It was in the Spring of Eighteen Hundred Seventy-six that the Sioux on
the Dakota Reservation became restless, and after various fruitless
efforts to restrain them, moved Westward in a body.
This periodic migration was a habit and a tradition of the tribe. For
hundreds of years they had visited the buffalo country on an annual
hunt.
Now the buffaloes were gone, save for a few scattered herds in the
mountains. The Indians did not fully realize this, although they
realized that as the Whites came in, the game went out. The Sioux were
hunters and horsemen by nature. They traveled and moved about with
great freedom. If restrained or interfered with they grew irritable
and then hostile.
Now they were full of fight. The Whites had ruined the hunting-grounds;
besides that, white soldiers had fought them if they moved to their
old haunts, sacred for their use and bequeathed to them by their
ancestors. In dead of Winter, when the snows lay deep and they were in
their teepees, crouching around the scanty fire, soldiers had charged
on horseback through the villages, shooting into the teepees, killing
women and children.
At the head of these soldiers was a white chief, whom they called
Yellow Hair. He was a smashing, dashing, fearless soldier who
understood the Indian ways and haunts, and then used this knowledge
for the undoing of the Red Men.
Yellow Hair wanted to keep them in one little place all the time, and
desired that they should raise corn like cowardly Crows, when what
they wanted was to be free and hunt!
They feared Yellow Hair--and hated him.
Custer was a man of intelligence--nervous, energetic, proud. His
honesty and sincerity were beyond dispute. He was a natural Indian
fighter. He could pull his belt one hole tighter and go three whole
days without food. He could ride like the wind, or crawl in the grass,
and knew how to strike, quickly and unexpectedly, as the first streak
of dawn came into the East. Like Napoleon, he knew the value of time,
and, in fact, he had somewhat of the dash and daring, not to mention
the vanity, of the Corsican. His men believed in him and loved him,
for he marched them to victory, and with odds of five to one had won
again and again.
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But Custer had the defect of his qualities; and to use the Lincoln
phrase, sometimes took counsel of his ambition.
He had fought in the Civil War in places where no prisoners were
taken, and where there was no commissary. And this wild, free life had
bred in him a habit of unrest--a chafing at discipline and all rules of
modern warfare.
Results were the only things he cared for, and power was his Deity.
When the Indians grew restless in the Spring of Seventy-six, Custer
was called to Washington for consultation. President Grant was not
satisfied with our Indian policy--he thought that in some ways the
Whites were the real savages. The Indians he considered as children,
not as criminals.
Custer tried to tell him differently. Custer knew the bloodthirsty
character of the Sioux, their treachery and cunning--he showed scars by
way of proof!
The authorities at Washington needed Custer. However, his view of the
case did not mean theirs. Custer believed in the mailed hand, and if
given the power he declared he would settle the Indian Question in
America once and forever. His confidence and assumption and what
Senator Dawes called swagger were not to their liking. Anyway, Custer
was attracting altogether too much attention--the people followed him
on Pennsylvania Avenue whenever he appeared.
General Terry was chosen to head the expedition against the hostile
Sioux, and Custer was to go as second in command.
Terry was older than Custer, but Custer had seen more service on the
plains. Custer demurred--threatened to resign--and wrote a note to the
President asking for a personal interview and requesting a review of
the situation.
President Grant refused to see Custer, and reminded him that the first
duty of a soldier was obedience.
Custer left Washington, glum and sullen--grieved. But he was a soldier,
and so he reported at Fort Lincoln, as ordered, to serve under a man
who knew less about Indian fighting than did he.
The force of a thousand men embarked on six boats at Bismarck. There a
banquet was given in honor of Terry and Custer. "You will hear from us
by courier before July Fourth," said Custer.
He was still moody and depressed, but declared his willingness to do
his duty.
Terry did not like his attitude and told him so. Poor Custer was stung
by the reprimand.
He was only a boy, thirty-seven years old, to be sure, but with the
whimsical, daring, ambitious and jealous quality of the center-rush.
Custer at times had his eye on the White House--why not! Had not Grant
been a soldier?
Women worshiped Custer, and men who knew him, never doubted his
earnestness and honesty. He lacked humor.
He was both sincere and serious.
The expedition moved on up the tortuous Missouri, tying up at night to
avoid the treacherous sandbars that lay in wait.
They had reached the Yellowstone River, and were getting into the
Indian Country.
To lighten the boats, Terry divided his force into two parts. Custer
disembarked on the morning of the Twenty-fifth of June, with four
hundred forty-three men, besides a dozen who looked after the
pack-train.
Scouts reported that the hostile Sioux were camped on the Little Big
Horn, seventy-five miles across the country.
Terry gave Custer orders to march the seventy-five miles in
forty-eight hours, and attack the Indians at the head of their camp at
daylight on the morning of the Twenty-seventh. There was to be no
parley--panic was the thing desired, and when Custer had started the
savages on the run, Terry would attack them at the other end of their
village, and the two fleeing mobs of savages would be driven on each
other, and then they would cast down their arms and the trick would be
done.
Next, to throw a cordon of soldiers around the camp and hold it would
be easy.
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Custer and his men rode away at about eight o'clock on the morning of
the Twenty-fifth. They were in high spirits, for the cramped quarters
on the transports made freedom doubly grateful.
They disappeared across the mesa and through the gray-brown hills, and
soon only a cloud of dust marked their passage.
After five miles had been turned off on a walk, Custer ordered a trot,
and then, where the ground was level, a canter.
On they went.
They pitched camp at four o'clock, having covered forty miles. The
horses were unsaddled and fed, and supper cooked and eaten.
But sleep was not to be--these men shall sleep no more!
The bugles sounded "Boots and Saddles." Before sunset they were again
on their way.
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By three o'clock on the morning of the Twenty-sixth, they had covered
more than seventy miles.
They halted for coffee.
The night, waiting for the dawn, was doubly dark.
Fast-riding scouts had gone on ahead, and now reported the Indians
camped just over the ridge, four miles away.
Custer divided his force into two parts. The Indians were camped along
the river for three miles. There were about two thousand of them, and
the women and children were with them.
Reno with two hundred fifty men was ordered to swing around and attack
the village from the South. Custer with one hundred ninety-three men
would watch the charge, and when the valiant Reno had started the
panic and the Indians were in confusion, his force would then sweep
around and charge them from the other end of the village.
This was Terry's plan of battle, only Custer was going to make the
capture without Terry's help.
When Terry came up the following day, he would find the work all done
and neatly, too. Results are the only things that count, and victory
justifies itself.
The battle would go down on the records as Custer's triumph!
Reno took a two-mile detour, and just at peep of day, ere the sun had
gilded the tops of the cottonwoods, charged, with yells and rapid
firing, into the Indian village. Custer stood on the ridge, his men
mounted and impatient just below on the other side.
He could distinguish Reno's soldiers as they charged into the
underbrush. Their shouts and the sound of firing filled his fighter's
heart.
The Indians were in confusion--he could see them by the dim light,
stampeding. They were running in brownish masses right around the
front of the hill where he stood. He ordered the bugles to blow the
charge.
The soldiers greeted the order with a yell--tired muscles, the
sleepless night, its seventy-five miles of hard riding, were
forgotten. The battle would be fought and won in less time than a man
takes to eat his breakfast.
Down the slope swept Custer's men to meet the fleeing foe.
But now the savages had ceased to flee. They lay in the grass and
fired.
Several of Custer's horses fell.
Three of his men threw up their hands, and dropped from their saddles,
limp like bags of oats, and their horses ran on alone.
The gully below was full of Indians, and these sent a murderous fire
at Custer as he came. His horses swerved, but several ran right on and
disappeared, horse and rider in the sunken ditch, as did Napoleon's
men at Waterloo.
The mad, headlong charge hesitated. The cottonwoods, the water and the
teepees were a hundred yards away.
Custer glanced back, and a mile distant saw Reno's soldiers galloping
wildly up the steep slope of the hill.
Reno's charge had failed--instead of riding straight down through the
length of the village and meeting Custer, he had gotten only fifty
rods, and then had been met by a steady fire from Indians who held
their ground. He wedged them back, but his horses, already overridden,
refused to go on, and the charging troops were simply carried out of
the woods into the open, and once there they took to the hills for
safety, leaving behind, dead, one-third of their force.
Custer quickly realized the hopelessness of charging alone into a mass
of Indians, who were exultant and savage in the thought of victory.
Panic was not for them.
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They were armed with Springfield rifles, while the soldiers had only
short-range carbines.
The bugles now ordered a retreat, and Custer's men rode back to the
top of the hill--with intent to join forces with Reno.
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Reno was hopelessly cut off. Determined Sioux filled the gully that
separated the two little bands of brave men.
Custer, evidently, thought that Reno had simply withdrawn to re-form
his troop, and that any moment Reno would ride to his rescue.
Custer decided to hold the hill.
The Indians were shooting at him from long range, occasionally killing
a horse.
He told off his fours and ordered the horses sent to the rear.
The fours led their horses back toward where they had left their
packmules when they had stopped for coffee at three o'clock.
But the fours had not gone half a mile when they were surrounded by a
mob of Indians that just closed in on them. Every man was killed--the
horses were galloped off by the women and children.
Custer now realized that he was caught in a trap. The ridge where his
men lay face down was half a mile long, and not more than twenty feet
across at the top. The Indians were everywhere--in the gullies, in the
grass, in little scooped-out holes. The bullets whizzed above the
heads of Custer's men as they lay there, flattening their bodies in
the dust.
The morning sun came out, dazzling and hot.
It was only nine o'clock.
The men were without food and without water. The Little Big Horn
danced over its rocky bed and shimmered in the golden light, only half
a mile away, and there in the cool, limpid stream they had been
confident they would now swim and fish, the battle over, while they
proudly held the disarmed Indians against General Terry's coming.
But the fight had not been won, and death lay between them and water.
The only thing to do was to await Reno or Terry. Reno might come at
any time, and Terry would arrive without fail at tomorrow's dawn--he
had said so, and his word was the word of a soldier.
Custer had blundered.
The fight was lost.
Now it was just a question of endurance. Noon came, and the buzzards
began to gather in the azure.
The sun was blistering hot--there was not a tree, nor a bush, nor a
green blade of grass within reach.
The men had ceased to joke and banter. The situation was serious. Some
tried to smoke, but their parching thirst was thus only
aggravated--they threw their pipes away.
The Indians now kept up an occasional shooting.
They were playing with the soldiers as a cat plays with a mouse.
The Indian is a cautious fighter--he makes no sacrifices in order to
win. Now he had his prey secure.
Soon the soldiers would run out of ammunition, and then one more day,
or two at least, and thirst and fatigue would reduce brave men into
old women, and the squaws could rush in and pound them on the head
with clubs.
The afternoon dragged along its awful length. Time dwindled and
dawdled.
At last the sun sank, a ball of fire in the West.
The moon came out.
Now and then a Sioux would creep up into shadowy view, but a shot from
a soldier would send him back into hiding. Down in the cottonwoods the
squaws made campfires and were holding a dance, singing their songs of
victory.
Custer warned his men that sleep was death. This was their second
sleepless night, and the men were feverish with fatigue. Some babbled
in strange tongues, and talked with sisters and sweethearts and people
who were not there--reason was tottering.
With Custer was an Indian boy, sixteen years old, "Curley the Crow."
Custer now at about midnight told Curley to strip himself and crawl
out among the Indians, and if possible, get out through the lines and
tell Terry of their position. Several of Custer's men had tried to
reach water, but none came back.
Curley got through the lines--his boldness in mixing with the Indians
and his red skin saving him. He took a long way round and ran to tell
Terry the seriousness of the situation.
Terry was advancing, but was hampered and harassed by Indians for
twenty miles. They fired at him from gullies, ridges, rocks, prairie-dog
mounds, and then retreated. He had to move with caution. Instead of
arriving at daylight as he expected, Terry was three hours behind. The
Indians surrounding Custer saw the dust from the advancing troop.
They hesitated to charge Custer boldly as he lay on the hilltop,
entrenched by little ditches dug in the night with knives, tin cups
and bleeding fingers.
It was easy to destroy Custer, but it meant a dead Sioux for every
white soldier.
The Indians made sham charges to draw Custer's fire, and then
withdrew.
They circled closer. The squaws came up with sticks and stones and
menaced wildly.
Custer's fire grew less and less. He was running out of ammunition.
Terry was only five miles away.
The Indians closed in like a cloud around Custer and his few
survivors.
It was a hand-to-hand fight--one against a hundred.
In five minutes every man was dead, and the squaws were stripping the
mangled and bleeding forms.
Already the main body of Indians was trailing across the plains toward
the mountains.
Terry arrived, but it was too late.
An hour later Reno limped in, famished, half of his men dead or
wounded, sick, undone.
To follow the fleeing Indians was useless--the dead soldiers must be
decently buried, and the living succored. Terry himself had suffered
sore.
The Indians were five thousand strong, not two. They had gathered up
all the other tribes for more than a hundred miles. Now they moved
North toward Canada. Terry tried to follow, but they held him off with
a rear-guard, like white veterans. The Indians escaped across the
border.
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Anybody can order, but to serve with grace, tact and
effectiveness is a fine art.