Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (12 page)

It did not seem to Curly to be much of a dream—it was not like any others he had heard about, especially such parts as not painting himself or not wearing a war bonnet—so he stayed on the prairie and continued to fast, hoping for a more suitable dream. But he finally fell asleep, and when he woke his father and Hump were standing over him. They were angry. He had left the village without telling anyone, at a time when all were concerned with the dying Conquering Bear, and gone into a country where Crow or Pawnee raiding parties might stumble over him. When Curly said he was seeking a vision, Crazy Horse was furious. His son had made no preparations, had not been purified, had received no advice from the wise ones for guidance. Chastened, Curly followed the others back to camp. He did not tell of his dream.

A few days later Conquering Bear died. After wrapping his body in a buffalo robe and placing it on a scaffold, the Brulés went off on a fall hunt. Curly was the first to locate a herd—he did so by placing his ear to the ground and listening for the thundering hoofs—and in the communal hunt he killed the first buffalo. Hump, the previous incident forgotten, sang Curly’s praises that night in the camp circle.
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In November four Brulés, led by Curly’s uncle Spotted Tail, went on the warpath seeking revenge for Conquering Bear’s death. They attacked the mail wagon on the Holy Road, killed two drivers and a passenger, and picked up $20,000 in paper money, which was never found (George Hyde suggests that the trader Jim Bordeaux got it, which seems likely).
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The following spring, 1855, the young Brulés, joined by some Miniconjous and Oglalas, made a series of unco-ordinated raids against the Holy Road. They concentrated on driving off livestock but engaged in no pitched battles or even any individual combat. They killed no whites, but they were a nuisance, enough to make the whites even more determined to revenge Grattan and teach the Sioux a lesson.
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The Brulés, in other words, fought as if they were engaged in a campaign against another Indian tribe. They appear to have felt that successful horse and cattle raids would be sufficient to convince the whites to abandon the Holy Road.

During this period the Old Man Afraid Oglalas stayed well north of Fort Laramie, out of trouble, but many of the young warriors—including Curly—lived with the Brulés, where the action was. This was typical of the Sioux and led to much difficulty. Chiefs like Old Man Afraid could claim that their tribes were peaceful, which was
true, but the whites could counter that the young braves were on the warpath, which was also true. The situation made it extremely difficult, indeed impossible, for the whites to figure out which Indians to punish.

In the summer of 1855 the Brulés, fat with buffalo and the white man’s cattle and rich in horses, gave up their war with the whites (at a time when the whites were most vulnerable, the Holy Road being filled with more-or-less defenseless wagon trains). Little Thunder, Spotted Tail, and other leaders led the warriors in a great expedition to the lower Platte country against the Pawnees and the Omahas. One group swung down to the Loup River to steal Pawnee horses, but the Pawnees were out hunting and could not be found. A second group of Brulés, with Curly along, ran into the Omahas, who had left their cornfields to hunt buffalo. The Sioux managed to steal a few horses; the Omahas came charging after them; a big fight followed, with three Omahas being killed.

Curly made his first human kill that day. He noticed an Omaha sneaking through the brush, fired an arrow, and saw the enemy straighten up, then fall forward, dead. Curly jumped from his horse and raced to the brush, scalping knife in hand. But when he lifted the hair, he saw with astonishment that he had killed a woman.

This was hardly a shameful act. According to ancient Sioux custom there was great honor in counting coup upon or killing an enemy woman within sight of her own warriors, the theory being that the warriors would fight even harder to protect or avenge one of their women than one of their men. Curly tried to lift her scalp, but when he saw that she was as young and pretty as his own sister, he got a little sick and left the scalp to another. Curly’s uncle Spotted Tail held the Omahas off while the Brulés collected their spoils and rode away. When they were safe, the men teased Curly for abandoning the scalp, even making up a little song about the experience:

A brave young man comes here

But a foolish one,

Without a good knife.

Curly said nothing, although years later he told a white Army officer that he disapproved of the ethics of the Sioux custom with regard to enemy women.
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While the Sioux were out stealing a few horses, committing the best of their warriors, and acting as if the war with the whites were over for the season, the whites were mounting a major expedition
against the Sioux. A new agent had been appointed for the Indians of the Platte, Thomas S. Twiss, another West Point graduate. The War Department, meanwhile, had ordered Brigadier General W. S. Harney, a hero of the Mexican War, to assemble a force at Fort Leavenworth in eastern Kansas and then march against the Sioux. The size of the force Harney gathered—six hundred men—indicated that the whites still held the Sioux in contempt, even after the Grattan massacre, although it was also true that by the United States Army standards of the time six hundred men was a large force. Harney’s orders were to follow the Oregon Trail to Laramie, then turn back and march northeastward, through the heart of the Oglala and Brulé country, to Fort Pierre on the Missouri River. He was to strike terror into the heart of any Sioux he met along the way. The orders were an open invitation to disaster—if the Sioux acted in concert they could crush six hundred men like so many flies.
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But the Sioux had no intention of acting together. The headmen had stifled the talk of the wild young warriors about war with the whites, and when Agent Twiss sent out runners to all the Sioux tribes, ordering them to move south of the Platte River or be considered hostile, more than half the bands, including the Oglalas, obeyed. By September, Twiss had assembled four hundred lodges of Sioux near Fort Laramie. Practically all the Brulés and Miniconjous “stayed out,” as the expression of the time had it, and were therefore considered hostile.

Among the hostiles was Little Thunder’s band of Brulés, which was camped on the Bluewater River, a few miles north of the North Platte River and a little more than one hundred miles east of Fort Laramie. Little Thunder was thought of as a friendly, but his band did contain young men who had been on raids against the Holy Road in the spring, and Little Thunder was well aware that by camping where he was he had placed his people in a dangerous position. Bordeaux sent out three special runners to urge Little Thunder to “come in” before Harney arrived, but the Brulés would not move. They had had a successful hunt and wanted time to prepare the buffalo meat and robes for the winter.
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The Brulés made no move to avoid a battle. While the women worked on the buffalo carcasses, the young braves went back to raiding the Oregon Trail. When Harney arrived in the vicinity on September 2, 1855, he found a train of emigrants which had been compelled to corral and defend itself three times that day. The Brulés had not attacked, but they had demanded arms and ammunition. The Indians said they needed the weapons to fight the soldiers. Obviously,
Little Thunder expected trouble; just as obviously, he knew nothing of white warfare and had no idea of the striking power of a mixed force of six hundred cavalry, infantry, and artillery. He believed either that Harney would pass by his camp or that Harney’s six hundred men would fall as easily as Grattan’s thirty-one had done.
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He obviously forgot, or ignored, the simple fact that nearly all (about two thousand) the Brulés and Oglalas had fought against Grattan, while he had only a handful of Brulés with him (about one hundred).

Little Thunder was not much of a leader. At this critical moment in the life of his band, his fighting strength was scattered all across the country. Curly, for example, who was living with the Little Thunder people that summer, was out hunting, along with three other teen-agers. But there was already plenty of meat in the camp and these youngsters could have been acting as scouts. Little Thunder had no scouts out to watch for the approach of the enemy. Other young warriors were pestering the whites on the Holy Road, rather than preparing themselves for the fight of their lives. The camp was in a valley surrounded by heavily wooded hills—about the worst possible position for a defensive action.

Given what the Brulés knew about Harney’s intentions and Twiss’s orders, one can only conclude that the Indians simply could not believe that anyone would dare attack a Sioux camp in Sioux territory. It had never been tried before Grattan marched into Conquering Bear’s camp the previous summer, and Grattan’s fate indicated to the Brulés that it would be a long time before anyone tried again. The Brulés were cocky, overconfident, unorganized, badly located, and wasteful of their fighting power. They were a long way from being “the finest light cavalry in the world,” as the Sioux have often been described.

At dawn, on September 3, 1855, Harney moved. In what would become the classic method of attacking a Plains Indian encampment, he sent the cavalry through the hills to get to the far end of the village, while he prepared to attack from the front with the infantry and artillery. With Harney was Lieutenant Alfred Pleasonton, who later, as a Civil War brigadier general, gave Custer one of his early breaks.

Without scouts, the Brulés did not know of Harney’s presence until the soldiers were nearly in position. Little Thunder then rode out beyond the village to meet Harney, Spotted Tail at his side carrying a white flag. A council followed, each side trying to fool the other. Harney wanted to buy time for his cavalry to get into position;
Little Thunder also hoped for delay so that the women and children could pack up and get away.

Little Thunder professed great friendship for the whites and explained his reasons for not obeying Twiss’s orders. Harney humored him until he received word that the cavalry was in place, then he said he had come to fight and Little Thunder had better get ready. Little Thunder and Spotted Tail fled back to the Brulé camp, Harney and the infantry hot on their heels. When Little Thunder got within hailing distance of the camp he called out to the Indians to run. They did so—and ran right into the cavalry.

What followed was more a massacre than a battle, although individual warriors—especially Spotted Tail—covered themselves with glory. But the Indians could not stand up to the fire power of the troops. There were about two hundred fifty Indians in Little Thunder’s camp. Within half an hour Harney’s men had killed eighty-six of them and captured seventy women and children. Harney also had possession of the camp. The survivors, less than one hundred, scattered in every direction, without food or shelter.
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This was unmitigated disaster, on a scale undreamed of by the Sioux. Curly returned from his hunting trip, drawn by the smoke and noise, to the carnage. What he witnessed no Sioux had ever seen before—a Sioux camp completely destroyed. Curly had been brought up to believe that the loss of one or two warriors on a raiding party was a shocking business, the loss of three or four a tribal disaster. Now he saw dozens of dead warriors stretched out before him, Sioux women dead too, their dresses thrown over their heads, their pubic hair taken as scalps by the soldiers, right in the middle of a Sioux camp. For Curly, as for the entire Sioux nation, this was a new kind of warfare, totally beyond their imagination.

Late in the afternoon Curly found a survivor hiding in the bushes, a dead infant at her side. Her name was Yellow Woman; she was a Cheyenne who had been visiting with the Brulés. Her husband and son had been killed by the soldiers. Curly put together a travois and carried her away to safety. It turned out that she was a niece of Ice, a famous Cheyenne medicine man; thus began Curly’s long and close association with the Cheyennes.
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Harney, meanwhile, pressed his advantage. He marched his captives up the Oregon Trail to Fort Laramie, where he called all the chiefs from the friendly camps to a council. Twiss had been preparing to hand out the annuity goods to the friendlies, but Harney ordered him not to do so. He then spoke very roughly to the headmen, telling them there would be no more presents until the four
Brulés who had attacked the mail wagon in November 1854 and stolen the $20,000 were turned over to the military. Until that was done, Harney said, the war would continue. He then dismissed the chiefs, telling them he would march the next morning to Fort Pierre, attacking any Indians he encountered along the way.
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Three events in quick succession showed that Harney had accomplished his objective and that the Sioux were absolutely terrorized. First, he marched from Fort Laramie to Fort Pierre through the heart of Sioux territory without seeing a single Indian; they all fled from his path. Second, Spotted Tail and the other culprits from the mail-wagon affair gave themselves up, surrendering at Fort Laramie within two weeks of Harney’s demand; before Harney’s attack on Little Thunder, no one would have believed it possible to induce a Sioux warrior to surrender voluntarily.
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Third, Harney held a council at Fort Pierre in March 1856. Most of the Sioux headmen were there and they readily agreed to stop molesting emigrants on the Oregon Trail and to permit travel on a road from Fort Laramie to Fort Pierre. In return, Harney promised to start issuing annuity goods again.
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