Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (72 page)

Yellow Horse said that “Custer fought and Reno did not; Custer went in to die, and his fighting was superb; I never saw a man fight as Custer did; he was conspicuous in the battle … directing his men.”
¹⁰
An Arapaho brave who was with Crazy Horse said, “Crazy Horse, the Sioux Chief, was the bravest man I ever saw. He rode closest to the soldiers, yelling to his warriors. All the soldiers were shooting at him, but he was never hit.”
¹¹

Two Moons, the Cheyenne leader, recalled that after he topped the hill, following Crazy Horse, “the shooting was quick, quick. Pop—pop—pop very fast. Some of the soldiers were down on their
knees, some standing. The smoke was like a great cloud, and everywhere the Sioux went the dust rose like smoke. We circled all around them—swirling like water round a stone. We shoot, we ride fast, we shoot again. Soldiers drop, and horses fall on them. Soldiers in line drop, but one man rides up and down the line, all the time shouting. … I don’t know who he was. He was a brave man.”
¹²

In twenty minutes, perhaps less, it was over. Custer and his 225 soldiers were dead. Around Custer’s body—which lay just short of the crest of the hill he so desperately needed to gain and which Crazy Horse had denied him—lay his closest comrades—Tom and Boston Custer, Autie Reed, Calhoun a little ways off.

There are many versions of Custer’s death. The one that sounds most authentic is Sitting Bull’s, who freely admitted that he was not there, but who got an immediate after-action report from some young Hunkpapas. Sitting Bull passed the account on to a reporter for the New York
Herald
in 1877.

SITTING BULL:
Up there where the last fight took place, where the last stand was made, the Long Hair stood like a sheaf of corn with all the ears fallen around him.

REPORTER:
Not wounded?

SITTING BULL:
No.

REPORTER:
How many stood by him?

SITTING BULL:
A few.

REPORTER:
When did he fall?

SITTING BULL:
He killed a man when he fell. He laughed.

REPORTER:
You mean he cried out.

SITTING BULL:
No, he laughed. He had fired his last shot.
¹³

If his life flashed in front of him, as is sometimes said to happen on the verge of sudden death, no wonder Custer laughed. If he did flash back, he had many achievements to be proud of—his West Point appointment and graduation, his general officer’s commission, his string of successful charges in the Civil War, his key role at Appomattox, the Washita, opening the Black Hills—and much to recall of the good life in Washington, New York, on the frontier posts. And of course, most of all, Libbie. He had turned down numerous offers that would have made him a rich man, choosing instead to live the life he loved. He had lived big, thought big, had only big ambitions. He had nothing to regret.

Not even on this last day. The attack had been a gamble, but so had all his attacks. It was a good plan. It could have worked. If only that damn Reno would have charged the camp when he first came upon it! Anyway, one doesn’t get to live in the White House without taking some risks. Custer had gambled all his life, and although he usually lost in card games or horse races, he always won on the battlefield. Like all confirmed gamblers, however, he knew that someday he would have to lose. At least, when he lost, all the chips were on the table. It was a winner-take-all game, and Custer would have played it again if given the chance.

He laughed. Then he died.

The world hardly needs another analysis of the battle of the Little Bighorn, but the temptation to comment is too strong to resist. Custer’s mistakes, in order of importance, were as follows:

First, he refused to accept Terry’s offer of four troops of the 2nd Cavalry. If Reno had had two more troops with him, he might have had sufficient momentum to make a successful charge when he first came upon the Sioux camp. Had Custer had two more troops with him, he might have made it up the hill. But he wanted all the glory for the 7th Cavalry, and it must be said that he managed to make it for generations the most famous outfit in the history of the United States Army.

Second, Custer badly underestimated his enemy, not so much in terms of numbers (where his guess of 1,500 was not a fatal underestimate) as in terms of fighting capability, where he was disastrously wrong. Splitting his force four ways was thus a major error. The point is this: Custer had more than six hundred men. He often boasted that with that force he could whip all the Indians “in the Northwest,” and he wasn’t far wrong. But he never got a chance to prove it, because of his own overconfidence and inept tactics. Had he kept the regiment together he would have faced three thousand warriors with six hundred-plus well-armed and disciplined troopers, and under those circumstances he should have won. But because he divided his column, and because Crazy Horse and Gall kept their forces close together, Custer faced 2,500 warriors with 225 soldiers. In the first case, the odds would have been five to one against him; in the second case, the odds were ten to one, the crucial difference.

Custer’s third mistake was assuming that his men could do what he could do; to put it another way, he attacked too soon. He should have spent June 25 resting, then attacked the next day, when Gibbon could have, on urgent request, reinforced him. All Indian accounts
agree that Custer’s men and horses, like Reno’s, were so exhausted that their legs trembled. It was a hot day, which further cut the troopers’ efficiency. A fourth mistake was to commit his command when he did not know his enemies’ position, strength, or location. He also lost the element of surprise—his enemies knew more about where he was, in what strength, and with what intentions, than he knew about them. Yet he attacked.

Finally, when Custer lost the initiative, he failed to gain the high ground and dig in, although here one should perhaps blame Custer less and praise Crazy Horse more.

How did Crazy Horse know to swing around the flank? This was not a simple circling maneuver of a small unit caught on the open prairie; it was an intricate series of movements over difficult terrain, planned in advance, requiring exact timing. Crazy Horse had learned the lesson from the Wagon Box Fight of 1867, when he had led an attack up a ravine with all the warriors crowded in on each other, masking their own fire. This time he realized that the way to use his manpower effectively was to spread it out. He had learned, in addition, one of the most basic combat lessons—never attack your enemy directly when you can outflank him. In an Indian-versus-Indian battle, flanking was not necessary, in fact, it did not fit into the scheme of things, as the object in an Indian fight was to win honors, not kill enemies. But if you are involved in an Indian-versus-white soldier fight, Crazy Horse had learned, you damn well better start maneuvering your warriors and striking the flanks. In military affairs it is exceedingly difficult to outflank a flanking force, but when it is achieved it is usually spectacularly successful.

It is even possible to speculate (I would not want to push this too far, but much of the fun of studying this battle is the free rein it gives to the imagination) that if Crazy Horse had not swung around Custer’s flank and hit him from an unexpected direction, the 7th Cavalry could have survived the battle of the Little Bighorn. With only enemies in the front to worry about, it would seem that it should have been possible for Custer to make it to the top of the hill, not just near its crest where Crazy Horse caught him. Once on top Custer could have held the high ground, and although the Indians would have attacked in great numbers, Custer should have been able to hold them off. Custer might have been able to rally his troopers and hold Custer Hill long enough to be rescued by Benteen and Reno or by Gibbon. Doubtful, certainly, but it was his best chance, what he almost surely must have had in mind.

Crazy Horse ruined it all. At the supreme moment of his career, Crazy Horse took in the situation with a glance, then acted with great decisiveness. He fought with his usual reckless bravery on Custer Hill, providing as always an example for the other warriors to admire, draw courage from, and emulate, but his real contribution to this greatest of all Indian victories was mental, not physical. For the first time in his life, Crazy Horse’s presence was decisive on the battlefield not because of his courage, but because of his brain. But one fed on the other. His outstanding generalship had brought him at the head of a ferocious body of warriors to the critical point at the critical moment. Then with his courage he took advantage of the situation to sweep down on Custer and stamp his name, and that of Custer, indelibly on the pages of the nation’s history.

There is some intriguing postfight speculation about this battle. What if Reno had charged, as Custer ordered and expected? He might have put the Indians on the run but that seems unlikely; more probably he would have pinned down Crazy Horse’s blocking force and that could have been important. But Crazy Horse had planned for and expected just such a maneuver (the soldiers always tried to hit from at least two directions at once, he had learned through experience). He still, probably, could have outflanked Custer.

What if Custer had followed Reno and supported his attack? Certainly that would have given him a better chance, but his horses and men just didn’t have sufficient energy to press home a charge. With a rested command, it might have worked.

What if Benteen had obeyed orders and come quick with the packs?
||
That would have helped only if Custer had gained the high ground. As it was, Crazy Horse had rubbed Custer out long before Benteen could have gotten there (if he ever could have made it). As to the charges that Benteen and Reno, who each hated Custer, deliberately abandoned him, such charges are a wholly unjustified slur on them and on the officer corps of the United States Army. These men were professional soldiers who did their best under trying conditions. Of course they made mistakes—who hasn’t in a combat situation?—but they were neither cowards nor traitors to their commander. They were hot, sweaty, hungry, thirsty, absolutely spent men, whose mistakes were in large measure a result of the positions Custer had placed them in. They thought (and so did their men) that Custer had abandoned
them,
but they did not abandon him.

The conclusion is inescapable. At the Little Bighorn, Custer was not only outnumbered; he was also outgeneraled.

All that followed the battle on Custer Hill was anticlimax. The Indians besieged Reno and Benteen, but as always they lacked the killer instinct. Enough had been done. The next day, when Sioux scouts reported to Crazy Horse Gibbon’s advance from the north, the great camp—possibly the largest Indian village ever seen in the Great Plains—retired to the south, toward the Bighorn Mountains.

The battle of the Little Bighorn had been a supreme moment in the life of the Sioux nation. Never before had the Sioux people been so united, nor would they be again. Never before had the Sioux warriors been so ably led, nor would they be again.

As the Sioux nation dispersed, Crazy Horse counted up the losses. Forty men dead, or thereabouts. He mourned for them, of course, but not too deeply, because it had been a good day to die.

* In this chapter I shall footnote only quotations. Statements of fact are taken from various sources—the literature on this battle is voluminous—but I have used as a general guide the works of Colonel W. A. Graham, especially
The Custer Myth
(which reprints Godfrey’s and Benteen’s long accounts, along with those of many other eyewitnesses, red and white), and Edgar I. Stewart’s
Custer’s Luck.
The serious student who wants to immerse himself in the innumerable controversies about the battle should begin by carefully reading Graham and Stewart about four times through, then go on to the more specialized (and less careful) accounts. One warning—to study this battle is to enter quicksand. Let Graham and Stewart be your guides. Hold to their hands, and abandon them at your peril.

† Benteen had decided there were no Indians to the south, so on his own he had decided to turn to his right. He joined Reno that afternoon.

‡ All estimates about what Custer did after Martini left him to take orders to Benteen are speculative. There are as many theories as there are accounts of the battle. What follows is my own best guess—but (except for Crazy Horse’s actions, which have been authenticated), only a guess.

∫ Or so the reported location of the soldiers’ bodies on the battlefield two days later led me to believe. This is not conclusive, of course, because the Indians may have moved the bodies after the battle.

|| Benteen did try, after joining Reno, to get through to Custer, but Gall’s forces blocked his way and he returned to Reno Hill.