Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (68 page)

With blood streaming down both his arms, Sitting Bull then danced around and around the pole, staring constantly at the sun. He danced after the sun had set, through the night and into the next day; for eighteen hours he danced. Then he fainted. When Black Moon revived him by throwing cold water on his face, Sitting Bull’s eyes cleared and he spoke to Black Moon in a low voice. His offering had been accepted, his prayers had been heard. He had had a vision.

Black Moon walked into the middle of the circle and called out, “Sitting Bull wishes to announce that he just heard a voice from above saying, ‘I give you these because they have no ears.’ He looked up and saw soldiers and some Indians on horseback coming down like grasshoppers, with their heads down and their hats falling off. They were falling right into our camp.”
⁹

Then the people rejoiced. They did not need a holy man to interpret Sitting Bull’s vision—clearly it foretold an attack on the camp by the soldiers, who would all be killed by the Indians. Even the most sophisticated agency Indian present at that Sun Dance was impressed by Sitting Bull’s performance and made into a believer. Let the soldiers come!

After the dance, the camp moved back to the valley of the Little Bighorn and settled down on Ash Creek. There, on June 16, Cheyenne scouts rode into camp. They reported that General Crook, old Three Stars,” was coming north again, at the head of a one-thousand-man column of white troops, accompanied by 260 Indian allies, mainly Crows and Shoshonis. The hostiles held a council. Some favored moving out of Crook’s way; others wanted to start every warrior in the camp moving toward Crook. Crazy Horse rejected both suggestions. He advised leaving half or more of the warriors in camp, to protect the helpless ones and to provide a reserve, while he rode at the head of 1,500 or so warriors to meet and turn back the Crook column. The advice was accepted. Sitting Bull insisted on coming along, although he was still so weak from his Sun Dance ordeal that he could barely sit a horse and needed a man to help him mount and ride. On the afternoon of June 16, the
column set off to attack Crook before Crook could attack the camp.
¹⁰

Crook’s column was part of a three-pronged offensive that had been under way for a month. From Fort Ellis in Montana Major General John Gibbon was moving east down the Yellowstone River with 450 men, while General Terry was now coming up the Yellowstone from the east with a total force of 2,700 men. Custer rode with Terry, at the head of the twelve troops of the 7th Cavalry. On the march Custer revealed two facets of his many-sided character. In his official capacity he was as tough, as meticulous, and as professional as any general officer could be. He pushed the men hard, but he pushed himself harder. He had the troopers up before dawn and kept them marching until after dark. He held regular inspections, saw to it that his men had the best available equipment and supplies (they were armed with the 1873 model Springfield .45-70s), and generally saw to their welfare while making certain that they were in fighting trim.

But the little boy in General Custer was still very much alive, and he could no more repress his juvenile spirit than he could his ambition. At times it almost seemed that the campaign was a summer camping trip. Custer had his dogs along and he frequently took off on hunting trips. Somewhat like the Sioux on the Little Bighorn, he was enjoying a reunion. Tom Custer was along, of course, along with Calhoun (Custer’s brother-in-law), Keogh, Cooke, and other old friends. Boston Custer—“Bos”—the general’s younger brother, was there too, serving as forage master. Custer’s nephew, Autie Reed, a teen-ager, had joined up and helped drive the beef herd. Mark Kellogg, the correspondent, joined Custer’s “family,” and together they had a jolly time. They were marching through magnificent terrain—“We are now in a country heretofore unvisited by white men,” Custer wrote Libbie with his usual exaggeration—and as always the scenery inspired Custer. The only thing wrong was Libbie’s absence, and on May 31 Custer wrote her, “I have about made up my mind that when I go on expeditions like this you are to go too. You could have endured this as well as not.”
¹¹

Custer and Tom delighted in playing practical jokes at the expense of their younger brother. Once the three of them went for a ride away from the column; Bos fell behind. “Let’s slip round the hill behind Bos,” Custer suggested to Tom, “where he can’t find us, and when he starts we’ll fire in the air near him.” They hid, Bos came over the hill, looked puzzled, and Custer let loose with a bullet that
whizzed over his brother’s head. Bos turned and fled back toward the column, Custer and Tom shooting over his head as he rode. “Tom and I mounted our horses and soon overhauled him,” Custer wrote Libbie. “He will not hear the last of it for some time.”
¹²

They slept in the open, Tom, Custer, Autie Reed, and Bos, around the campfire. “Tom pelted ‘Bos’ with sticks and clods of earth after we had retired,” Custer wrote Libbie on June 17. “I don’t know what we would do without ‘Bos’ to tease.”
¹³

Custer maintained his usual literary productivity during the march. He wrote long, descriptive letters to Libbie and articles for
Galaxy.
The steamboat,
Far West,
plying the Yellowstone, picked up the mail and brought letters from Libbie. Custer wrote far into the night and occasionally got up an hour or so before reveille in order to have more time to write. “Bloody Knife looks on in wonder at me because I never get tired,” Custer wrote, “and says no other man could ride all night and never sleep.”
¹⁴
Custer had cut his hair short for the campaign, but he was growing a beard. He wore a red tie, broad-brimmed white hat, and his fringed buckskin shirt.
¹⁵

Throughout the march, Terry leaned on Custer, who was, after all, on his fourth major expedition across the Plains while it was Terry’s first. With his wonderful sense of topography—he was almost as good as an Indian—Custer picked out the trail, no easy task as it had to be level enough for the Gatling guns and the wagons. Once, early in the march from Fort Abraham Lincoln, without permission, Custer took four companies on a forty-five-mile scout up the Little Missouri. Terry complained to his diary about Custer’s insubordination but did not put him under arrest or, evidently, even give him a verbal reprimand.

By June 10, Terry and Gibbon were in contact at the mouth of the Rosebud. Between them they had covered the upper Yellowstone to the mouth of Rosebud Creek and seen no tracks indicating that the hostiles might have crossed the river, so they were certain that Sitting Bull was somewhere to the south, camping on the Rosebud, the Tongue, the Little Bighorn, the Powder, or the Bighorn. With Crook coming up from the south, they had the Sioux trapped. Now the job was to locate the Indians before they escaped. Terry decided to send Major Reno and half the 7th Cavalry to the south on a scout of the Powder and Tongue valleys. Custer was to move the other half of the regiment back to the mouth of the Tongue, there to await Reno’s return.

Custer strongly opposed Reno’s making such a scout. He thought it a “wild goose chase,” arguing that the hostiles were on the Rosebud
or the Little Bighorn. He also thought it dangerous to leave half the regiment behind when a march of a day or two of all twelve troops of the 7th Cavalry would bring them to the Indian camp. Custer feared that the scouting expedition would put the Indians on the alert and make it possible for them to escape. But his real objection was that Reno, not he, would be in command. He evidently had a shouting argument with Terry about it, but Terry would not budge.
¹⁶

While Custer sat at the mouth of the Tongue, he made the last preparations for the battle he soon expected to fight. He was leaving his dogs behind and had officers and men give up their sabers, which were packed in boxes and stored. Custer left the regimental band behind, along with some staff officers and dismounted troopers. On June 16 the shake-down was complete, and Custer waited for Reno to return. That night in camp he finished an article for
Galaxy.
He was about one hundred miles north of Crook, but had no idea where Crook was. Nor did he know that Crazy Horse was marching that night toward Crook.

While Custer, Reno, Gibbon, Terry, and Crook looked for the Sioux, the Sioux found Crook on the Rosebud. On June 16 Crazy Horse led a night march through broken country from the big camp in the valley of the Little Bighorn across the divide to the Rosebud, about thirty miles to the south-southeast. They marched in column formation, with the front, rear, and flanks guarded by Sioux and Cheyenne
akicita.
Crazy Horse was not going to allow any ambitious youngster an opportunity to dash off and put Crook on his guard. At dawn, June 17, the column was close to the Rosebud near the mouth of Trail Creek. Here Crazy Horse stopped to allow the ponies to rest and graze while the men put on their war paint. At about 8:30
A.M.
Crazy Horse had his men on the march again.

Crook, meanwhile, had been marching since 4
A.M.,
June 17. As Crazy Horse was moving forward, Crook was ordering his men to unsaddle their horses and turn them out to graze. He had halted because the Crow and Shoshoni scouts were apprehensive and asked for time to carry out a reconnaissance. Chief Washakie, the great Shoshoni leader whom Crazy Horse had met in battle on a number of occasions, is said to have told Crook at this time that there were too many Sioux ahead for him to fight.
¹⁷

Crazy Horse had his army on the west side of the Rosebud Valley, hidden behind a high hill. Creeping to the top, he could see Crook’s 1,200-man force scattered on both sides of the river. The valley was
about a mile wide, with the creek running through the middle of it. To the north, the valley narrowed down into a heavily timbered canyon, a perfect place for an ambush if Crook could be lured in that direction. The valley ground below Crazy Horse was very rough and broken, covered with rocks, trees, and bushes.

Crazy Horse had no time to make any plans, for scarcely had he looked down on Crook’s scattered troopers than some Crow scouts rode up to his position. The Crows saw Crazy Horse and behind him a mass of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, and took off as fast as their ponies could run, headed downhill for Crook’s camp, yelling “Sioux! Sioux!” at the top of their lungs. Crazy Horse’s warriors immediately broke through the ranks of the
akicita
and gave chase. The battle of the Rosebud had begun.

The ensuing action was confused and confusing. There was no over-all leadership on either side; as Robert Utley notes, the broken terrain fragmented the fight and prevented effective central direction.
¹⁸
For the most part, it was every man for himself, with the hostiles charging again and again on Crook’s divided units. Never had the Sioux or Cheyennes fought so fiercely. Never before had they pressed home even one attack in the way that they did on several occasions that day. Colonel Anson Mills, who was in the battle, said the hostiles were “charging boldly and rapidly through the soldiers, knocking them from their horses with lances and knives, dismounting and killing them, cutting off the arms of some at the elbows in the middle of the fight and carrying them away.” The Sioux and Cheyennes had abandoned the old, safe method of hovering, circling at a distance. A new spirit was in them that day, and they came on with their ponies at the dead run, often breaking in among the troops and whipping them in hand-to-hand encounters.
¹⁹

One white soldier later reported that they just kept coming. “They were in front, rear, flanks, and on every hilltop, far and near. I had been in several Indian battles, but never saw so many Indians at one time before, … or so brave.”
²⁰

Crook counterattacked when he could, in an effort to drive the Indians from the field, and almost succeeded once. Short Buffalo later said that “Crazy Horse, Bad Heart Bull, Black Twin, Kicking Bear, and Good Weasel rallied the Sioux, turned the charge and got the soldiers on the run. Good Weasel was a kind of lieutenant for Crazy Horse—he was always with him. When these five commenced to rally their men, that was as far as the soldiers got.”
²¹

The Crows and Shoshonis fought magnificently; indeed, although the Army never admitted it, much less thanked its allies, the Crows
and Shoshonis time and again saved Crook from a full-scale disaster. Twice they boldly rode through Sioux lines to save an officer who had been dehorsed and cut off from his men. When young Jack Red Cloud lost his horse and started running on foot, the Crows surrounded him. Recognizing him, they started laughing, whipping him, and jerked off his large war bonnet, telling him he was a boy with no right to wear it. They took his Winchester away, too, an embarrassing loss as it was a special one, engraved and given to Red Cloud by the United States Government. Jack cried out for pity, an unheard of thing among warriors, which only made the Crows laugh harder. Eventually someone—Crazy Horse himself, some say—broke through the Crow ranks. Jack leaped behind his savior on the pony and they rode away safely. Jack then got a horse for himself and fled ignominiously to Red Cloud Agency, where he stayed for the remainder of the summer.
²²

Among the Cheyennes in this battle was Chief Comes-in-Sight, a brave warrior. His sister had followed him out to the battle. He charged the soldiers many times, but finally his horse was killed under him. Comes-in-Sight was near the whites, who began to concentrate their fire on him, while some Crows noticed the dehorsed Cheyenne and began to ride toward him. Suddenly, a rider dashed forward from the Cheyenne lines and swept down on Comes-in-Sight at full speed. The rider reached out a hand on passing, Comes-in-Sight grabbed it, swung himself on up behind the rider, and they made it back to their lines safely. He had been rescued by his sister, Buffalo Calf Road Woman, and ever afterward the Cheyennes called this battle by the name, “Where the Girl Saved Her Brother.”
²³