Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (53 page)

Custer later wrote about the Indians on the bluffs preparing to attack with an “immensely superior force,”
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but the fact that he could detach 40 per cent of his fighting strength to slaughter the ponies indicates that he was not hard pressed. His next action proved the point. When the butchering was done, he collected his troops—Elliott and his nineteen men were still missing—and began to march downstream along the Washita toward the Kiowa, Apache, and other villages. He hoped the warriors on the bluffs would flee to
their camps in order to prepare a defense, thus leaving him alone, and he planned to reverse directions and march back toward his wagon train when darkness fell. He later explained that he was worried about the safety of the wagons, which he had left behind two days before, but that excuse carries no weight, because the wagon train had an eighty-man escort, more than sufficient to take care of itself against almost any force of warriors.

Whatever his real reason for the retreat, Custer’s plan worked. As soon as the warriors saw Custer heading downstream they rode as fast as they could back to their camps. When darkness fell, Custer retraced his steps. Elliott still had not been found, but Custer would not waste time looking for him. He marched his men through much of the night and kept them moving until 2
A.M.,
despite the fact that they had not recovered their overcoats, were drenched with sweat from the morning’s fighting, hadn’t slept in two nights, and were now freezing. It is a wonder that he kept them going and a tribute to what good shape he had gotten them into before starting the campaign. This night he allowed the troopers to build bonfires to warm themselves, and the next day they met the wagon train. Custer then started for Camp Supply to report his victory to Sheridan.

The battle of the Washita was over. Almost immediately it was surrounded by controversy. Sheridan was delighted, of course, and issued a general field order praising Custer and the 7th Cavalry in the most grandiose terms.
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Eastern humanitarians, however, compared the Washita to Sand Creek, said that Black Kettle was an innocent victim attacked while living peacefully on his reservation, and denounced Custer as a bloodthirsty monster. Some Army officers had a different complaint; they accused Custer of abandoning Elliott and his nineteen men (who, it turns out, had been surrounded and killed). This charge rankled with the 7th Cavalry from then on, with officers and men taking sides for and against Custer.

The Washita battle raised other questions. Why was there no reconnaissance? Probably because Custer feared that the Cheyennes would escape again, as they had at Pawnee Fork. A reconnaissance would take time, which the Cheyennes might have used to get away. But why attack at all? Custer might have waited until dawn, then ridden into Black Kettle’s village under a flag of truce and demanded that Black Kettle turn over the young braves who had been rampaging in Kansas. It probably would not have worked; Black Kettle did not have that kind of authority and the warriors almost certainly would not have surrendered voluntarily. Still, Custer might have tried. That he did not was most likely a reflection of his single-mindedness;
having run the prey to ground, his only thought was to finish the hunt. Besides, he needed to prove to Sherman and Sheridan that he could both find and kill Indians.

Given his frame of mind at dawn, why then did Custer decide at noon to retreat? He had plenty of ammunition and was in possession of ample shelter for the winter weather, indeed the finest shelter the Plains afforded—the tipis. His own wagon train was coming up and would be with him shortly, and anyway the tipis were filled with buffalo meat. Custer’s force was self-sufficient and nicely stocked for a month’s campaign. But for the first time in his career he passed up an offensive opportunity, an opportunity so glittering that had he taken it and succeeded he would have killed more Indians than any other Indian fighter in history. The possibilities, had he continued to move downstream and destroy villages, were staggering, yet he turned around and marched the other way. To add to the mystery, he ignored his obligation, duty even, to search for Elliott and his men.

Why did he abandon the field? Did he think about Libbie, want to get home to her? Was he anxious to get back to Sheridan and claim the victory? Did he feel sorry for the Indians, pity them? Did he shrink from the thought of killing more women and children?

Or, more likely, when the warriors from downstream appeared on the surrounding bluffs, did he think of Fetterman? Most Army officers tended to see one hundred Indians where there were ten; did Custer see ten thousand where there were one thousand? In his own account of his decision to retreat, that was the only excuse he gave that made much sense, but it made sense only in the context of an imaginary, overwhelming force of warriors on the bluffs. Custer retreated, most probably, because he overestimated his enemy, which was the price he paid for attacking without reconnaissance.

It was also the price he paid for ignorance of the enemy. The previous summer he had consistently underestimated the Indians, as he would do again in his next big battle with them, on the banks of the Little Bighorn. He was hardly alone; not a single Army officer on the Plains had anything like an accurate knowledge of the enemy’s strength. This really was inexcusable. The Indian agents had a good count of the Plains Indians by this time, and the information was available to the Army. At the Washita, Custer figured he faced at least five thousand and perhaps as many as ten thousand hostiles, but it is extremely doubtful that there were so many warriors on the whole of the southern and central Plains, much less gathered at one spot in the middle of a hard winter. What the Army desperately
needed, and never got, was a first-rate intelligence corps. The white scouts, somewhat surprisingly, did not fill the void; they seem to have been as ignorant of Indian numbers as the officers. Custer and the scouts also consistently overestimated the number of guns the Indians had. If Custer had known how many Indians he was likely to encounter in Oklahoma, he would have realized that they had no chance to massacre his column. He could have smashed on into the downstream villages, confident that the warriors would not dare interfere with his bloody work.

Once he had decided to retreat, however, Custer’s order to burn the village and shoot the ponies made good sense. It was absolutely within the spirit and letter of Sheridan’s orders. It was also within the tradition of the American culture and its consistent policy toward Indians. These Cheyennes were enemies of progress; they stood in the way of the settlement of Kansas and they had to be removed. Custer’s destruction of Black Kettle’s people and village on the Washita can stand as a symbol of American Indian policy.

From the time of the first landings at Jamestown, the game went something like this: you push them, you shove them, you ruin their hunting grounds, you demand more of their territory, until finally they strike back, often without an immediate provocation so that you can say “they started it.” Then you send in the Army to beat a few of them down as an example to the rest. It was regrettable that blood had to be shed, but what could you do with a bunch of savages?

The men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took it for granted that the Indians had to be Christianized and modernized, but how could you do that until you caught them? The problem was more difficult on the Plains than it had been in the eastern woodlands, because with all that space it was hard to catch them. Compounding that problem, each Indian on the Plains required vast amounts of land to feed himself; to accommodate a few thousand Cheyennes on a reservation that would have allowed them to live as they wanted to live, the government would have had to have left them in possession of half of Kansas. In an America on an economic boom unprecedented in history, not to mention an America that was receiving millions of immigrants from Europe, who could abide that thought?

The point is that for all of America’s leaders’ sincere concern for the fate of the Indians, they had a higher loyalty. The men who made national policy, from the eighteenth century onward, supported by a broad consensus among the white population, have had as their first loyalty the doctrine of material progress. They have believed in that
doctrine more than in their Constitution or their treaties or their religion. America’s leaders and America’s white population have allowed nothing to stand in the path of progress. Not a tree, not a desert, not a river, nothing. Most certainly not Indians, regrettable as it may have been to have to destroy such noble and romantic people.

Well, it was regrettable, but who is to say they were wrong? Who can possibly judge? Who would be willing to tell the European immigrant that he can’t go to the Montana mines or to the Kansas prairie because the Indians need the land, so he had best go back to Prague or Dublin? Who wants to tell a hungry world that the United States cannot export wheat because the Cheyennes hold half of Kansas, the Sioux hold the Dakotas, and so on? Despite the hundreds of books by Indian lovers denouncing the government and making whites ashamed of their ancestors, and despite the equally prolific literary effort on the part of the defenders of the Army, here if anywhere is a case where it is impossible to tell right from wrong.

But we can tell truth from falsehood. It is, for example, totally irresponsible to state—as has so often been stated—that the United States pursued a policy of genocide toward the Indians, to cite the Washita as an example, and in the most extreme statements to claim that the Army actually did exterminate the red men. The United States did not follow a policy of genocide; it did try to find a just solution to the Indian problem. The consistent idea was to civilize the Indians, incorporate them into the community, make them part of the melting pot. That it did not work, that it was foolish, conceited, even criminal, may be true, but that doesn’t turn a well-meant program into genocide, certainly not genocide as we have known it in the twentieth century. Custer was many things, but he was no Nazi SS guard shooting down innocent people at every opportunity.

To return to the Washita battle, it was typical of the Indian-fighting Army in other ways. Without the Osage guides, Custer would have blundered into the Cheyenne village in the middle of the night, which would have led to an awful confusion and greatly reduced the magnitude of his victory, if he could have won at all. “Divide and conquer” was the watchword, and throughout its Indian-fighting history the United States Army relied on one set of Indians to help it locate and kill another set. The Washita was a surprise assault on a sleeping village, which again was typical; Custer had no idea what the party he had trailed to the Washita had been up to in Kansas—the warriors could have been off on a buffalo hunt, for all he knew, not a raid. Clearly Black Kettle’s people as a whole had
done the whites in Kansas no harm. Custer’s argument was that the village contained men guilty of murder, theft, and other outrages, which justified the attack. But although the city of Denver was also full of men guilty of murder, theft, and other outrages, no one in the Army ever thought to lead a column of cavalry on Denver, shoot it up, and burn it down.

But, of course, the city of Denver represented “progress,” not an obstacle to progress. At the Washita, Custer was serving his nation and helping his nation realize its destiny. Every person who has ever taken a train to California, or settled there or in Kansas, or driven an automobile through the area, or eaten the wheat or beef grown on the Plains, has reaped the benefit of the Washita battle. History is not black or white nor is it propaganda. History is ambiguous, if told honestly. It is hard enough to figure out exactly what happened and why; it is impossible to play God and judge the right or wrong of a given action, even the Washita.

Custer spent the remainder of the winter of 1868-69 roaming the Plains, once at the head of a small squadron of cavalry, once with a regiment of infantry added to the 7th Cavalry. He fought no battles, but he did manage to persuade most of the tribes—who had fled their camps on the Washita—to return to the Fort Cobb reservation. On his expeditions, which took him through western Oklahoma and the panhandle of Texas, he brought along three captive Cheyenne women, including the young girl who had almost become his “wife.” She seems to have attached herself to him and was a great help as a guide and in persuading the Indians to return to the reservation. Her name was Mo-nah-se-tah. Custer described her as “an exceedingly comely squaw, possessing a bright, cheery face, a countenance beaming with intelligence, and a disposition more inclined to be merry than one usually finds among the Indians. … Added to bright, laughing eyes, a set of pearly teeth, and a rich complexion, her well-shaped head was crowned with a luxuriant growth of the most beautiful silken tresses, rivalling in color the blackness of the raven and extending, when allowed to fall loosely over her shoulders, to below her waist.”
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In January 1869 Mo-nah-se-tah had a baby, which she brought with her on Custer’s last two expeditions.

The date of Mo-nah-se-tah’s delivery is important, because later the Indians claimed that Custer was the father. Custer was a figure larger than life, unbelievable in so many ways, and he attracted myths. In a sense, Custer was part of the Mike Fink-Paul Bunyan tall-tale tradition of America. More nonsense has been said, written,
and believed about him than any other Army officer. The Mo-nah-se-tah story is a prime example. The Indians spread the rumor that Custer had fathered her baby; whites picked it up, added embellishments, until it came to be believed that Custer had made her his mistress. Eventually, the story began to appear in serious historical studies and is now firmly established as one of the elements in the Custer myth. All that need be said about it, however, is that Custer first met Mo-nah-se-tah at the Washita on November 27, 1868; her baby was born on January 14, 1869.
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