The Veteran (31 page)

It was said later that the Sioux destroyed Custer that day. Not so. The Cheyenne did most of the frontal assault. Their cousins the Oglala Sioux deferred to them the honour of defending their own village, which would have been the first in Custer’s attack, and acted in an assisting capacity, moving xi round the flanks to cut off any retreat. From his vantage point Craig could see the Oglala slipping through the long grass far to the left and right. Within twenty minutes there was no hope of retreat. The zipping bullets and hissing arrows began to fall closer. One of the horse-handlers took a falling arrow in the base of the throat and fell, choking and screaming.

The Indians had some rifles and even a few old flintlocks, but not many. By the end of the afternoon they would be substantially rearmed with new Springfields and Colts. Mainly, they used arrows, which for them had two advantages. The bow is a silent weapon; it does not give away the position of the firer. Many bluecoats died that afternoon with an arrow in the chest and never saw a target. The other advantage was that clouds of arrows could be fired high in the sky, to fall almost vertically on the cavalrymen. The effect was particularly damning on the horses. Within sixty minutes a dozen mounts had been hit by falling arrows. They broke away from the handlers, tearing the reins from the men’s grasp, and galloped away down the trail. The others, uninjured, followed their example.

Long before the men were dead, the horses were gone and all hope of escape gone with them. Panic began to run like wildfire through the crouching troopers. The few veteran officers and NCOs simply lost control.

The Cheyenne village belonged to Little Wolf, but by chance he was missing. When he returned an hour too late for the fight, he was roundly abused for not being there. In fact, he was the one leading the scout party that had been tracking Custer up the Rosebud and across the divide to the Little Bighorn.

In his absence leadership went to the next senior warrior, a visitor from the Southern Cheyenne called Lame White Man.

He was in his mid-thirties, neither lame nor white. When a group of thirty troopers under an officer tried to make a break towards the river, he charged them alone, crushing their morale and dying a hero in the process. None of those thirty struggled back to the rings on the slope. Watching them die, their companions lost hope of survival.

From above, Lewis and Craig could hear the sounds of men praying and crying as they faced their death. One trooper, little more than a boy and blubbering like a baby, broke circle and came up the hill seeking one of the last two horses. Within seconds four arrows thudded into his back and he went down twitching.

The two men on horses were now within range, and several arrows whistled past. Perhaps fifty to a hundred men were still left alive on the slope below, but half of them must have taken an arrow or a bullet. Sometimes a warrior, seeking personal honour, would mount up and charge straight past the crouching soldiers, defying a hail of shot and, the marksmanship being what it was, riding away unharmed but covered in glory. And always the high-pitched screams.

Every soldier there thought they were war cries. Craig knew better. The charging Indian’s cry was not for battle but for death, his own. He was simply confiding his soul to the care of the Everywhere Spirit.

But what really destroyed the Seventh Cavalry that day was their fear of being taken alive and tortured. Each soldier had been completely brainwashed with stories of the hideous ways in which captives of the Indians died. In the main they were wrong.

Plains Indians had no culture of the prisoner of war. They had no facilities for them. But an opposing force could surrender with honour if they had lost half their men. After seventy minutes Custer had certainly done this. But in Indian lore, if opponents just kept on fighting, they would normally be killed to the last man.

If a prisoner was taken alive, he would normally only be tortured in one of two cases: if he was recognized as one who had formally sworn never to fight the Indians of that tribe again, and had broken his word, or if he had fought with cowardice. In either case he was without honour.

In Sioux/Cheyenne culture the withstanding of pain with fortitude and stoicism could recover that honour. A liar or a coward should be given that chance, through pain. Custer was one who had once sworn to the Cheyenne that he would never fight them again. Two squaws of that tribe, recognizing him among the fallen, pushed steel awls through the dead eardrums so that he could hear better next time.

As the circle of Cheyenne and Sioux closed in, the panic ran like a brushfire through the surviving men. Battles in those days were never fought in good visibility; there was no smokeless ammunition. After an hour the hill was wreathed in a fog of powder smoke, and through the fog came the painted savages. Imagination ran riot. Years later an English poet would write:

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up your remains,
Why, you rolls to your rifle and blows out your brains,
And you goes to your Gawd like a soldier.

None of the last survivors on that hillside would ever live to hear of Kipling, but what he described was what they did. Craig heard the first pistol shots as wounded men saved themselves the misery of torture. He turned to Sergeant Lewis.

The big man was white-faced beside him, both their horses running out of control. There was no escape back down the track; it seethed with Oglala Sioux.

“Sergeant, you’ll not let me die like a tied pig,” the scout called to him.

Lewis paused, thought, and his dedication to duty ended. He slipped from his horse, drew his knife and cut the thongs that tied Craig’s ankles to his girth-strap.

At that moment three things happened in less than a second. Two arrows from a range of no more than a hundred feet thudded into the sergeant’s chest. Knife in hand, he gazed at them with some surprise, then his knees buckled and he fell onto his face.

From even closer range a Sioux warrior rose from the long grass, pointed an ancient flintlock musket at Craig and fired. He had clearly used too much black powder in an effort to achieve increased range. Worse, he had forgotten to remove the ramrod. The breech exploded with a roar and a sheet of flame, shattering the man’s right hand to pulp. If he had been firing from the shoulder he would have lost most of his head, but he was firing from the hip.

The ramrod came out of the barrel like a quivering harpoon. Craig had been facing the man. The ramrod took his horse full in the chest, penetrating to the heart. As the animal went down Craig, hands still cord-tied, tried to throw himself clear. He landed on his back, his head slammed into a small rock and he was knocked cold.

Within ten minutes the last white soldier on Custer’s hill was dead. Though the scout was unconscious and never saw it, the end when it came was blisteringly fast. Sioux warriors would later relate that one minute the few dozen last survivors were still fighting and the next the Everywhere Spirit had simply swept them away. In fact most just ‘rolled to their rifles’ or used their Colt pistols. Some did the favour to wounded comrades, others to themselves.

When Ben Craig came to, his head sang and reeled from the blow by the rock. He opened one eye. He was on his side, hands tied behind, one cheek pressed to the earth. Grass blades were close to his face. As his head cleared he became aware of soft-shod feet moving all about him, of excited voices and occasional cries of triumph. His vision cleared also.

There were bare legs and feet in moccasins running across the hillside as Sioux warriors hunted for loot and trophies. One of them must have seen his eyes move. There was a yelp of triumph and strong hands jerked his torso upright.

There were four warriors round him, faces painted and contorted, still deranged by the killing frenzy. He saw a stone war club raised to smash out his brains. For one second as he sat and waited for death he wondered idly what lay on the other side of life. The blow did not fall. Instead a voice said, “Stop.”

He looked up. The man who had spoken was astride a pony ten feet away. The dropping sun was to the right of the rider’s shoulder and the glare reduced the image of the man to a silhouette.

His hair was undressed; it fell like a dark cloak around his shoulders and back. He carried no lance, nor yet a steel hatchet, so he was clearly not Cheyenne.

The pony the man rode moved a foot to one side; the sun went behind the shoulder and the glare fell away. The rider’s shadow dropped over Craig’s face and he saw more clearly.

The pinto pony was neither piebald nor skewbald as most Indian mounts. It was a pale fawn, known as a golden buckskin. Craig had heard of that pony.

The man on it was naked but for a breechcloth around his waist and moccasins on his feet. He was dressed like a simple brave but had the authority of a chief. There was no shield on his left forearm, implying that he disdained personal protection, but from the left hand dangled a stone war club. Therefore, Sioux.

The war club was a fearsome weapon. Eighteen inches of haft, ending in a fork. Into the fork was rammed a smooth stone the size of a large goose egg. This was tied with hide thongs which would have been soaking wet when applied as lashings. Drying in the sun, they would shrink and tighten, so that the stone never fell. A blow from such a club would smash arms, shoulders or ribs, and crush the human skull like a walnut. It could only be used at close quarters, thus bringing much honour.

When he spoke again it was in the Oglala Sioux tongue, which being closest to Cheyenne the scout could understand.

“Why did you tie the wasichu like this?”

“We did not. Great Chief. We found him thus tied, by his own people.”

The dark gaze fell on the thongs still tied to each of Craig’s ankles. The Sioux noticed, but said nothing. Sat, lost in thought. His chest and shoulders were covered with painted circles to represent hailstones and from his hairline a single black lightning bolt ran to his bullet-scarred chin. He wore no other ornamentation but Craig knew him by repute. He was looking at the legendary Crazy Horse, undisputed chief of the Oglala Sioux these past twelve years, since the age of twenty-six, a man revered for his fearlessness, mysticism and self-denial.

An evening breeze came off the river below. It ruffled the chief’s hair, the long grass and the feather behind the scout’s head, which came to rest on one buckskin shoulder. Crazy Horse noted this too. It was a sign of honour given by the Cheyenne.

“He lives,” ordered the war leader. “Take him to Chief Sitting Bull for judgement.”

The warriors were disappointed to lose the chance of so much loot, but they obeyed. Craig was hauled to his feet and hustled down the hill to the river. As he went the half-mile he saw the aftermath of the massacre.

Across the slope the 210 men of the five companies, minus scouts and deserters, were strewn in the strange postures of death. The Indians were stripping them of everything in the search for trophies, then carrying out the ritual mutilations, different according to each tribe. The Cheyenne slashed legs so the dead man could not pursue them, the Sioux battered skulls and faces to pulp with stone clubs. Others severed arms, legs and heads.

Fifty yards down the hill the scout saw the body of George Armstrong Custer, naked but for his cotton ankle socks, marble white under the sun. He remained unmutilated save for the punctured eardrums and would be found that way by Terry’s men.

Everything was being taken from pockets and saddlebags: rifles and pistols of course, with the copious supply of ammunition still remaining; tobacco pouches, steel-case watches, wallets with family photos, anything that could constitute a trophy. Then came the caps, boots and uniforms. The hillside swarmed with braves and squaws.

At the riverbank there was a cluster of ponies. Craig was hoisted onto one and he and his four escorts splashed through the Little Bighorn to the western bank. As they rode through the Cheyenne village the women came out to scream abuse at the one surviving wasichu, but they fell silent when they saw the eagle feather. Was this a friend or a traitor?

The group trotted down through the camps of the Sans Arcs and the Minneconjou until they reached the village of the Hunkpapa. The camp was in uproar.

These braves had not faced Custer on the hill; they had met and driven back Major Reno, whose remnants were even then across the river, besieged on their hilltop, joined by Benteen and the mule train, wondering why Custer did not ride back down the hills to relieve them.

Blackfoot, Minneconjou and Hunkpapa warriors rode hither and thither waving their trophies taken from Reno’s dead, and here and there Craig saw a blond or ginger scalp being waved aloft. Surrounded by screaming squaws, they came to the lodge of the great medicine man and judge. Sitting Bull.

His Oglala escorts explained the orders of Crazy Horse, handed him over and rode back to seek their trophies on the slope. Craig was roughly thrown into a teepee and two old squaws were instructed to watch over him with knives in their hands.

It was long after dark when he was sent for. A dozen braves came for him and dragged him out. Campfires had been lit and by their light the still-painted warriors were a fearsome sight.

But the mood had calmed, even though a mile away, beyond the cottonwood stand and across the river, out of sight, occasional shots in the dark indicated that the Sioux were still crawling up the hill to Reno’s defensive circle on the bluff.

In the entire battle, at both ends of the huge camp, the Sioux had taken thirty-one casualties. Although eighteen hundred warriors had been involved and their enemies had been virtually wiped out, they felt the loss. Up and down the camps widows were keening over husbands and sons and preparing them for the Great Journey.

At the centre of the Hunkpapa village was one fire larger than the rest, and around it were a dozen chiefs, supreme among them Sitting Bull. He was then just forty but he looked older, his mahogany face even darker in the firelight and deeply lined. Like Crazy Horse, he was revered for once having had a great vision of the future of his people and of the buffalo of the plains. It had been a bleak vision: he had seen them all wiped out by the white man, and he was known to hate the wasichu.