Little Big Man (63 page)

Once that was realized, however, the situation was still not desperate in any wise. All together the Seventh Cavalry numbered some six hundred men, trained to fight in an organized way: for example, the efficient manner in which Reno went into the skirmish line. A very small party of dismounted men, controlling their fire, could handle many times their number in unorganized savage riders.

If we could get down to the next ford, Custer could strike across into the village and thus relieve the pressure on Reno, and Benteen would no doubt be along in time to reinforce either command. Also, back the trail the pack train was coming on with reserve ammunition and its cavalry guard.

Well, it didn’t seem as bad to me as it might have been—though it wasn’t no picnic, either—but I looked at Custer and seen he was hit real hard. He stared angrily into the valley, jerking his head a little and squinting in the sunlight. I figured he was mad at Reno, who had been ordered to charge the hostiles, and even though that was now manifestly impractical, it would have been like Custer to hold it against him.

But then the General suddenly takes off his gray hat, waves it into the air, and cheers. Since we others there with him—brother Tom, Lieutenant Cooke, the orderly Martin, and myself—never joined in, it sounded right odd. With that raspy voice of his, it might have reached the troops in the valley had all been silent there. As it was, it never had a chance, amid the firing of white and Indian guns, savage war cries, and the rest. Not to mention that you don’t usually hooray at a defensive action.

Then he wheels Vic around and dashes back to the troops. Tom Custer’s orderly was there, and the General barked at him: “Go tell the pack train to come directly across country to join us.” In other words, not to follow the twisting trail we had made so far, nor to make no attempt to reach Reno, though he would soon need ammunition at the rate them carbines was firing.

Well, that was another man saved: I mean the orderly, Sergeant Kanipe. The rest of us started off again at a wild gallop across that upland country, following Custer’s breakneck lead upon his mare, his personal guidon whipping along just after, the red-and-blue swallow-tailed pennant showing crossed white sabers, as borne by a trooper on a fine big sorrel. We detoured around the worst draws and steeper cutbanks, leaped some and negotiated others, but it was a horse-killing ride and again some animals dropped in their tracks, saving a few more lives as their riders stayed behind, though I heard some of them never did reach the rear but was ambushed on the way. For unbeknownst to us the Indians had started already to cross the Little Bighorn to our side and infiltrate the coulees.

I reckon we went more than a mile in that fashion and come just below a ridge that was the highest point in the region, when Custer called still another halt. Again he rode out and up for observation, and the same little party accompanied him as before, me included, and his nephew Armstrong Reed, too, who had come on the campaign for a summer outing. It was reflected on the latter’s young face that, so to speak, I first seen the magnitude of that gigantic Indian camp which lay across the river.

I happened to glance at him as my pony reached the summit. Now Reed was a right handsome young fellow, like all the Custer clan, and his habitual expression was one which blended civilized breeding with eager interest. You saw that on a lot of Eastern lads who come West for adventure in them days, like the frontier was some type of exhibit put on for their education and entertainment, rather than the often mortal matter it was for us who lived there permanent.

Reed’s officer-uncles had fitted him out in a buckskin suit like their own and hung some weapons on him, and a comely sight he was, a-sitting his fine animal on that elevation. But something awesome was murking his clear eyes and setting his beardless chin to tremble, and if you think I shall deride him for it, you are wrong, for then I looked myself into the valley, across that ribbon of river and beyond the fringe of timber dark in the sun, and saw the biggest encampment of savages ever assembled upon this continent.

Almighty God, it stretched farther than the eye could limit, five mile anyway of clustered tepees and on the benchland to the west grazed their herd of twenty thousand ponies. I give that figure, allowing it might have been bigger, for I couldn’t see it all. But in my days along the Canadian River down south, I had observed them great masses of buffalo, and this was the closest thing to that vista.

How many Indians? I reckon the number was in the neighborhood of the pony population, for though certain braves might own several animals, there was always a multitude of women and children
who walked. Say fifteen thousand individuals, four to five thousand of them warriors. And we was two hundred-odd with Custer, another hundred with Reno now fighting for their lives, about the same with Benteen, and another hundred or so back escorting the pack train.

But here’s the queer feature: other than a few distant figures moving among the pony herd, and given the assumption that a great dustcloud downstream was raised by human beings,
we still did not see an Indian on our front
. There was not a soul in that part of the camp in our view. Was they all up engaging Reno? That field was now out of sight owing to the bluffs and the twists of the river. Or that cloud of dust downstream: was they, despite that strength, running away?

I’ll tell you what Custer did. He waved his hat again, and damn if he didn’t cheer once more!

“We have caught them napping,” he says to nobody in particular, and it was appropriate that nobody seemed to hear him but all continued to stare down as if paralyzed, though Tom Custer was almost chewing off his mustache and Lieutenant Cooke jerked fitfully at his muttonchops.

Then for me the moment was broke when that Italian orderly Martin, or Martini, grins into my face and says: “They sleep, yayss? Is good.” He never knowed the English expression, see, and anything his General said was literal to him.

Well, I didn’t have no time to disabuse him, for as Custer descended to where the troops was waiting, I rode alongside. I had suddenly realized what the Indians was up to. They wasn’t running or else the women would have been striking the lodges, for which there was ample time with us up in the high ground across river and Reno as distant as he was.

Nor was the force advancing on the latter nearly large enough to comprise all the warriors of a camp this size. Somewhere was a good four thousand more, and I thought I knowed their general situation: they had crossed our bank at one of the lower fords and awaited us in the ravines ahead.

No, Custer did not laugh when I yelled this at him. I don’t think he heard me at all, just kept spurring that poor mare who had been hard-rode now for miles on a hot and dusty day and was lathered and just about blown, and when he reached the command, he cheers
again and shouts: “Hurrah, boys, we’ve got them! We’ll finish them up and go home to our station.”

And them troops, who hadn’t no sleep to speak of in more than twenty-four hours, a quarter of them green men who never faced a warring Indian, mounted on exhausted or panicky animals, they give a cheer back at him, a rousing sound that echoed off the ridge, and once more we went into the gallop, larruping down a wide ravine for say three hundred yards, then another halt. Which I reckon piled up the column again, but I didn’t look back at them, it being no pleasure to study men who was about to be wiped out.

Oh, I knowed it for sure by then. That second cheer of his had done it for me: Custer had lost his mind.

Another type of person, seeing that huge village, might have admitted at least to himself that he made a mistake. Nothing shameful in it: in Indian-fighting a general seldom knowed the strength or disposition of the enemy. Some say Custer disobeyed his orders not to strike the hostiles until the time agreed on for his junction with Terry and Gibbon, the following day. But you can’t count on that sort of thing in the wilderness, and besides, he believed from the incident of the Sioux discovering the lost hardtack box back in the Wolf Mountains, that they’d know our presence and escape unless he attacked forthwith.

But having once seen the village and not backing off and pulling Reno out and getting the whole command assembled—Well, I expect Custer was crazy enough to believe he would win, being the type of man who carries the whole world within his own head and thus when his passion is aroused and floods his mind, reality is utterly drowned.

I was near him on that halt, and his hat was askew from being put on and off in premature victory celebrations, sweat streaked the dust on his stubbled cheeks, and his eyes was glazed, their usual bright blue gone milky.

He called the orderly, and Martin came up and saluted in his Italian way. Custer then spoke rapid as the firing of a Gatling.

“Tell-Benteen-it’s-a-big-village-and-I-want-him-to-be-quick-and-bring-the-packs.”

I doubt Martin got it, but he gives another florid salute and is ready to start off, only Cooke cries: “Wait, I’ll write it out,” and scribbles in his order book.

This was the last message anybody received from Custer and the five troops that followed him north from the Lone Tepee. You can read in the histories that Martin made it, riding back along the trail we had come. Foreign as he was, he did not understand the situation and the Indians tried to bushwhack him along the way but it didn’t bother him none even though his horse was hit. Shows what ignorance will do for you. Reaching Benteen, he told him we had the Sioux on the run, giving that officer another reason for not coming to our aid. I mean, besides his hatred of Custer.

From here on you have only my word for what happened to Custer and his five troops that Sunday afternoon,
for I am the only man what survived out of them 200-odd who rode down Medicine Tail Coulee towards the ford of the Little Bighorn River
.

If you don’t believe it, go find another: one of them cranks who wrote letters to poor Mrs. Custer in later years, some of them still children in 1876; or the Crow scout Curly, who used to be exhibited around as the sole survivor of the battle. Except that Curly was not upon the field, but only watched a portion of the fight from a distant ridge, and the white claimants was either nuts or just plain liars. It has been amusing to me to hear of men who sought recognition for what they never done, while I have been at pains until now to conceal my true experience.

It wasn’t long after Martin went that the ravine intersected with the big coulee called Medicine Tail, into which we turned left and descended a couple mile towards the river, with about one more remaining when it opened into a flat. We halted there briefly, for Mitch Bouyer and the Crow, on the high ground above, was waving their arms and Custer stopped to get their sign message. They could see the ford from that position and signaled that the enemy was crossing over.

Custer interrupted the report with impatient gestures, and with his hands said: “All right, you can go home now.”

The Crow had not been hired to fight—and you remember that they had refused to earlier—but to lead the column through this country which they knowed. So you could see Bouyer dismiss them, and they sat their horses up there for a while as we started to move again, looking down at us in that redskin way that is always called stolid, and so it is, though that don’t mean they haven’t no feelings, but rather that there isn’t much to be done about white men by even a friendly Indian. Them Crow always liked Custer, you see,
and I heard that the whole tribe cried like babies when his death was known.

Bouyer could have left too, but being a breed his pride was involved, I guess, at the sight of men to whom he was connected by a portion of his blood, going to their death. He followed the others for a few yards, then with a sudden effort wheeled his horse and come down to join us, galloping to Custer.

Ahead the flat narrowed again to form a steep gorge the sides of which was almost perpendicular cutbanks, for this coulee drained the high ground in the spring thaws and rains. You couldn’t have found a less congenial place for cavalry, which ain’t worth a damn without room to maneuver.

Bouyer pointed at it, and says: “If we go in there, we will never come out.” He was wearing buckskin and a broad-brimmed hat, but his black hair was long and he wore some Crow gewgaws, a bear-claw necklace and a medicine charm tied at his left ear.

Custer gives him a curious look. “I said you could go home,” he says.

Bouyer lifts his glittering black eyes towards the sun, his face brown as a hide, and while he did not speak I reckon he was bidding goodbye to that great fire in the sky, Indian-fashion, though ready to die as a white.

We entered the gorge at a fast trot, the five troops in formation, column of fours, and along come brother Boston to join us; he had been in the rear with the pack train, where I suspect his kin had wanted him to stay for his health, but come action, no Custer could be denied it even by another of the same clan.

Within each company of the Seventh, the men rode matched mounts: Tom Custer’s C Troop on sorrels; Troop E, gray horses; and the other three commands on fine bay animals. The guidons was swallow-tailed American flags with concentric circles of gilt stars within the blue field. They fluttered throughout the column, amid the rising dust as we descended that dry coulee, hearing nought but our own hoof-thunder.

I looked over my shoulder from time to time, for in a fight I like to know who’s behind, and I can still see in memory that gray-horse troop, always easiest to distinguish, a-trotting in orderly fours. But Tom Custer’s sorrels, in the leading company, was right handsome too, and almost red in the brilliant light.

God, it was hot along there. We had left the wind up on the
ridges, and I yearned to go into the gallop to get some breeze upon me. My hatband was sopping. I had the brim pulled down low to shade my nose, which was considerably burned from previous bright days. I had not shaved for a spell, and with dust and sweat intermingled, my sandpaper cheeks was right scratchy. I chewed a plug of tobacco to keep my throat wet, circulating the plug from side to side on my tongue, but suddenly it wasn’t juicy no more but raspy as a cactus burr, and I could hardly hold the carbine, the metal parts of which was searing hot from the sun. Salt sweat stung my eyes, and Cooke’s white horse ahead was too fiery-light to bear looking at.