Sitting Bull's War, page 26
Thus the remnants of the battered column rallied on the west face of the hill. Two Moon thought they may have numbered perhaps 105 at this point, judging from the complement of 212 that had maneuvered at the start in Medicine Tail Coulee. Beleaguered they were now but that did not mean defenseless. Many warriors remembered the moment of a fierce, even deliberate concentrated volley of fire rising from the soldier cluster. Warriors scrambled for cover and then watched a group of soldiers run a short distance southwestward from the hill toward the head of Deep Ravine, an obvious point of steady Indian emergence. The soldiers “scattered some in going down,” Two Eagles recalled, but in those headlands they took cover in the sage and tall grasses and formed what many have assumed, then and now, was a defensive position—a skirmish line. If relief for this command was somehow en route it would only come from the south. Instead, those soldiers met not assistance but the same biting resistance that by now was being meted out across every inch of this field. Iron Hawk remembered watching those soldiers run downhill, but he also saw Hunkpapas that “ran right up… and encircled them from all sides.”68
Almost simultaneously, a rider on a sorrel horse emerged from the knot of soldiers, the concentrated gunfire perhaps intended as his shield. Stunned warriors were surprised as the soldier galloped past. Many fired in vain and others quickly commenced a chase, including for a while Crazy Horse, but this soldier’s horse was fast and long-winded. Turtle Rib, a Miniconjou among the pursuers, thought “the soldier rode like the wind.” It appeared that the trooper might outpace his trailers as he bypassed Calhoun Hill and disappeared into Deep Coulee. As he gained that ravine’s southern shoulder and descended into Medicine Tail Coulee the rider may even have seen soldiers in the south, barely a mile away. They told later of seeing him. But just then an Indian bullet struck him in the back and killed him. Cheyennes believed that it was fired by one of their own, Old Bear, a young warrior by that name and not the famous Old Man Chief and prophet.69
Behind the valiant rider, in the circle on Last Stand Hill, what few horses remained were either killed outright to become breastworks or were released. The soldiers had nowhere to run and readied for a final desperate fight. Yellow Nose, the young Southern Cheyenne who earlier had captured the soldier flag, remembered the unique chaos of running horses that filled the air with blinding dust, atop clouds of smoke from constant gunfire, and mixed with the din of yelling Indians and rattling musketry. Some warriors attempted to capture animals on the spot. When White Bull’s own pony was hit, he caught one from this group as some rushed his way. Oddly, most of the surviving horses made for the river, and, as Runs the Enemy recalled, when they reached the water they were so thirsty they stopped and drank and drank. We captured the horses with their saddle bags, he said, “That gave us a chance to load up with shells and blankets and everything that the soldiers carried with them.”70
The running of the horses signaled the end, and the great confusion was over quickly. Standing Bear expressed it well. “I could see Indians charging all around me. Then I could see the soldiers and Indians all mixed up and there were so many guns going off that I couldn’t hear them. The voices seemed to be on top of the cloud.” Rain in the Face remembered plainly that “the soldiers fought desperately and hard and never surrendered.” Hollow Horn Bear, the Brulé living among the Sans Arcs, thought the soldiers fought as hard here as at any other place on the field.71
Many others remembered the final fury. Eagle Bear, an Oglala, noted that “we could not ride in a circle around [them] because they were on one edge of the hill. There were great numbers of us, some on horseback, others on foot. Back and forth in front of [them] we passed, firing all the time. Then suddenly we rode right into [them] and killed all who were still alive.” White Shield, a Cheyenne, was among those who joined the swarm. “The Indians made a charge,” he told an interviewer in 1908, “and killed all the wounded with hatchets, arrows, [and] knives.” This last surge was largely inspired by the chiefs. Low Dog screamed to his followers: “This is a good day to die: follow me.” Crow King told an army officer several years later that “every chief rushed his horse on the White soldiers and all our warriors did the same, every one whipping another’s horse.” Gall, virtually everywhere it seemed, told the anniversary crowd in 1886 that “the dust and smoke was black as evening. Once in a while we could see the soldiers through the dust, and finally we charged through them with our ponies.”72
Among those soldiers at the last were several who had drawn attention almost all along. During the course of the soldier advance from Medicine Tail Coulee four distinctively attired soldiers wearing buckskins rode at the head of the column. They could be seen continually consulting with one another, and endlessly peering about and seemingly plotting a course. They were plainly in charge. As soldiers always rallied to their flags, all along this bunch had in its midst a different one, larger than the others, swallow-tailed with a red top and blue bottom and large white crossed soldier knives on either side. When the advance collapsed beyond Last Stand Hill, the man with the flag was killed. A Cheyenne warrior whose name is lost to history wanted that flag, but as he rushed to pick it off the ground another blue coat leapt out and fought him hand to hand. The warrior beat the soldier to death with his war club, but another ve'ho'e shot him in the groin. The Cheyenne warrior grew dizzy and fell. When he regained consciousness, the flag was gone, and those buckskin soldiers who rallied to it were corralled on Last Stand Hill with the others. There the death of the last one was ever after a vivid memory belonging to another Cheyenne warrior.73
Yellow Nose, heroic in the capture of a soldier stars-and-bars flag earlier on Battle Ridge and, like Crazy Horse and Gall, among the everywhere warriors on the battlefield, remembered a lone man at the end wearing buckskins and shouting loudly to the soldiers around him. “The appearance of this man was so striking and gallant that [he] decided that to kill him would be a feat of more than ordinary prowess.” Yellow Nose rode into the fray. The buckskin soldier was bareheaded and armed only with a pistol, he recalled. As he neared the soldier he was fired upon, and his pony bolted to the side and ran beyond the man. Yellow Nose turned and charged the soldier again, jumping to the ground just as the buckskin man fired his last shot. The soldier drew a knife but Yellow Nose struck him in the back of the head with his club and he sank to the ground in a heap. He grabbed the knife and slashed him across the throat. “He quieted down.” Yellow Nose laughed and said: “Big man. Big man.” Yellow Nose later came to believe that he had killed the soldier chief who led these blue coats. Others remembered that buckskin-clad soldier, too. He had “blue marks pricked into the skin above the wrist.”74
Soldier resistance wholly collapsed. In their terror some men threw away their guns and when confronted by a warrior begged for mercy. Others used their pistols at close range, but when their guns were emptied, there was no time to reload. Several used their carbines as clubs. A few feigned death. And a handful ran. Carbine fire still reverberated southwest of the hill across the head of Deep Ravine where skirmishers were sent earlier in this closing episode. A small number of soldiers from Last Stand Hill—estimates vary, seven, ten, maybe fifteen—rose from their breastworks and ran toward them. Those that made it joined a few other survivors from that position and continued running into Deep Ravine, where warriors hunted and killed them all. Big Beaver recalled how none of those soldiers shot back. “My idea is that they used all their ammunition and were making this last effort to get away.” The last desperate stand of what was a substantial second attacking force occurred in the recesses of Deep Ravine. Red Horse noted the inevitable: “The Sioux did not take a single soldier prisoner, but killed all of them; none were left alive for even a few minutes.”75
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Wooden Leg recalled the moment when the guns went silent. “Warriors who had crept close began to call out that all of the White men were dead. All of the Indians then jumped up and rushed forward. All the boys and old men on their horses came tearing into the crowd amid an atmosphere full of dust and smoke. Everybody was greatly excited. It looked like thousands of dogs might look if all of them were mixed together in a fight.”76
The silence drew women and children to the field. During much of the fighting many of the camp’s noncombatants had massed on the bench west of the village, able to flee farther west if circumstances required but also able to watch the progression of the fight as it crept along the ravines and ridges east of the river. The ever churning clouds of dust and gun smoke were telltale indicators of the action. But even as they struggled on the eastern hillsides, many noncombatants returned to their circles and assisted the coming and going of warriors and the care of wounded men streaming back. And as the firing ebbed many were lured across the river and onto the field itself, drawn by the inevitable bounty of dead soldiers and horses. Some were involved, too, in the final killings.
The Miniconjou Iron Hail (Dewey Beard of another day) remembered chancing on a dying soldier laying on the ground, surrounded by a cluster of taunting Indians. They made gestures to strike him, and he was almost crazy waiting for the death blow. Women in the crowd were laughing. Then an Indian rode up with his son draped over his horse. He was singing a death song in his honor. When he saw the soldier he pulled up sharply, threw his leg over his pony, and jumped to the ground with a pistol in hand. He walked up to the blue coat and shot him dead without a word.77
Elsewhere Two Eagles watched a Cheyenne woman rummaging the field. Her hair was cut short in mourning for a son killed in the Rosebud fight. She carried an ax. When a soldier got up in front of her, two warriors near her grabbed and pinned the man to the ground while the woman killed him with the ax. Antelope Woman (Kate Big Head) was drawn to the field even while the last of the fighting raged and watched a similar killing. A living soldier sat on the ground, bewildered and rubbing his head. Three Sioux men surged on him and pinned him flat on his back. While two held the soldier down the third sawed off his head with a sheath knife.78
Impressionable boys watched these final killings. Thirteen-year-old Black Elk knew he should be happy about this. “These wasicus had come to kill our mothers and fathers and us, and it was our country.” As he told an interviewer years later, they were very foolish to do this and this is what they deserved. But as he walked about he tired of looking at the chaos. “I could smell nothing but blood and gunpowder.” Smoke and dust still blotted the sun. His stomach clenched and he felt sick.79
Charging Bear, another young Lakota, remembering the final moments, recalled years later a blood-smeared friend dying in agony as well as a young soldier “with hair like the morning sun and both eyes shot out. [He] had blown off the back of his own head.” And he thought of the soldier he had killed “and the way he had clawed at my arrow in his throat before he died, his blue eyes wide open. I got off my pony, vomited, walked dizzily a few steps and fell. Lying there on the ground, I cried. In half an hour I had got my fill of war.”80
Black Elk’s and Charging Bear’s reactions were uncommon. Hundreds of people scrounged the half-mile-long ridge from Calhoun Hill to Last Stand Hill seeking plunder, much as had the women who scoured the sprawl of the valley fight after those soldiers were repulsed. Women searched-out the dead, stripped soldiers of usable clothing, luring jewelry, and utilitarian leather wear, and rummaged laden saddlebags astride dead horses. Men likewise combed the grounds and searched the dead for weapons, ammunition, and other trophies. Flags and bugles were special treasures. No less than six flags were taken from this field. Scalping, too, was widespread.
Sitting Bull was not among those who inspected the field. After departing the bloody scene of the valley fight, he made his way through the village and joined noncombatants gathered on the hillside west of the camp. As the fighting progressed northward toward Last Stand Hill, he returned to the camp, to look after women and older men who had returned, and to tend wounded men returning or being delivered to home lodges. He contemplated telling the women to strike the lodges, but was overtaken by young warriors who had just come down from the fight and who called out: “No use to leave camp; every White man is killed.” Some on the battlefield recalled his stern warning from the time of the Sun Dance about not touching the spoils of their victory, but only Sitting Bull and those of his own band heeded the warning. In truth, there was no controlling the victorious Lakotas and Cheyennes as they went about doing to an enemy what they always had done. But this failure to heed Sitting Bull’s warning grieved the chief. He was sure it would be a curse on the people. “For failure on your part to obey,” he openly lamented, “henceforth you shall always covet White people’s belongings.” As one chronicler added, “the specter of dependence on the Whites would haunt him to his dying day.”81
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Even during the heaviest of fighting in the north some warriors remained conscious of the original force—the first soldiers—who had attacked the village earlier that afternoon. The surviving White men remained a distinctive threat to the camp now. When the Medicine Tail Coulee danger captured the camp’s attention, those blue coats had been largely abandoned by the warriors and for a while the soldiers held a nearly quiet bluff-top position above their river crossing. The soldier force there was also strengthened as other soldier segments scattered before, now joined them. But late in the fighting in the north, they could be seen advancing again and had come to within plain sight of Medicine Tail Coulee, where some had spotted the lone rider scrambling southward toward them until he was killed in the depths of that draw. At first, these advancing soldiers seemed oblivious to warriors bounding toward them. Red Horse recalled how chiefs had directed Sioux men to watch those soldiers on the hill and prevent the two forces from uniting. Facing an onslaught of warriors, however, those soldiers quickly recoiled and returned to their hilltop position, where Indians soon corralled them and shot at them from the ridge tops surrounding the position.82
The fighting on the southern field was costly but quickly stalemated. The soldiers drew their mounts and newly arrived pack mules into the center of a broad if irregular encirclement and quickly entrenched. From time to time, warriors made bold dashes against the soldier lines, but their impenetrability quickly stung. A fifteen-year-old Sioux boy, Breech Cloth, made one such dash against the east line at dusk, but his horse threw him, and he was shot and killed attempting to run away. His brother had been killed in the Rosebud fight, and he told his relatives that he would die in the same way if there was any chance to fight soldiers again. Standing Bear remembered joining other warriors at sunset to discuss what they might do. “We couldn’t get at the soldiers so we decided we would starve or dry them out,” he told an interviewer many years later. Some warriors stayed through the night, but most returned to the camp. White Bull, the Cheyenne sometimes referred to as Ice, added philosophically: Why “lose men recklessly?”83
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The village, meanwhile, remained a hive of activity. Late in the day, Little Wolf and his small band of Cheyennes reached the camp. Since chancing on the soldier column the day before and where this morning some of his warriors had been shot at by those men on Davis Creek, Little Wolf’s people had shadowed the blue coats as they crossed the divide and descended Upper Ash Creek. They watched the column divide several times and continued trailing its rearmost element, especially its ever-desirable pack train. They watched too when later one of the segments that had ridden far to the southwest joined the soldiers on the hilltop overlooking the Ash Creek-Little Big Horn confluence. Then, they had watched the mule train join that command. By the gunfire reverberating and then subsiding to the north, they had a sense of a major fight occurring elsewhere and then dying out. Only then did they depart the Ash Creek drainage and ride widely northward to the great camp. But even that approach proved challenging. When descending Medicine Tail Coulee the band first encountered Sans Arc warriors, a people not familiar with these Cheyennes. They surrounded Little Wolf’s people, some shouting “Kill them! Kill them!” Wooden Leg and a Southern Cheyenne elder, Yellow Horse, reacting to the commotion, recognized kin and intervened. Only then was the band taken to the Cheyenne circle where they learned fully of all that had transpired across the valley and upon the west-facing ridges east of the river.84
Elsewhere in the camp chiefs and elders agreed to consolidate the sprawling village into a smaller, concentrated mass. Heralds proclaimed the directive, and in a fluid motion the near eight hundred lodges scattered across the six great circles were disassembled and the people and their property relocated to the floodplain and hillside below the Cheyenne circle. The new camp was a helter-skelter sprawl of willow shelters, tent-flies, and sometimes mere buffalo robe bedding thrown on the ground. Standing Bear remembered the pandemonium. He also remembered that he could not sleep because he “kept recalling the horrible things he had seen. It seemed that everyone was excited and moving around and the whole village did not sleep a wink.” The ceremonial lodges in the former camp were packed, as were the lodge poles and covers belonging to nearly every family. We “were packed for moving away quickly if necessary,” remembered Kate Big Head. Behind them some lodges remained standing in the old camp, now covering dead warriors from the day’s battle. That area had become a literal dead camp.85
While notions of a great victory filled the hearts of many of the people that evening, heralds proclaimed it should be a night without celebration. Instead, it should be a quiet time for families to care for the wounded, and to mourn. Such compassion was widespread in the circles but may have originated with Sitting Bull. Moving Robe Woman recalled him saying: “We shall not celebrate tonight. There are too many of our warriors killed.” Another Hunkpapa, Good White Buffalo Woman, remembered that “while our hearts were singing for the victory [we] had won, there were wailing women in the village, for they had their dead.” Indeed, the fight had been a great victory, the complete realization of Sitting Bull’s stunning Sun Dance vision, but the grief was overwhelming. Victory dances could wait. 86
