Sitting Bull's War, page 24
The soldier position in the timber proved untenable almost immediately as the 130 men in the attacking force—the surviving skirmishers having rejoined the horse-holders—contended with jittery animals and increasing numbers of warriors pressing from all sides. Adding to the chaos, the Indians set fire to the tall, dry grass running throughout the entire cottonwood grove. Acrid smoke now merged with obscuring clouds of dust and gun smoke. Some warriors later thought the soldier position a good one. With water and trees for protection, the blue coats might not have been driven out. But the pressure intensified. Iron Hawk, a Hunkpapa, recollected that the Indians by now “were so thick that [the wasicus] would have been run over and could not have lasted but a short time if they had stood their ground in the woods.” And so, indeed, the soldiers ran.27
The soldiers’ retreat from the riverside timber southward proved a sheer hell. As the blue coats raced their horses into open ground, warriors at first cleared the way, fearing that they were being charged. But when they realized that the soldier were not attacking but instead attempting a frantic escape, they wheeled their ponies and closed on them right and left, swarming “like a cloud of mosquitos.” Crazy Horse was on the scene by now, animating all, and leading his own followers directly into the soldiers’ flight, with warriors striking with war clubs and knocking troopers from their horses, others using bows and arrows, some firing revolvers and Winchesters virtually point-blank. The consequences were devastating. One Bull killed two soldiers with his tomahawk. Charging Bear, an Oglala riding with Crazy Horse, remembered maneuvering his pony aside “a big soldier with red hair” and shooting him in the throat with an arrow, and when he fell he “took the big soldier’s gun and ammunition belt and rode after [his] chief into the smoke and roar of the battle.” Wooden Leg watched soldiers fall, and horses limp and stagger, with sounds of Indian tremolos and eagle bone whistles shrilling the air, amidst “yells of the kindred and the shouts of the Whites.” One also heard, Wooden Leg remembered, contemptuous jeering, with someone blurting: “You are only boys. You ought not to be fighting. We whipped you on the Rosebud. You should have brought more Crows and Shoshones with you to do your fighting.”28
The soldier retreat hugged the west bank of the river. The Ash Creek confluence used on their approach was on a different bearing and would have obliged a longer ride across ground even more exposed than this. The soldier destination was not apparent at first, but many warriors remembered the flight. White Bull recalled that from the moment the soldiers turned tail, swarming Sioux were on their heels, riding them down. “It was like a buffalo hunt,” he said. These expressions, running buffalo… a buffalo drive… a grand chase, would be common descriptors this day. Among Lakotas and Cheyennes, and by whatever metaphor, it was apt. It translated into pure mayhem and death.29
After nearly a mile, those soldiers in the lead reached a point where the eastern bluffs aligned with the river. They turned toward the water and commenced crossing, plainly angling for the high ground on the opposite side. But even that effort, like nearly everything else for the blue coats, was nightmarish. This was no natural river crossing, and riders and horses slipped, slid, and plunged over steep cutbanks into a river still surging in its June rise. As the soldiers slowed and bunched, Flying Hawk, an Oglala, remembered that “we got right among [them] and killed a lot with our bows and arrows and tomahawks.” Wooden Leg, likewise, was directly among them. With a carbine just taken from a fallen soldier, “I knocked two of them from their horses into the flood waters.” Red Feather, an Oglala, saw a soldier fall from his horse, his foot caught in his stirrup, and get dragged through the water. From the other bank, warriors shot soldiers as they floundered. “I could see lots of blood in the water,” recalled the young Cheyenne Brave Bear.30
And still the soldier anguish continued. The east bank of the Little Big Horn was as steep and treacherous as its west side and horses slipped and slid in ground wetted by the first to cross. Some tumbled backward. Those who reached the eastern bank faced other warriors who had crossed below and scattered death anew here and in the long steep draws that led survivors to the bluff top. Only on the top could adrenaline-pulsing soldiers savor their first small respite since the fight began. Behind them, warriors lurked in the carnage, killing wounded blue coats, stripping the dead, gathering weapons and cartridges, and catching runaway horses. Upward of thirty-one soldiers and allied scouts were killed in what came to be remembered as the Little Big Horn Valley Fight, this against Indian casualties numbering perhaps eight warriors killed in the buffalo chase alone, atop another twenty defenders and noncombatants killed elsewhere. But while this contingent of soldiers was repulsed, they were not the only ones on the field in this early phase of the great Battle of the Little Big Horn, and attention was quickly drawn elsewhere.31
* * *
As the fight opened at the south end of the village, a second column of cavalry, larger than the first, had followed the same course down Ash Creek that the attacking force had, but turned short of the creek’s confluence and was making its way northward, threading draws and ridges east of the Little Big Horn River and roughly parallel to it. This second column was mostly unnoticed by a camp already in the turmoil of a surprise attack. Most noncombatants fled north and west to the high bench beyond the village, a position affording a broad look at everything occurring in the camp below, plus logical routes of escape behind them if they too were threatened. But some noncombatants fled eastward, crossing the river at the Medicine Tail Coulee ford, and making their way into that dissected dry watercourse. Some took higher ground to the south, intent on watching the fighting in the valley. It was those villagers, women mostly, who first spotted this second column of soldiers. Some momentarily watched as those blue coats maneuvered high in the Medicine Tail drainage, while others scattered through the camp with warnings that another column of soldiers threatened.32
Tall Bull had returned to the Cheyenne circle when the soldiers in the south began their retreat, partly to offer assurances to the vulnerable ones that the blue coats were running away and partly to encourage the women to secure their lodges and meats, when he heard the cries that more soldiers were coming their way. He had a pair of field glasses and scanned eastward and watched those ve'ho'es moving along the high ridges east of the river. White Shield, who earlier had been fishing with his nephew, remembered looking into the distance and seeing soldiers on white horses. They “could be seen a long way off,” he recalled. Those soldiers were advancing now toward the river. Some Cheyennes rushed to the river’s edge and from scattered brush and tree cover fired across the stream and into the leading soldiers. White Shield and others, meanwhile, crossed the stream south of the coulee and also immediately closed on the enemy, which, under fire, had drawn up and dismounted on the bench above the coulee’s mouth. Among the warriors gathered at the river was one named Mad Wolf, who counseled: “No one should charge yet—the soldiers are too many. Just keep shooting at them.” 33
At the crossing in the south, bloody now with soldier and Indian casualties, White Bull remembered the moment when he heard the alarming news. He was fighting those retreating soldiers when someone from behind started yelling that troops were coming from the east toward the north end of the camp, three miles downriver. He and most of those around him spun their horses and galloped northward. Some riders returned by way of the village, usually assisting the return of a wounded friend or to change horses. White Bull and others crossed the river almost at once and rode the narrow toe-line at water’s edge until it opened into Medicine Tail Coulee.34
Charging Bear, fighting alongside Crazy Horse, was sure that they would have killed all those soldiers at the riverside if not interrupted by a messenger. Racing a lathered horse, the man cried out: “Brothers! Come quickly! More soldiers are attacking the camps!” Knowing that meant an attack on women and children, Crazy Horse’s bone whistle shrilled out, calling warriors back. He pointed with his rifle to the other side of the river, opposite the lower camps, and screamed: “They are near the helpless ones! Let’s go!” Eagle Elk, an Oglala caught in the mix, remembered being in “a river of warriors” streaming northward. As he passed the smoky copse where the first soldiers had fought in the timber, he saw an unhorsed one who had lost his gun and was being chased by Lakota boys who were shooting at him with bows and arrows. The soldier did not escape.35
Eagle Elk’s “river of warriors” streaming northward to the new threat were astounded by what they soon encountered. Whether riding through the camp, funneling through the brush and timber at riverside, or crossing the river and variously riding low ground northward to the mouth of Medicine Tail Coulee or climbing to the heights of the adjacent fronting ridge, warriors saw before them a mass of soldiers, some threading down the coulee and others maneuvering in the higher ground behind them. “They seemed to fill the whole hill,” remembered Runs the Enemy, the Two Kettles chief. “It looked as if there were thousands of them, and I thought we would surely be beaten.”36
Gall, seething over the loss of his wives and children, watched as Lakota warriors raced northward when one of his own followers, Iron Cedar, caught his eye, hailing him from high ground across the river. Gall rallied those immediately around him and bounded toward Iron Cedar. When they reached that higher ground, they too saw the soldiers maneuvering near the mouth of the coulee. Most of them were dismounted now, with horses having been withdrawn behind them by horse-holders. Those cavalry mounts particularly drew Gall’s attention. Sensing their vulnerability, he and his followers began firing into the soldier flank, keying on the horse-holders, and yelling, waving blankets, and scattering many of the mounts into the hands of watchful women.37
The response to this second attack on the great village was almost instantaneous and furious, as enraged Cheyennes, by simple proximity to their own circle, confronted the approaching enemy first and stalled their attack near Medicine Tail Coulee’s mouth. As they did, other warriors, Lakotas mostly, arrived from the south and simultaneously besieged the southern flank and rear of those advancing blue coats. The Indians’ combined frontal and flanking fire was devastating. A Cheyenne, Soldier Wolf, remembered, that they fought in the bottom for “quite a time,” and that two soldiers were killed and left there. “But soon,” he said, “the Indians overpowered the soldiers and they began to give way, retreating slowly, facing the front.” Horned Horse, an Oglala, also remembered the soldiers wavering and then how the “command reeled back toward the bluffs.”38
* * *
For his part, Sitting Bull had ranged widely. In this opening hour of what many came to know as the Battle of the Little Big Horn, he was never caught in the midst of the most dangerous fighting but yet always seemed close enough to observe and assess virtually everything occurring in both brutal attacks. Riding the black pony brought in by One Bull, he, like so many others, first tended to the safety of his family, ensuring their flight to the bench north and west of the camp to join many other noncombatants. When returning to the Hunkpapa circle, he continually encouraged the warriors as they rallied to deflect the initial assault. At a distance, he trailed the action as it flowed from the first line of fighting to the timber at riverside and on to the bloody river crossing. Some women and young boys who had not fled milled through the battle scene, killing wounded soldiers and poking and stripping the dead, despite Sitting Bull’s admonishments against doing so. Several accounts tell of Sitting Bull’s presence for one such fatal moment—the death of a Black man named Isaiah Dorman, a civilian interpreter for the army on this campaign.39
* * *
Dorman, a freeborn forty-four-year-old Pennsylvanian, had a long history on the Minnesota and Dakota frontier. He had arrived there in 1853 and secured employment as an officer’s striker, including with young Alfred Sully, at Fort Ridgely on the Minnesota River. His employment with Sully continued into the Civil War and brought him to Dakota in 1863, where he remained variously engaged as a mail carrier, wood hawk, and interpreter in and around Fort Rice. He had also accompanied the Dakota segment of the 1871 Northern Pacific Railroad Survey. Dorman married a Lower Yanktonai woman and was fluent in the Lakota language.40
Early in the flight from the timber, Dorman’s horse was killed and tumbled atop him, pinning him beneath it. Other soldiers rode by and acknowledged him, but inexplicably ignored him, perhaps simply because he appeared hopelessly wounded. Runs the Enemy remembered seeing the Black man in this fix but also merely rode on. The Hunkpapa Bear’s Ghost remembered seeing Dorman and that he was wounded in the breast but still able to talk. When Hunkpapa women scoured the field a while later several recognized the interpreter, who remained alive and stranded. They knew him as Black Hawk or, jocularly, Teat, and berated him for siding with the Whites in this war.41
As one woman raised a gun and prepared to shoot Dorman, Sitting Bull, watching nearby, blurted out: “Don’t kill that man, he is a friend of mine.” Sitting Bull then stopped and provided Dorman with water. The reaction may seem odd, but it is in keeping with the chief’s befriending such middlemen, and likely remembering meeting Dorman and sharing food and tobacco some years before, as he had more recently with Frank Grouard. But the women paid Sitting Bull no heed, and when he mounted and continued to the north, Moving Robe Woman shot Dorman dead. She had learned earlier that her brother, Deeds, was killed on Ash Creek and in anger she and others slashed the Black man, mashed his body with stone mauls, and cut off his head. A soldier who viewed the remains two days later said that Dorman’s body looked “as though it went through a hash machine.”42
* * *
For a moment, the soldier force operating in the Medicine Tail Coulee had divided itself. One component was operating near the mouth, seemingly originally intent on striking the camp at its midsection. The other, larger than the first, was making its way northward out of the drainage, ascending the long ridge in front of it, and heading, some thought, for the village’s lower end. But increasing numbers of warriors were engaging those troops too, at first warriors from the east, including some who had been hunting that morning, and others, like the Cheyenne friends Wolf Tooth and Big Foot, still opportunistically seeking glory. The very movement of these soldiers from Ash Creek northward had blocked any simple return to the camp, but all were perfectly positioned now to harass these blue coats. They seized the moment, dismounting, creeping close, and loosing arrows and gunfire from the many gullies bisecting the upper drainage. Those warriors from the east were soon joined by a mix of other oncoming fighters. “Although it was natural that tribal members should keep together,” Wooden Leg later recalled, “there was everywhere a mingling of fighters from all of the tribes.” Gall likewise remembered that “all the Indians were mixed up then,” and so it remained for the remainder of the day.43
The cresting of that long ridgetop posed an immediate dilemma for this lot of blue coats. When surmounting the ridge they lost any manner of cover, and once exposed they and their horses began taking devastating Indian fire. As they pressed northward onto a prominence known later as Battle Ridge, the soldiers in the rear dismounted and attempted to provide covering fire. Low Dog remembered how the soldier shooting was extremely inaccurate as they dually struggled to load and fire while still holding the reins of skittish horses. For the Rosebud veterans, the action playing out resembled the soldier retreat along the southern shoulder of Kollmar Creek, although here the fighting was all the more intimate and intense. Determined warriors inflicted casualties and increasingly spooked army horses that reared and escaped their holders, further exacerbating the plight of those men.44
At the same time, the soldiers that had advanced down Medicine Tail Coulee nearly to the river’s edge were slowly withdrawing northeastward following the shoulder of an angular draw subsequently known as Deep Coulee. They plainly hoped to rejoin the blue coats on the higher ground, but they were hunted at every step. An unnamed Cheyenne visiting the ground a few years later told a soldier with him that it was like “herding” those soldiers up the hill. The blue coats fought well and successfully joined the others, but they had suffered scattered casualties along the way. Once joined again, the combined soldier force doggedly pursued its northward course, but they were stringing out noticeably and suffering harassment from ever increasing numbers of warriors filling the adjacent draws east and west. Rain in the Face reflected imaginatively on their predicament: “Those soldiers were followed by our warriors, like hundreds of blackbirds after a hawk.”45
The Oglala Shave Elk acknowledged the steadiness with which the soldiers pushed up the hill, and also how only then did the “battle begin in good earnest.”46
* * *
The focus of this great fight was narrowing to a sequence of straight-line ridges, draws, and hilltops north of Medicine Tail Coulee on an otherwise geographically opaque and nameless landscape. The reunited troops continued their advance northward but were precariously stretched-out. Some warriors thought they were pushing the Whites. More likely, the northward movement was a self-directed attempt to reach the high ground on the soldier’s horizon, a half mile distant, or to apparent open ground beyond, suggesting another drainage leading to a probable river crossing. Evidence of any greater intent—striking the north end of the village as some chroniclers have supposed—is thin, but three matters were clear: that the blue coat force was making a deliberate move north; that it was disjointed and exposed to an ever-surging body of incensed warriors; and that a catastrophic outcome was ever more probable, with the crucial tipping toward that end beginning simply enough in the column’s rear.47
