Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (54 page)

Custer’s winter campaigning was marked by many difficulties, of which the most significant was keeping the horses and mules going. One major lesson learned was that an extended winter campaign was well-nigh impossible. A short expedition, like Custer’s at the Washita, was feasible, but over an extended period of time snow, mud, and cold inhibited movement and caused suffering and exhaustion to the men and even more to the animals. Even after he had reduced his command by weeding out the unfit horses, Custer returned from one expedition with two thirds of his eight hundred men dismounted. On another march Custer had to burn nearly all his wagons because his mules had perished. Frequently his men were reduced to eating mule or Horse meat. In March 1869 a New York visitor to one of Custer’s camps reported that “the dead carcasses of dozens of horses … lay scattered about, tainting the fresh spring air with their disgusting stench.”
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The Army’s transportation system, in short, was not much better than that of its enemies; Army horses and mules were no more able to campaign on the frozen prairie than the Indian pintos.

Custer had a personal problem, too. On February 9, 1869, the St. Louis
Democrat
printed an unsigned letter from an officer of the 7th Cavalry criticizing Custer for making no effort to save Elliott and his men. When Custer read the story, he called all his officers to a conference. Tapping his boot top with his whip, he said he intended to horsewhip the author. Captain Frederick Benteen, a leading anti-Custer officer, shifted his revolver to a handy position in his belt and said, “All right, General, start your horsewhipping now. I wrote it.” Dumfounded, confused, red-faced, Custer stared at Benteen a moment, then walked out.
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The climax to the expeditions came on March 15, 1869, when Custer—with Mo-nah-se-tah’s help—found a Cheyenne village, headed by Little Robe and Medicine Arrow, in Texas just west of the Oklahoma boundary, between Sweetwater Creek and the North Fork of the Red River. These Cheyennes had been running all winter.
Custer wanted to force them back to their reservation at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where they could be watched. He also wanted to rescue two white women held captive by the Cheyennes. Custer, his troopers, and most white Americans had been indignant at the brutal killing of two white captives by Indians in Black Kettle’s camp immediately after the 7
^th
Cavalry charged into the village in November 1868. The Cheyennes had had the right idea, however, white indignation notwithstanding, because this time Custer held back from a surprise attack. He wanted to rescue the captives alive, not recover their bodies, and he knew that the first shot fired would be the signal to massacre the white women.

Custer rode toward the village with only his interpreter with him. When in sight of the Indians he rode in a tight circle, the signal that he wanted to parley. The Cheyennes invited him into camp, then sat him down in a circle inside Medicine Arrow’s lodge. Medicine Arrow lit a pipe and held it while Custer puffed away on it. As Custer smoked, Medicine Arrow told him in Cheyenne that he was a treacherous man and that if he came there with a bad purpose—to do harm to the people—he would be killed with all his men. Then Medicine Arrow poured the ashes from the pipe on the toes of Custer’s boots, to give him bad luck.”
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Custer assured Medicine Arrow of his peaceful intentions and was allowed to leave.

The following day some Cheyennes came to Custer’s camp to repay the visit. Custer asked if they were ready to go to the reservation at Fort Sill and if they were willing to trade for the white captives. When the Cheyennes indicated that they were not prepared to do either, Custer seized four men. Holding them as hostages, he said they would be freed when the captives had been released. Custer waited three days; when the Cheyennes made no move to comply with his demands, he told them he would hang the hostages the next morning if the white women were not released. The following day the Cheyennes freed the captives. According to George Bent, the half-Cheyenne who had cast his lot with his mother’s people and was living in the Medicine Arrow village, the Cheyennes then paid a friendly visit to Custer’s camp. Bent heard Custer give a command. Soldiers started grabbing at the Indians, attempting to take their weapons, while other troopers tried to surround the visitors. All the Indians got away except three men, whom Custer held and sent north to Fort Hays, Kansas, telling the Cheyennes that the hostages would be freed when the village moved onto its reservation. Afterward two of the hostages, eighty-year-old Slim Face and fifty-year-old Curly Hair, were killed by guards at
Fort Hays. The Cheyennes, meanwhile, had gone onto their reservation.
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The winter campaign was over. Taken all in all, it had been a success. Operations by the 5th Cavalry in the summer of 1869 completed the job, and Sherman’s goal of clearing the territory between the Arkansas and Platte rivers of Indians had been accomplished.

Custer spent the summer of 1869 and the next two years at Fort Hays, with Libbie. A famous Indian fighter now, he was the center of attention. He shot wild turkey, antelope, and elk, became an expert buffalo hunter (hunting buffalo, he declared, was as exciting as hunting Indians), and guided a number of distinguished eastern and European visitors on buffalo hunts. Libbie later wrote a fascinating, detailed description of their years together at Fort Hays,
Following the Guidon.
If she can be believed, they never had a sad day, never got depressed, never missed the comforts of civilization.

The Kansas Pacific Railroad brought congressmen, businessmen, and other members of America’s elite to Fort Hays. These men were in a hurry to get to Kansas before the buffalo were gone, fences built, and cattle and wheat had replaced the primeval prairie. The atmosphere was terribly romantic. Custer would turn out a company or two of the 7th Cavalry, along with the band to play “Garry Owen,” and lead his guests and troops on a wide-ranging hunt. His staghounds bounded along beside the column. “One of the guests,” Libbie reported, “enthusiastically happy, and fearless in expression of his joy, kept turning to take in the rare sight, declaring that nothing in our prosaic nineteenth century was so like the days of chivalry, when some feudal lord went out to war or to the chase, followed by his retainers.”
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Custer was the knight
sans peur et sans reproche,
while she was his lady fair. Peace brought good times to Custer, just as it did to Crazy Horse, four hundred miles north.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Truce on the High Plains, 1869-73

Hump:
“We’re up against it now. My horse has a wound in the leg.”

Crazy Horse:
“I know it. We were up against it from the start.”

The Sioux hostiles spent the summer of 1869 on the Powder River. Red Cloud led one big expedition against the Shoshonis, and Crazy Horse led a couple of small parties on raids against the Crows,
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but for the most part the Indians concentrated on hunting. By fall they had an immense pile of buffalo robes and they set off for the North Platte River, where they expected to trade their robes for guns and ammunition, blankets, coffee, utensils, and a little whiskey. Many of these Indians, including Crazy Horse, had not been near a trading post for five years or more and they badly needed the white man’s goods, to which they had become accustomed but which they could not make themselves.
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But when the great camp arrived on the North Platte the soldiers there fired at the hostiles, wounding one, and the Indians drew back. Sherman had surrendered the Powder River forts on the understanding that the Oglalas and other hostiles would either move to an agency on the Missouri River or would stay on the Powder River; the whole point to the treaty had been to keep the wild Indians away from the Platte and thus away from the Union Pacific Railroad. The government’s orders, therefore, were that there could be no trading along the North Platte. Making matters worse, the traders could not load up their wagons and go to the Powder River to trade. Sherman’s attitude was simple; if the Indians wanted white man’s goods, let them move to their reservations. If they insisted on living the wild life, let them do so without any help from the whites.
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The government was especially insistent that none of the Powder River Indians get their hands on firearms, because from Sherman on down the attitude of the Army officers was that the treaty of 1868 was a truce, not a peace treaty. As Sherman put it, “we all know that
the time approaches for the battle that is to decide whether they or the United States are sovereign in the land they occupy,” and it would be the worst sort of foolishness to give arms to future enemies.
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The Indians felt they had been lied to. So did the traders, who had used their influence on Red Cloud to get him to sign the treaty on the understanding that trade would be resumed once peace came. But as far as the government was concerned the scheme worked, because it led to a split in the Oglalas. Red Cloud and half or more of the Powder River hostiles soon moved onto an agency on the White River, south of the Black Hills, called Red Cloud Agency.
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Crazy Horse and the other Oglala hostiles stayed in the Powder River country. Within less than a year Red Cloud had so many complaints about his treatment at his agency that the whites took him to Washington to meet the Great White Father, President Grant. They persuaded Red Cloud to come to this 1870 summit meeting by promising him that Grant would listen carefully to his complaints. But their real purpose was to show Red Cloud the enormous power of white society, and they went to great lengths to make sure he saw that power.

“That was an epic journey,” George Hyde writes of the trip to Washington by Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and the other Indians who went along. “By the time they reached the Missouri the Oglalas had grown accustomed to train life; but now they came to Omaha, a hive of white people with hundreds of buildings, some of them very high—four, five stories! The Oglalas liked Omaha; but Chicago stunned them, and as they traveled on their ideas of the world, one by one, toppled and fell in ruins. They reached Washington dazed and rather frightened; that they had any courage left was a splendid compliment to their breed and training.”
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In Washington, Red Cloud and Spotted Tail made many complaints to the authorities but got little satisfaction. Instead, the government concentrated on showing them such things as the big naval guns, including a fifteen-inch Rodman gun which was fired for them. The great shell went screaming over the Potomac and could be seen skipping over the water miles away. Red Cloud was awe-struck.
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Later, Red Cloud and the others went to New York, where they were terribly uncomfortable, although Red Cloud managed to make a splendid speech at Cooper Union, much to the delight
of the friends of the Indians.
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When he got back to the Plains, Red Cloud put away his warrior’s clothing and from that time onward played the role of politician, working both for his own advancement and for the good of his people. He looked the other way when his young men sneaked out of the agency in the spring to join Crazy Horse and the hostiles on the Powder River—he knew Indian braves too well to try to stop them—but he himself stayed off the warpath. As far as can be determined, he never again lived in the Powder River country he had fought so hard to defend.

With Red Cloud gone, Crazy Horse’s stature among the hostiles rose. As an advocate of war to the bitter end, he was held in high esteem by those warriors who shared his sentiments. His unquestioned bravery and his skill in leading war parties against the Crows or Shoshonis made him a bigger and bigger man. He had not, however, replaced Red Cloud as leader of all the Oglalas on the Powder River—far from it. When the war ended in 1868 with the burning of Fort Phil Kearny, the Oglalas and their allies had no reason to stay together in one big camp and they scattered into small bands, which was much more to their liking, coming together in the spring for a Sun Dance and perhaps again in the fall for a buffalo hunt. Insofar as there was a chief over the Oglalas, it was Old Man Afraid, who had refused to go to Washington with Red Cloud; but even Old Man Afraid was more a respected elder whose sage advice would be fully heard than he was a governmental leader who could give orders. The Oglalas, in short, had no real leader.

Crazy Horse was foremost among the many war leaders, but he was not a chief of a band, much less of the whole tribe. He continued to take his duties as shirt-wearer seriously, so seriously that he still held back from running off with Black Buffalo Woman, even though she wanted to marry him, and he was furious with No Water for not allowing her to have her freedom. But he would not disrupt the tribe.