Black Hills (32 page)

It is gone. The
Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa
handed down in his band from generation to generation, the most sacred item the tribe has, the heart of their mystery and their defense against the dark powers of the earth and sky, the pipe entrusted to him by Limps-a-Lot. Gone.

Paha Sapa is naked except for his breechclout, even his moccasins torn from his feet. He is covered with mud and horse’s blood and his own blood. His one eye does not see well.

—
I still have to report the Vision to Limps-a-Lot and the elders. I still must tell them, then take my lifelong punishment for losing the
Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa.

Hurting everywhere, Paha Sapa crawls out of the water and mud, pulls himself forward up the muddy bank by grasping grasses, reaches the top, and staggers to his feet.

Three Crows are standing just a few paces away. Paha Sapa cannot run. These are not the same Crows—they are older, larger, and they wear
wasichu
soldier shirts open over their tattood chests.

Behind the three Crows are about sixty mounted men, black against the sunrise, but obviously cavalry. One of the
wasichus
shouts something in the same ugly syllables that Paha Sapa hears from Long Hair’s ghost at night.

The closest Crow, an old man with a scar running from his forehead across his nose and down his cheek, takes three steps forward, raises his repeating rifle, and brings the wood-and-metal stock down hard against Paha Sapa’s forehead.

O
f all people on this good Earth, my darling, you know that my reputation as America’s “Greatest Living Indian Fighter” is exaggerated. Under my orders and following my lead, thousands upon thousands of Rebels were killed, but it’s not been my honor to kill many Indians.

Unlike the Rebs, the Indians are a sly and elusive enemy. The warriors fight at a time and place of their choosing, almost never in a stand-up battle but with feints and usually from a distance (except for their rushing in to count coup or to scalp fallen whites), and then they flee, often running to hide behind the skirts of their women and the rattles of their babies in villages. So the only time the cavalry usually can surprise and bring the warriors to fight is when we attack one of their villages, especially early, just after dawn. So it was at my Battle at the Washita River.

Those warriors, mostly Cheyenne, that bloody year of 1868 had been coming up out of the Indian Territory and out of Texican country farther south to raid in Kansas. That November, General Sheridan had showed me the butcher’s bill just since August—110 white people killed, 13 women raped, more than a thousand head of cattle stolen, and countless settlers’ cabins burned and looted. The Kansans were taking this rape, theft, and slaughter personally.

The Indians’ violence flowed, as you know I believe, directly from the peace treaties we signed with Red Cloud and the others that year at Fort Laramie: treaties in which Sherman gave the tribes everything they’d ever demanded and more, including the army’s agreement to abandon our entire string of forts along the Bozeman Trail and then, on top of that, acknowledging Sioux ownership of the Black Hills,
despite the fact that the Sioux were recent invaders there themselves and also in spite of the additional fact that white men—miners—were already following my surveying trail into those hills and building their own cities there. But Indians, like any worthwhile enemy, see concession as weakness, so it was little surprise that mere weeks after their chiefs signed these agreements, their braves were slaughtering settlers all over Kansas, then retreating to safe havens such as the Fort Cobb Agency on the Washita River in northern Texas country, where they took our beef, wintered over, and waited for good weather before riding off to slaughter more settlers.

You remember Phil Sheridan, of course, my dear. (And I remember you dancing with him at Fort Leavenworth when the general came out to take over Hancock’s command.) General Sheridan was as helpful to my career as he was a bad dancer with you. He plucked me out of Monroe, where I was dying from boredom (except for the wonderful days and nights with you, my love), and on November 12, Sheridan and I were leading a mixed force of infantry and cavalry deep into Indian country.

The hostiles, with our help at such agencies disguised as forts as Fort Cobb, had short supply lines, but the cavalry always suffered from unacceptably long lines of supply, often all the way back to Leavenworth. Thus we built the Camp Supply depot on the North Canadian River near the Oklahoma panhandle. The hostiles were so used to their sanctuary there south of the Arkansas River that they’d grown smug and careless; this time, with Camp Supply as our logistics base, we were going to take them by surprise in the winter. (The old mountain man Jim Bridger argued that such a winter campaign couldn’t be done—that cavalry would founder in drifts in a day and be dead in three days—but Sheridan and I knew better than that.)

I’ve told you, Libbie, about Phil Sheridan’s unusual, almost nonsoldierly habit of using swear words (which I forswore forever on that same day in 1862 when I gave up drinking forever after you had seen me drunk in Monroe, just after I began courting you)—well, anyway, Phil’s delusion that he was the first cavalry commander in the West to consider attacking the Indians in the dead of winter (many before him had done so) mixed with his swearing made for a fascinating briefing before my officers and men and I set out in a serious snowstorm to the tune of “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”

The snow helped our Osage scouts (who were eager to settle old scores with their enemy the Cheyenne), and on November 26 we crossed the trail of a band of Indians returning to their village in the Oklahoma country from what obviously had been a raid into Kansas. We immediately left the wagon train behind and followed that trail south for a day and a night.

I pushed the men hard, as you know I tend to do when on the real warpath, stopping only once for coffee and hardtack in the short, freezing day and longer, freezing night. It was the only stop my men saw from 4 a.m. to late into the next day. My 720 men followed me through the night, the only sound the crack of ice atop the snow as their horses’ hooves broke through the crust. Finally one of the Osage guides called me forward to the crest of a hill, and I was surprised to see a river valley stretching away below us. I could see vague shapes moving about a half mile away, but I assumed they were buffalo.

“No,” grunted the Osage. “Heap Indians. Ponies.”

I whispered the query to the old Osage—why did he think they were Indian ponies? In the dim starlight, they could have been anything.

“Me hear dog bark,” grunted the old guide.

I strained to hear but could make out no barking dog. For a second I thought I heard a bell… Indians sometimes bell the lead mare in their pony herds… but it was not clear enough. Finally I heard the thin, frail cry of a baby rise out of the dark valley. There could be no doubt now.

I ordered the attack to begin at first light.

I divided my forces, just as I did yesterday (was it yesterday?) at the Little Big Horn. I broke the column into four detachments—one to swing around to the far end of the village in the valley, two to sweep in from the sides, my own detachment to attack south from our current location.

I had no idea how many Indians were down there that night, of course, Libbie; it might have been a hundred; it might have been ten thousand. But I had seven hundred cavalry at my command, and no force of irregulars on earth could stand up to seven hundred US Cavalry fighting with surprise on their side.

Some of the members of the regimental band said after that battle that it was so cold their lips stuck to their brass instruments when they began playing our regiment’s beloved “Garry Owen” at the beginning of the attack as I’d ordered, but they exaggerate. In truth, it was only their spittle that froze, soon sending the brass notes faltering and then stopping, but that was unimportant, since I’d already led the detachment down off our hill and into the valley and village at full speed, me at the lead (of course), sword out and extended in one hand, pistol in the other.

The Indians—it turned out to be a Cheyenne village, which pleased our bloodthirsty Osage scouts no end—were caught totally by surprise, but warriors came erupting from their tents and teepees within seconds, hurling lances, notching arrows, and firing repeating rifles. We cut them down where they stood. I have to admit to
you the truth of war, Libbie—when an old man or old woman or, I saw early in the fight, a ten-year-old boy picked up a fallen brave’s rifle or lance and directed it at my men, the cavalrymen cut them down as well. Many of these troopers had been chasing hostile Indians for two years or more, never catching them in a fair fight, only seeing the scalped whites, raped women, and burnt settlements in the hostiles’ wake. The pent-up frustration on the part of my men was very great, the fighting—though brief, less than an hour with only the first half hour being a true fight—horribly intense.

The braves retreated from the village and tried to wade the Washita River, but we shot many of them down as they stood waist-deep in the rushing icy water. Those that reached the thick trees on the other side continued firing from vantage points there, but groups from all four of my converging detachments were sent in—the trees were not so tight that we had to dismount—and, one by one, the warriors were killed. Almost none allowed themselves to be captured.

Our own casualties were light—one of my officers killed and two officers and eleven enlisted men wounded. My second-in-command (you remember Major Elliott) and nineteen of his men had been seen chasing hostiles away from the river, and although we expected that detachment to return soon, it never did. We later learned that the Indians downriver had ambushed and killed Elliott and all his men.

Still, the victory was all but complete. I had fifty-three prisoners—mostly women and children who had remained hidden in their lodges during the fighting—and more than nine hundred Indian ponies. The women and children we would take back with us, but I ordered almost 850 of the ponies, mostly pintos, destroyed. I know how much you love horses, my darling, and knew when I told you upon my return that you were upset with the idea, but I believe you’ve come to understand that I had little choice. I let the women, children, and a couple of ancient men choose ponies for riding, but there was no way my troopers could herd the other 850-some Indian pintos all the way back to Camp Supply. Leaving them for the enemy to reclaim was unthinkable.

There are many memories for me from that battle along the Washita, but the screams of the ponies, the smell of the gunpowder mixing with the scent of the ponies’ blood in the cold morning air, the sounds of their heavy falling in the snow and along the icy banks of that river… well, they are indelible.

By ten a.m., I’d learned who it was we’d fought. The band belonged to the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle—the so-called peace chief—the very same Black Kettle who’d somehow managed to survive Colonel Chivington’s slaughter of his band at Sand Creek in Colorado. Black Kettle’s sister told me, through my interpreter, that the old chief had camped here away from and farther north of the other Indian villages
now strung out along the Washita down this long valley—encampments of Apache, Arapahoe, Kiowa, and even Comanche—precisely because he, Black Kettle, had been afraid of an attack by cavalry (a fear that none of the other Indians appeared to have shared, although none of the other chiefs had been at Sand Creek). Black Kettle himself had been killed, we discovered, in the first minutes of the shooting as the old man attempted to flee, not even staying to protect his family or grandchildren.

The intelligence of the thousands of Indians camping so near did not alarm me—this many cavalry troopers could have handled any number of warriors they sent upstream at us—but it decided me on shooting the ponies and withdrawing for the time being.

I know that you remember, Libbie, the outrageous newspaper articles that soon sprang up comparing this fair-fight victory to Chivington’s massacre at Sand Creek. As we discussed at the time, this was not only untrue, it was libelous. Black Kettle’s band along the Washita had been harboring many of the braves who’d been terrorizing Arkansas. We found white men’s and women’s scalps. We found photographs, weapons, clothing, utensils, and other loot from the burned cabins. More than that, Black Kettle’s braves had two white women as hostages (one very young), and they cut the women’s throats at the first sound of our attack. These were not innocent, peace-loving Indians, however much Black Kettle had liked to call himself the “peace chief.”

Black Kettle’s sister kept talking and talking and talking, blaming everything on the few “hot-blooded young braves” who had joined the tribe, babbling away, but I soon realized that she was just playing for time. By noon, the first hundreds of warriors from the many villages downstream were beginning to appear on the bluffs across the river. By late afternoon, there would be thousands there, and I’m sure that’s exactly what Black Kettle’s sister wanted—for us to still be in that indefensible position as thousands of Arapahoe, Kiowa, returning Cheyenne, Apache, and Comanche fell upon us.