Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (26 page)

Despite the strategic shortcomings, this was an impressive campaign. It was as close as the Sioux and Cheyennes ever came to making a concerted, unified
offensive
movement. The two-pronged attack was the right idea—it kept the soldiers from one area from reinforcing those under attack in another region. Indian morale was high. After the easy victories over the whites in 1864, the warriors were full of confidence. They were also impressed by their own numbers; never having seen such a large war party before (there were perhaps as many as three thousand warriors in the Oglala-Cheyenne camp alone), they were certain that nothing could stand in their path.

On the evening of July 24, 1865, after a three-day march, the expedition camped just below the Platte Bridge near Fort Casper (the site of present day Casper, Wyoming). The Oregon Trail crossed the North Platte River where the bridge stood and there was a small garrison stationed on the south bank to protect the bridge. The Indians could have attacked the garrison itself, with overwhelming numbers, or they could have burned the bridge and then, through sniping, prevented the soldiers from repairing it. Either way, they would have cut the white man’s line of communications. But the Indians’ idea of fighting was getting the enemy out into the open, where the red men’s numbers and skill as horsemen would be most telling and where their casualties would be lightest. So Roman Nose, Red Cloud, Young Man Afraid and the others decided to use the old decoy trick.

Twenty men would make up the decoy party. George Bent was one of them, Crazy Horse another, joined by the other shirt-wearers. The idea was that the decoys would draw a pursuit from the soldiers. Crazy Horse would lead the cavalry into the hills beyond the north
bank of the river, where the main body of warriors would be waiting over the rise, held in check by an
akicita
from each tribe.

At dawn, July 25, Crazy Horse was ready. Tossing a little dust over his hair and on the bay he had gotten from the Crows, he mounted up and trotted off with the decoys. They rode down toward the bridge, Crazy Horse motioning toward the herds of American horses and mules on the opposite bank. As they approached the bridge, Crazy Horse and the others shook out their buffalo blankets, as if in preparation for a stampeding of the herd. A company of troops with a howitzer came dashing out of the fort protecting the bridge, raced across the bridge, and stopped on the north bank. Holding the bay in check with one hand, Crazy Horse pretended to be beating his horse with the other, hoping to convince the soldiers that he was in a panicky retreat and thereby inducing them to follow. But the troops stayed put, so Crazy Horse and a young Cheyenne jumped from their horses and fired a few well-aimed shots at the soldiers. The whites responded by lobbing some howitzer shells in the direction of the decoy party.

When the warriors hidden behind the hills heard the heavy firing, they could not be restrained. First one or two broke ranks, an
akicita
policeman chasing them; then the multitude galloped to the top of the hills, to see what was happening. The soldiers below took one look, saw perhaps three thousand warriors staring down on them, and retreated to the safety of the fort. With Red Cloud and Young Man Afraid roaring at them, the members of the
akicita
finally caught up with the warriors and started herding them away from the hilltops, striking the stubborn ones with their quirts. The furious headmen then sent a Cheyenne, High Back Wolf, to tell the decoy party to return.
²⁹

When High Back Wolf passed on the message, one of the decoys spoke angrily: “Now, when I see anything and go to get it, I want to succeed in getting it.” Crazy Horse shouted his approval—he too wanted some action. “All right,” High Back Wolf said. “I feel just as you do about that, but I am trying to do what the headmen have asked me to do.” Then, after thinking about it for a minute, High Back Wolf decided to hell with his orders. “Come on now,” he called out. “Let us swim the river and get close to the soldiers.” With a whoop, Crazy Horse and the others did so.

A half dozen soldiers, returning from a hunting expedition, were riding up the river on the south bank and had nearly reached the post. Crazy Horse and the decoy party charged through these soldiers,
giving them the fright of their lives. At such close quartets, moving at top speed, the Indians could not use their weapons, but they had an orgy of coup counting as they rode through the terrified troops. Turning to charge again, the decoys ran into another small party of soldiers, who had come out from the fort to help their comrades. These troops shot High Back Wolf, who fell dead. (High Back Wolf had a powerful bullet-proof medicine, but it worked only on the condition that he put no metal, especially a bullet, into his mouth on the day of a fight. In the excitement just before he was killed, High Back Wolf had put a bullet into his mouth while reloading his six-shooter.) Crazy Horse tried to retrieve the body but could not, and the decoys retreated across the river, their heads hanging. The next dawn Crazy Horse, High Back Wolf’s father, and some Cheyennes sneaked down to the fort and retrieved the body.
³⁰

Later that day, July 26, Crazy Horse and the decoy party went out again, to try to accomplish their mission once more. The decoys went through their whole bag of tricks, pretending that their ponies were crippled or that they had fallen off—anything to get the troops to come out. But the soldiers just watched. Then, when the decoys had about given up, a party of troops on gray horses came riding out and crossed the bridge. The decoys thought they were finally being pursued, but in fact the troops (under the command of Lieutenant Caspar Collins) were headed upriver, going to escort a wagon train that was coming down the trail and about which the Indians knew nothing.

This time Red Cloud, Roman Nose, and Young Man Afraid had made a more complex plan. The Oglalas were stationed downriver from the bridge, the Cheyennes upstream. As Lieutenant Collins swung to his left on the north bank, the Oglalas below the bridge rode out to cut the soldiers off from the bridge. Then the Cheyennes swung down on Collins’ flank. Collins fled back toward the bridge, shouting that he was a friend and wanted no fight. Some Oglalas recognized him and gave way, yelling at each other over the noise of the battle not to shoot, this was a friend. But just as Collins reached the bridge, most of his men safely across, his horse bolted and took him back into the hills, where the Cheyennes killed him. They kept his horse for a long time, but it was always uncontrollable and no one could ride it.
³¹

The Cheyennes were angry with the Oglalas for letting the soldiers get away. The Indians outnumbered the troops by one hundred to one or more, but only eight soldiers had been killed. The Sioux had counted lots of coup on the retreating soldiers, but what good was
that? A body of nearly three thousand warriors had spent weeks in preparation, then made a three-day march, and all they had to show for it was eight scalps and some coup counted. True, the Sioux were less experienced in fighting whites than the Cheyennes, and had fewer guns,
*
but still the Cheyennes muttered that their allies should have killed more. Later in the day the Cheyenne mood softened when they discovered the wagon train, pillaged, and burned it, killing all the drivers except for two men who swam the river and got away.
³²
That night the Indians held a victory dance; the next day most of them began riding back to the Powder River.

That was the end of the great allied Indian expedition of 1865. The Indians had put the war “in the bag,” as the Indians phrased it, never mind that the troops still held the upper Platte Bridge, their stockade intact. The leaders could not hold the warriors together and the Indian army melted away. Up at Fort Rice, the Hunkpapa warriors had also broken through the
akicita,
spoiling Sitting Bull’s ambush. The white man’s line of communications remained secure.

Unknown to the Indians, while they were taking the war to the Holy Road, the United States Army was trying to bring the war to them. In late summer of 1865 three strong columns of troops, more than two thousand soldiers in all, set out from Fort Laramie for the Powder River country. They wanted to teach the wild Sioux and Cheyennes a lesson, then force them back into an agency on the Missouri or, even better if everything went well, down to Oklahoma. Gold had been discovered in Montana and the whites wanted a road through the country, along the shortest route between the Holy Road and the mines. It was called the Bozeman Trail.

But the troops the Army sent were Civil War regiments of draftees or volunteers, and the men were full of resentment. They wanted to be mustered out, not sent off to the farthest reaches of the Wild West to get killed by savage Indians. Those who did not desert to go to the mines spent their time sulking and cursing the Army; one regiment even pulled off a mutiny. To understate the case, their hearts were not in their work, and they blundered their way around the countryside, never managing to find any Indians who did not want to be found. Occasionally, the Oglalas or Cheyennes would run off some of the soldiers’ horses and otherwise pester them, but mainly the Indians left them alone. In September the soldiers, by then badly confused and often lost, were slaughtering their own horses for food. When they finally reached Fort Laramie, the soldiers
were in a frightful condition, mere crowds of ragged, hungry, and footsore men. One captain said they looked like tramps.
³³

While the Army was out making futile marches, the United States Government inaugurated a new Indian policy. The Radical Republicans were just coming into full control in Congress, anxious to remake the image and reality of America. They wanted to force the United States to live up to its obligations to blacks and other minority groups, including Indians. In their view, the trouble on the Plains came because the Army was always starting Indian wars; the solution was to buy a peace with the hostiles. These Indian lovers were just as determined to open the Bozeman Trail (and thus further the national purpose) as the bitterest Indian hater. The only real difference between the two groups was that the Indian lovers thought it would be cheaper to get control of the Powder River country through bribery than through fighting.

So a peace commission went out, loaded with presents, and all the friendlies signed whatever the commissioners told them to sign, took their gifts, and were happy. The Indians who made their marks on the treaty gave the whites the right to build posts and open roads in the Powder River country, a region none of the friendlies had been in for decades, if ever. The commissioners then proclaimed that peace had arrived. Meanwhile, there were three thousand or more Sioux and Cheyenne warriors on the Little Missouri and Powder rivers who had no intention of allowing any whites to enter their land.

Not until December 1865 did some bureaucrat realize that when the soldiers started out for the Powder River the next spring they would meet with opposition, a treaty with the Sioux being not much good when it did not include any of the hostile Sioux. So government agents sent a copy of the treaty up to Fort Laramie, with instructions to get the hostiles to sign. Runners went out to bring the chiefs into the fort, but only one or two minor chiefs came in. The others, including Young Man Afraid, Red Cloud, and Roman Nose, stayed out.

Thus did the year 1865 come to an end. Both sides had made a big effort, but nothing of consequence had been accomplished by either one. Still, something had been learned. The Indians had reorganized, Crazy Horse becoming a leader of the Oglalas, and Young Man Afraid and Red Cloud were now big men. The whites, too, were choosing new leaders. Both sides were preparing for an all-out struggle in 1866.

* Hyde estimates that the Oglalas had one gun per hundred warriors at this time.

CHAPTER TEN

War and Love Among the Americans

“We went out a skouting yesterday. We got to one house where there was Five Secessionests and they broke and run and Arch haloed out to shoot the ornery Suns of bitches and they all let go there fire. They may say what they please, but goddamit pa, it is fun.” From a letter from an Ohio recruit, writing home after his first brush with the enemy

George Armstrong Custer was a war lover. The Civil War was the great event in his life. He won national prominence and thoroughly enjoyed himself during those four bloody years. He responded enthusiastically to every aspect of war—being with “the boys,” drinking, swearing, loving the pretty young maids, fighting, marching. Custer had as much endurance as any Plains Indian and far more than his fellow whites; he actually enjoyed spending two or three days in the saddle, without rest or food. A 2
A.M.
breakfast of hardtack and black, unsweetened coffee has little appeal to most men, but Custer reveled in such moments. He could imagine few things finer than the hearty comradeship, the rough good humor of the campfire. Always curious, always anxious to see new places or to have new experiences, Custer made the most of his wartime travels, which took him up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States and threw him into daily contact with the great and near great. So often was he in the right place at the right time that “Custer’s luck” became a byword in the Army.