Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (57 page)

With the grand duke, Custer, Barrett, assorted Russian admirals, ambassadors, and generals looking on, the Brulés drove the herd into the canyon. The newspaper reporter described what followed: “Spotted Tail and his chosen Sioux, with a wild whoop, charged into the midst of the fleeing herd, and with unerring aim let fly the feathered arrows from their bows. It was then that the Imperial party
were favored with a splendid view of a scene that few white men, who have lived many years upon the plains, have ever witnessed. It was difficult to decide which to admire the more, the skill of the Indian in managing his horse, or the rapidity and accuracy with which he let fly his feathered darts into the side of the doomed buffalo. In some respects the scene resembled a charge of cavalry upon troops already routed and fleeing in disorder; and the Duke was forcibly reminded of the riding of the Cossacks in his native country.”
²⁹
Alexis retrieved an arrow that Spotted Tail had shot clear through a buffalo, to take home and show his father.

Luncheon that noon consisted of caviar and other delicacies, along with champagne, brought out to the hunters from base camp. Custer and Alexis had become great friends by this time; the Russian was as much of a practical joker as Custer and the two delighted in pulling childish pranks on the dignified Russian ambassadors and admirals. Custer also regaled Alexis with stories about how it had been in the old days on the Plains, before the coming of the railroad. Alexis was disappointed at not seeing any of the enormous herds he had heard so much about. Custer explained that the grand duke had got there just in time; in another few years there would be no more buffalo left on the central Plains. Hides were being sent east from Fort Riley and other points at the rate of forty thousand per shipment. If the ground had been bare instead of covered with snow, Alexis could have seen for himself—the Plains were covered with buffalo bones (indeed, a minor but flourishing industry was springing up on the Plains; settlers in need of cash would gather wagon-loads of bones and take them to the railroad station, where they were shipped on east by the tons to be ground up for fertilizer).
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When camp broke up, Cody provided a parting flourish of drama. With the Brulés pretending to chase his wagon, he drove the grand duke at breakneck speed in a four-in-hand over the prairie, Custer along as a passenger, whooping and hollering.
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Back at North Platte, Alexis asked Sheridan if Custer could stay with the party for the remainder of his tour of the country, and Sheridan readily agreed. So Custer rode the train to Denver (the Union Pacific was across the Plains by this time and a spur ran down to Denver), where he attended a grand ball, then went on another buffalo hunt with Alexis. On January 21, 1872, they took the Kansas Pacific, headed for St. Louis and the East.

Until the previous year the Kansas Pacific and the Union Pacific had advertised that passengers could shoot buffalo as the train sped along, and thousands had been killed and left to the wolves and
coyotes by the sportsmen of the day, who realized that it was all coming to a rapid end and that this was their last chance. As the imperial party rattled through Kansas, it saw buffalo along the tracks, nothing like the numbers encountered two years earlier but enough to excite Alexis and Custer. They climbed into the baggage car, each armed with a Spencer rifle, and took pot shots at buffalo as the train sped along at twenty miles per hour. Alexis claimed six kills, while Custer and Sheridan (who soon joined the two hunters) also did their best to eliminate the scattering of buffalo left in Kansas.
³²
Barrett wrote that Custer was “enjoying his vacation as keenly as a schoolboy.”
³³

Custer’s trip with Grand Duke Alexis across the Plains was a dramatic illustration of the conquest of space that the railroad brought about. In the
summer
of 1867 Custer had taken four days to cover the distance from westernmost Kansas to Fort Riley in the eastern part of Kansas, and even then he had ridden the railroad for the last half of the way. In the
winter
of 1872, he covered a much longer distance over much of the same route in less than twenty-four hours, including some stops to pick up the heads of dead buffalo shot by Alexis.
³⁴
Before the coming of the railroad, it took from ten days to two weeks just to cross Kansas.

From ten days at best in the summer to one day in the winter—what an enormous difference! No wonder the men of that era had a sense of bigness about them, an unshatterable confidence in the future, a perfect belief in America and in technology, an absolute faith in their destiny. They had done a remarkable thing in conquering the continent. Custer was proud of his intimate part in the building process, and one supposes that he filled Alexis’ ears with old-timer stories about how tough it used to be to get across the Plains, along with only half-joking complaints about how the comforts and conveniences of modern civilization were making men soft. But he surely conveyed something of a feeling of love for those railroad tracks they were bouncing across at twenty miles per hour and all they symbolized; equally probably, Alexis must have been impressed by the railroads across the Plains—Russia had nothing like them.

Libbie joined the party at Louisville, Kentucky, where there was another endless series of grand balls. She danced with His Imperial Highness and was the center of attention throughout the night. A reporter described her, now thirty years old, as “a dark loveliness.”
³⁵
Alexis invited both her and Custer to accompany the party on a steamboat trip down the Ohio to the Mississippi, then on south to
New Orleans. The Custers accepted and had a marvelous time, surrounded by all that royalty, being served coffee and rolls in bed in the morning, chatting with the distinguished visitors. “The Admiral is all sunshine and sweet simplicity,” Libbie recorded in her diary. “He strives to interest Alexis in the towns we pass, length of rivers, and the like. But in boat or on the train Alexis is not concerned with the outside, only with the pretty girls, with music—he sings magnificently, and has already learned Lydia Thompson’s Music Hall ditty—which he renders ‘If efer I cease to luf …’—in his eternal cigarette, and in joking with his suite and with the General [Custer].”
³⁶

In New Orleans there were more balls, visits to the restaurants, shopping, and receptions. The imperial party stayed at the St. Charles Hotel and played the horses at the Fair Grounds.
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The grand duke then took the train to Pensacola, Florida, where a Russian warship picked him up and took him to Havana for more touring.

The Custers went back to Monroe for a short visit and to attend the wedding of Custer’s sister Maggie and Lieutenant James Calhoun, whom Custer managed to get appointed to the 7th Cavalry staff. Then they returned to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where Custer relieved the boredom by wearing a different costume every day. Sometimes he would don a military uniform, then civilian clothes with a dove-gray topper, next fringed buckskins. Barrett came for a visit. Custer lost big money betting on horse races. For the most part, though, he fretted and fumed, wondering when he would get back to the Plains.
³⁸

In February 1873 he finally got the orders he wanted. He was to gather together the 7th Cavalry and take it to Fort Abraham Lincoln, on the Missouri River just south of the town of Bismarck, North Dakota. The Northern Pacific was moving westward and was about to enter territory the Sioux thought had been promised to them in the treaty of 1868. There was going to be trouble, big trouble, and Sheridan wanted his best man on the scene to protect the advancing railroad. Custer had made it possible to build the Kansas Pacific; now he could do the same for the Northern Pacific.

Custer greeted the assignment with unabashed delight. He strode into Libbie’s sewing room in their Elizabethtown quarters, laughing and talking so fast she could not make out a word he was saying, waltzed her around the room, picked her up and put her on top of a table, out of harm’s way, and proceeded to throw furniture in every direction, including a chair he tossed into the kitchen. Libbie hopped
down from the table, grabbed an atlas, and quietly retired into a safe corner to look up Bismarck. “When my finger traced our route from Kentucky almost up to the border of the British Possessions,” she later wrote, “it seemed as if we were going to Lapland.”
³⁹

So, in the spring of 1873, Custer started back toward the land he loved. The Northern Pacific was still short of Bismarck, so it had a long way to go before it reached the Yellowstone River country, home of most of the Sioux hostiles. Custer expected that his services would be needed for a long time to come. His job was to drive the Sioux out of the way. The time had come for Custer to meet Crazy Horse on the field of battle.

* The agency was a small group of buildings—warehouse, Army headquarters, agent’s house, etc. The area around it, where the Indians set up their tipis—sometimes forty miles or more away from the agency—was the reservation.

Part Four

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Crazy Horse and Custer on the Yellowstone, 1873

“My Precious Darling—Well, here we are at last, at the far-famed—and to you far-distant—Yellowstone. How I have longed for you during our march in what seems a new world, a Wonderland.”  Custer to Libbie, July 19,1873

“Sitting Bull had great power over the Sioux. He was a good medicine man. He made good medicine. Many Indians believed him. He knew how to lead them. He told the Sioux many times he was not made to be a reservation Indian. The Great Spirit made him a free Indian to go where he wanted to go, to hunt buffalo and to be a big leader in his tribe.”

Lewis Dewitt, a white scout

Sitting Bull is perhaps the most famous of all North American Indians. The whites first knew him as the instigator of resistance to United States Army forays in 1872 into the northern Sioux territory and then as the organizer of the Indian forces that fought Custer at the Little Bighorn in 1876. Later he was a star attraction in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. There he made money, most of which, Annie Oakley, another of Buffalo Bill’s stars, stated, “went into the pockets of small, ragged boys. Nor could he understand how so much wealth could go brushing by, unmindful of the poor.” After looking over much of the eastern United States, Sitting Bull declared that in his opinion “the white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it.”
¹

His photograph—the one in which he is wearing a buckskin, fringed shirt, a crucifix around his neck, his braids over his breast, weasel tails hanging from them, his chin jutting at the camera, his broad mouth set, his sharp nose pushing out defiantly, his eyes narrow and hard, watching and wondering, a single feather in his hair —has been distributed worldwide. Books have been written and
movies made on his life. He appeals to everyone—to the Indian lover his strength of face and character and the awesomeness of his dignity bear witness to the nobility of Indians, while to the Indian hater his ferocious resistance to the whites entitles him to, if nothing else, deep respect.

Sitting Bull was an extraordinary man for any race at any time, and such a man is of necessity complex. He was all that the whites thought he was, and much more. He was an orator, a philosopher, an adviser, a propagandist for his cause, a lay preacher, a teacher, a husband and father, a healer of the sick, a psychiatrist, a political leader, and a man. He evidently never held any authorized tribal position, either political or military, which may have contributed to rather than detracted from his strength. Something like that had happened with Red Cloud; although Red Cloud was never a chief, the 1865-68 Powder River war was known as Red Cloud’s War to the Indians as well as to the whites. It was as if the allied Indian forces at Captain Fetterman’s defeat in 1866 outside Fort Phil Kearny had been one big war party, with Red Cloud as its leader.

In somewhat the same way, the struggle that began in 1872 and lasted until 1877 is sometimes called Sitting Bull’s War. Sitting Bull was neither the chief nor a war leader in his tribe, the Hunkpapa Sioux, nor did the alliance formed by the Indians grant him any position or power. Nevertheless, he was the Benjamin Franklin of the effort, the adviser to everyone, the man to inspire the resistance, to give it some shape and form, to ask hard questions of the men making the actual decisions, to oversee everything, to be the father of it all. Frank Grouard, the white Army scout and translator who lived with the Oglalas and Hunkpapas for five years, later said that “Sitting Bull’s name was a ‘tipi word’ for all that was generous and great.”