to his bravery in standing alone against several armed enemies.