CHAPTER 27 Greasy Grass
SATURDAY, JUNE 24, was a mean hot day, and the south wind served only to choke the men behind with the dust of them in front. It got so bad after a time that the troops was obliged each to march along a separate trail, so as not to stifle them following, and also to diminish the great cloud that marked our progress. For we was getting close to the hostiles, and it was just after the noon halt that we crossed the place where another great Indian trail, coming from the south, joined the one we had been on so far.
That was not long after we found the enormous abandoned campsite where the lodgepoles for a sun-dance lodge was still standing. On the floor of the latter was some pictures traced in the sand: lines representing pony hoofmarks on one side and them of iron-shoed cavalry horses on the other; between, figures of white men falling headfirst towards the Indian ranks.
My head was thumping, and the smell of bacon at breakfast had made me go off and heave. I felt so miserable of body that, in compensation, my mind rested somewhat easier than it had been. The Ree and Crow, however, waxed even unhappier than before, while looking at them sand drawings, and chattered to Fred Girard and Mitch Bouyer, their respective interpreters, for being Indians they was much affected by symbols.
Up come Custer shortly, and Bouyer tells him that the pictures meant “many soldiers falling upside down into the Sioux camp,” which was to say, dead.
At that point I steps forward, saying: “General—”
But he interrrupts: “It’s the teamster, isn’t it? Well, teamster,” Custer says, looking down his sharp nose, “I understood your place was with the mules.” Yet he was not sore, but rather amused. “Or do I have it wrong?” he goes on. “I am only the regimental commander.”
“Sir,” I says, wincing from my hangover, “I don’t know how good a job these scouts is doing. I believe the way they put their reports sounds to you like sheer superstition and you ignore it.” Bouyer and Girard was giving me dirty looks.
“Whereas,” I says, “the whole point of being an Indian lies in the practical combination of fact and fancy. These here drawings and bones was left purposely for you to find and be scared by. If you are frightened off, or go ahead and get whipped, then they will have constituted a prophecy. If you win, however, they will have been just another charm that never worked. But the important matter is that the hostiles know you are following them, and are herewith announcing they ain’t going to run.”
Custer had been showing a flickering smile. Now he throws back his head and makes a barking laugh. He once again seemed like his old self, rather than the sober figure he had become since leaving the Tongue.
“Teamster,” he says, “I have the reputation of being a severe man. But I am also surely the only commanding officer who could stand and listen to the recommendations of a mule skinner. I have a partiality for colorful characters—California Joe, Wild Bill Hickok, and so on—in whose company I should say you belong. Charley Reynolds is a splendid scout, but he is too quiet.”
He laughs again, taking off his gray hat and slapping his boots with it. “This campaign has been altogether too humorless! Very well,” he says, “you wanted to be a scout. You are one as of this moment. Your orders are to stay with me, to say whatever comes into your head, and not to bother these other fellows.”
So that’s how I was appointed official jester to the commander of the Seventh Cavalry, as a result of merely telling the truth. Now you might think I took offense at it, but you would be wrong. It meant that I might be even more ineffectual than when traveling with the mules, for everything said by a man who is an authorized idiot, so to speak, is naturally taken as idiotic. But I would be at the head rather than the tail of the column. Maybe I could even jolly Custer out of the worst mistakes. So I accepted the position, and that threw the General into another laugh, and Girard and Bouyer got the idea, too, and laughed, and so did the Crow and Ree without understanding, but Indians is always polite if possible.
Now my orders might have been to stay with Custer, but that was unlikely for any human being, even one without a hangover and riding a better mount than my half-lame pony, for the General’s reputation for energy had not been exaggerated. Back and forth he rode upon Vic and when he tired that animal out, the striker would bring up Dandy. Scouts was ever coming in with reports, but Custer would generally go out a mile or more to meet them. Then back he’d trot and maybe continue along the column to speak to one of the troop commanders. All the while, his adjutant, Lieutenant Cooke with the enormous mutton-chop whiskers, was writing out orders and sending them hither and yon by means of couriers, and replies come back and Custer’d read them in his quick, impatient way sort of like an eagle.
His brother Tom, a carbon-copy of the General with the characteristics less authentic—like he was more impudent than truly arrogant, with his hat on the side of his head, etc.—Tom was generally in evidence at the head of the column rather than back with his troop, and to get in on the importance he would also send messages to the pack train and so on; and the other brother Boston as well as the nephew Armstrong Reed, both young fellows, they was usually to be seen acting as if we was on a picnic outing.
So I was largely ignored and never had no more chance to amuse the General, had I wanted such, the rest of the day, nor indeed didn’t talk to nobody except once or twice I tried to strike up a conversation with Custer’s striker—not the man from the Washita, but a fellow named Burkman, but he was almost a moron, wearing his cap way down to his eyes, and a butt for everybody’s wit.
We marched thirty mile and went into camp at eight o’clock of the evening, but in come the Crow scouts shortly with a report that the Sioux trail had swung west and crossed the Wolf Mountains in the direction of the Little Bighorn, or Greasy Grass as the Indians called it, so at about midnight we started to move again. I don’t believe anyone had got a wink of sleep in the interim, for the news had soon went around that the hostile village was expected to lie in the river valley, in which case we’d attack it at dawn.
Of course during that halt, I encountered Botts, who had ate a quick meal and went wandering about sticking his nose in everywhere.
“What did I tell you,” he says. “Hard Ass will pitch into the Indians tomorrow, a whole day before the junction with Terry and Gibbon. And by the time they come up, he can deliver that village all skinned and gutted, compliments of the Seventh Cavalry. Curse his dirty heart,” he says, “but you gotta hand it to him.”
I warns Botts to keep his voice down, for we was right near the headquarters tent, but he says nobody would hear on account of Custer was holding a officer’s conference there and was deaf to anything but his own voice.
Then Bottsy says he had to get back to his troop and take care of the men. I don’t want you to have the idea he was not a good sergeant.
“Them recruits,” he says, “is already dragging their tails from these long marches and some ain’t fired a carbine more’n once or twice, nor seen a red excepting the coffee-coolers around the fort. If fired too fast, them Springfields heat up and the ejector sticks. I reckon the agents have fitted out the hostiles with repeaters, which can panic a man unless he realizes our pieces got twice the range of the Winchesters and Henrys.”
Them recruits made up about a third of our force. Some was Irish, and some was Germans who come over here to dodge the draft in the Old Country, couldn’t find no jobs, joined the U.S. Army, and was killed by savage Indians before they learned English: real peculiar experience.
As me and Bottsy was parting, we heard the officers in the tent sing some sad old songs: “Annie Laurie,” and the like, and then “Praise God from whom all blessings flow,” which took me back to my days at the Reverend Pendrake’s church. As singing, it wasn’t too good, I expect, but sounded very nice there in the wilderness and some of the enlisted men gathered around to listen.
Then, maybe to cheer people up after the plaintive and melancholic selections, they ended up with “He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”
Bottsy says: “If they mean Hard Ass, then it’s sarcastic.”
So the column got into motion again and marched all night, going up a little creek off the Rosebud that led west towards the Wolf Mountains. It was right dark, without a moon, so them behind had to follow the leaders by the smell of dust and the sound of swinging equipment; whole troops kept getting lost, and there was shouts and curses and the banging of tin cups to locate them again, so when first light come about half-past two, we had done only some six miles and had not had no sleep since the night before.
However, we had reached the Wolf range by now, which really ain’t mountains but rather just bad country, steep hills and ravines and such between the Little Bighorn and Rosebud valleys, and went into camp in a coulee big enough to hide the whole regiment, where the idea was we could stay until the following morning, then cross the divide and at dawn strike the hostile camp which was expected to lie on the other side.
Now I had flopped upon the hard ground and tried to take a snooze, but never had no more success at it than most of the troopers. I wager to say that once again nobody slept during that halt: we was all too tired. The water thereby was so alkali the horses would not touch it; coffee made with such will take the skin off your tongue—which some of them recruits discovered there for the first time.
I don’t think Custer sat down, except upon his horse, at any time during that morning, nor took a bite of food. He wore buckskin pants with a long fringe down the leg, blue-gray shirt, gray hat, and boots that come to just below the knee. Around his waist was a canvas Army belt holding two holstered English Bulldog double-action pistols and a hunting knife in a beaded scabbard. The stubble on his cheeks was substantial now, for he had not shaved in ever so long; and being fair, it looked white. I mean because his face otherwise seemed so aged, them hitherto clear blue eyes being bloodshot from loss of sleep, with pouches beneath.
But he wasn’t slowing down none, and when word come in from the scouts that from a high point ahead they had spotted the Indian village fifteen mile upriver, he was washing the trail dust off his face from a bowl placed on a tripod. Quick he folded his collar back and leaped onto the bare back of Vic without even drying himself, for the air would do that as he rode: already in early morning you could feel it developing into a real scorcher. Off he went to alert the troop commanders, and within the hour we was on the trail again towards the pass across the divide.
The Crow and other scouts had stayed upon the butte from which they had made their observations, and when the column reached its vicinity, Lieutenant Varnum, the scout commander, come down and says: “General, our presence is known to the hostiles.”
“No,” says Custer. “No, it is not.” He spurs Vic into a trot up the slope.
Varnum goes after him, shouting: “Sir, we encountered six Sioux and gave chase, but they got away, riding towards the village.”
Soon the ground got so steep and rough we had to dismount and walk the rest of the way to the top of the butte, and Custer still outdistanced everybody else. Varnum looked utterly perplexed.
“He won’t believe there is a village,” he says.
On the summit was the Crow and Ree, Mitch Bouyer, most of the white scouts, and Lavender. The view to the northwest, down the Little Bighorn valley, must have been good were the air clear, but at this hour it was obscured by the midmorning summer haze you get in that country.
Nor had Custer brung his field glasses. The Crow, however, possessed an old battered brass telescope, and White Man Runs Him handed it to the General.
“Look for the smoke of their fires,” he says in Bouyer’s translation. “And the big horse herds on the benchland to the left of the river.”
Custer stares through the instrument for a minute. “I cannot see a thing,” he says.
Goes Ahead says: “Look for little worms. That is how ponies look at this distance, like maggots upon a buffalo hide that has not been fleshed.”
Custer gives the telescope back to White Man Runs Him. “No,” he says, “there is no village.”
Bouyer now speaks for himself, with an unhappy expression on his swart face: “General, there is more Sioux in that river bottom than I ever seen in thirty years out here. I swear it.”
“No,” says Custer, and walks briskly to where the orderly is holding his horse.
Back we went towards the column, and when still a half mile away, out rode Tom Custer and says to the General: “Armstrong, they have seen us!” A box of hardtack had fell off a mule, and when a detail of men went back the trail to fetch it, they found it being opened by a Sioux with his hatchet, had fired on him, but he escaped.
I don’t know if Custer then changed his mind about the village, but so long as his kin had reported it, I guess he at least believed there was hostiles in the neighborhood, so had the trumpeters call in the officers and told them to prepare to attack immediately since surprise was so longer possible and the Indians would have time to scatter if there was further delay.
The weary troopers mounted their tired horses again, and the Ree called Stab spit on some magic clay he carried and anointed the chests of his fellow tribesmen as a charm against misfortune, and shortly we moved out and across the divide.
That was about noon on that fateful Sunday, June 25, 1876, in the hundredth year of this country’s freedom, and though it be ever so long ago I recall it like it was happening this instant. I can get to sweating when I think of the heat of that day and how my flannel shirt clung to my back and how the dust got into my nose and coated my tongue, and I guess owing to my changed point of view that country did not look so attractive as my Indian memory of it, being chopped up and washed out with ravines and now and again tufts of reddish-brown grass or shabby gray sage.
Having crossed the divide, we reached the headwaters of a small creek that in spring must have been a tributary of the Greasy Grass, but now its bed was bone-dry pebbles. Right here it was that Custer made the division of his forces that a lot of people have criticized him for, but if you understand the situation as he saw it, what he done wasn’t necessarily foolish.
He did not believe there was a village where the scouts said, though he did think it was likely the Indians was someplace along the river, between where we would reach it following the dry creek, and Terry and Gibbon’s column coming up from the mouth.
It was however possible that the Sioux might be going upstream towards the Bighorn Mountains and would get around our left flank. Therefore Custer sent Captain Benteen and three troops to diverge from the main column on a left oblique and scout across the bluffs in that direction until he could see whether the upper river valley was clear.
My friend Botts was with Benteen’s battalion, so off he went with the contingent. I never seen him again my life long, though I don’t believe he perished.
Of the remaining eight troops, Custer kept five and gave three to Major Reno, and the two columns rode side by side descending through the timbered creek bottom which widened as it neared the river. I reckon we had come ten mile and two hours from the divide when we sighted that single tepee. There it stood, on the south bank of the creek, with some Indians clustered about it, and as often happened, we almost charged before recognizing they was our own scouts.
It was a Sioux lodge, and all about it was signs of a recently vacated camp with warm fire-ashes, and Lieutenant Hare tells Custer that when he and the Crow approached, they run off fifty-sixty hostiles.
Fred Girard rode up on a knoll from which he could look into the Little Bighorn valley, and he now waves his hat and shouts: “There go your Indians, running like devils.”
“Bouyer,” Custer orders, “tell your Crows to pursue them.”
So Bouyer passes that on to Half Yellow Face and the rest, and they chatter among themselves for a time, and Custer gets furious at the delay and when Bouyer says the scouts refused, I thought from the General’s expression he would have pistol-whipped them had there been time.
“They are afraid,” says Bouyer. “There are more Sioux along the Greasy Grass than there are bullets in the belts of your soldiers.”
“You are women!” shouted Custer, and them scouts knowed enough English for that and winced like they had been struck, yet still they sat upon their ponies while that blue dust cloud raised by the fleeing hostiles plumed above the valley.
I dismounted and went into the tepee. Inside was a body of a Sioux brave, dressed in fine clothing and resting upon a low scaffold, not dead long enough to smell, and there was Lavender, a-standing alongside.
I says: “Know him?”
He says he never, and turns away and ejects the shell from his Sharps, inspects and reinserts it, does the same for his revolver, and cleans his knife upon his shirt though it looked clean enough. Then some of the Ree set afire to the tepee, so we left it and mounted and Lavender bends over his saddle to give me his hand. His face was all powdered from the dust. He never said a word, nor did I, for there ain’t no rules on going into a fight about how to leave your friends. Me and Lavender was just matter-of-fact, I expect, having gone over everything long since.
So he tied the feathered hat tight beneath his chin and trotted his bay pony after Reno’s column, which had started to move briskly towards the river.
“Where they going?” I asked Custer’s orderly for the day, a trumpeter named John Martin who was an Italian just come over from Italy, his real name being Giovanni Martini, and he didn’t know English very good.
“At what?” I asks.
It seemed that Lieutenant Varnum had gone ahead to a ridge and seen a village several mile downstream, so Custer at last believed there was such, when a white man told him, and we was going to attack it.
When Reno’s rear troops had gone by, Custer’s command fell in behind and followed till we neared the river. In later arguments about the battle, some said Reno expected, on fording the river and advancing up the bottom, that the General would come behind in support. I don’t know about that; I never heard what orders Custer had give on that occasion, being inside the tepee with Lavender.
What I do think, though, is that he had an idea to use again the tactic with which he had had success at the Washita, where he also divided his force and struck the village from several points simultaneous, for we was still some distance from the ford which Reno was crossing when Custer turned right and led us off on a course roughly parallel to the river but behind some bluffs which cut off a view of it. It seemed to me that the plan was for us to get downstream a mile or two and ford over at that point and strike the lower end of the camp while Reno was attacking the upper.
I remember thinking then of how in a similar maneuver at the Washita, Major Elliot’s command had got cut off, and right while Custer was elsewhere winning, the Cheyenne slaughtered Elliot. That incident was supposed to have touched off Benteen’s hatred for Custer, and now Reno might be in similar jeopardy. Or maybe Benteen himself, for with only three troops he was away off to the left, and nobody really knowed how many hostiles there was nor exactly where they was situated.
For example, Custer didn’t seem to be in no hurry. He had slowed his pace after that turn to the right—which was O.K. by me on that pony of mine, but looked odd when you consider Reno’s fight was about to begin at any minute. Also I was uneasy at the sight of the terrain ahead. I did not claim any good memory of this stretch of the Little Bighorn from years ago, but what I did recall was that them northern rivers sometimes are bordered by real high bluffs that go on for miles without a break that will let you down to the water, and even when you arrive there you cannot rely on finding a ford.
Yet Custer was dawdling, and even stopped to water the horses at a little creek we come to. That was the place where I went up to him, and Tom was also there, and his brother-in-law Calhoun, and I thought again how he had sent off Benteen and Reno but was careful to keep his own family about him.
He looked quite drawn, I thought, and had his hat off to fan himself in the heat, and damn if I didn’t wish at that moment that he never had cut his hair.
But soon as he looked at me, he started to smile. “Yes, teamster,” he says, “do you wish to submit your plan of attack?”
“No sir,” says I, “I don’t mean to jest now. I know something of this country and it don’t look to me like we are going to find a ford for several mile.”
Tom pulls his blond mustache in annoyance and says: “Armstrong, why do you tolerate this idiot?”
“He amuses me,” the General says. “Don’t you, teamster? He is a frontier eccentric,” he goes on as if I wasn’t there. “You know I am partial to the type.”
Then I noticed that newspaper correspondent Mark Kellogg, dismounted and holding his bridle over an arm while scribbling in a notebook. Now he says: “Would you repeat that last phrase, General?” “Partial to the type,” Custer says very distinct and slow enough for it to be copied. I seen then that he was holding an interview right there.
“Thank you, General,” Kellogg says. “Now would you care to characterize your mode of operation as we pause on the brink of battle?”
Custer brushed some trail dust off his shirt. “Very well,” he says. “I have been called impetuous. I resent that. Everything that I have ever done has been the result of the study that I have made of imaginary military situations that might arise. When I become engaged in a campaign and a great emergency arises, everything that I have ever heard or studied focuses in my mind as if the situation were under a magnifying glass. My mind works instantaneously but always as the result of everything I have ever studied being brought to bear on the situation.”
He was going to say more, I think, but at that moment his adjutant, Lieutenant Cooke, who had rode down to the river with Reno and stayed awhile on the near shore as observer, come dashing back, his whiskers flying like birds at his cheeks.
He reined in and shouted from his foaming mount: “Girard reports the Indians are coming out to meet Reno, and in force.”
As if to exemplify his self-estimate, Custer leaped into the saddle of his mare and asked: “Where are the hostiles?”
“About three miles downstream when I received word,” Cooke says. “By now Reno must have engaged them.” And indeed a few seconds after that we commenced to hear the snapping gunfire.
“How big is the village?” Custer asked, but Cooke didn’t know on account of the river bent like a corkscrew downstream and there was cottonwood timber in every bend which cut off the view.
The trumpeters sounded the order to mount, and there was some confusion getting the horses away from the water, but Custer didn’t wait, he galloped furiously up the northward slope to a ridge beyond and everybody followed as best they could for two mile of rough travel which was brutal to the horses, and I believe several dropped from exhaustion and their riders stayed behind with them, thus being unwittingly saved from the slaughter soon to come.
Then we halted again, though the animals was so excited by now that a lot was out of control, especially in the hands of them recruits, and you had rearing, bucking, and a certain panic back along the column. But I must say for my own pony, who had looked to drop dead earlier at a smart walk, in an emergency he got himself together somehow and did right well: I guess his tough Indian breeding showed up, and then it was more his type of terrain than for them big cavalry beasts.
Now we had been traveling more or less parallel to the course of the Greasy Grass, but behind the bluffs, and Custer ordered the halt so he could go out to a high point and look down at the situation in the valley—his first such of the day, remember, excepting that morning long-range view from the Wolf Mountain Crow’s Nest, from which he could not make out a thing. And up to this moment, he had still not seen one live, hostile Indian with his own eyes. It was real strange, as if some sort of charm was at work.
If so, the spell commenced to break now, for as we rode out onto the bluff above the river and looked into the western bottom, we saw enough Indians to satisfy any appetite. I’d say five-six hundred was massing against Reno’s command, which had dismounted and gone into a skirmish line that appeared a thin blue necklace at our distance and elevation. He had only a few more than a hundred men. And we also seen where the enemy was coming from. There could be no further doubt as to the existence of a village: it started a mile or so downstream and God only knowed how far it went, for on account of them loops of the Greasy Grass, we saw only the lower end—though I still wasn’t sure that Custer understood that. But figuring on the warriors charging Reno, and the visible tepees, the redskin population could not be far below two thousand souls.
Once that was realized, however, the situation was still not desperate in any wise. All together the Seventh Cavalry numbered some six hundred men, trained to fight in an organized way: for example, the efficient manner in which Reno went into the skirmish line. A very small party of dismounted men, controlling their fire, could handle many times their number in unorganized savage riders.
If we could get down to the next ford, Custer could strike across into the village and thus relieve the pressure on Reno, and Benteen would no doubt be along in time to reinforce either command. Also, back the trail the pack train was coming on with reserve ammunition and its cavalry guard.
Well, it didn’t seem as bad to me as it might have been—though it wasn’t no picnic, either—but I looked at Custer and seen he was hit real hard. He stared angrily into the valley, jerking his head a little and squinting in the sunlight. I figured he was mad at Reno, who had been ordered to charge the hostiles, and even though that was now manifestly impractical, it would have been like Custer to hold it against him.
But then the General suddenly takes off his gray hat, waves it into the air, and cheers. Since we others there with him—brother Tom, Lieutenant Cooke, the orderly Martin, and myself—never joined in, it sounded right odd. With that raspy voice of his, it might have reached the troops in the valley had all been silent there. As it was, it never had a chance, amid the firing of white and Indian guns, savage war cries, and the rest. Not to mention that you don’t usually hooray at a defensive action.
Then he wheels Vic around and dashes back to the troops. Tom Custer’s orderly was there, and the General barked at him: “Go tell the pack train to come directly across country to join us.” In other words, not to follow the twisting trail we had made so far, nor to make no attempt to reach Reno, though he would soon need ammunition at the rate them carbines was firing.
Well, that was another man saved: I mean the orderly, Sergeant Kanipe. The rest of us started off again at a wild gallop across that upland country, following Custer’s breakneck lead upon his mare, his personal guidon whipping along just after, the red-and-blue swallow-tailed pennant showing crossed white sabers, as borne by a trooper on a fine big sorrel. We detoured around the worst draws and steeper cutbanks, leaped some and negotiated others, but it was a horse-killing ride and again some animals dropped in their tracks, saving a few more lives as their riders stayed behind, though I heard some of them never did reach the rear but was ambushed on the way. For unbeknownst to us the Indians had started already to cross the Little Bighorn to our side and infiltrate the coulees.
I reckon we went more than a mile in that fashion and come just below a ridge that was the highest point in the region, when Custer called still another halt. Again he rode out and up for observation, and the same little party accompanied him as before, me included, and his nephew Armstrong Reed, too, who had come on the campaign for a summer outing. It was reflected on the latter’s young face that, so to speak, I first seen the magnitude of that gigantic Indian camp which lay across the river.
I happened to glance at him as my pony reached the summit. Now Reed was a right handsome young fellow, like all the Custer clan, and his habitual expression was one which blended civilized breeding with eager interest. You saw that on a lot of Eastern lads who come West for adventure in them days, like the frontier was some type of exhibit put on for their education and entertainment, rather than the often mortal matter it was for us who lived there permanent.
Reed’s officer-uncles had fitted him out in a buckskin suit like their own and hung some weapons on him, and a comely sight he was, a-sitting his fine animal on that elevation. But something awesome was murking his clear eyes and setting his beardless chin to tremble, and if you think I shall deride him for it, you are wrong, for then I looked myself into the valley, across that ribbon of river and beyond the fringe of timber dark in the sun, and saw the biggest encampment of savages ever assembled upon this continent.
Almighty God, it stretched farther than the eye could limit, five mile anyway of clustered tepees and on the benchland to the west grazed their herd of twenty thousand ponies. I give that figure, allowing it might have been bigger, for I couldn’t see it all. But in my days along the Canadian River down south, I had observed them great masses of buffalo, and this was the closest thing to that vista.
How many Indians? I reckon the number was in the neighborhood of the pony population, for though certain braves might own several animals, there was always a multitude of women and children who walked. Say fifteen thousand individuals, four to five thousand of them warriors. And we was two hundred-odd with Custer, another hundred with Reno now fighting for their lives, about the same with Benteen, and another hundred or so back escorting the pack train.
But here’s the queer feature: other than a few distant figures moving among the pony herd, and given the assumption that a great dustcloud downstream was raised by human beings, we still did not see an Indian on our front. There was not a soul in that part of the camp in our view. Was they all up engaging Reno? That field was now out of sight owing to the bluffs and the twists of the river. Or that cloud of dust downstream: was they, despite that strength, running away?
I’ll tell you what Custer did. He waved his hat again, and damn if he didn’t cheer once more!
“We have caught them napping,” he says to nobody in particular, and it was appropriate that nobody seemed to hear him but all continued to stare down as if paralyzed, though Tom Custer was almost chewing off his mustache and Lieutenant Cooke jerked fitfully at his muttonchops.
Then for me the moment was broke when that Italian orderly Martin, or Martini, grins into my face and says: “They sleep, yayss? Is good.” He never knowed the English expression, see, and anything his General said was literal to him.
Well, I didn’t have no time to disabuse him, for as Custer descended to where the troops was waiting, I rode alongside. I had suddenly realized what the Indians was up to. They wasn’t running or else the women would have been striking the lodges, for which there was ample time with us up in the high ground across river and Reno as distant as he was.
Nor was the force advancing on the latter nearly large enough to comprise all the warriors of a camp this size. Somewhere was a good four thousand more, and I thought I knowed their general situation: they had crossed our bank at one of the lower fords and awaited us in the ravines ahead.
No, Custer did not laugh when I yelled this at him. I don’t think he heard me at all, just kept spurring that poor mare who had been hard-rode now for miles on a hot and dusty day and was lathered and just about blown, and when he reached the command, he cheers again and shouts: “Hurrah, boys, we’ve got them! We’ll finish them up and go home to our station.”
And them troops, who hadn’t no sleep to speak of in more than twenty-four hours, a quarter of them green men who never faced a warring Indian, mounted on exhausted or panicky animals, they give a cheer back at him, a rousing sound that echoed off the ridge, and once more we went into the gallop, larruping down a wide ravine for say three hundred yards, then another halt. Which I reckon piled up the column again, but I didn’t look back at them, it being no pleasure to study men who was about to be wiped out.
Oh, I knowed it for sure by then. That second cheer of his had done it for me: Custer had lost his mind.
Another type of person, seeing that huge village, might have admitted at least to himself that he made a mistake. Nothing shameful in it: in Indian-fighting a general seldom knowed the strength or disposition of the enemy. Some say Custer disobeyed his orders not to strike the hostiles until the time agreed on for his junction with Terry and Gibbon, the following day. But you can’t count on that sort of thing in the wilderness, and besides, he believed from the incident of the Sioux discovering the lost hardtack box back in the Wolf Mountains, that they’d know our presence and escape unless he attacked forthwith.
But having once seen the village and not backing off and pulling Reno out and getting the whole command assembled—Well, I expect Custer was crazy enough to believe he would win, being the type of man who carries the whole world within his own head and thus when his passion is aroused and floods his mind, reality is utterly drowned.
I was near him on that halt, and his hat was askew from being put on and off in premature victory celebrations, sweat streaked the dust on his stubbled cheeks, and his eyes was glazed, their usual bright blue gone milky.
He called the orderly, and Martin came up and saluted in his Italian way. Custer then spoke rapid as the firing of a Gatling.
“Tell-Benteen-it’s-a-big-village-and-I-want-him-to-be-quick-and-bring-the-packs.”
I doubt Martin got it, but he gives another florid salute and is ready to start off, only Cooke cries: “Wait, I’ll write it out,” and scribbles in his order book.
This was the last message anybody received from Custer and the five troops that followed him north from the Lone Tepee. You can read in the histories that Martin made it, riding back along the trail we had come. Foreign as he was, he did not understand the situation and the Indians tried to bushwhack him along the way but it didn’t bother him none even though his horse was hit. Shows what ignorance will do for you. Reaching Benteen, he told him we had the Sioux on the run, giving that officer another reason for not coming to our aid. I mean, besides his hatred of Custer.
From here on you have only my word for what happened to Custer and his five troops that Sunday afternoon, for I am the only man what survived out of them 200-odd who rode down Medicine Tail Coulee towards the ford of the Little Bighorn River.
If you don’t believe it, go find another: one of them cranks who wrote letters to poor Mrs. Custer in later years, some of them still children in 1876; or the Crow scout Curly, who used to be exhibited around as the sole survivor of the battle. Except that Curly was not upon the field, but only watched a portion of the fight from a distant ridge, and the white claimants was either nuts or just plain liars. It has been amusing to me to hear of men who sought recognition for what they never done, while I have been at pains until now to conceal my true experience.
It wasn’t long after Martin went that the ravine intersected with the big coulee called Medicine Tail, into which we turned left and descended a couple mile towards the river, with about one more remaining when it opened into a flat. We halted there briefly, for Mitch Bouyer and the Crow, on the high ground above, was waving their arms and Custer stopped to get their sign message. They could see the ford from that position and signaled that the enemy was crossing over.
Custer interrupted the report with impatient gestures, and with his hands said: “All right, you can go home now.”
The Crow had not been hired to fight—and you remember that they had refused to earlier—but to lead the column through this country which they knowed. So you could see Bouyer dismiss them, and they sat their horses up there for a while as we started to move again, looking down at us in that redskin way that is always called stolid, and so it is, though that don’t mean they haven’t no feelings, but rather that there isn’t much to be done about white men by even a friendly Indian. Them Crow always liked Custer, you see, and I heard that the whole tribe cried like babies when his death was known.
Bouyer could have left too, but being a breed his pride was involved, I guess, at the sight of men to whom he was connected by a portion of his blood, going to their death. He followed the others for a few yards, then with a sudden effort wheeled his horse and come down to join us, galloping to Custer.
Ahead the flat narrowed again to form a steep gorge the sides of which was almost perpendicular cutbanks, for this coulee drained the high ground in the spring thaws and rains. You couldn’t have found a less congenial place for cavalry, which ain’t worth a damn without room to maneuver.
Bouyer pointed at it, and says: “If we go in there, we will never come out.” He was wearing buckskin and a broad-brimmed hat, but his black hair was long and he wore some Crow gewgaws, a bear-claw necklace and a medicine charm tied at his left ear.
Custer gives him a curious look. “I said you could go home,” he says.
Bouyer lifts his glittering black eyes towards the sun, his face brown as a hide, and while he did not speak I reckon he was bidding goodbye to that great fire in the sky, Indian-fashion, though ready to die as a white.
We entered the gorge at a fast trot, the five troops in formation, column of fours, and along come brother Boston to join us; he had been in the rear with the pack train, where I suspect his kin had wanted him to stay for his health, but come action, no Custer could be denied it even by another of the same clan.
Within each company of the Seventh, the men rode matched mounts: Tom Custer’s C Troop on sorrels; Troop E, gray horses; and the other three commands on fine bay animals. The guidons was swallow-tailed American flags with concentric circles of gilt stars within the blue field. They fluttered throughout the column, amid the rising dust as we descended that dry coulee, hearing nought but our own hoof-thunder.
I looked over my shoulder from time to time, for in a fight I like to know who’s behind, and I can still see in memory that gray-horse troop, always easiest to distinguish, a-trotting in orderly fours. But Tom Custer’s sorrels, in the leading company, was right handsome too, and almost red in the brilliant light.
God, it was hot along there. We had left the wind up on the ridges, and I yearned to go into the gallop to get some breeze upon me. My hatband was sopping. I had the brim pulled down low to shade my nose, which was considerably burned from previous bright days. I had not shaved for a spell, and with dust and sweat intermingled, my sandpaper cheeks was right scratchy. I chewed a plug of tobacco to keep my throat wet, circulating the plug from side to side on my tongue, but suddenly it wasn’t juicy no more but raspy as a cactus burr, and I could hardly hold the carbine, the metal parts of which was searing hot from the sun. Salt sweat stung my eyes, and Cooke’s white horse ahead was too fiery-light to bear looking at.
We had reached some five hundred yards of the ford when we seen the first enemy on our front all day: several Sioux was riding in slow circles just this side of the river, either to tease us into chasing them or as a signal to others in hiding. The camp was now concealed owing to the stand of cottonwood along the far shore. Then the Sioux vanished, and from behind a little rise above the ford appeared four warriors. They brandished their weapons overhead and shouted at us: “Hey-hey-hey-hey-hey.”
At which Custer forthwith halted the column.
I knowed that sound too well: it was the Cheyenne war cry. Then I done a funny thing. From unstudied instinct, I throwed my carbine to the shoulder and pulled off a shot. Missed them, and Custer started shouting at me, his eyes blooded and his face blackening with rage.
“You swine,” he says, “who gave you that order to fire? I am in authority here. I’ll have you shot for this. I don’t care how highly placed your connections, you rotten spy, be they in the White House itself. This is what comes of your damned Indian policy, corrupt agents, venal politicians.”
I think in his warped mind he had come to identify me with President Grant. Now he drew his pistol and I guessed was going to shoot me down, but like a madman will, he suddenly changed his whole mode of thought, and spurring his mare, cried: “Forward, the gallant Seventh! CHA-A-A-A-A-RGE!”
Now the trumpeter, spooked by this performance, sounded the Dismount call upon his instrument, but even that was too thin to be heard beyond the leading troop, and I reckon them behind couldn’t see much for the dust, so what you had was Custer larruping down the coulee. then Cooke, Bouyer, and me strung out between, and then that first company climbing off their horses.
Meanwhile, down at the ford, five hundred more braves had swarmed across the Greasy Grass, and more was coming like bees out of a shaken hive.