Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (23 page)

H
OT SUN ON BROWN
grass in a swollen corner of Montana: Curtis walked the graveyard yet again, site
of the worst military loss by American soldiers in the West. He had been over the
killing ground dozens of times, had asked the Crow scouts who’d been with George Armstrong
Custer the same questions repeatedly, in only slightly different ways. The Indians
begged off—they were tired of talking about the Battle of the Little Bighorn, recalling
men who cried for their mothers, naked white-bellied bodies floating in the river,
puddles of blood and gnarled sinew staining the dirt. How many times did they have
to show the place—
yes, yes, this is where Custer stood!
—and swear it was the very spot where the commander of the Seventh Cavalry had taken
his last breath? How many times would they have to summon those images of slaughter
in the shadeless hills? The land drained by the Little Bighorn, with its grassy rise
to the horizon, its river-sculpted fresh bottomland, its clusters of lodgepole pine
and cottonwood, was not hard to like. In the winter, snowdrifts piled high against
granite slabs where men had fallen; in the summer, wild floral heads nodded in afternoon
breezes. But after the events of June 25, 1876, the ground could never again be just
another fold of western land that might boost a spirit at sunset. Too many ghosts
floated around, their final casting in the hereafter yet to be sorted.

An examiner of forensics and long-buried facts, Curtis was midway through a third
year of working this historical autopsy. Journeys to the Zuni and Acoma, to the Hopi
and Apache, to the Pima and Mojave—he had undertaken them over the same years. But
throughout that period, no question troubled Curtis more than this one. What really
happened on that afternoon in 1876? Some wondered why he would devote so much time
to a single battle. But the stated purpose of
The North American Indian
was to “form a comprehensive and permanent record” of the “customs and traditions”
of native people, and few traditions among the Sioux were more important than violent
conflict. And after four centuries of Indian wars—lethal clashes over ownership of
a continent—the Battle of the Little Bighorn was the beginning of the end, to be followed
a year later by the pathos of the Nez Perce’s flight and then the last roundup of
Comanche, Cheyenne and Apache stragglers.

In the summer of 1907, Curtis noticed some things and overlooked others. “The bleached
bones of troop horses and pack mules” stood out, he wrote in his notebook, and made
him wonder who rode those army animals, their ribs now whitened in the July sun. How
had they fallen?

Curtis had with him three eyewitnesses—Hairy Moccasins, Goes Ahead and White Man Runs
Him—superb sources, courtesy of the tireless work of Alexander Upshaw. All three were
Crow natives, also known as Apsaroke, of late middle age, who had been with the commander
of the Seventh Cavalry up until the final hour of his life. Custer’s company was annihilated,
of course. The Seventh lost 258 men. The three Crow guides and another Indian scout,
Curley, had fled and lived. It was White Man Runs Him who was the first to reach another
army column with the breathless report that Custer’s force had been “wiped out.”

Well into the early twentieth century, the popular story of Custer was much the same
one that went out over telegraph lines not long after his mutilated body was found.
The timing of Custer’s death—the height of America’s centennial celebration—would
not allow for nuance in the national narrative. He was the commander, all of thirty-six,
who stood his ground against impossible odds, a legend while alive, a hero in death.
This was the story boys read in school and acted out in the summer woods, one playing
Custer to the other kid’s Crazy Horse. This was the Last Stand invoked by politicians
on the Fourth of July. A biography—with Custer doomed and fearless, and Major Marcus
Reno, the commander of a routed side detachment, drunken and cowardly—matched the
press coverage. This version was popularized by the Wild West Show of the peripatetic
promoter Bill Cody. He milked it in outdoor performances around the world, complete
with an “authentic” reenactment of the battle: circus Indians whooping over mismatched
boys in blue. The last and most influential line of the legacy’s defense was Custer’s
wife, the formidable Libbie, who guarded her husband’s name like a wizened hawk sitting
on a time-frozen nest. It was Libbie who first nagged the army into moving her husband’s
body from Montana dirt to an honored grave at West Point, and she who used a web of
influential friends to silence anyone who dared depart from the story of his death.
Yes, there had been a formal military inquiry, witnesses called, field notes reviewed.
The main issue—how could a commander so misjudge the size of the enemy, thus inadvertently
leading his soldiers to slaughter—was kicked around but never resolved. Custer’s reputation
was intact.

Early evening, with the sun’s sting receding at last, Curtis moved his party uphill
to a perch of level ground that afforded a broad, sweeping view of the Little Bighorn.
He repeated every step in the staging leading up to the battle. “When the troops traveled
slow, we did the same,” Curtis wrote. “When they had halted, we halted. When the scouts
went ahead, I waited where Custer had for the return of the scouts.” Joining Curtis
and the scouts were Upshaw, translating the Indian words, and Hal Curtis, age thirteen
and endlessly entertained by the work of his father. Clara had come out to the northern
plains as well—another attempt to be a part of her husband’s life in Indian country.
She stayed back at the larger camp on the Pine Ridge reservation, the Dakota home
of the Rosebud Sioux Nation. Working with the Sioux and some Cheyenne, Curtis had
conducted several rounds of interviews with veterans who took part in the fight. From
them, he heard that Custer’s eardrums were pierced by women before the blood on his
face had dried, because he refused to listen. He was told of the bravery of Crazy
Horse, who’d been swimming when the battle started, then had quickly mounted a horse
and made several daring charges to split Custer’s men. “Let us kill them all off today,”
he said, “that they may not trouble us anymore.” And this rare victory was given the
usual cast by the Americans: when Indians won, it was always a massacre.

Curtis had also walked the battlefield with these Indian victors, these still proud
Sioux of the western subtribe who called themselves Lakota. He sat where bodies were
found, pressing for information about strategy and intent. He recorded many anecdotes,
the violent vignettes somewhat altered by time, but he wanted the bigger picture.
“They could tell vividly of their actions,” Curtis wrote, “but could give no comprehensive
account of the actions as a whole.” Already he had taken many pictures of the participants.
He was fond of Red Hawk’s portrait, his eyes full of tragedy, half his face obscured
by a droopy war bonnet, and wrote that his “recollection of the fight seemed particularly
clear.” Red Hawk appeared to be fond of Curtis too, giving him the Sioux name of Pretty
Butte. It was Red Hawk who posed for Curtis atop a white horse drinking water at a
stop, the picture titled
An Oasis in the Badlands.
There, the ninety-one-year-old Red Hawk is shown on his mount with a rifle protruding
from a simple saddle—a pose meant to convey that the Sioux still had some fight left
in them. What Curtis saw in the Sioux was what rival tribes feared in them: a fine-honed
tradition of war makers and buffalo chasers, scary good at bloodletting.

Now Curtis concentrated his work on the other side of the battle, those Indians who
had worked for Custer, longtime enemies of the Sioux. The Crow feared the Sioux more
than they did the whites. If captured by a Lakota, a Crow knew he would be facing
mutilation, burning, eye-gouging and other forms of slow torture. So when Custer and
his bluecoats arrived with cannons and rapid-firing guns, the Crow saw a chance for
a permanent advantage in the northern plains. If the army could do something about
another Crow enemy, the Cheyenne, it would further serve their purposes. The Crow
scout White Man Runs Him had led the Curtis party up the Rosebud River, one rise over
from the Little Bighorn, following the path where Custer broke from his main command
on the Yellowstone. The party walked the easy miles to the divide, one side falling
away to the river they had just followed, the other giving way to the bumpy valley
of the battle. They dropped down a bit, to a lookout known as the Crow’s Nest. It
was here, said the scouts who had led Custer, that they first saw the Indians camped
below. Most of them were Sioux under the guidance of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse,
though they had with them a sizable contingent of Cheyenne and Arapaho.

The Cheyenne had good reason to hate the Americans. Over three hundred years of contact
with whites, from their migration out of the upper Mississippi headwaters, to the
northern plains, to the eastern Rocky Mountains, the tribe had warred, traded and
hunted their way to upward mobility. But then came the Sand Creek Massacre, on November
29, 1864, the most brutal slaughter of Indian innocents by U.S. combatants. A camp
of about five hundred Cheyenne, almost all women, children and old people, had made
a peace pact and were gathered under an American flag in Colorado when they were attacked
by a former Methodist minister, J. M. Chivington, leading a volunteer army of drunks
and malcontents. Curtis described what happened in Volume VI:

“. . . practically all were scalped, and that women as well as men were so mutilated
as to render description unprintable; that in at least one instance a woman was ripped
open and her unborn child thrown by her side; that defenseless women, exposing their
breasts to show their sex, and begging for mercy, were shot down with revolvers placed
practically against their flesh; that hours after the attack, when there was not a
militant Indian within miles of the camp, children were used as targets.”

The Indian scalps were later displayed, to great whistling and applause, at an opera
house in Denver. Four years later, Custer wiped out a village of Cheyenne on the Washita
River. Approaching the Indians in that encounter, one of Custer’s officers wondered
what they would do if they found themselves outnumbered. “All I am afraid of is we
won’t find half enough,” said Custer.

There were certainly more than enough Cheyenne and Sioux camped along the Little
Bighorn. Women and children, thousands of ponies and hundreds of tipis made the gathering
appear a vast, almost festive tent city of smoke, dust and chatter. About 5,000 Indians
were in the valley, though the numbers varied in all accounts, and the scouts could
not judge the size by what they had seen. Custer’s men numbered 650 soldiers.

A bit closer to the Little Bighorn, Custer broke up his forces into three battalions.
The prize was in his grasp; he was not about to let the enemy slip away and bring
glory to some other commander in what might be the last battle of the Indian campaigns.
One flank, under Major Reno, veered left and south, downward to the river, to cut
off any escape. Another remained on higher ground. Custer moved in the general direction
of the camp, though he stayed above the river, roughly parallel to it. In early afternoon,
Reno ordered his men to battle. They charged into a thicket of small trees and brush,
confronting women and children who appeared in a panic. The gunfire roused the warriors,
who quickly massed. They swarmed Reno’s men and set fire to the brush, pushing them
into defensive positions in the timber. Reno was a brooding man, prone to drink during
the day until he passed out at night. He and Custer, a teetotaler, despised each other.
As it became apparent to Reno that his men would be routed, he ordered a retreat.
His words are not carved in stone at West Point: “All those who wish to make their
escape follow me!” It turned into a run-for-your-lives, desperation scramble, but
it ultimately saved Reno and many of his men.