Little Big Man (68 page)

“No,” said he. “This is the end.”

After a bit I gathered my strength and we climbed on, passing the remains of C Troop just below the knoll, and it ain’t my purpose to dwell upon the particulars of the carnage, for I think I have said enough about how the Indian women would come out after a battle and deal with the wounded. Well, they was served up with such a banquet following the Battle of the Little Bighorn as to surfeit the worst glutton. There was so many corpses to deface that they actually got tired of mutilating after a time; and so, many bodies stayed untouched, some not even stripped for the clothing.

But Tom Custer had got it real bad, resembling something on a butcher’s block. I would not have recognized him, except that his initials was tattooed upon one arm, along with an American flag and the goddess of liberty. His blond scalp had been ripped off down to the nape of the neck, his skull was crushed, his body opened from breastbone to groin, and his—I don’t want to say any more; just let his example stand for all those ravaged, though he was about the worst I seen. Remember Bottsy’s story that Rain in the Face swore to cut Tom’s heart out and eat it? By the looks of things he could have done that, though in later years he denied it.

So it was in the greatest dread that I gained the summit of the knoll, Old Lodge Skins more leading me than I him, for if they had done that to Tom, what horrors must have been the General’s lot?

We went up through the barricade of fallen horses, who was beginning to swell from the corruption, they having been dead for a day, the odor terrible, and there, strewn about like ears of corn, was the white bodies of the men who had died alongside me not twenty-four hours earlier. For a moment it was utter still, but I reckon that was an effect within my own head, for a light breeze blew up there and after a bit I heard a whispering flutter that traveled along the ground.

I seen what it was then: hundreds of dollars in greenback bills was scampering along the earth in the wind, now and again blowing over
a naked corpse to give him some decency. It was that pay which Custer had held back from the men until they got a day out of Fort Lincoln. The Indians found it when stripping the bodies and flung it away as they did the other papers they come across, love-letters, orders, and the like, which added to the murmuring drift, giving the resemblance of an abandoned picnic ground to the area where none of the bodies had been violated and could have been sleeping but for the arrows erected from them.

One cheekful of Lieutenant Cooke’s mutton-chop whiskers had been scalped, along with his head. Kellogg, the newspaper fellow, was lying where I seen him fall, full-dressed, unmarred.

Old Lodge Skins said: “Take me to the formerly Long Hair.”

It ain’t easy to identify men who are both dead and naked. They tend to merge and blur, like the people in a Turkish bath, only rigid as well.

But finally I saw General Custer, arms still in the crucified extension in which he fell, resting across the bodies of two troopers, where I guess he had been flung when stripped. There was a neat hole in his left chest, and another on the same side of his temple, very little blood from the first, none at all from the second, which I expect had been received as the Indians rode about the field when everybody was down, shooting each so as to make certain of him.

He was not scalped nor mutilated. What got me was his expression. I swear it was still a faint smile, slightly derisive, utterly confident.

“There he is,” I told Old Lodge Skins, taking his hand in mine and pointing with both. And the chief went to Custer, stooped, and felt his head briefly. I would have opposed his doing anything nasty, but I knowed he wasn’t going to: he was simply looking at the late General in a blindman’s fashion.

Then he straightened up and says: “This was the man who brought the soldiers to the Washita?”

“Yes.”

“And at Sand Creek before that?”

“No, that was another.”

“Ah.” He nodded his old head in the big war bonnet, and its feathers flexed in unison, like when a flight of birds unanimously changes direction in the sky. It was a beautiful thing, which I mention on account of the contrast with everything else in this place. There was no living thing throughout the field but him and me and
the flies. The other Indians had finished up the day before, had fetched away their own dead, and would never return.

“All right,” says Old Lodge Skins. He touched the lance-end of the bow lightly to Custer’s bare white shoulder, taking symbolic coup upon it, and he says something to the corpse which I can’t translate no better than:

“You are a bad man, and we have paid you back.”

So that was that, and we started down to camp, only I was still imbued with the glory and tragedy of it all. Custer had had to die to win me over, but he succeeded at long last: I could not deny it was real noble for him to be his own monument.

So I expresses to Old Lodge Skins a thought that occurred to many other white men after the outside world learned of Custer’s Last Stand—only I had it first because I was the first American to see him lying dead, as I was the last to see him live—a romantic thought it was, and appropriate in view of the General’s heroic idea of himself that he imposed even upon a skeptic like me.

I says: “He was not scalped, Grandfather. The Indians respected him as a great chief.”

Old Lodge Skins smiled at me as at a foolish child.

“No, my son,” says he. “I felt his head. They did not scalp him because he was getting bald.”

Back at the tepee I laid low, and you can read how the Indians continued to besiege the remainder of the Seventh on Reno Hill, that morning and afternoon of the 26th, but then some boys out herding horses come running through the tepees with news that more bluecoats had appeared, moving down the Greasy Grass from its mouth. So the warriors was called in and the women struck them countless tepees in no more than three-quarters of an hour, and we commenced to move south, everybody, thousands of Indians, tens of thousands of animals, in a column maybe four mile long, with the women and children on ponies which also pulled travois behind, and the warriors riding guard ahead and behind.

Still in my paint and buffalo hat, I stayed with the family contingent of course, riding one of Old Lodge Skins’s ponies, him alongside on another, and also his wives. A few Indians had looked at me while we was moving out, but nobody said beans. I reckon they was tired of fighting by now and didn’t want no more trouble unless forced into it. I learned a new thing: that Indians can’t keep their
attention very long even on winning. I mean, I knowed they was like that in warring tribe against tribe, but I hadn’t ever seen them whip white men before.

It was early evening when the Cheyenne group passed through the valley across from Reno’s position, for we was last in line, and I looked over at them bluffs but could not see a soul, for the distance was some miles. Also the Indians had earlier fired the grass to screen our movements, and smoke still drifted aloft.

The soldiers coming from the north was of course Generals Terry and Gibbon, on their way to that junction with Custer, a day late as he had been a day early, and now they would find him two days dead and the Indians vanished.

You can read about that, and also about Reno and Benteen’s defense of their hill and the finding of the bodies of Lavender, Charley Reynolds, Lieutenant McIntosh the halfbreed Iroquois, and Bloody Knife the Ree, among others down in the valley. I come through that bottomland with the Indian assemblage, but fortunately didn’t have to see any of my dead friends. I reckon they lay in the timber.

And of course you can read of the Little Bighorn battle itself in a couple hundred different versions, for it is being argued up to this time. First come the newspaper stories, and next there was a military investigation to determine whether Reno had been a coward, which heard a lot of witnesses and declared him not guilty—though some of the very officers who testified in his favor continued to blacken his name out of court. Even as a remnant, the Seventh Cavalry lived up to its glorious traditions, linking arms in public while privately slandering one another.

And then come the accounts of officers and men who served in the other part of the field, and that of the Crow scout Curly. Other fellows went about the reservations, interviewing Indians who had fought on the hostile side. This naturally resulted in a mess: no two savages could agree on what had happened in even their own particular area, seeing things different as they invariably did, not to mention the roles played by manners and fear. Some Indians thought they would be punished if they made it sound too bad; some, out of courtesy, told the investigator what they thought he wanted to hear. One would claim all Custer’s men committed suicide; another, that the troops had crossed the ford, penetrated the village, and was driven out, with the General getting killed and falling in the middle of the river.

Last of all the scholars went to work, some setting up residence on the battlefield, which become a national monument, and going over the ground with tape measures and surveyors’ instruments. Did Custer disobey his orders? Could Benteen have reached him in time to save the day? What was the exact route of travel taken by the five troops after leaving the Lone Tepee? For every question there are ten answers, pro and con on every detail.

But I alone was there and lived it and have told the God’s honest truth so far as recollection serves. To this day I bear scars on cheek and shoulder from wounds I received on that ridge above the Little Bighorn River, Montana Territory, June 25, 1876, in the engagement with Sioux and Cheyenne Indians in which General George A. Custer and five troops of the Seventh U.S. Cavalry perished to the last man but one.

Why have I kept silent till now? Well, hostile Indians was never popular in this country, but for some years after the Little Bighorn their following dropped away to where it was outnumbered by admirers of the rattlesnake. “That’s right,” you can hear me say to a fun-loving bunch in some saloon, “I was saved by my friends among the Cheyenne.”

Then I outlived that era, and along about 1920 I got to dropping a few hints to my then acquaintances but went no farther when I seen the look come into their eyes. What with being related to my Pa and Caroline, I am right sensitive to reflections on my sanity.

Oh, since I been in this old-folks’ home and watched them Western shows on the television, I might have made a remark or two, for it gets on my nerves to see Indians being played by Italians, Russians, and the like, with five o’clock shadows and lumpy arms. Redskins don’t hardly ever have to shave, and even the huskiest of them have smooth limbs rather than knotty muscles. As to feature, they don’t look nothing like gangsters. If the show people are fresh out of real Indians, they should hire Orientals—Chinese, Japs, and such—to play them parts; for there is a mighty resemblance between them two, being ancient cousins. Look at them without bias and you’ll see what I mean.

I guess my reasons for mainly keeping quiet boil down to this: Who would ever have believed me? But I am now too old to care. So if
you
don’t, you can go to hell.

CHAPTER
30
The End

HARDLY HAD THAT
vast Indian procession got through the valley where Lavender died when it commenced to break off in fragments which thereupon scattered in every direction, some east to the Tongue and Powder and some farther on to the Slim Buttes area where they was whipped in the following September by General Crook. Some even returned to the reservations.

Sitting Bull and his bunch of Hunkpapa eventually circled around and went on up into Canada, what the Indians called Grandmother’s Land on account of Queen Victoria, and they stayed there awhile, where there was still buffalo, and the Mounted Police give them medals showing the Grandmother’s likeness and says they was welcome as long as they didn’t kill her subjects. Which they did not, for there was hardly any Canadians in that area, and Sitting Bull had such a grudge against Americans that by contrast he loved anyone else. But finally he come back to the U.S., and later toured with Cody’s Wild West show for fifty dollars a week in wages, plus expense money, plus exclusive rights to sell photographs of himself.

Some said that while he had been spiritual leader of the Sioux on the Greasy Grass, he got yellow when Reno attacked the lower end of the camp, and hid out in the hills till the fight was over, not having faith in his own medicine. Gall spread that story, and I don’t know if it was truth or just jealousy.

Getting back to those days immediately following that great fight: Old Lodge Skins decided to take his band south into the Bighorn Mountains. That is, he suddenly turned his pony in that direction, and those who wanted to come along, did. Which sure included me. I was relieved to see that Younger Bear, after thinking for a long time about it, sitting there upon his pinto animal, chose
finally to go east with a number of other Cheyenne. He and I had really reached the end of our mutual relations, being square at last. He had never come around to see me again after that morning when he determined I was alive, and I certainly didn’t seek him out.

He had had his great day, and these many years later it does my heart good to think about it, for the Human Beings he went with was badly whipped by General Mackenzie in the fall, and the remnants surrendered the following spring and was sent to that reservation down in Indian Territory where they got the ague and damn near starved. So they broke out, men, women, and children, and fought their way back north for hundreds of mile, under attack all the distance, threadbare and hungry, armed only with bows, for their rifles had been took from them. I reckon when the subject of manliness comes up, you can just say “Cheyenne” and be done with it.

Finally the Government understood that they would either have to be exterminated or let to stay in the country where they was born. So an agency was established on the Tongue River, and the Northern Cheyenne live there to this day.