CHAPTER 18 The Big Medicine of Long Hair
FIRST LIGHT COME OUT of the east not long afterward. I was still out of doors and full of wonder, so much so that I was actually considering to go break the ice on the river and take me a Cheyenne plunge. But my pony, tethered near, was stirring for a morning drink. Actually—you won’t believe this—he looked at me out of his big clear eyes and said: “Father, take me down to the water.” I don’t mean he spoke in words, but he said it. Then he said: “We are in for a big fight.” To hell with what you believe. He said it. I was there.
I said: “Oh, you hear the crashing of the snow crust up the valley. That is just the horse herd of your brothers and cousins.”
“No,” said my pony, stubbornly shaking his head as I undid the halter from the picket pin. His breath and mine was steaming great clouds in the cold.
“Come,” said I, “I’ll show you.” I mounted him and started out of the cottonwood grove which the camp was in among. My own tepee stood near the edge with no timber close enough to fall on it in case of storm, so we rode only forty yards to the open bottomland of the valley and looked up the meadow where the herd was. At that moment I heard a distant shot behind me, from the hills on the far side of the village. Reason I didn’t turn, though, was that straight ahead, galloping in a line that stretched across the snow-whitened bottom, come a great body of animals. But you can be fooled by the morning air and all the more when crystalline, which magnifies, so that at distance a man will seem a horse, a horse a buffalo. Allowing for this effect, I seen that charge as our pony herd in stampede, set off by Pawnee raiders. With a purpose to go get my gun, I wheeled; and as I did, a whole brass band commenced to play, trumpets, flutes, and drums. I thought I had lost my mind. It was an Irish tune called “Garry Owen,” what I had heard the post band at Leavenworth play in Sunday concert. At the first strains, my pony reared and throwed me. “I told you,” he screamed and bolted crazy towards the oncoming charge, going maybe fifty feet before his front legs broke at the knees and he plunged into the snow, skidding in a long trace of red.
He had been hit in the neck while I was still mounted, for that whole line had begun to fire upon the first notes. I was drenched with his blood. From about three foot above ground the air seemed solid with whining lead. Yet I got up and run untouched towards my tepee. I might have been yelling but couldn’t tell owing to the music. I couldn’t even hear the hoofbeats or the carbine fire, just that band blare.
Digging Bear was coming out of the lodge door, carrying my piece and a leathern pouch of ammunition. Ten yards still away, she throwed me the rifle and swung her arm back to hurl the pouch, but a little black hole sprung in her broad temple, like a fly had lit there, and she set down dead in the snow. A dozen more slugs snapped through the lodge cover behind her, and when I run inside, I seen young Wunhai had gathered half of them into that warm brown breast I had fondled several hours before, her deerskin bosom all bitten up.
Sunshine sat in the rear, Morning Star at her nipple.
“Down, down!” I shouts. “Lie flat.” She curled around the baby, and I covered her over with buffalo robes. I went to do the same for Frog Lying on a Hillside and Corn Woman and her children, but they were gone from the tepee.
By time I got to the door again, the bluecoats was so close they fired beyond our lodge into those in the timber behind. To leave by that egress would have put me under their hoofs, so with my knife I slashed a rent in the back and slipped through it. Indians was coming out everywhere, some not getting far before they went under, others diving behind cottonwoods and subsequently delivering a return fire, mainly arrows, but the targets was bad and their own folk running between.
The cavalry pounded in among the lodges now, the band still playing out in the open valley where they rested. That music was driving me batty. I belly-flopped behind a tree. I had not yet fired my piece, but not because of delicacy. No, I would have dropped them troopers without mercy had I the wherewithal to do it: they was ravaging my home, had killed two of my women, and because of them my dearest wife and newborn boy lay in uttermost jeopardy. At such a time you see no like betwixt yourself and enemy, be he your brother by blood or usage.
But my gun was empty. Around the lodge I kept it unloaded in case them children got to tinkering. The ammunition rested in that pouch under Digging Bear’s body, some fifty yards of galloping cavalry from where I lay.
Some Cheyenne had went to the river, leaped in, and was using the high bank as fortification behind which they covered the retreat down the center of the icy stream by a large body of women and children. I thought I saw Corn Woman and her young among them, but the gun smoke was thick now and closed across about that time, and when it cleared a trooper’s horse was shot under him and fell into my line of vision. I was distracted by the sight of them saddlebags, where the cavalrymen generally packed their extra ammunition. I run towards it, but before I got there the animal clumb to its feet and galloped away riderless. Just stunned, I reckon. But the trooper was hurt worse. He lay with his left boot at a strange angle from his upper leg. He was a young fellow, hardly beyond a boy, with a newly started mustache. Him and me, our eyes met, and a blaze come into his as they was windows in back of which somebody just fired a torch, but it was dying caused it and not recognition, for the next instant his head pitched forward showing the back of the skull busted open like an orange. And the Cheyenne who did it, using a wooden war club embedded with a triangular blade of rusty iron, took the lad’s carbine and cartridge belt and dashed for the river, whooping, but got his own as he leaped the bank, belched blood as he hit the water, and sank in frothing commotion.
Already the troops had passed into the lower reaches of the village, the noise suddenly half-distant as if from a fight in the room next door. I had a mind to go back to my lodge and fetch the cartridges from underneath Digging Bear, but knew the soldiers would soon reverse for the clean-up and my activity might bring them down on where Sunshine was hid, so I run among the other tepees, and that was when I saw the stout body of Black Kettle, sprawled near his lodge door. He had signed his last treaty. Sand Creek and now this. His wife lay nearby, still dying.
Old Lodge Skins, I thought: I must get to him. He’d be helpless now, with no sons and blind. So I doubled back, for his tepee was near my own, and on the way I passed numerous dead Indians and almost got shot by a wounded brave I didn’t know, but he went under before he could stretch the bowstring. The incident brought my appearance to mind. I hadn’t cleaned the black paint from my face of the day before—it keeps your nose and cheeks warm in winter—but some of it must have been scraped away in this or that activity since. Aside from that, my hair was wholly exposed. Well, I didn’t know what to do about it at the moment.
I plunged in through the entranceway of Old Lodge Skins’s tepee. Sure enough, he was still there. But he was not abandoned. Them two young wives of his was trying to get him to flee. The one had a baby strapped to her back. The other was especially wrought up, and automatically went for me with her butcher knife, though she used to see me often.
I held her off on the muzzle of my empty gun, and says: “You women run for it. I’ll help Grandfather.”
“Kill me then, too,” cries Tassel Woman, who had that knife.
“Get on out, you fool!” I yells, and stepping to the side, fetches her a swat in the ample hindquarters with the stock of the Ballard. “Go down to the river.”
That shook some sense into her, and the other with the baby said: “I believe you”; and they left.
“My son,” Old Lodge Skins remarked, quite casually. “Sit down beside me and we will smoke.”
Would you believe it? That old man set there upon his buffalo robe and commenced to fill his pipe.
“Grandfather, have you lost your wits? The bluecoats are wiping us out. We have only the time of a bird flight to get under the riverbank before they turn back.”
“Black Kettle is dead,” said he. “I know it. I am blind and cannot fight. Yet neither will I run. If it is my day to die, I want to do it here, within a circle.”
Well, I could see from the set of his leathery old jaw that talk from me would never stir him.
I says: “All right, I will light the pipe.” He stuck his head forward, I grabbed away the pipe stem with my left hand, and with my right fist I hit him full force upon the chin. My hand was perfectly stunned, I couldn’t unclench it. Old Lodge Skins, however, setting there like a rock, appeared undamaged.
“You are worried too much, my son,” he said. “Your hand slips upon the pipe. Give me the brand. I will light it myself. Then we shall smoke, and your worry will lift and fly away like the little buffalo bird.”
I didn’t think I’d ever regain the use of my right hand, so I brought him a glowing coal in my left. By now the shooting outside was coming back in our direction. What I had intended to do with that blow, you see, was to knock him unconscious and carry him to the river. I now considered cold-cocking him with my rifle butt, but it was likely his head was even harder than his jaw, besides being padded with that coarse, thick hair.
He puffed on the pipe and offered the usual smoke clouds to East and West, etc. By God, I thought, he is sticking to it, he is an Indian to the core. You know how you think about foreigners, savages, and so on, that in an emergency they’ll be just like yourself, even to talking English. But it was me who had to become Cheyenne here.
I got the eloquence of desperation. “The river is part of the great circle of the waters of the earth,” I says in the highest, squeakiest voice I could imagine, in mimicry of the falsetto of classic Cheyenne oratory. It seemed to work: Old Lodge Skins come alert and put down his pipe.
“The sacred waters flow through the body of the earth as the blood runs within a man and the sap within a tree. All things are joined in this great current. O White Buffalo Spirit, hear me! Lead your children to safety by the river!”
I don’t want you to think I was mocking anything at this point. Get into a battle and see how derisive you feel. No, I felt the call then. It might have been an instinct for preaching inherited from my Pa, but I was right exalted.
Not so much so, however, that I failed to see Old Lodge Skins picking up a huge old muzzle-loader from where it had laid beside him. My God, I thought, he’s going to shoot me for trying to save him, the crazy old galoot.
Then I heard a noise at the door and turned, and a soldier crouched there, thrusting in a pistol and trying to see through the dim light.
“Barroooom!” I never heard a louder report than that made by Old Lodge Skins’s piece. It must have been double-charged to make such a noise, spitting fire and smoke halfway across the tepee circle, and when the ball hit that soldier boy he was flung out the door like an empty suit of clothes.
The chief set up from where he had laid back with the five-foot barrel between his moccasin toes. He had sighted on sound.
“Go get his hair, my son,” said he. “Then we will talk some more about the river. Maybe I will go there.”
“It’s probably too late already,” I says. “Now they will come like coyotes to a rotting carcass. I won’t argue with you any more.”
I took an arm and pulled him to his feet. He never resisted in the slightest. I reckon he had decided to go: otherwise I’d never of moved him, I’m sure of that. I slit the tepee cover with my knife and prepared to lead him out.
“Wait,” he said. “I must take my medicine bundle.” This was a sloppy parcel about three foot long and wrapped in tattered skins. Its contents was secret, but I had once peeked into that of a deceased Cheyenne before they put it with him on the burial scaffold, and what his contained was a handful of feathers, the foot of an owl, a deer-bone whistle, the dried pecker of a buffalo, and suchlike trash: but he undoubtedly believed his strength was tied up in this junk, and who was I to say him nay. So with Old Lodge Skins. I got his bundle from a pile of apparent refuse behind his bed.
Then we started out again.
“Wait,” the old man said. “My war bonnet.” He never wore this item since I knowed him, because I think I have said that Cheyenne chiefs did not go in for display: they was generally the plainest of the men you’d see. He kept his in a round rawhide case hanging from a tepee pole.
“Perhaps you would like to see it?” he asks. “It is very beautiful and a reminder to me of my fighting days as a young man.” He actually starts to undo the case.
“Some other time, Grandfather,” says I, hanging it on my shoulder by its leathern string.
About that time, a number of carbines begin to pour lead into the tepee; it sounded like we was in a beehive. But do we leave? No, Old Lodge Skins has first to get his sacred bow and quiver of arrows, and then a special blanket, and of course his powder horn and shot bag, and his pipe and tobacco case. I am loaded down with this crap, and the United States Cavalry is blowing out the front of the lodge.
I commence to curse in English and howl in Cheyenne, and try to push him through the slit I cut, but no use, he stands embedded like a tree and puts on the rest of his jewelry: bracelets, bear-claw necklace, breastplate of tiny bones, and the lot.
Now the soldiers set fire to the face of the lodge. I guess that’s when I might have started to cry. I didn’t care about being killed no more, would indeed have welcomed death, I think, if I could have got the suspense over. I say crying; it might have been laughter. Whatever, it was hysterical.
“Come, my son,” he says. “We cannot stay in this tepee all day. The soldiers are about to burn it down.”
So after all that, it is him who leads me out, my legs like tubes of sand. Now of course not even the cavalry was so dumb as to assault only the tepee door. They was around back, too. We stepped directly into the reception of three troopers, and they fired pointblank, so close I don’t know why our hair didn’t burn from the flash.
All I can testify to is that they missed, and while the fearsome reports was still reverberating through my tortured eardrums, I heard Old Lodge Skins say: “Pay no attention to them, my son. I have now seen that it is not our day to die.”
If you have any sense, you won’t believe the following account of how we gained the river. I don’t, myself. But then you have to find another way to explain it, for here I am today and therefore I must have survived the Battle of the Washita in 1868.
Old Lodge Skins give me his rifle and he lifted that medicine bundle up before him in his two hands and started to sing. I saw then that the eyes of them troopers was not focused upon us, and we walked right past them while they fired again into the rip we had come out of. I heard one of them say: “We got them all, boys. Let’s have a look.” But another believed they should give it a few more rounds, so they went on pouring lead into that empty tepee.
The chief walked slowly on, in a dead line for the river, singing and holding high his medicine bundle. The soldiers was everywhere among the village now, mostly afoot but some still mounted, but neither kind made no difference to us. We walked right through them without incurring their interest of eye or ear, though the chief’s voice was loud, ranging from the heavy guttural to the piping falsetto, and in appearance we must have been a novelty, even in a Cheyenne camp: first, Old Lodge Skins, his blind eyes shut, and then me, with black-streaked face and sandy hair, leggings and blanket, and carrying all that rubbish and two empty rifles.
Now we approached the rear of a line of skirmishers firing at the Indians defending the riverbank, the whole action having moved downstream some from where I had first seen them, as the Cheyenne retreated slowly along. The main party of women and children was gone from sight, though some stragglers waded here and there in the cold Washita.
Well, he had kept it up so far, and I didn’t know why we wasn’t seen and shot down except maybe because the sheer audacity of the stunt made us invisible to the soldiers, but would he march through them skirmishers and into the crossfire?
He would and did, and we went untouched though, as if in accompaniment to his song, I heard much whistling of lead about my ears. But one thing happened: the Indians stopped shooting till we reached the bank. They saw us all right, and I think their so doing is the only thing that kept me from being permanently warped by that experience. That, and the shock of jumping waist-deep into the frigid water, which felt like I had been skinned from toe to belly-button.
Once me and Old Lodge Skins was in the Washita, the other Indians pushed us downstream after the women and children. Someone said: “Leave the river at the big bend, where the depth is over the head from shore to shore.”
I reckon they took me for the chief’s personal nurse in his blindness. I was reluctant to go, what with Sunshine and Morning Star still hiding beneath the robes in our tepee, so far as I knew. But I couldn’t do no good for them. The soldiers now had complete possession of the village and was already herding together such women and children as had neither resisted nor run. They’d no doubt soon find my two and add them to the captives, and all I’d accomplish by making an attempt at this time to liberate them would be to get myself executed as a renegade, if not shot down before my identification was established.
So off we waded, the chief and myself, and now I led him rather than vice versa as it had been this far, for he had come out of his medicine spell on entering the water and was a blind old man—which I guess given his character was typical now that the worst of the danger was temporarily gone. He was his best when confronting a menace. Keeping under the bank we was out of the line of fire, and made good progress, though after a time in that freezing element my body felt like stone.
We waded for about three-quarters of a mile when we overtook the women and children what had gone on before, they being slowed by the smaller kids, some of whom was in up to the neck. I dropped that junk I carried for Old Lodge Skins, including both our rifles, and seizing one little boy, put him upon my shoulders. In this fashion we did another good mile to the horseshoe bend, and then all left the water to avoid that deep section, with a purpose to cut across the intervening tongue of land and re-enter the river below.
The air was ferocious upon my wet clothes. I swung that boy to the earth and he rejoined his mother and her other children, but we hadn’t got much farther when that woman set down and begun to tear strips from her dress and bind them about the feet of her offspring, which I reckon was about to freeze off though the kids had not made a sound.
That was when a party of cavalry rode up on our rear. I realized later that this was the detail commanded by Major Joel Elliot, who Custer sent downstream to strike a large concentration of Cheyenne on the south shore, below our family group. We had three armed braves with us, traveling as guards, and a man called Little Rock who had a muzzle-loader stopped and shot a horse from under a trooper, and the instant after, himself fell dead from the answering fire.
The women and children hastened to get back into the river, and I must say I went along with them. There was a moment there when Little Rock fell that I thought I should go pick up his gun and perform a manly role, but another of the remaining two braves beat me to it.
Well, the women and children was almost all into the water, below the bend, and me and Old Lodge Skins was just climbing down the steep bank to join them when a man shouts down from above: “You can come back. We have surrounded them.”
So I push Old Lodge Skins up again, and he is seemingly lighter to move than when we was on the downslope.
He says, right lively, handing me his medicine bundle, “Give me my rifle. I want to rub out some soldiers before the young men get them all.”
“I left it over there,” I says and takes that opportunity to slip away. There was plenty of women around to help him from now on, and a great body of Cheyenne was running up from the south, while others had got between the cavalry detachment and the river, driving them into the tall grass of the rising ground towards the bluffs.
The trooper unhorsed by Little Rock’s shot had earlier dropped off to take captive the woman who was binding her children’s feet. She had delayed till he was surrounded. Now I saw the rush that overwhelmed him, and when the Indians cleared away, he was stripped naked and lay red upon the trampled snow.
Elliot’s command dismounted and let go their horses, which run wildly down the valley and the soldiers lay in the high grass, where they was concealed except for the smoke of their carbines. They kept up a steady fire, but it was panicky and unaimed, most of it straight up into the winter sky, and when the Indians saw that, they didn’t bother to creep up no more but those that was mounted rode right in and commenced killing them like chickens, and the women and children come up to watch. The fight lasted maybe twenty minutes, and at the end all you could see was the swarm of Cheyenne backs as they bent to take coup and butcher.
I don’t know if you ever seen carnage in winter. It ain’t pretty at no season, but in the cold the blood soon freezes and a body stiffens up before you know it. If you wait too long, you have to break its limbs to get its shirt off.
I mention this not to be ghoulish but to list my motive in hastening into the grass: I needed one of them uniforms. There was forty-fifty Indians and only fifteen bodies to be shared among them. I had a bit of luck: I run into Younger Bear, on his knees and at work with a knife. I realized now that he had been one of the two or three braves who had first rode in among the soldiers. He was wearing a big war bonnet that I hadn’t recognized. His left shirt sleeve was reddened and drops of blood was dripping from the fringe onto the nose and lips of the corpse he was scalping. He was also sweating profusely, for I guess his knife was dull and that left arm didn’t have no strength to pull the hair away as the skin was severed.
However, he was quite calm as to mood. He noticed my leggings alongside him and said without looking up: “You pull while I cut.”
So I did. I knelt and took hold of them light-brown, rather fine-textured locks of the dead white man. I think he was right young. His mouth was strained open as if in a silent cry. I endeavored not to study him, for he might have been somebody I once knowed, and there wasn’t anything personal in what I was doing. So at length his skull cover come free, and I was obliged to Younger Bear for taking it quickly from me.
“I saw you charge in to take coup before,” I says. “That was brave.”
The Bear wiped the sweat from his brow and left a great smear of blood in its place. He sighed and shrugged, but he was pleased. He handed me his knife and said, as you might to a guest sitting before a roast turkey: “Go on and take something for yourself. There is a pretty ring on his left hand.”
“Well,” says I, “I could use the shirt and pants.”
Younger Bear makes a gesture as if to say it’s on the house, and I got the uniform off that soldier and his boots, and later I found his hat nearby. I bundled that stuff under my arm, and the Bear went back to work. The soldier now lay in his wool underwear. He had unbeknownst to himself done me a favor, and I thought I would try to return it though he might never know that either.
I said to the Bear: “You had better get your arm tied up before you bleed to death.”
He looked like he noticed it for the first time, poked the muscle and winced.
“Come,” I said, “where’s your pony?” Then I saw his horse over a ways, and who should be patiently holding its bridle but Olga. And there also with her was little Gus, watching the other Indians milling about with their gory trophies, and he had a tiny wooden knife and was wielding it in imaginary scalping procedure. I reckon he would have liked to do a little real cutting with it, but Olga was restraining him with her other arm, I’ll say that much for her.
The Bear took a minute more to do something which I surely didn’t watch and then got up.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll go and you can have the rest of him. Thank you for your help.” He puts out his hand to me, and I took it—and kept it, for it wasn’t his, but rather the right hand of that soldier, which he had severed and stuck into his sleeve, drawing his own arm up.
“Hahaha!” he laughed. “Good joke!” He was still laughing as he went over to Olga, carrying the scalp and trailing that suit of long underwear like a whole human skin.
Now I had to put on that uniform, a ticklish proposition, for soon as it was on my back I’d be alien to the Indians, but I could not get back to the village dressed otherwise. My purpose of course was to go find Sunshine and the baby. They would be prisoners by now. Wearing the blue clothes, I could get access to them, and in the disorganization of battle we could make off to the hills. Nobody would question a soldier herding along an Indian woman with a baby on her back.
Having finished their butchery in the tall grass, the Cheyenne started to move downstream again. I saw blind Old Lodge Skins among them, being led by a woman—no, it was Little Horse, who was after all his own son. That was as it should be. I done my job and had my own to look after.
The firing had died away except for scattered flurries throughout the valley, and the smoke rising above the camp was now black from burning lodges. Our people was heading for the other villages along the lower Washita. I doubted that the soldiers intended to press on in that direction, for it was afternoon now, and on the bluffs across the river I could see a body of mounted Indians which I reckon had come up from the downstream camps to oppose their progress. There was fifteen hundred lodges in that valley, of which only a little more than fifty stood in Black Kettle and Old Lodge Skins’s village. But these other camps was strung out over ten mile and discontinuous one from the next. I believe it was at the Washita that the Indians learned a lesson in villaging, for eight years later on the Little Bighorn they didn’t leave no space between their tepee circles to let Custer through.
George Armstrong Custer. I had never heard of him by this time in my life though I understand he had got a name for himself in the Rebellion. Here’s something maybe you didn’t realize: Indians almost never knowed who it was attacked them until the battle was done, and sometimes not even then. Look at what had happened to me so far upon this day: I had seen only two soldiers close up: one had been that trooper what fired into Old Lodge Skins’s tepee; and the other, Younger Bear’s victim. We had been charged at dawn by whites, dressed in blue. Nobody knew who led them, nor cared. Later, if another treaty council was held, the soldier-chief would likely be there, and say as an opening statement to the Cheyenne: “You remember how I beat you on the Washita.” Which would be the first time the Indians had this information.
Afterwards they’d call that man not by his white name but by a peculiarity of his appearance on this occasion, like in later years General Crook was Three Stars; General Miles, Bear Coat; and General Terry was called by some The Other One, I guess because they run out of names.
When they got to know Custer, the Cheyenne and their allies named him Long Hair, but I believe 99 per cent of the individuals within the tribe would not have recognized him in parade gear at the head of his troops; and not even the chiefs he counciled with would have knowed him with his hair cut. This time will come.
Right now, there I was trailing along behind my Indian comrades as they proceeded downriver at the Washita. Custer I never heard of, but the brass badge on that dead trooper’s campaign hat told me his outfit was Company G, Seventh Cavalry. Suppose I run into other fellows from the same company? I undid it from the felt and throwed it aside. Then with my knife I tore a hole where the badge had been, as if a bullet had blown it out.
But I had yet to get into the uniform, though the other Indians what stripped the soldiers had put on articles of their loot, here a brave in a sergeant’s jacket, there a little kid wearing the gray-flannel Army shirt like a dress, and maybe a woman in a piece of wool underwear over her deerskins.
At last we come to where the ground swelled and I set down as if to tighten my moccasin lacings until the last of the Cheyenne had disappeared over the rise. Then crawled two hundred yards through the grass-matted snow, stood up, took my bearings, saw a clear route to the riverbank and took it, plunging once more into the icy Washita, which rose to my chin at this point. It was all I could do to keep that uniform above the stream, but it was still dry when I reached the other side, and for warmth alone I was glad to exchange it for them buckskins which would freeze stiff between each step.
I also remembered to scrub the black from my face; what I missed would look natural enough as the soot of battle. As you might suppose, the clothing was all too big. Now, trousers and shirts was worn voluminous in the Army, but the cavalry jacket was cut snug. I’d just have to leave this one unbuttoned to cover up the situation, despite the cold. My feet had room to tour independently within the boots, and the hat was pretty loose even with a stuffed headband.
But I was ready, and stuck my head out of the brush patch which I had used as dressing room. I found myself looking directly at a Cheyenne brave some twenty yards on, who sent an arrow towards me before I could blink. It seemed to travel quite slow through the atmosphere, the only difficulty being that my dodge was of similar character, as if immersed in a barrel of molasses. The triangular iron head, with its razor edges, had an affection for my nose and followed wherever I pointed that feature. I mean, it seemed so. It seemed as if I was somersaulting over and over, and the educated arrow followed every convolution, a spare half inch from my beak. Actually, whatever happened was over in an instant, the arrow had disappeared, the Cheyenne was face down and dead, and a cavalry corporal rode up with a smoking weapon.
“My God,” he said, “what a place to take a dump.” Which is what he figured I had been doing in them bushes and what could I do but grin at him. “Git on,” he said, pointing to his horse’s hindquarters. “Don’t it hurt?”
Then I saw from the corner of my eye that the arrow was lodged in my hatbrim, as close across my right temple as it could have been without tearing skin. From the trooper’s angle, feathers fore and head aft, it must have looked as though my skull was spitted. I throwed it away and mounted behind him and we went back to the village.
Now we got in among the tepees at the lower end of camp, and this soldier, he trotted up to a little group of blue-dressed figures, we dismounted, and he saluted a man.
“Sir,” he says, “I scouted the—”
“Just a moment,” interrupts the officer what he has addressed and turns to me. I am standing there apart, getting my bearings, for troops is going hither and yon, looting tepees, herding Cheyenne women and children together into one party, driving captive ponies. I hardly knowed the place where I had lived some weeks.
“Soldier,” orders this officer, “come here.” I seen he meant me, so went to him. He was a right good-looking fellow, tall and well-proportioned, and I recall the collars of his blue-flannel shirt was embroidered with two gold stars on each point. He had a yellow mustache and his fair hair was so long in back, its curls barely cleared his shoulders.
His eyes was icy-blue, and under brows so pale you could see them only by their bushiness. He says in a voice like a rasp across the grain of a board, “Button that jacket!”
He says: “Consider yourself under arrest. Give your name to the sergeant of the guard.”
Now that trooper who picked me up does me another favor. “If the general pleases,” that soldier says, “I found this man in the brush and had to kill an Injun to get him clear. He was hit in the head by an arrer, poor devil, and is out of his mind, I believe.”
I didn’t need no further cue. I laid my head on the side and sort of goggled my eyes, letting my tongue flap loose.
A spasm of impatience run over the general’s face. “Well, get him out of here,” he said. “This is a field headquarters, not the laboratory of an alienist.”
“Now,” said my benefactor, “if the general will hear the report of my scout—”
“No, I do not intend to,” responded the officer. “It cannot have much value if instead of observing the enemy’s dispositions, you were rescuing lunatics.” He jerks his back to us, and says to them others: “I have decided to shoot the captured ponies.”
One of them officers was a heavy-set, fatherly-looking man with a full head of white hair showing below his hat. I seen him gazing at me with a trace of amusement, as if he knowed the deal. But now he gets disturbed at what the general said and starts to protest.
“There are eight hundred ponies in that herd,” he says. “Had we not better save our ammunition for—”
“I have decided to shoot them,” says the general, “and do not require your suggestions upon the matter, Benteen.”
Benteen gives him a long look of undisguised scorn. Then he says in his benevolent way to the corporal, who was still standing with me alongside him: “You had better collect a detail of fifteen men and go and execute all of our four-legged prisoners. If you run out of ammunition, you might go over on the bluffs and borrow some from the Cheyenne.”
The corporal salutes him, and so do I, and I swear he winks at me. The general never saw it, though, for he was striding vigorously up and down in his smart boots, ordering things of various officers and men, and one of them is the director of the band, I guess, for shortly that group begins to play.
When we had gone on a ways by foot, the corporal says: “I’d think you would of knowed better than to let Hard Ass Custer catch you with your jacket open. He is a real son of a bitch, ain’t he? Goddam, I’d pay the Cheyenne what put a bullet in his brass heart.”
I said, “But that Benteen ain’t bad.”
“Ain’t bad?” exclaimed the corporal, right angry at my understatement. “I know fellows in his company would whip you for saying less than that he is the best officer who ever rode in the U.S. Goddam Cavalry.”
“That’s what I meant,” says I. Actually, at this point I was trying to find a chance to slip away from him and get to where the prisoners had been collected.
“You see how he looked at Custer? He don’t give a damn for him, I’ll tell you that. You can’t fight rank, but you don’t have to put your nose up in it, either, and the Colonel won’t. He’s right worried now over Major Elliot. Hard Ass won’t send out a patrol to look for him. That was what I was really doing out there when I run into you. You see anything of him?”
“Not me,” I says. That was when I realized it was probably Elliot and his command that the Cheyenne had wiped out and butchered in the grass across the river. I had been wise to throw away the badge from my hat.
“Benteen and Elliot served together in the War,” he says. “Well, we have to get shooting them horses. And you best find you a carbine if you can and praise your luck that Custer didn’t notice you’d lost yours. He’d of spread-eagled you in the snow.”
“I left it with my bunky,” says I, for I had learned the lingo when I was with the soldiers after the Solomon battle. “I’ll go fetch it.”
“All right, and then you get back on the double, for I got my eye on you,” he says, assuming the style of a noncom now he had work to do. That’s how it goes with rank, among the whites; I had forgot how quick relations can change.
Soon as I got some men and horses between him and me, I headed for the prisoner’s corral, which I found to be several tepees they had let to stand near the center of the camp, into which the women and children had been collected. I could hear them singing that doleful death dirge of the Cheyenne as I approached. These lodges was of course ringed by a guard of soldiers, and I looked for some difficulty in gaining access there, for I wouldn’t want to tell my purpose in so doing.
In addition I never wanted to get caught again by anybody and put on special duty. My late uneasiness as a white man among Indians was nothing beside the feeling I had now, slogging along in the enormous boots, with only my ears holding up that hat, and the jacket stood away from my body as if it was an empty hogshead.
But then I remembered Old Lodge Skins’s stunt in walking through that crossfire, which by the way was the only time I could recall his medicine working against the whites. He had kept up his assurance, that’s why; and I reckon being blind had helped; he wasn’t distracted by anything he saw. Well, I didn’t close my eyes but I did put myself in a state of concentration: I swelled up to fill that uniform, somehow, and I walked hard and smart up to a sergeant standing at the door of one of them tepees.
“General Custer sent me to interrogate the prisoners,” I said.
“All right,” he responds, and steps aside. But then before I could enter, he grabs my elbow and puts his mustache into my ear.
“Listen,” he says, “you say a word for me with one of them young squaws and I’ll make it worth your while. I mean, being you speak Indian, it wouldn’t be no chore. Tell her after dark to come and whistle out the flap, and I’ll give her a present.” He slaps my shoulder, and I go within.
That lodge was packed solid with Cheyenne women and children, too crowded for anyone to sit down. They stood looking at me, with their blankets drawn close and a good many of the wives had undone their braids so their hair would hang free to be torn out in mourning. Some had scratched long rents down their cheeks for the same reason, and the wailing, rise-and-fall of the death songs did not diminish for my arrival. But when the smaller children saw my uniform, they grasped their mothers’ legs and buried their little brown heads in the blankets.
One old woman was crying in high-pitched shrieks that at length would exhaust her air and then she would gasp and cry in a different tone on the in-breath till her lungs was filled and back to the positive weep. After a minute or so of this, during which I had not spoken, she breaks off and says to me: “Go away and let us die of sorrow.”
It turned out that this sentiment, while it may have been sincere enough in the long view, had also the particular aim of ascertaining whether I could understand the language. For no sooner had I indicated that I did, she hangs upon the sleeve of my jacket and wails again, but alternates it with the following.
“I am the sister of Black Kettle. I told him we would be punished if he did not stop our young men from raiding the whites. But he would not listen to me. ‘Shut your mouth, you foolish woman,’ he would say. Well, was I not right? Black Kettle is dead, and all our warriors, and we helpless ones will be put to death by the soldiers. I told him it was bad to make war on the white people, who have always been our friends. They are wonderful people, good and kind, and I can understand why they punished the wicked Human Beings. But we helpless ones could do nothing, and now I suppose must suffer for our bad men.”
“Shut your mouth, you foolish woman,” I says. I knowed her, she was called Red Hair though hers was gray, and frankly I never heard before that she was sister to the chief. I won’t say that was a lie, but if it wasn’t, it was the only particle of truth in her whole harangue. I’m not blaming her, see, for it was a good line to take and I believe she used it a little later on General Custer himself with some success, but I had better fish to fry.
Quicklike, she stops her weeping and says: “Would you like a beautiful young girl to bring the moon and stars into your lodge tonight?”
All this while of course I had been surveying the faces roundabout, but I did not see Sunshine.
“Now, they aren’t going to kill you,” I says, “so you can stop working your tongue two ways. If you weren’t busy lying, you would see who I am. You know I’m not a soldier. I have just come back from helping get the rest of our people safely downriver, and am dressed like this so I may pass among the bluecoats.”
The old hag squints cunningly at me. “Certainly, I know who you are. I just believed you had become a traitor.” This is a free translation. What she actually said was she thought that at the sight of the white man’s meat I had become their dog.
“I am looking for my wife and child, old woman, and I want to find them before they grow to such an age as yours, when the mind shrivels, falls into dust, and blows out the earholes in the night wind.”
She was beginning to enjoy this exchange, the way harpies of that sort do, and come back at me with doubts about my manhood, etc., as if we was bantering in the midst of normal Indian life a thousand mile from the U.S. Cavalry, for them Cheyenne Women were tough and got more so with age. She was a hard-bitten old bitch, and give her a knife she would have slit that horny sergeant from belly-button to breastbone if she thought she could have got away with it. As it was, I reckon she might function as procuress for him. She’d last as long as she could, and I take my hat off to her.
However, she never knowed what become of Sunshine, and I looked through them other prisoner-tepees with the same result, and then, with a terrible apprehension clawing into my vitals, I went to the upper end of the village where my lodge had been. But nothing was there save the ashes of our fire, a strip or two of deerskin, some buffalo hair, and the like. The soldiers had drug down all the tepees and burned them, with all therein that was left after looting, in one great blaze upon the Washita banks, the smoke from which I had seen earlier. By now that bonfire was down to a steaming heap of gray and black, and the snow melted off roundabout in a great circle of yellow.
In the meadow, they had started to shoot eight hundred ponies, and that was a mess, for some of the fellows on the killing detail must have got excited by the rearing, coughing, bleeding animals trying to kick each other’s guts out as the lead seared within them, and pretty soon the bullets commenced to fly through the camp, and cursing consternation come from the troops on the other side. I reckon they griped to Custer, for I saw him ride by with an officer trying to talk to his stiff back, but as usual he wasn’t listening, and what he did when he reached the herd was to dispatch a few of the ponies himself with his sidearm, I guess to show them the right way.
The band was still playing. Next place I went was to where they was digging a burial trench for the Indians what had died in camp: the bodies lined up side by side, still dressed except for the smaller articles that made souvenirs: necklaces and such. Very few of them was scalped, and I didn’t see no mutilations at all. That should be said: this wasn’t Sand Creek, and these troops was Regulars, not Volunteers; professional fighting men are always less bloody than amateurs.
I seen Black Kettle again; his silver medal was gone. And then I seen young Wunhai, and I seen Digging Bear.… Seventy-eighty bodies there might have been, and I expect more in the brush and timber which they wasn’t bothering about, and then the Indians from downriver might have recovered some others.
Corn Woman and her children and little Frog, they must have escaped down the Washita; they wasn’t here. But what of Sunshine and Morning Star? Thank God, I couldn’t find them among these dead; on the other hand, when I went to help Old Lodge Skins, they had been still under the buffalo robes. Had they gone into the river at a later time, I would have seen them when myself below the horseshoe bend.
I left that burial place before they lowered Wunhai and Digging Bear and shoveled earth upon them. I recall feeling disorderly at the time, like if I had stayed, I would have thrown myself into the trench alongside. Wunhai looked like a dead wren, but Digging Bear had not died easy as I had thought —— I don’t want to talk of it, I had been fond of them women. They was maybe just Indians, but they had been mine and small use I was to them.
I searched the timber and I searched the brush, and I found three bodies but none of them was Sunshine, and I wandered so far as to come below the bluffs and the Cheyenne watching there seen me and started down, and I had to run for it. There was sufficient of them up there to retake the village, especially while the troops was shooting ponies, burning property, herding prisoners, and all, but Custer knowed how to put Indians on the defensive. It was winter, and he burned up their robes. They lived by their riding, and he killed their horses. He held captive fifty of their women and children. They watched him helpless.
Now they was afraid he would go after the camps along the lower Washita, and he knowed they was, so had determined to move in that direction and by posing as a menace to the downstream villages he would keep them too worried to counterattack. This I found out later. At the moment, back in the timber, I heard the bugles sounding assembly call. I reckon it wasn’t no more than a half hour afterward that the whole regiment commenced to march downriver, carrying with them the captives on ponies saved for that purpose from the massacre of the herd, and naturally the band was blaring.
I never come from concealment either to cheer them off or see what they was doing. Easy enough to follow the latter by ear. Take a river valley hardened by winter, you can hear a gunshot about five mile away: think of the distance a brass band will carry. The Cheyenne had left the bluffs in a panic to get to their families. Custer had the knack, all right. Everything he done said to all other living creatures: I win and you lose.
Well, when it sounded like the rear guard had reached the horseshoe bend, I returned to where our camp had been. Before leaving, the army had also pulled down the tepees where the captives was held and put them to the torch. These was still burning. The dead bodies of eight hundred horses lay in the meadow, here and there a hoof still jerking. Owing to the cold, they had not yet gone ripe enough to attract the carrion-feeders, though I seen three coyotes lurking a half mile up the valley and a raven or two high in the cottonwoods. The raw wind of late afternoon lifted black fragments from the refuse pile on the riverbank.
Custer had also shot such dogs as didn’t run with the fleeing Indians, and them little bodies was strewn about amidst spent shells and arrows and the other litter. Considerable blood had spattered upon snow and earth, and when in shadow it froze bright red, soaking in and browning only where in sunlight.
Of the several hundred souls that occupied the place of late, I alone stayed quick. I set down upon the cold bank of the Washita. Though the river had earlier known some blood, them red bursts and filaments never last long in a flowing stream but join the mix and move on, and someplace a thousand miles away a fellow will drink himself some water and unbeknownst imbibe a particle of somebody else’s juice of life. The sun was falling behind a blue ridge of smoke fringed with gold, like a sash hung across the western sky. You might have said that Custer flew his personal colors even on the horizon.
I wasn’t setting there in self-pity, mind you, nor anger. I was just trying to figure it out. Circumstances seemed to disintegrate upon me shortly after I had got settled in them. I was twenty-six years of age, yet as I could recall, this here was the first time I could ever locate the source of my troubles in one individual.
I would have lived in that camp on the Washita throughout the winter, and when the new grass come up in the spring we would have broken the treaty and moved north, got us buffalo and Pawnee en route, and maybe run one of them antelope surrounds again if Old Lodge Skins was up to it and if the railroad hadn’t scared away all the game, and so on up to the Powder River for some good fights with the Crow, and bear hunts and lodgepole-cutting in the Bighorn Mountains. All the while I’d have had them four women tending to my every little wish.
I seen General Custer as responsible for my loss. And I didn’t yet know how nor where I would do it, but I decided to kill that son of a bitch.