Bill Dugan_War Chiefs 03 (16 page)

At Dead Buffalo Lake, Sitting Bull garnered special honor, advancing on the column on horseback, ignoring the bullets flying all around him while he attacked a mule skinner, counted coup, and made his escape, driving a stolen army mule ahead of him. But it was a hollow triumph; the army pressed on, and the Sioux were driven relentlessly westward.

At all three battles, loss of supplies was the most serious damage inflicted. Many lodges, vast quantities of meat necessary for the coming winter,
weapons, and household articles had to be abandoned. The meat was tossed into ravines, where the Hunkpapa hoped to retrieve it as soon as the fighting stopped. But each time the army discovered the abandoned food they burned it, along with everything else the soldiers could find.

After the battle at Stony Lake, Sibley turned back to Minnesota and the Sioux moved across to the west bank of the Missouri River. It was tempting to think that the worst was over. Looking for buffalo, the Sioux again crossed the Missouri. Sully, as Sitting Bull knew, was at Fort Pierre. Slowed by drought, he was presumed to have given up the field for the year, but that was a miscalculation. At Whitestone Hill, Sitting Bull and Sully locked horns once again, and the encounter cost the Sioux forces one hundred dead, one hundred and fifty-six taken prisoner, and once more huge losses of food and other supplies.

Once again the Sioux scattered, the Santee heading east and the Hunkpapas recrossing the Missouri yet again and heading north. They needed food, and the Ree might be willing to trade corn for buffalo hides. Sully broke off his pursuit and turned his attention to building another fort on the Missouri, raising Fort Sully near the meeting of the Missouri and the Cheyenne Rivers. The fort was fully garrisoned, and Sitting Bull now realized that the white soldiers had come to stay. The winter would allow him time to regroup, but he knew that when spring came, the soldiers would take the field again.

All winter long, Sitting Bull and the other Sioux chiefs made preparations for the coming campaign. At the same time, they sent messages by whatever means came to hand—traders, missionaries, friendly Indians—that Lakota lands were inviolate and that the white men did not belong. It was saber-rattling, but the chiefs were determined to back it up with force if necessary. However, Sully paid no attention.

In the spring of 1864, Sully led a column up the east bank of the Missouri. An advance unit stumbled into an ambush set by three warriors, and an engineer was killed. Sully’s men caught the three warriors and beheaded them, setting the severed heads out on stakes on a hilltop. If there had been any doubt that Sully meant business, there could be no longer.

As word of the atrocity spread, the Sioux began to concentrate their forces near the Knife River. By mid-July, Sully had three thousand men in the field, and the Sioux had established nearly fifteen hundred lodges, quarters for several thousand warriors. When word reached the huge village of Sully’s approach, the Sioux broke camp and moved northward to the edge of the Dakota badlands, establishing a camp nearly four miles long at Killdeer Mountain. They had chosen their position with an eye both to defense and escape, should it prove necessary. Sitting Bull and the other chiefs conferred on the best way to halt Sully’s column. They were confident, and their sheer numbers seemed to give them an advantage they had lacked in previous confrontations with both Sibley and Sully.

When word reached them that Sully was coming, the warriors prepared for the battle in high spirits. Sitting Bull was accompanied by his uncle, Four Horns, and his nephew, White Bull. Instead of moving the camp, as they had before, they left it in place. Those who would not be involved in combat climbed the mountain to get a good overview of the battle, and the mountainside teemed with women, children, and old men.

The Sioux rode out from the village confident, almost cheerful. They had wanted a good fight, the chance to teach the white soldiers a lesson, and it looked like their chance had finally come. Five miles from the village, the two forces met, Sully at the head of twenty-two hundred men. He had left several hundred soldiers behind to protect a wagon train of immigrants and miners headed for the gold fields.

Sully’s men had dismounted, because the land was not fit for cavalry tactics, and they spread out in a long skirmish line. There were other troops behind it, holding the horses and manning the long-range weaponry. The Sioux squared off, and the two lines stood facing one another, each waiting for the other to make the first move. One Lakota, Lone Dog, decided to test the waters. “I’m going to ride across their line,” he said. “If they shoot at me, then we should shoot back.”

He advanced on horseback, keeping a wary eye on the skirmish line, then crossed in front of it, waving a huge, ornate war club and shouting at the soldiers as he would at a band of Crows. Before
long, bullets were sailing all around him, kicking up dust around the hooves of his war pony, and whistling as they passed over his head. He made it all the way to the far end of the skirmish line without being hit, then turned toward the Sioux line, the troopers still trying to bring him down.

Lone Dog rode for cover, then reappeared almost immediately, intending to dare the soldiers once more. But by this time, the fight had gotten started. The skirmish line began its advance. Armed with better weapons, the soldiers pressed the Sioux hard, driving them back slowly but surely. The Sioux, used to individual combat, had no supreme commander. They fought in their usual way, each warrior—either alone or with a small group of friends—advancing as he saw fit. But the disciplined white soldiers were controlled and deliberate in their advance, easily overmatching any thrust made by solitary warriors or the occasional knot of charging Sioux.

For five miles, the Sioux were driven back, fighting every inch of the way but losing ground steadily. Sully’s artillery had bursting shells and used them to good effect, reserving them for concentrated groups of Sioux on horseback. The rapid fire and long range of the soldiers’ guns kept the Sioux beyond their effective range, where bows and old muskets could not reach the soldiers at all.

The warriors were forced now to take cover in ravines and hollows and clumps of brush. Once more, they were fighting not to conquer but to delay. The women and children swarmed down the mountainside now, rushing to break camp and
salvage as much of their possessions as they could, while the warriors tried to slow the advancing column.

The cover offered by the ravines concentrated the Sioux and made them easy prey to the artillery. Shells lobbed into the ravines were wreaking havoc all along the line. Whenever the Sioux tried to mount a counterattack, gathering fifty or a hundred warriors for an assault, a unit of the column would detach and army discipline enabled it to beat back the Sioux assault, often turning the tables and inflicting heavy casualties as the Sioux were forced to withdraw to high ground, where they were still within reach of the army rifles.

One crippled Lakota, a man who was unable to walk and barely had use of his arms, asked to be allowed to die in battle. His wish was granted, and Bear’s Heart was lashed to a drag pulled by a horse. He advanced on the white soldiers, his feeble arms pulling helplessly at makeshift reins. He was unarmed and could not defend himself, let alone inflict damage on the soldiers. He was cut down by heavy fire and lay in the field, beyond help, while the battle raged on.

The column was close to the Indian settlement now, and the Sioux were desperate. As Sitting Bull and Four Horns tried to fend off a thrust toward the scurrying noncombatants, Four Horns was hit in the back. “I am shot,” he called.

Sitting Bull rushed to his uncle’s aid and grabbed the bridle of Four Horn’s horse, while the older man hung on as best he could. Leading the horse to cover, Sitting Bull helped Four Horns from
his mount and tried to remove the bullet, but it was buried too deeply, and there was no time to get at it. Dressing the wound, Sitting Bull saw the soldiers overrun the village. Most of the lodges were still standing, and hardly any of the supplies had been removed. It was the same as Dead Buffalo Lake and Stony Lake. The village was taken by the soldiers, and the women and children ran for their lives.

As Sitting Bull helped Four Horns back onto his horse for flight, the soldiers had already begun to torch the tipis, and thick black smoke was curling up into the cloudless sky.

Missouri River Valley
1864

S
ITTING BULL LED FOUR HORNS
to safety as the Sioux bands scattered, leaving Sully and his men in possession of the village … or what was left of it. For miles, Sitting Bull kept looking over his shoulder at the thickening black smoke as the Sioux lodges were reduced to cinders. He was worried about the loss of food. Then, too, with the buffalo harder and harder to find, lodges were going to be more difficult to replace. It took several skins for a single lodge, and there had been hundreds of lodges in the village, most of them abandoned to the enemy. How difficult it might be to hunt enough buffalo to replace them was something he could only imagine.

But he had more important things on his mind on this ride. Every glance at the dense black smoke reinforced the impression he had gained that a new way to fight had to be found. The white men did
not fight like the Crows or the Hohe. They had tactics that the Hunkpapas had never encountered, and they fought for different reasons. They were not interested in glory. They did not care whether they managed to touch an enemy with a hand or something held in the hand, the only thing that really mattered to a Sioux warrior. As it was, the white soldiers seemed content to remain at a distance and fire their guns. Killing Sioux was all that mattered to them.

Intuitively, Sitting Bull understood that the gap between his culture and that of the white soldiers was enormous, and since the white soldiers were not going to cross over to his ways, he would have to find a way to convince the Sioux to adjust to the white man’s way of making war. If he couldn’t, then the Sioux would be pressed further and further west, something the Crows were unlikely to accept. And he knew that it would be increasingly difficult for the Sioux to get guns, because the white men would try to prevent their modern weapons from falling into Sioux hands. That would put the Lakota at a further disadvantage against the Crows and the other tribes to the west. But he knew that changing the habits of a lifetime would take a great deal of persuasion. Killdeer Mountain had convinced him, and he had to find a way to teach the others what he had learned.

On the long ride, he had plenty of time to mull it over. He also had more immediate concerns to attend to. Four Horns was in great pain, but managed to stay on his horse. “I can feel the bullet inside,” he said.

“Can you ride?”

“Do I have a choice? We have to find the women and children. We can’t leave them unprotected with the Long Knives on the warpath.”

The wound had stopped bleeding, and Sitting Bull knew that the herbs he had applied would help it heal and prevent infection, but he wished he had been able to remove the bullet.

It was near nightfall by the time they found the fugitive Hunkpapas. It had not been as easy as usual to follow them, because there were so few travois, which normally gouged the earth and left a clear path for returning hunters and warriors to follow. The Hunkpapas had gone their own way, leaving the Santee to make their own choices. In the days following the Killdeer Mountain battle, the Sioux regrouped. They kept scouts out to watch for Sully’s column while they tried to reestablish themselves, making new lodges and hunting almost around the clock to replace the pilfered food.

Camped on the western edge of the badlands, the Hunkpapa were joined by several other bands, including some Brule and Sans Arcs Sioux and even a contingent of Cheyenne. Sitting Bull knew that Sully would not leave on his own, but he wondered whether the Sioux could drive him away, outgunned and desperately in need of supplies as they were.

Night after night, he talked with the other chiefs, trying to make them see what he had seen at Killdeer Mountain. “They do not fight like we fight,” he told them. “They keep coming, even
when one of them is killed. Sometimes when one of our warriors is killed, we take time to mourn, maybe even stop fighting altogether, but the white soldiers never stop. It is like they don’t care what happens to anyone. When a white soldier is killed the others keep on fighting. They walk right past him like he is not even there.”

“If we have enough warriors, we can defeat them,” Spotted Eagle, one of the Sans Arc chiefs, argued.

“How many is enough? You saw how many Long Knives there were. There were more of us, many more, and still they drove us away and burned our village.”

“They have better guns. If we can get such guns, then we can defeat them.”

“No, it is not just the guns, and not just the numbers. It is the
way
they fight. They have one leader and they all do what he tells them to do. We don’t fight like that, so we sometimes get confused. It is then easy for them to push us back.”

“We fight as we have always fought,” Spotted Eagle insisted. “That is not our way to fight.”

“I think maybe it should be. I think maybe the only way to defeat the Long Knives is to fight the way the Long Knives fight.”

“Does Sitting Bull want to be the one great war leader like the one the Long Knives have? Is that why he tells us this?” another of the chiefs asked.

Sitting Bull shook his head. “No, I want only that we consider it, to see if it is something we can learn to do. If it is, then we will have to deal with the question of who should be the one leader.”

Spotted Tail, the Brule chief, put in, “The Long Knives don’t have just one chief, anyway. A long time ago, it was Harney. Now it is Sully and Sibley. They are told what to do by the Great Father in Washington. They told us that at Fort Laramie when many Lakota touched the pen to the peace paper. The Great Father is not even there when the Long Knives fight against the Sioux, so the Long Knives do what they want, just like the Lakota warriors.”