24
SUNDAY, JUNE 25, 1876, began like every day for the Lakota: with horses and cooking fires. It was early when Black Elk’s father woke him to take the horses out to graze. “Daybreak,” he recalled, meaning the predawn first light when all is a greenish blue-gray. The people in the camps along the river had thousands of horses, so many of them they covered the broad sloping grassland rising to the west thick as the fur on a buffalo’s back. From a distance seen through summer heat the hills would ripple as if they were alive. Twenty thousand horses could strip the grass from miles of prairie in a day or two, and the elders in the assembled camps had agreed to meet later in the morning to discuss removal of the village—perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow. In the village itself at this hour were only the best horses, tethered close to their owners’ lodges for safety. Black Elk’s father was known as a hater of whites; in the Fetterman fight a falling horse had crushed his right leg, and he limped for the remainder of his life. The possibility of a white attack was much on his mind. Before sending him off he told his son, twelve years old, to be careful, to keep an eye always on the camp, and to make sure he had a rope on one of the horses so he might catch it quickly in the event of danger.
The sun was just cracking over the horizon as Black Elk and a cousin led their horses up the nearby hill. Throughout the camp men and boys were taking the good horses out to graze, and they were not the only ones up and about. First light was the time for mothers and grandmothers to poke up last night’s cooking fire. Old men went out early to relieve themselves or pray or just smell the morning. There would have been an immense but quiet stir all through the camps along the Peji Sla Wakpa, Lakota for Greasy Grass River, but nothing to cause alarm or fright. The Hunkpapa woman known as Good White Buffalo Woman (Pte San Waste Win) said later she had often been in camps when war was in the air. “The Sioux that morning had no thought of fighting,” she said. “We expected no attack.”1
Those who saw the assembled camp said they had never seen one larger. There were at least six separate camp circles, perhaps seven, cheek by jowl, with the Cheyenne, by general agreement, at the northern (downriver) end near the broad ford where the Medicine Tail Coulee and Muskrat Creek emptied into the river. At the southern (upstream) end were the Hunkpapas. Between these two along the river’s bends and loops were the camps of the Sans Arcs, Brulé, Miniconjou, Santee, and Oglala. Some said the Oglala were the biggest group, the Hunkpapas next, with perhaps seven hundred lodges between them.2 The other circles might have totaled five to six hundred. That would suggest as many as six to seven thousand people in all, with a third that number being men or boys of fighting age. Further confusing the question of numbers was the constant arrival and departure of people from the agencies—whole bands out to hunt, small groups of young men coming for the sun dance and the war parties sure to follow, a few Arapahos who happened to be passing through, men out alone on the plains tracking lost or stolen horses. The great camp had come together in March or April, even before the plains started to green up, according to He Dog. Indians arriving from the agencies on the Missouri reported that soldiers were coming out to fight, so the various camps made a deliberate point of keeping close together, seeking strength in numbers, moving every few days in the constant pursuit of grass for the ponies and buffalo for the people.3
Among the many who rode out early on the 25th were a group of hunters going after buffalo some miles to the east along Tullock’s Fork, and several parties heading southeast, traveling independently of each other, and making for the divide that separated the valleys of the Little Bighorn and the Rosebud. One small group, Fast Horn and a friend or two, had reached a spot near the high point of the divide later known as the Crow’s Nest, by five thirty in the morning. Also going that way were the Hunkpapa Little Bear with two sons, Wicohan (Deeds) and Hona (Little Voice), looking for lost horses.4 Ahead of them was a larger group led by a well-known agency man, the Oglala Black Bear, who had come out from the Red Cloud Agency some weeks earlier, also in pursuit of missing horses. Explaining later, Black Bear did not say the horses had been stolen, exactly, just that they had gone north with some Oglala who were hoping to join Crazy Horse. Black Bear did not travel alone, but brought with him half a dozen friends.5 Having recovered their horses, they set out early on the morning of June 25—probably just about the time Black Elk and his cousin were thinking of returning to the camp for something to eat.
There was constant traffic along the 400-mile route connecting the Red Cloud Agency on the White River with the hunting grounds along the Tongue and the Powder. The first day’s journey would take Black Bear and his friends over the divide into the valley of the Rosebud, where the fight with soldiers had taken place a week earlier. Black Bear would have heard the frequent reports of soldiers moving about the plains, but it was probably something of a shock when his party spotted a large company of soldiers moving rapidly along Davis Creek, heading west for the divide the Indians had just crossed. Black Bear said they watched the soldiers from a ridge or rise, concealing themselves in the traditional way of men on the plains. As they watched, five or six hundred soldiers rode by, followed by a packtrain with more than a hundred mules. The hour would have been close to nine thirty in the morning, and the little group of Indians had already come about twenty miles from the big camp.6 The soldiers were putting up a lot of dust and traveling fast—so fast, as Black Bear told Indians later, that he was sure he had no chance to beat them back to camp to give warning. It was a delicate point. Warning was just what the big camp on the Little Bighorn needed.
Shortly after the passing of the soldiers, Black Bear and his friends were approached by three Cheyenne, who said they had been following these soldiers for several days, all the way from the Powder River. Only an hour or so earlier, they said, some soldiers surprised them as they were preoccupied trying to break open a wooden box of military supplies they had found in the trail. Shots had been fired. The Cheyenne fled. After talking the two groups separated—Black Bear and friends heading for the agency, ten days away, the Cheyenne continuing to track the soldiers.7
The big village on the Little Bighorn was thus surrounded by a kind of informal early-warning system—a wide screen of travelers, hunters, women out gathering roots and herbs, and seekers of lost horses making their way hither and yon over a broad expanse of prairie a dozen miles or more from the campsite. There as the morning turned increasingly hot and sultry large numbers of adults and children were swimming in the river. The water would have been cold; the river, Black Elk remembered, was high with the June rise of meltwater from the snowpack in the mountains. Groups of women had gone into the hills to the east or the prairie to the west with sharp sticks to dig for tsimpsila. There were many late risers this morning following dances the previous night which ended not long before first light. One very large tent near the center of the village—probably two lodges raised side by side—was filled with the elders called chiefs by the whites, but variously named “short hairs,” “silent eaters,” or “big bellies” by the Indians. The council lodge was painted yellow. There in the morning the leading men decided to put off moving the camp for another day.8
It was approaching midafternoon when the first warnings began to reach the big village. Which came first is hard to establish. Not long after the camp criers had gone out to say there would be no move of camp that day, the Oglala Runs the Enemy was smoking with several leading men in the big council lodge when a report arrived that soldiers were coming. “We could hardly believe that soldiers were so near,” he said later. It made no sense. For one thing, whites never attacked in the middle of the day, and the men with Crook were known to have retreated back down to Goose Creek. For several moments more, Runs the Enemy confessed, “We sat there smoking.”9
But other reports followed quickly. The Hunkpapa White Bull was watching over horses not far from camp when scouts rode down from Ash Creek10 with the news that soldiers had shot two boys at the forks of the creek two or three miles back.11 Women who had been out digging turnips across the river to the east “came riding in all out of breath and reported that soldiers were coming,” said the Yanktonai chief Thunder Bear. “The country, they said, looked as if filled with smoke, so much dust was there.” One woman in their group had been shot and killed by the soldiers during the escape.12 The Oglala Fast Horn came in to say he had been shot at by soldiers he saw near the high divide on the way over into the Rosebud.13 But the first warning to bring warriors on the run probably occurred at the Hunkpapa camp a little before three o’clock when horse raiders—Arickarees working for the soldiers, as it turned out—were seen making a dash for horses grazing in a ravine not far from the camp. Within a very few moments shooting could be heard at the south end of camp. With the boom of gunfire the peace of the big camp was quickly replaced by pandemonium: shouts and cries of women and children, men calling for horses or guns, boys sent to find mothers or sisters, swimmers rushing from the river, men trying to organize resistance, looking to their weapons, painting themselves, or tying up their horses’ tails.
As warriors rushed out to confront the Ree horse stealers, people at the southernmost (upstream) end of the Hunkpapa camp were shouting alarm at the sight of a line of approaching soldiers, first glimpsed on horseback a mile or two away.14 By the time the soldiers were nearing the camp at ten or fifteen minutes past three o’clock Indians had boiled out of the lodges to meet them. Now came the first shots heard back at the council lodge, convincing Runs the Enemy at last to put his pipe aside. Moving Robe Woman, a sister of Deeds then in her early twenties, heard a volley of shots from the soldiers followed by the clatter of bullets hitting the lodgepoles of the camp. “Bullets sounded like hail on tepees and tree tops,” said Little Soldier.15 Already people were beginning to die; the family of Gall (Pizi), two wives and their three children, were shot to death near their lodge at the edge of the camp. Moving Robe Woman was singing a death song for her brother; she had painted her face red, carried a Colt revolver, and intended to kill soldiers in revenge (and did before the day was over). Near her a man running for his horse jerked in mid-stride and fell to the ground dead.
But now the Indians were rushing out in front of the soldiers and shooting back, making show enough to check the attack. The whites dismounted. Every fourth man took the reins of three other horses and led them along with his own into the cover of the trees near the river. The rest of the soldiers deployed in a skirmish line to confront the Indians. It was all happening very quickly. As the Indians came out from the edge of camp to meet the soldiers, the river was to their left, obscured at this point by thick timber and undergrowth. Gall’s wives and children died just inside those trees. The soldiers’ skirmish line was straight ahead. To the right was the open prairie rising away to the west, and out there, beyond the end of the line of soldiers, there began to accumulate a rapidly growing force of mounted Indians. These warriors on horseback were swinging wide, swooping around the end of the soldiers’ line of perhaps a hundred men. Some of the Indians, He Dog and Brave Heart among them,16 rode still further out, circling a small hill to appear behind the soldiers. By that time the soldiers in the skirmish line were bending back around to face the Indians behind them. In effect the line had halted; it moved no closer to the Hunkpapa camp. Firing was heavy and rapid, but the Indians racing their ponies were hard to hit. Ever-growing numbers of men were rushing out to meet the soldiers while women and children fled the camp, heading downriver. Not more than fifteen or twenty minutes into the fight it was the Indians who were gaining control of the field; now the soldiers were pulling back into the trees that lined the river, recoiling from the men rushing out to meet them, more every moment.
The battle’s pattern was already established: moments of intense fighting, rapid movement, close engagement with men falling dead or wounded, followed by a period of sudden relative quiet as the two sides reorganized, took stock, prepared for the next clash. The soldiers disappeared into the trees, and Indians by ones and twos cautiously made their way in after them while others gathered nearby. Shooting fell away but never halted completely. Simultaneously two large movements were unfolding: most of the women and children were moving north down the river, leaving the Hunkpapa camp behind, while a growing stream of men passed them on the way to the fighting—“where the excitement was going on,” said Eagle Elk, a friend of Crazy Horse’s brother-in-law Red Feather. Crazy Horse himself was approaching the scene of the fighting at about the same time. He was far from first on the scene. He had been swimming in the river with his friend Yellow Nose when they heard shots. Moments later, horseless, he met Red Feather, who was bridling his pony. “Take any horse,” said Red Feather as he prepared to dash off, but Crazy Horse hung back to wait for his own mounts. Red Feather saw him again ten or fifteen minutes later, when the Indians had gathered in force near the woods where the soldiers had taken refuge.17
It was probably during that quarter hour that Crazy Horse prepared himself for war. In the emergency of the moment many men grabbed their weapons and ran toward the shooting, but not all. War was too dangerous to treat casually; a man wanted to be properly dressed and painted before charging the enemy; without his medicine, and time for a prayer or song, he would be weak. The Cheyenne Brave Bear once described to his friend George Bent how his father helped prepare him for the battle:
I took my small sack that had my porcupine-tail hairbrush and my paints. I had to put on same paint that my shield was painted with, and had to put it on just as my shield was painted. This was on my face. My father took off my shield [the] blacktail deer tail. This was to [be] tied to my scalp lock. This charm was to turn bullets from me. My father touched my head four times with this tail before tying it on to my scalp lock. This shield my father gave me of course knew all the medicine that belong to it. As I went out … my father held my shield towards the sun and said to the shield [and] to the sun to protect me from bullets. Then he put the shield on my right side and told me to go and die in the battle.18
Waterman, an Arapaho who took part in the battle, said he took time to paint his face yellow and red and hang a deerskin bag containing a certain root about his neck. His companion Left Hand stuck two feathers through a cross-shaped piece of buffalo hide which he fixed into his hair.19Crazy Horse, too, prepared himself before fighting. Nearby in the river, when Crazy Horse heard the first shots, had been the daughter of his friend Standing Bear, just eight years old, who had been learning to swim. The girl, called Fast Eagle Woman, remembered that her father and Crazy Horse told the women there to pack up quickly and move away from the sound of shooting. Her seventeen-year-old brother, also known as Standing Bear, reported that after the first warnings Crazy Horse took time to ready himself for battle, calling on a wicasa wakan to invoke the spirits and then taking so much time over his preparations “that many of his warriors became impatient.”20
Another young Oglala, Spider, noted several details of the chief’s preparation. Ten young men who had sworn to follow Crazy Horse “anywhere in battle” were standing nearby. Crazy Horse dusted himself and his companions with a fistful of dry earth gathered up from a hill left by a mole or gopher. Into his hair he wove some long stems of grass—no feathers, according to Spider. Then he opened the medicine bag he carried about his neck, took from it a pinch of stuff, “and burned it as a sacrifice upon a fire of buffalo chips which another warrior had prepared.” The wisp of smoke carried his prayer to the heavens. Others reported that Crazy Horse painted his face with hail spots and also dusted his horse with the dry earth. With these preparations completed, according to Spider and the younger Standing Bear, Crazy Horse was ready to fight.21
By the time he caught up with Red Feather and his cousin Kicking Bear the warriors were massing near the timber along the river just south of the Hunkpapa camp. It was hard to see the soldiers, but there was a lot of shooting; the bullets clattered through the tree limbs and sent leaves fluttering to the ground. Several Indians had already been killed and others were wounded, including Long Elk, Pretty Bear, and Elk Heart.22 There was shouting and singing; some women who had stayed behind were calling out the high-pitched, ululating cry called the tremolo. The twelve-year-old Black Elk saw a “very pretty” young woman singing encouragement to the fighters. Iron Hawk said this woman was his aunt, and she was urging on the warriors who were arriving in numbers:
Brothers-in-law, now your friends have come.
Take courage.
Would you see me taken captive?23
At just this moment the crowd near the timber cried out, “Crazy Horse is coming!” From the hill to the west where Indians were circling around behind the soldier lines came the charge word: “Hokahey!” Many Indians present at the fight near the wood said that Crazy Horse several times raced his pony alone past the soldiers, drawing their fire—an act of daring sometimes called a brave run. Men were blowing their eagle-bone whistles. Red Feather remembered, “Some Indian shouted, ‘Give way; let the soldiers out. We can’t get at them in there.’ Soon the soldiers came out and tried to go to the river.” As they bolted out of the woods, Crazy Horse called to the men near him, “Here are some of the soldiers after us again. Do your best, and let us kill them all off today, that they may not trouble us anymore. All ready! Charge!”
Crazy Horse and his followers and all the rest now raced their horses directly into the soldiers. “Right among them we rode,” said Thunder Bear, “shooting them down as in a buffalo drive.”24 Wild confusion marked the fighting; the whites were fleeing for their lives, each man fighting off the nearby Indians as he could. Horses were shot and soldiers tumbled to the ground; a few managed to pull up behind friends, but on foot most were quickly killed. “All mixed up,” said the Cheyenne Two Moon of the melee; “Sioux, then soldiers, then more Sioux, and all shooting.” Crazy Horse and Kicking Bear were right there in the front of the mad race. Kicking Bear’s brother, Flying Hawk, said it was hard to know exactly what was happening:
The dust was thick and we could hardly see. We got right among the soldiers and killed a lot with our bows and arrows and tomahawks. Crazy Horse was ahead of all, and he killed a lot of them with his war club; he pulled them off their horses when they tried to get across the river where the bank was steep. Kicking Bear was right beside him and killed many, too, in the water.25
“The air was full of smoke and dust,” said Two Moon; “I saw the soldiers fall back and drop into the river-bed like buffalo fleeing.” The water was deep and fast from the June rise. “Several of the troops were drowned,” said Red Horse.26 The young Cheyenne Brave Bear, painted and dressed for battle, watched the slaughter at the river crossing.
The worst of it was [when] the soldiers struck very high banks of the river and all went over. When they struck the water it sounded like cannon going off. This was awful as the bank was awful high. When I rode to the bank the Indians were shooting the soldiers as they came up out of water. I could see lots of blood in the water.27
It was a scene of confusion and horror. At the river, Red Feather and Kicking Bear caught up with two fleeing men dressed in white shirts and blue trousers, but they weren’t soldiers. “Those two are Indians,” shouted Kicking Bear, “Palani!” He used the Lakota word for Arikara/Arickaree; the Rees had been first on the scene, just long enough to round up some Sioux horses and kill several people. Red Feather shot the horse from under one of the fleeing Ree scouts, then jumped down on the Ree struggling to regain his feet. He stabbed him to death with a knife. In almost the same instant Kicking Bear shot the second man twice. Many of the Indians charged right across the river after the soldiers and chased them as they scrambled up the bluffs toward a hill. White Eagle, the son of Horned Horse, was killed in this part of the chase. A soldier stopped just long enough to scalp him—one quick circle cut with a sharp knife, then a yank on a fistful of hair to rip the skin loose.28
The whites had the worst of it. More than thirty soldiers were killed in all before they reached the top of the hill and threw themselves down to make a stand. The bodies of soldiers and dead horses were left on the flat by the river below. Among them were a couple of wounded Ree scouts. The Oglala Red Hawk said later that the warriors did not hesitate when they found these men. “The Indians said these Indians wanted to die—that was what they were scouting with the soldiers for; so they killed them and scalped them.”29 Black Elk was there, stripping the dead of clothes and weapons. He rode by a wounded soldier, legs twitching and kicking in his agony. A man rode up to young Black Elk and said,
“Boy, get off and scalp him.” So I got off and began to take my knife. Of course the soldier had short hair so I started to cut it off. Probably it hurt him because he began to grind his teeth. After I did this I took my pistol out and shot him in the forehead.
Black Elk completed his bloody task. He had never taken a scalp before. We may recall his horror on the night when he watched by firelight as the people of his village dismembered the body of a Crow who had been shot and killed while trying to steal horses. Black Elk was slow to see the glory in scalping the white soldier grinding his teeth in pain. He had had enough. “I returned to where my mother was standing on top of the hill with the others.” But when his mother saw the scalp she did not hesitate. “My mother gave a shrill tremolo for me.”30 This made Black Elk feel proud.
The crossing of the river by the soldiers brought a second breathing spell in the fight. Some of the Indians chased the soldiers to the top of the hill, but many others, like Black Elk, lingered to pick up guns and ammunition, to pull the clothes off dead soldiers, or to catch runaway horses. In this opening phase of the fight, many Indians saw Crazy Horse charging among the soldiers as they raced their horses for the river, but no one saw him go up the hill or attack the soldiers who were making a stand at the top. Instead, he stopped at the water’s edge and promptly turned back with his men toward the center of the great camp. The only Indian to offer an explanation of his abrupt withdrawal was the Hunkpapa Gall, who said that Crazy Horse and Crow King feared a second soldier attack on the camp downriver, and returned at a run to block the danger. Gall said they had seen soldiers heading in that direction along the bluffs across the river. Establishing what they might have seen requires a sense of the chronology of the battle.31
The whole fight along the river flat—from the first sighting of soldiers riding toward the Hunkpapa camp (shortly after three o’clock) until the last of them crossed the river and made their way to the top of the hill—lasted about an hour. During that hour a second group of soldiers was visible at least three times on the eastern heights above the river and the Hunkpapa village.32 The first sighting came only a minute or two after the initial group of soldiers began its mile-and-a-half ride down the valley toward the Hunkpapa camp—about five minutes past three. Ten minutes later, as the first group was dismounting to form a skirmish line, the second group across the river was sighted again, this time on the very hill (now known as Reno Hill) where the first group would take shelter after their mad retreat back across the river. At about half past three the second group could be seen for a third time on a high point above the river not quite halfway between Reno Hill and the Cheyenne village at the downriver end of the big camp. At that moment the first group of soldiers was just completing its retreat into the timber, back away from the massing Indians. It is very likely that the second group got their first clear view of the whole long sprawl of the Indian camp from this high bluff, later called Weir Point, and that may explain the three cheers bellowed out by the men which were heard and later described by White Bull, Brave Wolf, and the Miniconjou chief Hump.
Of course it is entirely possible that the Indians saw the soldiers all three times, and perhaps more often than that. The country was alive with Indians coming and going in all directions on both sides of the river. The Yanktonai White Thunder saw soldiers make one false move toward the river south of the ford by the Cheyenne camp, then turn back on reaching “a steep cut bank which they could not get down.”33 While the soldiers retraced their steps to find a new way to reach the river, White Thunder and some of his friends went east up and over the high ground to the other side, where they were soon joined by many other Indians. In effect, White Thunder said, the second group of soldiers had been surrounded even before the opening of that phase of the battle.
But He Dog said it simplest, “We looked and saw other soldiers coming over the big hill right over east. They kept right on down the river.”34 Downriver meant toward the center of the big camp. Gall at any rate was certain it was fear of a second attack by the soldiers which sent Crazy Horse and his friends racing downriver while many other Indians were still stripping bodies or chasing the first group up onto the bluffs.35
From the spot where the soldiers retreated across the river to the next crossing place at the north end of the big camp was about three miles—roughly a twenty-minute ride. Between the two crossing places much of the eastern bank of the river was blocked by steep bluffs coming down almost to the water’s edge, but just beyond the Cheyenne camp was an open stretch of several hundred yards which in later years was called Minneconjou Ford. It was here that Indians say the second group of soldiers came closest to the river and to the Indian camp. By most Indian accounts it wasn’t very close.
Approaching the ford at an angle from the high ground to the east and south was a dry creek bed at the bottom of a shallow ravine now known as Medicine Tail Coulee. The exact sequence of events and placement of men at the opening of this phase of the battle is difficult to establish, but it seems likely that the first sighting of soldiers at the upper end of Medicine Tail Coulee occurred at about four o’clock, just as the first group of soldiers was making its dash up the bluffs toward Reno Hill, and as Crazy Horse and his followers were turning back from that fight to head downriver. Two Moon was in the Cheyenne camp when he spotted some soldiers as they emerged over an intervening ridge and began to descend toward the river. Also watching was Shave Elk, later known as Thomas Disputed, who said, “There were a few soldiers ahead of the main body.”36
Gall and three other Indians were watching the same body of soldiers from a high point on the eastern side of the river. Well out in front were two soldiers. Ten years later Gall spoke of them as Custer and his orderly. It may have been Custer, but more probably it was not. This man he called Custer was in no hurry, Gall said. Off to Gall’s right, on one of the bluffs upriver, some Indians came into sight as Custer approached. Feather Earring said Indians were just then coming up from the south on that side of the river “in great numbers.” When Custer saw them, Gall said,
his pace became slower and his actions more cautious, and finally he paused altogether to await the coming up of his command. This was the nearest point any of Custer’s party ever got to the river … Gall is of the opinion that when Custer slowed his pace and finally halted, the latter began to suspect he was in a bad scrape. From that time on Custer acted on the defensive.37
Others, including Iron Hawk and Feather Earring, confirmed that Custer and his men got no closer to the river than that—at least several hundred yards back up the coulee. Most of the soldiers were still further back up the hill. Some shots were fired by the soldiers into the Indian camp, which by this time was almost entirely deserted; the women and children had largely made their way still further downriver, some taking refuge in the ravine that marked the course of Onion Creek, some going further down. The few Indians at Minneconjou Ford fired back at the soldiers. The earlier pattern repeated itself. Little stood in the way of the soldiers at first, but within moments more Indians began to arrive and they kept coming—some crossing the river, others riding up along the eastern bank of the river. But there was no battle at or near Minneconjou Ford—“not much shooting there,” said He Dog. By the time fifteen or twenty Indians had gathered near the ford the soldiers had already hesitated, then began to ride on up out of Medicine Tail Coulee, moving generally downriver at a billiard-shot angle from their original approach, heading toward high ground, where they were joined by the rest of Custer’s command coming across country.38
We might pause here to suggest the probable pattern of the fight which followed as described by the Indians.39 It took about an hour, but to those involved it must have appeared to be unfolding with relentless speed. The battle known ever since as the Custer fight began when the small leading detachment of soldiers, choosing caution, recoiled back from their approach to the river toward higher ground at about fifteen minutes past four in the afternoon. This move may be described as the last freely taken by the soldiers when those nearest the river decided it would be smart to pull back and away. Their exact thinking, of course, cannot be known. But from this moment forward everything the soldiers did was in response to the pressure of Indian attack growing steadily and rapidly in intensity.
The speed with which events succeeded one upon another continues to amaze more than a century later. As described by Indian participants, the fighting followed the contour of the ground and its pace was determined by the distance covered, the time it took for Indians to gather in force, and the comparatively few minutes it took for each successive group of soldiers to be killed or driven back. The path of the battle follows a sweeping arc up out of Medicine Tail Coulee across another swale into a depression known as Deep Coulee. That in turn opens up and out into a rising slope cresting at a ridge (Calhoun Ridge) which rises to a hill (Calhoun Hill), and then proceeds, still rising, on a northwest course past the depression in the ground—Bourke thought it a buffalo wallow—identified as the Keogh site, and thence to a second elevation known as Custer Hill. The high ground from Calhoun Hill to Custer Hill was what men on the plains called “a backbone.” From the point where the soldiers recoiled away from the river to the lower end of Calhoun Ridge is about three-quarters of a mile—a hard twenty-minute uphill slog for a man on foot, much quicker for a man on horseback. Shave Elk ran the distance after his horse was shot at the outset of the fight, and he remembered “how tired he became before he got up there.” From the bottom of Calhoun Ridge to Calhoun Hill is another uphill climb of about a quarter of a mile.
But it would be a mistake to assume that all of Custer’s command advanced in line from one point to another, down the coulee, up the coulee, and so on. Only a small detachment had approached the river and then recoiled away. The greater part of the command, probably including Custer himself, marched across country while the separate detachment had gone down toward the river. By the time this group rejoined the rest of Custer’s command the soldiers had occupied a line from Calhoun Hill along the backbone to Custer Hill, a distance of a little over half a mile. This is evidently what He Dog meant to convey when he said Custer’s command “kept right on down the river and crossed Medicine Tail coulee and onto [a] little rise. Here Custer’s line was scattered all along parallel with river.”40
Flying Hawk, brother of Kicking Bear and cousin of Crazy Horse, described the move this way: “Custer came down off the second ridge [after crossing Medicine Tail Coulee] and went up onto Calhoun Hill, leaving a detachment there, and he went right on over to Custer Hill and made a stand there.”41
Another account of the position of Custer’s men at the opening of the battle was given by the younger Standing Bear, who described the whole course of the fight in a few lucid sentences:
Custer … made no known attempt to reach the river to cross. He went right up on Calhoun Hill and disposed his forces along the top of the ridge to Custer Hill. The men on Calhoun Hill finally gave way and fell back toward Custer Hill. Keogh made a desperate stand and he and his men were killed. The men fell back along the ridge leading their horses … uniting with those left alive on Custer Hill [who] broke and ran on foot down toward the ravine and river.
Keep in mind that sweeping arc; imagine you have stretched your right arm out and then swept it up and around to the left just as if you were signaling to someone the way to go. That was the uphill route of the soldiers as they headed from Medicine Tail Coulee up to the ridge toward Custer Hill. The whole distance would have been about a mile and a half or a little more. A man on foot following the arc without opposition would have reached Custer Hill in about forty minutes, badly winded, at perhaps five minutes before five o’clock in the afternoon. It took longer than that because Custer’s men encountered successive attacks along the way. The arc made no twists and turns. Only at the end, when the last of the soldiers ran for the river, was there an abrupt right-angled turn from the route the battle had been following.
Keep in mind, also, the five site names: Calhoun Ridge, Calhoun Hill, the Keogh site, Custer Hill, and the Deep Ravine, where the last of the soldiers were killed. Red Horse said that Custer’s command “made five different stands.”42 At each of these sites there was a round of combat which began and ended in a little more or a little less than ten minutes. Think of it as a running fight, as the survivors of each separate clash made their way along the backbone toward Custer at the end. In effect the command collapsed back in on itself. As described by the Indians, this phase of the battle may be said to have begun with the scattering of shots near Minneconjou Ford mentioned by He Dog; to have unfolded in brief, devastating clashes at Calhoun Ridge, Calhoun Hill, and the Keogh site; to have climaxed in the killing of Custer and his immediate entourage on Custer Hill; and to have ended with the pursuit and killing of a last thirty or so soldiers who raced on foot from Custer Hill toward the river down a deep ravine.
And keep in mind, finally, what was heard by the soldiers preparing their defenses on Reno Hill just over four miles to the south, and by a few additional men left behind in the timber when the soldiers made their mad retreat. Coming upriver was the sound of three episodes of heavy firing from the direction of the Custer fight—one at four twenty-five in the afternoon, about ten minutes after the soldiers recoiled away from their approach to Minneconjou Ford; a second about thirty minutes later; and a final burst about fifteen minutes after that, dying off before five fifteen. The distances were great but the air was still that day, and the .45/.70 caliber round of the cavalry carbine made a thunderous boom. Twenty or forty shots all fired at roughly the same moment told any listener there was a fight going on in earnest. At twenty-five past five o’clock some of Reno’s officers, who had ridden out with their men toward the sound of shooting, glimpsed from the high ground known as Weir Point a distant hillside swarming with mounted Indians who seemed to be shooting at things on the ground. They were not fighting; more likely the Indians were finishing off the wounded, or just following the Indian custom of putting an extra bullet or arrow into an enemy’s body in a gesture of triumph. Once the firing began it never died away entirely between volleys; the last scattering shots continued until night fell.
The officers at Weir Point at five twenty-five also saw a general movement of Indians heading their way—a lot of Indians, more Indians than any of them had ever encountered before. Soon the forward elements of Reno’s command were exchanging fire with the warriors, and the soldiers then all returned with dispatch to Reno Hill. Those are the parameters by the clock of the Custer fight—first shots near the Minneconjou Ford about four fifteen, battle over and Indians heading back upriver to renew the attack on Reno by five thirty.43
As the soldiers made their way from the river toward higher ground at the beginning of the Custer fight, the country on three sides was rapidly filling with Indians, in effect pushing as well as following the soldiers uphill. “We chased the soldiers up a long, gradual slope or hill in a direction away from the river and over the ridge where the battle began in good earnest,” said Shave Elk. By the time the soldiers made a stand on “the ridge”—evidently the backbone connecting Calhoun and Custer hills—the Indians were beginning to fill the coulees to the south and east. “The officers tried their utmost to keep the soldiers together at this point,” said Red Hawk of the soldiers on Calhoun Hill, “but the horses were unmanageable; they would rear up and fall backward with their riders; some would get away.” Crow King said, “When they saw that they were surrounded they dismounted.”44 This was cavalry tactics by the book. There was no other way to make a stand or maintain a stout defense. A brief period followed of deliberate fighting on foot.
As Indians arrived on the scene they got down from their horses, sought cover, and began to converge on the soldiers. Taking advantage of brush and every little swale or rise in the ground to hide themselves, the Indians made their way cautiously uphill “on hands and knees,” said Red Feather. From one moment to the next, the Indians popped up to shoot before dropping back down again. No man on either side could show himself without drawing fire. In battle the Indians often wore their feathers down flat to help in concealment; the soldiers appear to have taken off their hats for the same reason. Hatless soldiers, some dead and some still fighting, were noted by a number of Indians. From their position on Calhoun Hill—not much of a hill, but higher than the ground nearby—the soldiers were making an orderly, concerted defense. When the Indians approached dangerously near, a detachment of soldiers suddenly rose up and charged downhill on foot, driving the Indians down back to the lower end of Calhoun Ridge. Now the soldiers established a regulation skirmish line, each man about five yards from the next, kneeling in order to take “deliberate aim,” according to Yellow Nose. Some Indians noted that there was a second skirmish line as well, stretching perhaps a hundred yards away along the backbone toward Custer Hill. It was here in the fighting around Calhoun Hill, many Indians reported later, that the Indians suffered the most fatal casualties—eleven in all, according to Gall. For some minutes the soldiers’ steady fire held the Indians at bay—but not for long.45
Almost as soon as the skirmish line was thrown out from Calhoun Hill the Indians pressed in again, snaking up to get within shooting distance of the men on Calhoun Ridge while others made their way around to the far (eastern) slope of the hill, where they opened heavy, deadly fire on the horse holders. The breaking of white resistance began with a threat to their horses. Without horses the soldiers could neither charge nor flee. Loss of the horses meant loss of the saddlebags with all the reserve ammunition, about fifty rounds per man. Fear of losing the horses brought panic. Daniel White Thunder later told a white missionary, “As soon as the soldiers on foot had marched over the ridge, White Thunder and the Indians with him stampeded the horses … by waving their blankets and making a terrible noise.”46
“We killed all the men who were holding the horses,” Gall said.
When a horse holder was shot down the frightened horses began to lunge about. “Their horses were so frightened that they pulled the men all around,” said the Oglala Low Dog.47 “They tried to hold on to their horses,” said Crow King, “but as we pressed closer they let go their horses.” Many of the horses charged away down the hill toward the river, adding to the confusion of battle. Some of the Indians quit fighting to chase after them.
The fighting was intense, bloody, at times hand to hand. Men died by knife and club as well as gunfire. The Cheyenne Brave Bear saw an officer riding a sorrel horse shoot two Indians with his revolver before he was killed himself. Brave Bear managed to seize hold of the horse. At almost the same moment, Yellow Nose wrenched a cavalry guidon from a soldier who had been using it as a weapon. Eagle Elk, in the thick of the fighting at Calhoun Hill, saw many men killed or horribly wounded—one Indian who was “shot through the jaw and was all bloody.” The young Standing Bear, climbing up the hill toward the fighting, apparently saw this same man; he had blood in his mouth, was “very dizzy,” fell, and then got to his feet again. The Cheyenne Wooden Leg also saw this man, falling, getting to his feet, falling again. “His whole lower jaw was shot away. The sight of him made me sick. I had to vomit,” said Wooden Leg.
Eagle Elk saw a Cheyenne whose horse fell and broke both of the man’s legs. He saw a horse shot in the head, running in circles. He saw an Indian lying on the ground, almost certainly dead. “He wore a bird on his head, and the bullet went through the bird and his head.” He saw his brother’s horse, riderless, and feared his brother had been killed.48
The hill was swarming with men—Indian and white. As the fighting around Calhoun Hill approached a climax a Cheyenne chief on horseback suddenly charged into the middle of the soldiers. Some called him Crazy Wolf; others knew him as Lame White Man. He fell from his horse, killed by a bullet which passed entirely through his chest, exiting from his back, but in the chaos of the battle he was scalped and his body stabbed by some Sioux, who thought he was one of Custer’s Arikara scouts. With the death of Lame White Man, Two Moon became the leading Cheyenne chief in the battle.49
The soldiers put up a stout resistance around Calhoun Hill. “At this place the soldiers stood in line and made a very good fight,” said Red Hawk.50 Some of them fired as many as twenty or thirty rounds from a single position, slowing the Indian advance up the hill and inflicting many casualties. But a soldier with a Springfield trapdoor carbine could fire that many bullets in five minutes or less. The soldiers were completely exposed. Many of those in the skirmish line down the ridge died where they knelt; when their line collapsed back up the hill the entire position was rapidly lost and the whole character of the battle suddenly changed. It was at this moment that the Indians won.
In the minutes before the collapse, the soldiers continued to hold a single, roughly continuous line along the half-mile backbone from Calhoun to Custer Hill. Men had been killed and wounded but the force of some 210 remained largely intact. It is likely that the eleven dead and wounded among the Indians cited by Gall were matched by similar numbers among the soldiers. The Indians heavily outnumbered the whites, but nothing like a rout had begun. What changed everything, according to the Indians, was a sudden and unexpected charge up over the backbone by a large force on horseback. The central and controlling part played by Crazy Horse in this assault was witnessed and later reported by many of his friends and relatives, including He Dog, Red Feather, and Flying Hawk.
When the first group of soldiers—Reno’s men—were retreating across the river and up the bluffs on the far side, Crazy Horse had headed back toward the center of camp. He had time to reach the mouth of Muskrat Creek and Medicine Tail Coulee at roughly fifteen minutes past four o’clock, just as the small detachment of soldiers watched by Gall had recoiled back away from the river toward higher ground. It was here that He Dog heard the few shots exchanged before the soldiers moved away and the Indians started to climb the hill after them. Flying Hawk, brother of Kicking Bear and friend of Crazy Horse, said he had followed Crazy Horse down the river toward the center of camp. “We came to a ravine,” Flying Hawk recalled for a friend. “Then we followed up the gulch to a place in the rear of the soldiers that were making the stand on the hill.”
Gall said much the same: “Crazy Horse went to the extreme north end of the camp and then turned to his right and went up another very deep ravine and by following it, which he did, he came very close to the soldiers on the north side.” From his half-protected vantage at the head of a ravine, Flying Hawk said, Crazy Horse “shot them as fast as he could load his gun.”51
This was one style of Sioux fighting. Another was the brave run or the charge. Typically the change from one to the other was preceded by no long discussion; a warrior simply took it into his mind that the moment was right. He might shout out, “I am going!” Or he might yell out the charge word “Hokahey!” or give the war trill or clench an eagle-bone whistle between his teeth and blow the piercing scree sound. Red Feather said Crazy Horse’s moment came at the point in the battle where the two sides were keeping low and popping up to shoot at each other—a standoff moment. More Indians were coming all the time; it may be that Crazy Horse simply felt the moment was ripe to overwhelm the soldiers. The Arapaho Waterman said the Indians had “moved up the hill and closed in on the soldiers. There was a great deal of noise and confusion. The air was heavy with powder smoke, and the Indians were all yelling.” Out of this chaos, said Red Feather, Crazy Horse “came up on horseback,” blowing his eagle-bone whistle and riding down between the length of the two lines of fighters. “Crazy Horse,” said Waterman, “was the bravest man I ever saw. He rode closest to the soldiers, yelling to his warriors. All the soldiers were shooting at him but he was never hit.” Red Feather said the same: “The soldiers all fired at once, but didn’t hit him.”52 It was this brave run of Crazy Horse, thought Red Feather, that triggered the first of the two major charges the Indians made on the soldiers.
The excitement of Crazy Horse making his run in front of the soldiers, the piercing scree of his whistle, the crashing of the soldiers’ guns coming all at once suddenly impelled a great mass of Indians up into motion. Red Feather thought the critical element was the concerted volley at the galloping chief; it would take a few moments for the soldiers to reload. In that brief moment of imagined safety the Indians rose up and charged. Here and now, said He Dog in 1910, “is where Crazy Horse charged and broke through and split up soldiers into two bunches.” Ten years later he told a second interviewer much the same: “There is a sort of gap in the ridge which Crazy Horse broke through, cutting the line in two.” Panic followed instantly; the men gathered around Calhoun Hill were suddenly cut off from the rest of the soldiers stretching along the backbone toward Custer Hill, leaving each bunch alone to face the hordes of Indians on foot and horseback in among them.
Red Feather had charged with Crazy Horse; his horse was shot from under him.
He came to an officer who was shot through the stomach who was sitting on the ground, holding a gun in his hand. Red Feather tried to take the gun away, but the officer dropped the gun and grabbed Red Feather [who] was scared to death until someone shot the officer.
Soldiers always tried to keep an enemy at bay, to kill him at a distance. The instinct of Sioux fighters was for exactly the opposite: to charge in and touch the enemy with a quirt, bow, or naked hand while he was still alive. There is no terror in battle to equal physical contact—shouting, hot breath, the grip of a hand from a man close enough to smell. The charge of Crazy Horse brought the Indians right in among the soldiers who were clubbed and stabbed to death. The soldiers recoiled away in the two bunches cited by He Dog.53
The soldiers still alive at the southern end of the backbone now made a run for it, grabbing horses if they could, running on foot if they had to. Foolish Elk said,
All were going toward the high ground at end of ridge. The gray horses went up in a body; then came bay horses and men on foot all mixed together. The men on horses did not stop to fight, but went ahead as fast as they could go. The men on foot, however, were shooting as they passed along.54
“Bunches” was the word He Dog had used. There were no more skirmish lines. Men crowded in on each other for safety, too panicked to think clearly. Organized resistance was at an end. Iron Hawk said the Indians followed close behind the fleeing soldiers, “picking up arms and revolvers and ammunition and … using these instead of clubs and bows and arrows.” Red Hawk said much the same: “By this time the Indians were taking the guns and cartridges of the dead soldiers and putting these to use.” There were plenty of guns to take—a carbine and a revolver from each of thirty bodies on Calhoun Ridge and Calhoun Hill, more all the time from the bodies of soldiers killed along the backbone leading toward the Keogh site and Custer Hill. It is likely the guns taken earlier from as many as thirty soldiers killed in the retreat to the river had by this time also reached the fighting along the backbone. Now the boom of the Springfield carbines was coming from Indian and white fighters alike. Now the killing was quick and one-sided.
“We rode among them and pulled them from their horses,” said White Bull.
“Everywhere the Sioux went the dust rose like smoke,” said Two Moons.
Indians shot into the fleeing men from behind. In the rush of survivors from Calhoun Hill to rejoin the rest of the command, the soldiers fell dead with no more pattern than scattered corn. In the depression or buffalo wallow where the body of Keogh was found were the bodies of perhaps twenty men, all crowded tight in around him. But the Indians describe no real fight there—just a rush without pause right up along the backbone, killing men all the way. “They made no stand here,” said Foolish Elk. Keogh and the men who clung to him were evidently overrun in a moment, shot down and killed in the time it takes to write it. While these died others ran; the line of bodies continued along the backbone. “We circled all around them,” Two Moons said, “swirling like water round a stone.”55
Another little group of dead was left on the slope rising up to Custer Hill, ten or more. On the ground stretching from the site of this group to Custer Hill, a distance of about two hundred yards, no bodies were found. The soldiers on the gray and bay horses had dashed ahead, leaving the men on foot to fend for themselves. Perhaps this last group that died on the slope were all that remained of the soldiers on foot. Or it is possible the open stretch of ground with no bodies was the result of organized firing from Custer Hill, holding the Indians at bay while survivors ran up the slope. Whatever the cause, something briefly halted the momentum of the pursuit. The Indian accounts mostly agree that there was some kind of pause in the fighting before the final climax—some moment used for positioning, closing in, creeping up, delivering a hot fire onto the soldiers who were falling all the time, preparing for the second and the last of the charges cited by Red Feather.
But this pause was brief; it offered no time for the soldiers to count survivors. Officers and men were all jumbled up, many wounded. Certain big facts must have been obvious: half of Custer’s men were already dead, huge numbers of Indians were pressing in from all sides, the horses were wounded or dead or had run off, there was nothing to hide behind. “When the horses got to the top of the ridge the gray ones and bays became mingled, and the soldiers with them were all in confusion,” said Foolish Elk. Then he added what no white soldier lived to tell: “The Indians were so numerous that the soldiers could not go any further, and they knew that they had to die.”
Indians on horseback raced around the soldiers; others crept closer to shoot carefully. The whites were in chaos. The shouts and yells and crashing of guns terrified the horses, who became “wild with fright and uncontrollable,” said Horned Horse. Red Feather said the plunging of their horses “pulled the men all around, and a great many of their shots went up in the air.” The Indians surrounding the soldiers on Custer Hill were now joined by others arriving from every section of the field, from down near the river where they had been chasing horses, from stripping the dead of guns and ammunition along the ridge, from up the river where Reno’s men on their hilltop could hear the beginning of the last heavy volley of firing a few minutes past five o’clock. “There were great numbers of us,” said Eagle Bear, “some on horseback, others on foot. Back and forth in front of Custer we passed, firing all the time.”
Kill Eagle, speaking only a few weeks later, said the firing came in waves; he clapped “the palms of his hands together very fast for several minutes” to demonstrate the intensity of the firing at its height, then clapped slower, then faster, then slower, then stopped.
The soldiers were helpless; in this final stage of the fight they killed or wounded very few Indians. The young Cheyenne Brave Bear said, “I think Custer saw he was caught in bad place and would like to have gotten out of it if he could, but he was hemmed in all around and could do nothing only to die then.”56
When Custer died is unknown; his body was found in a pile of soldiers near the top of a hill surrounded by other men within a circle of dead horses, one of them his own. It is probable that he fell during the second and final charge by the Indians. In this final charge almost everybody took part. The job did not take long. Low Dog called to his followers, “This is a good day to die: follow me.” The Indians raced up together, a solid mass, close enough to whip each other’s horses with their quirts so no man would linger behind. Low Dog and Crow King were in the thick of it. “Then every chief rushed his horse on the soldiers, and all our warriors did the same,” said Crow King. “There was great hurry and confusion in the fight.” This is what Horned Horse had described when he tangled his fingers together—“Just like this, Indians and white men.”
In their terror the soldiers threw their guns away, put their hands in the air, and begged mercy, saying, “Sioux, pity us; take us prisoners.” But the Sioux took prisoner only women or children, not grown men. Red Horse said the Sioux “did not take a single soldier, but killed all of them; none were left alive for even a few minutes.” Now the mass of whites disintegrated utterly, men died without firing their guns, the surviving horses stampeded away from the noise and struggle, and the young Standing Bear heard Indians shouting, “They are gone!”57
Not more than half the soldiers had lived to reach Custer Hill. Now half of that half were dead or dying and the last forty or more of the soldiers on foot with only a few on horseback—Two Moons said five; others said two—dashed away downhill toward the river. One of the mounted men wore buckskins; Indians said he fought with a big knife. “His men were all covered with white dust,” said Two Moons.
These soldiers were met by some Indians coming up from the river; among them was the twelve-year-old Black Elk. He noted that the soldiers were moving oddly—“They were making their arms go as though they were running, but they were only walking.” He thought they were panicked; more likely these men were wounded, hobbling, lurching, throwing themselves forward in the hope to escape.58
All these men were hunted down by the Indians following them downhill, killing them all the way. Some of the whites jumped or clambered down into a deep ravine in the hope of escape. On the steep, far side of the ravine soldiers left claw marks in the gravely banks as they tried to scramble up with their hands. “We were right on top of the soldiers and there was no use in their hiding from us,” said the young Standing Bear. The Indians chased them down “with arrows, guns and war clubs,” he said. Respects Nothing remarked that some of the clubs were of stone, and some were of the kind known as gunstock clubs, with two or three knife blades protruding from the edge. To be crushed and stabbed to death with such a weapon was the ultimate horror.
Brings Plenty and Iron Hawk killed two men running up a creek bed and figured they were the last. Others said the last man dashed away on a fast horse, pulled steadily ahead of his pursuers as he raced upriver toward Reno Hill, and then inexplicably shot himself in the head with his own revolver. Still another last man, it was reported, was killed by the sons of the noted Santee warrior chief Red Top (Inkpaduta), a leader of the Sioux war of 1862. Two Moon said no, the last was a man with braids on his soldier shirt (i.e., a sergeant) who rode one of the remaining horses faster than the others heading in the final rush for the river. He eluded his pursuers by rounding a hill and then making his way back upriver. But just as Two Moons thought this man might succeed in escaping a Sioux shot and killed him. It is possible this was the same man Flying Hawk said was killed by his friend Crazy Horse—a white soldier who bolted on horseback in the final moments of the fighting. He seemed to be getting away until Crazy Horse “got him” about half a mile to the east. But the truth is that none of these “last men” was really the last to die. The truly last were the soldiers lying wounded on the field or pretending to be dead.59
Very quickly after the fight was over the hill was swarming with Indians: warriors putting a final bullet into soldiers, women and boys who had climbed the long slopes from the village. They joined the warriors who had dismounted to empty the pockets of the dead soldiers and strip them of their clothes. It was a scene of horror. Many of the bodies were mutilated, but in later years Indians did not like to talk about that. They said they had not seen it and did not know who had done it. But the testimony of witnesses was impossible to ignore. Soldiers going over the field in the following days left many detailed descriptions of the mutilations, and drawings made by the Miniconjou Red Horse left no room for doubt. Red Horse gave one of the earliest Indian accounts of the battle, and a few years later he made an extraordinary series of more than forty large drawings of the fighting and of the dead strewn over the field. Many pages were devoted to the dead Indians, each lying in his distinctive dress and headgear. Additional pages showed the dead soldiers, some naked, some half stripped. Each page depicting the white dead, like the battlefield itself, showed many severed arms, hands, legs, heads. These mutilations, like the killing of every soldier, were evidence of the Indians’ anger; they believed a man was condemned to have the body he brought with him to the afterlife.60
“The young boys between the ages of 11 and 15 years old,” said Eagle Bear, “ran from one body to another, shooting arrows and firing rifles into them.” Eagle Ring, the eleven-year-old son of Respects Nothing, was one of these. He was on the hill with the women after the fight and watched as women beat the corpses with sticks. “They stripped the dead naked,” he said, “but did not mutilate the bodies.”
Black Elk was also on the hill. When he and his friends found a soldier with arrows sticking out of him they would grab hold of the shaft and shove it in further. After the men’s boots had been pulled or cut off, boys would jam iron arrow points in between the toes of the soldiers to be sure they were dead. Occasionally one of the soldiers was still alive. At any sign of life, said the Arapaho Waterman, “The squaws would become frightened and scatter.” But not all ran away. Men named Swift Bear and White Bull, brothers of Crow King, had been killed in the early part of the fight. When it was over two sisters of the dead men climbed the hill with the rest of the women and children; they “came with axes and knocked the brains out of some wounded soldiers.” Moving Robe Woman killed soldiers to avenge the death of her brother, Deeds.
Acts of revenge were integral to the Indians’ notion of justice, and they did not forget quickly. The Cheyenne White Necklace, then in her middle fifties and wife of Wolf Chief, had carried in her heart for a dozen years bitter memories of the death of a niece, killed in the massacre at Sand Creek in 1864. “When they found her there, her head was cut off,” she said later. Coming up the hill in the first minutes after the fighting had ended, White Necklace came upon the naked body of a soldier lying dead. She had a hand ax in her belt. “I jumped off my horse and did the same to him,” she recalled. “I cut off his head!”61
In one case, talked about for a hundred years among the Cheyenne, some women on the hill took their revenge on the body of a man they recognized. Most Indians claimed that no one really knew who was the leader of the soldiers until weeks or even months after the battle. He Dog always said he learned that General Custer was at the Little Bighorn two weeks later when some Indians coming out from the Standing Rock Agency said it was Long Hair they had killed on the hill. Others said no, there was talk of Custer on that very first day. The Oglala Little Killer, twenty-four years old at the time of the battle, remembered that Custer’s name was sung by warriors during the dancing held in the big camp that night. Nobody knew which body was Custer’s, Little Killer said, but they knew he was there. Sixty years later in 1937, he remembered the song.
Long Hair, Long Hair,
I was short of guns, and you brought us many.
Long Hair, Long Hair,
I was short of horses, and you brought us many.62
It is possible that some Indians knew Custer was there while most did not. As late as the 1920s elderly Cheyenne said two southern Cheyenne women on the hill came upon the body of Custer. He had been shot in the head and in the side. The southern Cheyenne Magpie, known to have been at the Little Bighorn, was one of those who repeated this story. Kate Big Head was another. Magpie and Kate Big Head, along with others, said that the two southern Cheyenne women knew Custer from the time of the Battle of the Washita in 1868, and had seen him up close the following spring when he had come to make peace with Stone Forehead and smoked with the chiefs in the lodge of the Arrow Keeper. There Custer had promised never again to fight the Cheyenne, and Stone Forehead, in order to hold him to his promise, had emptied the ashes from the pipe onto Custer’s boots while the general, all unknowing, sat directly beneath the sacred arrows hanging from the lodgepoles above.
It was said that these two women were relatives of Mo-nah-se-tah, the Cheyenne girl whose father was killed at the Washita by Custer. Many believed that Mo-nah-se-tah had been Custer’s lover for a time. No matter how brief, such a connection was considered to be a marriage according to Indian custom. On the hill at the Little Bighorn, it was told, the two southern Cheyenne women stopped some Sioux men who were going to cut up Custer’s body. “He is a relative of ours,” they said. The Sioux men went away.
Every Cheyenne woman routinely carried on her person a sewing awl in a leather sheath decorated with beads or porcupine quills. The awl was used daily, for sewing clothing or lodge covers, and perhaps most frequently for keeping moccasins in repair. The moccasin soles were made of the heavy skin from a buffalo’s neck; this was the same material used for shields and it was prepared in the same way—not tanned, but dried into rawhide. Pushing an awl through this hide required strength. “The making and keeping in repair of moccasins was a ceaseless task,” noted Lieutenant Clark in his notes for a book on the Indian sign language. “The last thing each day for the women was to look over the moccasins and see that each member of the family was supplied for the ensuing day.”63 In the many photos of Plains Indian women taken during the nineteenth and early twentieth century their hands are notable for thickness and strength.
In the early days the awls of the Plains Indians consisted of a five- or six-inch sliver of bone, polished to a fine, slender point at one end for piercing leather, and rounded at the other to fit into the palm of the hand for pushing through tough animal hides. In later times Indian women acquired awls of steel from traders. It will be recalled that Custer’s wife, Elizabeth, had once worried that Mo-nah-se-tah would pull out a knife concealed about her person and stab her husband to death. Now the southern Cheyenne women among the bodies on the hill overlooking the river took their awls and pushed them deep into the ears of the man they believed to be Custer. He had not listened to the warning of Stone Forehead, they said. He had broken his promise not to fight the Cheyenne anymore, they said. Now his hearing would be improved, they said.64
——
The morning after the big fight the Indians renewed their attack on the soldiers forted up on the hill, but along about the middle of the afternoon scouts reported that more soldiers were coming up the river. It was decided to break off the fight and move the big camp. For several hours a huge mass of Indians and ponies moved upriver. The dust kicked up by the ponies and the smoke from a prairie fire partially obscured the departing Indians, but soldiers on the hill said later the mass was so dense it was impossible to distinguish one Indian from the next, or a man from a woman, and the whole body was at least a mile wide and a mile and a half or two miles long. While the big camp was moving away a number of Indians pinned down the soldiers on the hill with well-aimed shots. After the people were gone, the last of the fighters took their horses and departed.
The soldiers were watched closely the next day by Indian scouts. One of them was He Dog’s younger brother, Short Bull, who was nearby when the soldiers walked over the battlefield, picking things up and burying the dead. The wounded survivors from the first fight were placed on litters which headed downriver to the mouth of the Bighorn. “I was one of the scouts who saw this and reported to Crazy Horse,” said Short Bull.65
On that day or perhaps the next it was said that Crazy Horse sought out an inscription rock along Ash Creek, which winds up and away from the Little Bighorn toward the divide in the east. He was accompanied by a noted Cheyenne warrior named Braided Locks, who watched as Crazy Horse scratched or etched into the sandstone a petroglyph of his name—a horse, a snake, and jagged streaks of lightning. A wavy line in the air was the sign for snake, and it was also a sign for crazy. The lightning streaks suggested a modified craziness, something closer to a vision or sacred swoon. Braided Locks later told his son, Whistling Elk, that this drawing on the rocks came from a vision:
Crazy Horse had dreamed the horse was standing on a high pinnacle and he saw the snake above it and streaks of lightning moving over it. He must have had the vision back when he was a young man, and maybe he used it for power all his life afterwards.”66
Over the summer of 1877 Lieutenant Clark questioned many Indians about the fight at the Little Bighorn. From Crazy Horse himself Clark seems to have learned only that two horses had been shot from under him in the fighting. Clark does not name the other Oglala he asked about the fight, but one of them drew a rough map of the battlefield in pencil on the floor of Clark’s quarters at Camp Robinson. Before leaving the Indian attempted to scuff out the map with the sole of his moccasin, but sufficient remained, Clark said, “to allow me to retrace it, which I did and then copied it on paper.”
Like every early map, Clark’s showed a series of camp circles along the west bank of the Little Bighorn with the Hunkpapas (upriver) in the south and the Cheyenne (downriver) in the north. A dotted line showed Custer’s route down toward the river at Minneconjou Ford. A coulee and ridge lead up and away to the hilltop where Custer was found dead. Clark gives a brisk, no-frills account of the fight. His explanation for the disaster is already familiar: too many Indians. “The troops attempted to rally once or twice but were literally overwhelmed with numbers and in a few moments not one was left alive to tell the story.”
Lieutenant Clark was writing for the Army. His report was addressed to the adjutant general of the Department of the Platte; Crook read it and forwarded it to Sheridan, who passed it on to Sherman. Clark’s conclusion was unadorned.
This fight brought Crazy Horse more prominently before all the Indians than any one else. He rode with the greatest daring up and down in front of Colonel Reno’s skirmish line, and as soon as these Indians were driven across the river, he went at once to General Custer’s front and there became the leading spirit. Before this he had a great reputation; in it he gained a greater prestige than any other Indian in the camp.
These words left no room for doubt: among the Indians, Crazy Horse was the dangerous man.
At Fort Laramie during the 1868 treaty council all but one of these women averted their eyes from the camera in the manner considered seemly by the Lakota. Only the woman on the right, the wife of a man named Grey Eyes, gazed openly at the photographer, Alexander Gardner. (photo credit i2.1)
After the 1868 treaty the Oglalas split, half going south to live on the Red Cloud Agency in Nebraska (shown here in 1876), while the other half remained in the north with chiefs like Crazy Horse, He Dog, and Black Twin, who wanted nothing to do with whites. (photo credit i2.2)
The mixed-blood interpreter William Garnett (right) dressed neatly for his photograph seated beside his friend and sometime employer, Baptiste Pourier, a scout for the military at Fort Laramie. The photo is a tintype and the image is therefore reversed. The photographer may have been D. S. Mitchell, who visited the Red Cloud Agency in 1877, the year Garnett turned twenty-two. (photo credit i2.3)
William Garnett, son of a Confederate general, spent his life among the Sioux. He is shown here about 1905. Standing behind him are his wife, Fillie, daughter of the well-known trader Nick Janis, and four of Garnett’s children. (photo credit i2.4)
Red Cloud dominated the Oglala for more than sixty years after killing chief Bull Bear in 1841. This portrait was probably taken in October 1876, when photographer S. J. Morrow visited the Red Cloud Agency at the time General Crook, angered by Red Cloud’s defiance, tried to depose him. (photo credit i2.5)
Spotted Tail with wife and daughter, photographed by S. J. Morrow in October 1876, when General Crook proclaimed him chief of the White River Sioux. Spotted Tail was a dogged defender of his people, but he stopped fighting the whites for good about 1865. (photo credit i2.6)
General George Crook began an autobiography in the 1880s but abandoned the manuscript after a brief, guarded account of the battle of the Rosebud, where most of his officers thought he had been whipped by Crazy Horse. He is pictured here near the end of his career, about the time he was appointed commander of the Military Division of the Missouri. (photo credit i2.7)
Lieutenant William Philo Clark, General Crook’s chief of scouts, was confident he could “work” Indians to do the Army’s bidding. He was photographed by D. S. Mitchell standing beside Little Hawk, uncle of Crazy Horse, at the Red Cloud Agency in 1877. (photo credit i2.8)
General Crook’s favorite scout, Frank Grouard, lived with Crazy Horse’s band for several years before showing up at the Red Cloud Agency in 1875. He is pictured here in 1891 at the Pine Ridge Agency in South Dakota, shortly after the battle of Wounded Knee. (photo credit i2.9)
Woman Dress, a nephew of Red Cloud enlisted as a scout by Lieutenant Clark, was the source of a report that Crazy Horse was planning to murder General Crook in council. As a reward he was retained as a scout when most others were dismissed in 1878. (photo credit i2.10)
He Dog, a lifelong friend of Crazy Horse, said they were “born in the same year and at the same season of the year. We grew up together in the same band, played together, courted the girls together, and fought together.” But during the last weeks of Crazy Horse’s life He Dog sided with Red Cloud. (photo credit i2.11)
American Horse joined Crazy Horse as a Shirt Wearer of the Oglala in 1868, but sided with Red Cloud thereafter. He was standing near Crazy Horse when the chief was fatally stabbed and helped to carry him into the adjutant’s office. (photo credit i2.12)
George Sword (front, right) with Two Bears appeared in a play, May Cody, or Lost and Won, when it premiered in New York City on September 3, 1877, one day before the Army attempted to arrest Crazy Horse in his camp on the White River. Sword is shown here with Buffalo Bill Cody (center) and three other members of Cody’s theatrical troupe. (photo credit i2.13)
When the Army came to arrest him, Crazy Horse fled with his ailing wife from the Red Cloud Agency to Camp Sheridan (shown here in October 1877). That night, promised by Lieutenant Jesse Lee that no harm would come to him, Crazy Horse agreed to return to Camp Robinson the following day. (photo credit i2.14)
The body of Crazy Horse was taken by his father and mother to the Spotted Tail Agency, where it was wrapped in a red blanket and placed in a low tree overlooking the military post. A day or two later, Lieutenant Jesse Lee arranged to surround the traditional scaffold with a board fence to protect the body from wolves. (photo credit i2.15)
Little Big Man in Washington in September 1877. His right hand covers the wound on his left wrist received two weeks earlier in the struggle with Crazy Horse. Most of the northern Indians fled back to the Powder River country in October 1877 but Little Big Man, hoping to become an important chief, stayed behind. (photo credit i2.16)