Sitting Bull's War, page 27
Informed tallies of Indian fatalities suggest that as many as forty-five or fifty Lakota warriors were killed, plus another ten women and youths. A common Cheyenne count is six or seven men killed. Actual numbers and many identities are lost to history. Whatever the great toll, the anguish was widespread and palpable. Burial details varied. Already some of the deceased were interred in rocky crevices west of the village while a few others were lofted to scaffolds in the riverside tree cover. Still others were placed in funerary lodges scattered through the old camp, and some were carried along with the families when the camp dispersed to be buried elsewhere. Soldiers in the distant army circle saw burial pyres and heard the rhythmic drumming and singing of mourning songs. They interpreted it as a night of revelry.87
* * *
A curious thing happened late in the day. Several Cheyenne women combing the battlefield made their way to Last Stand Hill. In the midst of dead horses and severely mutilated soldiers they came across one individual who was stripped naked, visibly shot several times, but not mutilated in any manner. They were sure the man was named George Custer, an individual they had encountered on the southern plains many years before. One of the women stuck the point of a trade awl into each of his ears, “to improve his hearing,” it was said, as he had not listened to the peace talk in the south and, not listening, had brought about his own death. But the Custer name was not spoken in the camp that evening nor in the days that followed, and the northern traditionals did not know this identity for many weeks.88
Aside from the Cheyenne women, the Lakotas and Northern Cheyennes at the Little Big Horn had no sense of who they had defeated. At best, some speculated that it was again the soldiers from the south, those troops, too, led by an individual still unknown to them. Some Hunkpapa women, as with those Cheyennes, may have recognized one individual, Isaiah Dorman, the Black man killed in the valley fight, but no one knew that a soldier named Marcus Reno led that attack. In truth, as Wooden Leg later quipped: “It made no difference to us.” At its simplest, the villagers had defended a camp of steadfast traditionals, men, women, and children, from a daring attack, and they had destroyed a despicable enemy. It came on a day that at its start had dawned so placid and ordinary for people dedicated to life on the buffalo prairie.89
10 A DANGEROUS TIME
“We can go nowhere without seeing the head of an American.”
—Sitting Bull, Hunkpapa Lakota
On June 25, 1876, this Indian war came home to Sitting Bull and his loyal coalition of traditionals. The near five thousand Lakotas and Northern Cheyennes camping with him along the Little Big Horn River were committed to a simple life on the buffalo prairie, as in the days of their forebearers. But on that day, they were attacked by a Whiteman army, and they destroyed it. Many events stretching through the years had foreshadowed this almost inevitable climactic and transformative moment. The Indians had suffered relentless hounding in the buffalo country by railroaders, prospectors, and surveyors; the invasion of the Black Hills, their “Heart of the Earth”; and the March attack on peaceful Northern Cheyennes on the Powder River, people agreeably heeding the government’s summons. There was also the recent receipt of an incomprehensible mandate from the Great Father demanding the midwinter surrender of their lifeway, and repeated warnings from agency kin and officials that soldiers were massing against them. But in the midst of this chaos there were favorable signs: a dramatic Sun Dance vision portending a great victory, the turning back of the soldiers on Rosebud Creek, and now this triumph at the Little Big Horn.
Many in the Little Big Horn encampment that evening savored the day’s victory, but sages and elders among them saw dire consequences. The camp had lost some sixty killed and countless others severely wounded, many of whom would die in the days ahead. By contrast, the people had killed 263 soldiers, Indian scouts, and civilians in the valley and hillside fights. It was the height of their ascendency. From that day forward, the story of Sitting Bull’s War turned dramatically against the traditionals. The consequences came slowly at first, but nothing would ever be the same again. It was indeed a day, as history is wont to echo from time to time, that lives in infamy. The Whites would never forgive it. The traditionals would always remember it with pride but regret terribly what came after.
* * *
In the dawning of June 26, the huddled villagers were ever mindful that elements of the blue coat army, crippled but still menacing, remained bunched on a ridgetop six miles south of their drawn-up camp. In the early morning hours, warriors streamed in that direction to continue the fight. A few Sioux warriors, “the watching party” as Standing Bear called them, had kept an eye on the soldiers through the night, plinking at them occasionally to declare their continuing presence and ensure that no one escaped. When other warriors came on, most of the overnighters went home, and the new arrivals gradually renewed the fight. The soldiers were in a tight fix, but the action around the hilltop, dramatic in moments, quickly proved pointless. As the Brulé warrior Hollow Horn Bear later explained, through the night the soldiers had burrowed deeply into the ground like prairie dogs, where Indian guns and arrows could not reach them. This was not a position that could be rushed. This could never be another Last Stand Hill.1
Warriors persisted no less in challenging the prairie dog circle, rising and shooting from time to time, and sometimes charging the entrenchments outright. In one instance, sensing soldier vulnerability on the south side, warriors rushed the line and nearly succeeded in breeching it. Long Road, a Sans Arc, got close enough to strike a soldier with his coup stick but as he turned to run, he was shot dead. The Whites mustered a counter charge and scattered the attackers. Doing so, they overran Long Road’s body. One of the blue coats later crowed that he “was the only dead Indian left in our possession.”2
On a ridge northeast of the soldiers a Miniconjou, Dog’s Backbone, huddling among White Bull’s followers, watched bullets kick dust around him and cautioned those within earshot: “Be careful. It is a long way from here but their bullets are coming in fierce.” Barely had he blurted his warning when he was shot in the head and tumbled to the ground. Standing Bear and others crawled over to the man and saw how the bullet had entered above an eyebrow. He was killed instantly.3
As absorbing as the hilltop fighting had become, alarming news began to run the camp around midday. Men ranging down the Little Big Horn Valley searching for ponies had encountered other blue coats advancing their way. Among those soldiers, they could plainly see long guns—some manner of artillery and in this instance, Gatling guns—and walking soldiers, men they particularly despised because they were armed with deadly long-range rifles. While some continued to shadow those soldiers, others raced to the camp to spread the frightening news.4
Wooden Leg remembered the chiefs counseling. Many wondered whether this sighting represented the return of the Rosebud soldiers? But Little Wolf, the Cheyenne Old Man Chief who had arrived late the day before, noted that the soldiers who struck from the east yesterday and likely these approaching from the north now had Corn Indians with them, meaning Arikaras, not Crows or Shoshones. They could not be the soldiers from the south. Some wished to rise up and attack those blue coats immediately, just as had occurred on the Rosebud. The chiefs and counselors thought they had fought enough, however, and that the village should, as Wooden Leg remembered, “continue in our same course—not fight any soldiers if we could get away without doing so.” This cautious refrain had successfully guided the camp since the sighting of soldiers on the Yellowstone in the spring. But the elders also agreed to break camp and move up the Little Big Horn toward the mountains away from all blue coats.5
The chiefs’ reluctance to engage formally did not deter some warriors from riding in that direction anyway, whether to eye this threat themselves or perhaps even intervene. White Bull had been among those watching the soldiers in the south through the night, but after sunup he had returned home to eat and sleep. Around midday he remembered his father awakening him with news of trouble in the north. White Bull, the Sans Arc Many Lice, and one other rode downriver together and quickly encountered others doing the same. When nearing the soldiers, they exchanged a few shots with the blue coats in the lead and successfully ran off some of their horses. But they never fully engaged, acknowledging that the blue coat force outnumbered them greatly. In due course the warriors returned to camp, some arriving before everyone broke for the south, others following later in the camp’s traces.6
The oncoming threat in the north and the camp’s departing preparations brought about a deliberate if slow closure to the fighting with the entrenched soldiers on the hilltop. Sitting Bull was particularly outspoken on the matter, proclaiming that morning: “Let them live. They are trying to live. They came against us and we have killed a few.” Reflecting on that same point several years later, Low Dog suggested that it was a chiefs’ decision to break off the fight, a consensus prevailing by then that those men had been punished enough, and that “we ought to be merciful and let them go.” Red Horse, a Miniconjou chief in the camp, was considerably more dogmatic, telling an interviewer a short while later that it was the coming of the walking soldiers that saved the others. “Indians can’t fight walking soldiers; they are afraid of them, and so we moved away.”7
Some less sympathetic warriors regretted the disengagement. Two Moon was sure the soldiers could have been starved out. Flying Hawk assured an interviewer many years later that given time, “we could have killed all the men that got into the holes on the hill.” He Dog was similarly positive, saying, “we would have worn them out in a few days.” Red Hawk was likewise insistent that if it had not been for more soldiers coming from the north, they could have wiped out the hilltop command “in another day or two.” Each spoke in hindsight, imagining a luxury of time they did not have. The great village by now was threatened again, and once more it needed to be in motion.8
The movement southward began in the late afternoon. Again, the Cheyennes led. The withdrawal was deliberate, and somber, a movement plainly dictated by the threat posed from the oncoming soldiers. Some families carefully transported wounded fathers and sons on travois. Pony herds were pushed in unison on the hillsides west of the long caravan, and watchful warriors skirted the procession and trailed all. Behind them the grasses were fired, and soon a cloak of white smoke and dust obscured the parade from the puzzled onlookers burrowed into the hillside across the river.9
Abandoned behind the people was another camp of the dead. Scattered about were funerary lodges, new burials along Shoulder Blade Creek (the drainage from the west that bisected the heart of the initial camp), standing lodge poles, a litter of meats and other foodstuffs, buffalo robes, undressed skins, blankets, cooking pots, and personal possessions, most of it abandoned by the mourning families. Also scattered across the dead camp were fifty or sixty ponies and American horses, almost all of them wounded, plus many Indian dogs. Most disturbing to the soldiers coming onto the smoldering field the next morning was the profusion of bloody army uniform and body parts, gauntlets, cavalry saddles, and severed human heads. Such things portended other grisly discoveries strewn across the hills to the left, where one oncoming officer thought he had sighted “buffalo lying down.”10
* * *
For the people in the great village, the late afternoon travel stretched into late evening. It was a determined, nonstop movement of some fourteen miles up the Little Big Horn to the mouth of what some then knew as Box Elder Creek, likely today’s Sand Creek. Along the way, they passed their grazed-over post-Rosebud victory camp. There in the darkness the caravan stopped and rested until daybreak. They slept in the open much as they had done the night before. Next morning, June 27, they continued their ascent of the Little Big Horn Valley and by midday reached the mouth of Lodge Grass or Wood Lice Creek. In a broad flat just below the creek’s mouth, they established a formal camp in the customary fashion, with Cheyennes at the upstream end and Hunkpapas at the tail end downstream.11
That evening the chiefs and elders assembled in a grand council held openly in the Oglala circle. The chiefs announced tallies of their dead in the Little Big Horn fight. The numbers varied and did not include noncombatant casualties or deaths occurring along the departure trail. Wooden Leg, an observer of the gathering, reported that an Oglala chief announced to the assembly that the Big Chief of the soldiers two days ago was a man called Long Hair—Custer. “I know it was him,” the Oglala asserted. Some Oglalas, in fact, had had close contacts with this man, both on the Yellowstone in 1873 and again in the Black Hills in 1874. No one discounted the Oglala’s assertion, but no one else made such a claim just then either. The combined counsellors also reckoned with the inevitable breakup of the massive village, commencing almost certainly on the morrow. This camp was simply too big and its needs for grass, wood, water, and food too vast to hold together much longer, particularly under the duress of the blue coat threat.12
That evening while the great camp of traditionals held together one final time, dancing occurred in most of the camp circles, with warriors telling of their experiences in the fight and their glorious coups. The dancing did not carry on very long into the night, however. Some people in fact were still in mourning and took no part in it at all. One chronicler later lamented that there would be no such celebration of massed traditionals again for many years to come.13
The next morning, June 28, the spinoff of bands began. Already in the darkness the day before, the five Arapahos who had appeared in the camp in the eight-day respite between the Rosebud and Little Big Horn quietly slipped out of camp. They disappeared into the Wolf Mountains, headed, two of them later reported, for Red Cloud Agency. Aside from their Cheyenne hosts, no one else noticed their departure. Also barely noticed was the departure that morning of Magpie Eagle’s twenty lodges of Cheyennes. This independent-minded band joined the great village the day before the Little Big Horn fight after slowly descending and hunting the Rosebud Valley during the time of the Rosebud fight. They were headed now for the Black Hills country and eventually to the White River Agency. They trailed directly east out of the camp. In due course, several from that band, all Southern Cheyennes, continued through the Pine Ridge Country bound farther south still for the Southern Cheyenne agency in Indian Territory. In early August J. D. Miles, the agent there, reported their arrival and noted details elicited from their descriptions of the Rosebud and Little Big Horn fights. He also noted their possessing now sugar, coffee, arms, horses, and scalps taken in the latter battle.14
Nearly all the remaining Cheyennes separated and continued up the Little Big Horn, overnighting near the mouth of Pass Creek, in the shadows of the Big Horn Mountains. From there the next day they ventured even closer to the mountains, intending to lay over and replenish food stocks and lodge poles. The various departures stripped most, though not all, of the Northern Cheyenne circle from Sitting Bull’s mix of devout traditionals. At Little Big Horn, the apex of this movement, the Cheyennes comprised one of the largest circles in the great camp, some 145 lodges (152 with Little Wolf’s late arrival), adding more than two hundred fighting men to the coalition.15
Meanwhile, the surviving camp turned to the southwest that morning of June 28 and ascended Lodge Grass Creek, advancing to a camp some thirteen miles upstream. The pause was memorable on two counts. That evening the villagers were startled by a bugle call. It blared in the distance, and upon reconnaissance, warriors saw a line of ten or fifteen soldiers riding abreast, all dressed in blue uniforms, astride army horses, and displaying a fluttering stars-and-bars soldier flag. Dogs barked in alarm. Women shrieked: “The soldiers are coming!” Word had passed the camp not long before that soldiers were, in fact, not following this exodus but had stopped on the Little Big Horn battlefield and were burying their dead. But now this. The alarm was but short lived. The people in the village soon recognized the chargers as Indians dressed in soldier clothing and riding army horses captured three days ago. They were doing this “just to fool us,” Young Black Elk remembered.16
From that camp another splintering occurred. The next morning the remaining Cheyennes, most under Two Moon, ascended the narrow neck of land to the west that separated Lodge Grass Creek from Rotten Grass Creek. The Rotten Grass drainage, a picturesque tributary of the Big Horn River, was another buffalo-hunting range the Cheyennes favored. Like those Cheyennes who chose to remain in the Little Big Horn Valley and were now in its Big Horn Mountain headlands, Two Moon’s people were seemingly intent on continuing southward to the foothills to hunt. But after three days on Rotten Grass Creek, they turned about and retraced their trail to the east, evidently resolved to realign with kin. Sitting Bull was the ever stalwart traditional Two Moon had rallied with in the immediate wake of the Powder River fight. His lone regret in parting from the revered chief, Two Moon said, was that “I did not see him again.”17
* * *
That the soldiers in the Little Big Horn Valley appeared to have stopped there to bury their dead was not entirely true. A small column of cavalry had in fact advanced from that force and had just reached the mouth of Lodge Grass Creek on the Little Big Horn, a mere thirteen miles behind Sitting Bull’s surviving coalition. The soldiers reported encountering scaffolded Indian dead on the trail and an endless scattering of discarded property. They saw also that the Indian enclave had divided and was now trailing in three different directions. But at that point the soldiers followed no trail and merely turned about. Surprisingly, this nearness was not reported in any of the dispersed Indian camps.18
