Sitting Bull's War, page 25
Most warriors remembered their own advance on these soldiers. Flying Hawk, riding with Crazy Horse, recalled he and other mounted warriors turning from the fighting in the south to the extreme north end of the camp, crossing the river, and ascending a deep ravine that brought them “very close to the soldiers on their north side.” Flying Hawk could only be referring to Deep Ravine, the next bisecting draw north of Deep Coulee. Meanwhile other influential leaders, Two Moon, Crow King, Gall, and Rain in the Face among them, led followers up Deep Coulee and challenged the soldier’s left flank. One early chronicler aptly noted that Indians commanded virtually every little gully and ravine running from the sides of the ridge, and every little bunch of sage. He remembered a stinging, persistent harassment.48
Midway to the distant horizon the troops paused on a feature ever after remembered as Calhoun Hill. There a portion of the force dismounted and challenged warriors pressing their flanks and rear. The Oglala Red Hawk remembered how the soldiers fought bravely but their horses, whether held by every fourth man or individually, were unmanageable. Some got away. Others would rear up and fall backward. Protecting those animals was critical and when any were lost, dismounted troopers were doubly disadvantaged. Cast afoot in a dire fight, they had also lost the reserve ammunition carried in their saddlebags. In the moment, each side was still delivering a galling fire. The Oglala Red Feather recalled that if either side showed a head, an adversary would shoot at it. And still, Red Hawk declared, “the Indians kept coming.”49
Fallen soldiers and lost horses were simple gifts. Sioux and Cheyenne fighters at the Rosebud had captured a number of soldier carbines and revolvers, plus ammunition scrounged from saddlebags or loosely collected from the field later on, but now they were doing so on a much greater scale, and the consequences were immediately telling. White Bull remembered that “if it had not been for this they could not have killed them [all] so quickly.”50
But overcoming the soldier line did not come without cost. The soldier defense on Calhoun Hill was gallant. Indians remembered a difficult fight and that many of the Lakota and Cheyenne casualties in this segment of the battle occurred in the face of these skirmishers scattered along this ridge. Gall, standing on the site ten years later, offered details without hesitation, telling an interviewer that eleven warriors were killed here.51
Two Moon saw an opportunity to weaken the soldier flank and he challenged his warriors to follow him in a charge. When they were assembled he led them up the sloping ground and into withering enemy fire. The Cheyenne attack faltered and the warriors fell back, regrouped, and charged a second time. The result was the same. Yet a third charge was made, and this time the Cheyennes drove the soldiers back in panic. For Two Moon, after this, “the fight… was merely a slaughter.”52
The confusion the Cheyenne attack caused in the rear presented other opportunities. White Bull saw a man waver in his saddle, and he raced forward on his pony to count first coup. The dying man fell from his horse. White Bull jumped from his pony, struck the man with his quirt, and took his revolver and cartridge belt. Almost in the same moment he saw another soldier with yellow hair aim his carbine at him. “I dodged it,” he said, and grabbed and wrestled with the man. “The soldier was strong and brave,” White Bull admitted, but “I lashed him across the face with my quirt,” and struck him again. “He drew his pistol. I wrenched it out of his hand and struck him with it three or four times on the head, knocked him over, shot him in the head, and fired at his heart.” It was a hard fight, he allowed, “but it was a glorious battle. I enjoyed it. I was picking up head-feathers right and left that day.”53
The soldier line faltered. “The Indians were overwhelming,” remembered Red Hawk, watching as those men fell back steadily, though in an orderly fashion behind the forward mounted troops who were still inching northward toward the horizon. By this time, too, as he explained in a 1906 interview, “Indians were taking the guns and cartridges of the dead soldiers and putting them to use.” Gall also recalled this withdrawal, telling a Chicago newspaperman in 1886 that those soldiers afoot “never broke, but retired step by step.” Yellow Nose, a twenty-two-year-old Ute raised by Southern Cheyennes, sensed an enveloping despair in that withdrawal. He labeled it a retreat shrouded with a mantle of dread if not panic. In their first position, the soldiers knelt and took deliberate aim, he remembered, with every fourth man holding the horses. In subsequent movement, every soldier again took possession of his own horse. But the mounts had grown wild with fright, and their rearing and plunging made it impossible for the soldiers to shoot with steadiness and accuracy, and riderless horses were soon stampeding in every direction.54
The soldier movement in its entirety seemed to lack central control, and their disorder was proving increasingly fatal. Warriors infiltrated every crevice the landscape offered and seized every opportunity to pour on a withering fire. Another critical factor was that the soldiers were getting more distant from possible help. Instead of withdrawing to the south where other soldiers were still presumably maneuvering, these besieged blue coats continued their northward push, away from any possible relief, apparently aiming still for the highest point on their horizon. But they were no longer an organized force. Instead, they were a flailing, tactically impotent body of men, obviously led by the mounted soldiers ahead of them, but trailed by a dishevelment of mounted, dismounted, and wounded men, with the entire force painfully nipped at front to back by their enemy. The column, as one later scholar described it, had lost its tactical cohesion and was disintegrating. One senses that even the soldiers at this point realized that this battle was no longer being fought for victory, but for their own survival.55
The strung-out line presented repeated opportunities for open assaults and demonstrations of great courage. Lame White Man, the respected Southern Cheyenne leader whose small band of followers had lived among the Northerners for years, watched this scattered enemy line stagger northward and rallied those around him, crying out: “Young men, come now with me and show yourselves to be brave.” Indians leapt up, including some already prominent in this war—Comes in Sight of the Rosebud eight days earlier and Waterman, the determined Arapaho interloper—and rallied to the chief, who screamed again: “Come. We can kill all of them.” The rush was bold and deadly, as mounted Cheyennes and Sioux charged into horsed and unhorsed soldiers, driving away animals, clubbing panicked blue coats, counting coup even on living enemies. An observer watched some soldiers put pistols into their mouths and end their own lives. But the soldiers sustained a deadly return fire, one bullet striking Lame White Man in the breast and killing him instantly. White Bull watched this spectacle and was moved by the apparent recklessness of such an inspirational leader. He had never seen a man so willingly “throw his life away,” he said later.56
Perhaps inspired by Lame White Man’s challenge, Yellow Nose, another Southern Cheyenne, rode into the fray. Spotting a soldier carefully guarding a stars and bars flag—a company guidon—he shot the man, snatched the staff and its flag, and used it to count coup on the fallen trooper. As he held the flag high for others to see, soldiers rushed to the man’s aid and fired at the Cheyenne at close range. A bullet gashed Yellow Nose’s forehead, blinding him with his own blood and fatally wounding his pony. He was in a dire fix, but he escaped, cleansed the blood from his face, and within moments rejoined the fight. Yellow Nose’s flag episode was brazen. The Cheyennes forever remembered it, much as they did the girl saving her brother at the Rosebud.57
By now the trailing companies of the advance to the north, the segment held in the recesses of Medicine Tail Coulee when the attack began, faced annihilation. Their rearmost defense had collapsed, and warriors wreaked havoc on the thinning flanks, wounding and killing soldiers, scattering horses, and segmenting ever smaller groups of survivors who persistently rallied for one another until they too were overrun. Meanwhile, the leading segments of this frail line had passed that high point on the horizon that seemed to have beckoned them from the start and began following another ridgeline dipping to the northwest. But they had all but reached the limits of their advance and when looking back, they could plainly see that no effective force was following them.
Sioux and Cheyenne warriors ever after remembered personal episodes of bravado. Some were widely witnessed, and, often carefully documented, and they have become features of the general lore. Doubtless many more became personal family tales, reserved for retelling in lodges, cabins, and reservation homes, where, generations later, the heroics remain vibrant, even today. Perhaps the most consequential, an episode that was indeed widely witnessed and documented, focused on the charismatic warrior-chieftain Crazy Horse, who at the perfect moment made a charge that hastened the end for these despicable blue coats.
Crazy Horse arrived at the ridge fight by way of Deep Ravine, and in its head he and his followers had added their own fire to the soldier flank, loosing arrows and gunshots at any exposed wasicu. “He fired as fast as he could load his gun,” Flying Hawk recalled. Clouds of smoke and dust billowed across the scene and yet through those obscuring shrouds opportunities for heroics presented themselves. Warriors to the left had stalled the advance of the soldier line as it ambled the broad shoulder of a nameless ridge leading to the river. Warriors eastward of them on the opposite side of the crest had run off horses being held in a dimple of that crown. The soldier line farther to the right was thinning to near total annihilation. Those men had been engaged in the ridgetop clash the longest, with most of their horses having been run off or released. They were strung-out survivors now being cut apart piecemeal as they feebly attempted to keep pace with the northward movement of the surviving effective force. In that sector Flying Hawk remembered “there was only a few of them left.”58
White Bull, who had engaged bravely in the fighting near Calhoun Hill, had worked his way farther north and joined the party of warriors assembled with Crazy Horse. Here their competitive nature again served them well, and much as they did in the fight with railroad surveyors on Arrow Creek in 1872, they goaded each other into striking the soldiers before them. As at Arrow Creek, Crazy Horse saw the perfect moment and struck first. Mounting his pony, with the scree of his eagle bone whistle rising above the din, he charged straight into the soldier line. “The soldiers all fired at once,” Red Feather remembered, “but didn’t hit him.” And the soldiers panicked and scampered right and left, splitting, as He Dog said, into two bunches and leaving each alone to face oncoming warriors. Crazy Horse rode straight through. His charge had divided the soldier line.59
Waterman, the Arapaho, watching the episode from afar, remembered Crazy Horse as “the bravest man I ever saw.” White Bull, He Dog, Red Feather, and others followed and peeled right and left into the enemy, clubbing and stabbing soldiers to death. “This charge seemed to break the morale of the survivors,” White Bull believed. “They all ran, every man for himself, afoot and on horseback.” One small concentration formed on Calhoun Hill on the right, another group clustered in the center, and still another gathered on the high ground on the left, a landmark ever after legendarily remembered as Last Stand Hill. As one chronicler aptly put it, the killing now was quick and one-sided.60
* * *
Great charges by Crazy Horse and others that afternoon electrified those around them, but already across this battle ridge from south to north a determination and certainty were playing out. This fight had but one inevitable outcome, the complete destruction of this soldier command. Gall, the broad-shouldered Hunkpapa, was interviewed carefully on the field in 1886 at a tenth anniversary gathering of battle survivors. He gave voice to the hard fighting on another sector of this ridge, around Calhoun Hill, where he figured prominently. Those soldiers “never broke,” he told transfixed newspapermen and officers, but, leading a sizeable band of Hunkpapas, Miniconjous, and Sans Arcs, “we charged through them.” And we brought “special fire against the troopers who held the horses while the others fought. As soon as a holder was killed, by waving blankets and great shouting the horses were stampeded. The soldiers fought desperately and hard and never surrendered.” Some warrior chieftains achieved ends with bold, dazzling charisma. Measured against the likes of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and White Bull, Gall seems to have achieved his desired ends by exercising simple if repetitive quiet resolve.61
Red Hawk, an Oglala active throughout the fighting around Calhoun Hill, also recalled the soldier gallantry exhibited there, costly though it was to warriors around him. Already Lame White Man was killed leading fearless charges on that front. Eagle Elk remembered another warrior, an Oglala Sioux named Red Horn Bull, shot through the jaw and horribly bloodied. Wooden Leg saw the same individual. “He wobbled dizzily as he moved along. He fell down, got up, fell down again, got up again. As he passed near to where I was I saw that his whole lower jaw was shot away. The sight of him made me sick. I had to vomit.” Others saw him, too, remembering how his jaw was hanging on his breast, his teeth showing like a necklace. Friends tore up a cloth and tied his jaw back onto his head. Somehow, the horribly maimed Red Horn Bull survived the battle and died on the Pine Ridge Reservation years later.62
The fall of Calhoun Hill and the entire ridgeline under such pressure was all but inevitable. Scattered survivors attempted to make their way northward, but few succeeded. The movement was frantic. The ingenious phrase “buffalo chase” appears often in many warrior accounts and aptly reflects those final anxious movements. And as the Calhoun sector and ridge quieted, warriors themselves surged northward to the battle’s last scenes.
* * *
The soldiers at the head of this northernmost column, strung-out, vulnerable, and continually diminishing now, were confronting their own difficulties. Mostly the mounted remnants of the smaller force that originally advanced down Medicine Tail Coulee, these blue coats were the least diminished of the troops advancing along the extended ridge leading to an ever-beckoning high point on the horizon. But upon reaching that high point the column’s direction changed in a pronounced way as they descended on a northwesterly course along a broad grassy shoulder that at its farthest western extent dropped to the river. Ahead presumably were several crossings, not yet actually seen. Advancing perhaps a quarter of a mile along the slope, the column inexplicably halted, as though pondering a course ahead or perhaps waiting for those behind to close-up.63
But the pause proved catastrophic. It allowed warriors to strike with fury and they did. Wolf Tooth, the adventuresome Cheyenne who snuck out of camp early that morning, was among friends, Cheyennes mostly, attacking on the column’s right. Those warriors had shadowed these soldiers for miles. Other attackers funneled to the front of the soldier column from the crossings straight ahead, while more, Two Moon and White Bull among them, struck at the column’s left. The near encirclement was complete and reckoning. “This made the soldiers turn,” Wolf Tooth recalled, and they “went back in the direction they had come.” The soldiers’ mystifying pause proved providential for the Indians, and fatal for the blue coats. As Shot in the Eye, an Oglala arriving on the field by way of one of those crossings ahead, put it, “this gave the Indians plenty of time for their warriors to scatter and secure the best positions around [this] little command.” The soldiers advanced no farther, and having turned and stopped, they surrendered the offensive, however feeble their offensive momentum was at that point.64
The Indian onslaught was furious. White Bull and others watched some of the soldiers dismount and return a steady defensive fire, momentarily stalemating an assault. Nonetheless, as warriors watched in amazement, a daring Cheyenne, wearing a feather bonnet and an animal skin, made several mounted passes in front of the soldiers—an honor-earning bravery run—drawing fire but escaping harm each time. Iron Hawk heard a Cheyenne say the bold warrior was “bulletproof.” All along, more warriors kept streaming to the scene, and the clouds of smoke and dust grew darker. Iron Hawk heard another voice blurt out: “Now they are going, they are going.” The gray horses held by the dismounted soldiers were bolting and stampeding toward the draw to the south, Deep Ravine. For some warriors, chasing loose horses became an irrepressible lure. For the soldiers, the loss was disastrous.65
Into this chaos rode an unexpected lot of warriors, a mix of nearly twenty young Cheyenne and Sioux men, the Suicide Boys. These were individuals who had lost a relative in the Rosebud fight and the night before had pledged to throw away their own lives in the next battle. They charged as a group, some helping to scatter the gray horses and others jumping from their ponies and engaging soldiers in hand-to-hand fighting. They paid a heavy toll, and most were maimed or killed, but so were soldiers. Others joined the surge. Wolf Tooth, a primary informant, saw panic everywhere. “There was no time for the soldiers to take aim or anything,” he recalled. Some started to run, but they were killed before they got far.66
Others joined the killing spree. The fearless young Cheyenne, Buffalo Calf Trail Woman, riding alongside her husband, Black Coyote, was one of few women to ride into the fray. Armed with a six-shooter pistol, she fired many shots into the soldiers. Late in the fight she saw a young Cheyenne who had lost his pony, and took him up on her own and rode toward the river where the freed soldier horses were gathering. Fearlessness and warrior-like gallantry had marked her at Rosebud, too, where she was remembered as the Girl Who Saved Her Brother. Here she was known among the Cheyennes as Brave Woman.67
By now the soldiers had nowhere to go but to the hill behind them, a refuge already drawing frantic survivors from the ridgeline fighting south of there. “Last Stand Hill,” so warmly revered in the present day, is not the same prominence it was on June 25, 1876. Its original small, pronounced crown has been shaved-off repeatedly over the years to accommodate the trappings of a popular national park. But the destination was not its top anyway. Physical geographers refer to such rises and knolls as hogbacks, landforms having gentle faces with sharply dropping backslopes. This prominence on the Little Big Horn hillside was easily accessible from its west and south, but not so its north or east. And it was manifestly exposed. It was a poor position to stage a defense, although it was the best within reach.
