Custer Page 6

  Lame Deer, where I spent two weeks, was not as bad a place as Pine Ridge, but it was bad enough. The main street was filled with rusted cars. It was bleak, but I decided to stay there rather than in the hard-bitten town of Hardin, Montana, a town notoriously cruel to Indians.

  Eventually I switched to a motel near the battlefield. It was grim, but so was everything else in Montana.

  In Hardin there are not one but two annual reenactments of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, one put on by the town itself and the other by the powerful Real Bird family. I did not see either one. I then lived in Virginia, where reenactments of Civil War battles were a kind of plague. I did, over the years, visit a few of the major battlefields, discovering in the process that I was not really a battlefield buff.

  In Montana I noticed that the guides to the battlefield were all Crow. The Crow scouted for Custer, and have been pretty much the white man’s Indians ever since. In Montana neighboring tribes—Crow and Cheyenne—could not be more different. In two weeks on the Cheyenne reservations I had maybe two conversations. In one day on the Crow reservation I had at least a dozen.

  The Cheyenne fought Custer, for which they were exiled to the Wind River, the reservation that has had the greatest number of teen suicides among Native Americans. Some were taken as far as Oklahoma. In 1878 about three hundred Cheyenne fought their way out of the dreaded Oklahoma reservation and made for their Montana home. The revolt was lead by Little Wolf and Dull Knife. Theirs was a heroic march; most were cornered in Nebraska, but a few did make it. Though hotly pursued, some admiration was felt for the heroism of the march, which can be seen in the John Ford movie Cheyenne Autumn.

  CUSTER BATTLE REENACTMENT.

  I was privileged to hear the story of the Cheyenne Long March from the mouth of a Cheyenne elder, Mrs. Elk Shoulders. At the time I didn’t know what I was hearing, but a translation arrived in a few days, and I enjoyed it. I didn’t enjoy Mrs. Elk Shoulders so much because her emphatic Cheyenne made it seem that she was angry with me.

  The surviving Cheyenne were put on a reservation near the Tongue River, where some of them are today.

  There is a small park in Lame Deer, and a plaque marks the spot that the survivors returned to. My cowboy hero, early Montana rancher Teddy Blue Abbott, thought the Cheyenne march a tremendous thing. Their resistance was astonishing.

  Once I thought about it I realized why the Cheyenne of Lame Deer didn’t want to talk to me. Why would they? The Cheyenne of Lame Deer were part of the bad, punitive legacy of Custer. The older Cheyenne don’t want to assimilate, and some of the young Cheyenne sided with them, against their parents, most of whom now wanted the white man’s goods, if not the white man’s way.

  Being in Lame Deer was a painful experience. The Crow had long ago sold their coal to the strip miners; the Cheyenne refused, and hired a team of Harvard lawyers to argue that pure, coal-dust-free air was essential to their religion. So far the Cheyenne are winning. The big coal-fired station in Colstrip was, for a time, the only one actually built in Montana.

  The Crow are not so much venal as future-minded. I went with my son James to their sun dance and there were so many white anthropologists there that the event might as well have been held in Harvard Yard.

  The bitter scorn of the Cheyenne is harder to forget than the Crow sun dance or anything else I saw in Montana.

  THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF COMMENTS have been made about the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the more than 130 years since it was fought. In the years just after the battle very few of these comments were made by Native Americans. This was self-protection. Some Indians who fought in the battle held their tongues for forty or fifty years—but once the Indians ceased to be afraid they would be punished, the testimony came in a flood. And, across three or four generations, it is still coming.

  I am not, I repeat, a battlefield buff, and I am not even sure I should call myself a historian. I walked the Custer battlefield twice, without, I confess, being very moved by what can now be seen. I was more interested in what the Crow guides were telling the tourists. Had there been Cheyenne guides the tourists would have been told a different story.

  LITTLE BIGHORN RIVER, 1886.

  If you seek details about the battle itself, I would refer you to Evan Connell, Robert Otley, James Donovan, and Nathaniel Philbrick, who, between them, sweep in virtually everything verifiable about the battle, as well as a few things that are pure guesswork. Read these four books and you can consider yourself very well informed about Custer, his men, the Indians, and the battle itself.

  As to the battle itself, historians now think that as many as ten thousand Indians, mainly Sioux and Cheyenne, were camped along Little Bighorn creek, in a generally north–south axis. Perhaps a quarter of these were warriors, the rest women and children.

  Major Marcus Reno, on Custer’s orders, with his three companies, attacked this huge gathering of Native Americans from the south; he soon realized he was catastrophically overmatched and fled back across the river with what men he could, to seek the protection of the nearby bluff, where he dug in and held out.

  Custer, well to the northeast, did not know of Reno’s routing. He, confident as ever, charged down into the valley of the Little Bighorn expecting to put the savages to flight. Some think he made a desperate attempt to turn north, only to be blocked by Crazy Horse, but that may be romance. In fact he and his men were all very soon dead. Custer was hit twice.

  What I would like to convey here is something of the atmosphere, the ambience that existed on the northern plains when Custer and the other generals, Terry and Gibbon, marched off from Fort Lincoln to subdue the Sioux.

  I would also like to consider some of the enduring mysteries the conflict engendered, hoping to see them in the context of the times. I would like to sketch in an overall view of the battle as we now know it.

  MAJOR MARCUS RENO.

  There was a plan, approved by Grant; Terry and Gibbon tried to follow it and did follow it, only to discover when they got themselves and their large body of troops to the mouth of the Bighorn River that Custer, the rebel general, had simply ignored the order and marched his men somewhere else, to the mouth of the Little Bighorn River, some distance from where they were.

  Why this surprised anyone I don’t know: it was just the kind of thing Custer would be sure to do. He was the child-man who never learned to share and, on this occasion, had no intention of sharing. As Custer was riding out of Fort Abraham Lincoln, Terry called after him, asking him not to be greedy, to save some for them. Custer answered with a wave and went determinedly on his way.

  Throughout his career Custer had never been known to wait for anyone. In part this was his perpetual restlessness, his own need for glory. In part though it was a miscalculation about the Indians; he was convinced that the Indians would always run if faced with well-disciplined, well-generaled soldiers. This was probably based solely on his victory at the Washita, where he only killed eleven warriors because most of the other Cheyenne who were there saw running as their best chance.

  Custer, though, rarely reasoned from his own experience. At the Little Bighorn he ignored all tradition and put his soldiers into battle at midday, when they were very tired. Had the assault been made at dawn the Indians might have missed the fatigue—as it was they saw the soldiers’ legs wobbling. Seeing how dead tired the soldiers were must have raised the confidence of the Indians a good deal. Crook’s men had not been tired a week earlier, at the great Battle of the Rosebud, and yet the Indians won. Now there were many more Indians and the soldiers were tired at the beginning of the battle; by the time it ended they were not tired: they were dead, as was their commander.

  George Crook, the most experienced Indian fighter the army had (with the possible exception of Mackenzie), always claimed victory at the Rosebud, but no one agreed with him, and his claim was made halfheartedly.

  Crook had been ordered to sweep the Powder River, where he found few Indians. Then, on the Rosebud, one week
before the Battle of the Little Bighorn, he found plenty; but for the bravery of his Crow and Shoshone scouts, he might have suffered a very costly defeat—the Rosebud rankled him all the rest of his life. In his readable autobiography he argued that he won, but most students of the battle think otherwise.

  In Crook’s favor is the high death toll of the Indians: thirty Indian dead at least; Crazy Horse, who was there, counts thirty-six, which would be an enormous loss for a hunter-gatherer people. Crook’s loss was eight, and yet Crook was good. Had he not been good the death toll among the whites would surely have been much higher.

  Most of those warriors who survived the Rosebud were there at the Little Bighorn. Sitting Bull, though, was not at the Rosebud.

  Immediately after the Battle of the Rosebud, General Crook retreated one hundred miles south. The retreat may represent his real conclusions about that difficult battle. What puzzled Crook were the huge numbers of Indians buzzing around that part of the country. He had not expected to find Indians in such numbers. Realizing that there might be even more nearby, he immediately dispatched a courier to Fort Abraham Lincoln, warning Custer, Terry, and Gibbon not to take the Indians lightly. This did not arrive until all three generals had left, and did not catch up with them until it was too late.

  LONESOME CHARLEY REYNOLDS.

  These couriers, like Lonesome Charley Reynolds, had to cross hundreds of miles of country teeming with hostile natives. Like Lonesome Charley, they chose to travel mostly at night.

  The question that has most disturbed or engaged historians ever since is whether Custer, had he had the warning from the south, would have behaved more prudently. Most historians doubt that he would have. I agree. Whatever he and Crook thought of one another, it is unlikely that Crook’s troubles would have swayed Custer at all.

  SCOUT OF CUSTER SURROUNDED BY INDIANS.

  SIOUX PREPARING FOR THE BATTLE OF THE LITTLE BIGHORN.

  OPENING OF BATTLE OF LITTLE BIGHORN BY AMOS BAD HEART BUFFALO.

  CUSTER'S LAST CHARGE.

  SIOUX INDIANS FIGHTING AT THE LITTLE BIGHORN.

  CusteR's last RallY.

  FREDERICK REMINGTON PAINTING OF CUSTER'S LAST STAND.

  CUSTER'S LAST STAND.

  THE SOLE SURVIVOR.

  EVERYONE IN A POSITION TO advise Custer, as he approached the Little Bighorn, concurred on one precaution: he should not divide his force. Keep it one force. Sensible advisers listened to the many scouts, who were certain that Indians in numbers long unseen would be met with on the Little Bighorn. For more than a week scouts had been reading sign and exchanging information, None of the scouts had ever seen so many trails. To this day historians argue about how many Indians Custer faced. The upper number might be ten thousand, with a quarter of those warriors and the rest women and children. No one in living memory of Indians had seen a fighting force that large. Even the few elders who remembered the Laramie conference didn’t think it had been that large.

  Custer, if he even heard these numbers mentioned, probably considered them gross exaggerations. Many military men might have disbelieved the figure. Hunter-gatherers could not afford to spend much time in groups that large. Where would the food come from? Mention ten thousand Indians in a group and many frontiersmen would shake their heads in doubt.

  But the conflict at the Little Bighorn turned out to be one of those occasions when received wisdom was wrong.

  Custer, in any case, had made a career of defying received wisdom. He said to someone that he could beat 1,500 red rascals. Probably never for a moment did he expect more.

  Could he have won, had he kept his troop together? He had, all told, about 670 men. Would that number have been enough to back these Indians off? We’ll never know, but on paper it looks a lot better than 250, which is about what he personally went to war with.

  Major Reno, the villain of the story in Libbie Custer’s eyes, had three companies, Benteen had three companies, and Custer had five. And more were with the pack train. And, in fact, Custer may only have faced about 1,500 men; the other thousands may not have existed.

  When Custer addressed that final note to Benteen he can have had no real idea where Benteen was: he had sent him to check out some badlands. Custer was within an hour of his death by then; he may have admitted to some miscalculation—to himself, at least. So he tells the distant Benteen to be quick, when Benteen is probably in no position to be quick. And then it all falls apart.

  What did he feel as it fell: dismay, terror, confusion, determination? There’s a legend that when he fired his last bullet he smiled or laughed. Although who could have seen this last smile is not clear. Many of the Indians would not know of Custer—it is hard to know, or in fact impossible to know. Nathaniel Philbrick has a good chapter on the smile, which we only know about because Private Thomas Coleman, who found the body, mentions it. Custer’s final smile is one of the true mysteries of the Little Bighorn.

  In time several Indians claimed to have killed Custer. Which one did we don’t know, but we do know that he was shot twice.

  CUSTER WAS RASH—ALL HIS LIFE, rash. He was, for most of his life, an extremely confident man. He trusted his instincts to see him through, and, in the Civil War years particularly, they did sustain him. When he divided his troops he did it almost casually. He ignored Benteen, an experienced man, and he ignored the rest of his officers as well. “Custer knows best” was his unspoken motto.

  Excellent reconnaisance was available to him but he ignored it as well. Custer just did not want to be bothered. What he wanted was to get on with the fight.

  All Custer’s native advisers, without exception, told him that he would die if he went down into the valley of the Little Bighorn.

  What surprises the reader, or this reader at any rate, was that the scouts themselves expected to die, and did, one being Mitch Bouyer, a half-breed said to be the protégé of the famous mountain man Jim Bridger. He could speak English. Custer’s favorite scout, Bloody Knife, also expected the worst. Bloody Knife was standing near Major Reno when he caught a bullet in the head; Major Reno was splattered with Bloody Knife’s brain matter. Many historians think that this gruesome circumstance unnerved Reno—it would unnerve most people. Reno had seen plenty of carnage during the Civil War but being splattered with brains might indeed have had a bad effect, one not to be overlooked—but it probably should not be exaggerated, either. He did not behave unreasonably once the battle was joined.

  To a man the scouts said the whites would die if they rode into the valley; then, to a man, the scouts died with their military leaders. They did not flee, although most would probably have escaped had they done so. Was there then a scouts ethic: you must rise or fall with your commander.

  It seems to me that the role of native scouts in the conquering of the Indians has been understudied. Buffalo Bill Cody was a fair scout himself. Crook gave full credit to his Pawnee scouts, who found him the hostiles he was looking for. And the Red River explorer, Captain Randolph Marcy, had a Delaware scout named Black Beaver, who was said to know every creek between the Columbia River gorge and the Rio Grande. Kit Carson could have made the same claim.

  CURLY.

  THE FAR WEST.

  Crook’s Crow and Shoshone scouts saved his bacon at the Rosebud. The gunman Tom Horn was one of the few white scouts who gained the respect of the Apaches he helped locate. Later, he became a gun for hire, killed a young boy, and was hung.

  On the subject of survivors, the great Hunkpapa Gall, a man so impressive that he even impressed Elizabeth Custer, had only scorn for Curly, the scout who was the one escapee from the Little Bighorn. Mitch Bouyer told Curly to get, while there was still time, and Curly got. He was the one who brought the news of Custer’s defeat to the waiting crew of the steamer Far West, who didn’t believe him at first. Later, when Curly advertised himself as the one survivor of the famous battle, Gall was withering in his scorn. Where are your wings? he asked, for once the Indians had Custer surrounded only a bird could have gotten out
.

  No one who saw Gall ever forgot him. He had been injured nine times, several times seriously, and yet he rose from death again and again. Libbie Custer put it this way:

  Painful as it is for me to look upon the pictured face of an Indian, I never in my life dreamed that there could be, in all the tribes, so fine a warrior as Gall.

  CUSTER, SCOUT BLOODY, PRIVATE NOONAN, AND CAPTAIN WILLIAM.

  MITCH BOUYER.

  CUSTER WITH CURLY AND HIS DOGS.

  CROW ARMY SCOUT FOR CUSTER.

  BLOODY KNIFE, CUSTER'S SCOUT.

  AS I HAVE SAID, MAJOR Marcus Reno proved to be the principal antihero of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Custer had given Reno orders more precise than those he gave Benteen—the latter also survived, with most of his men. Major Reno’s orders were to ride south to the foot of the big village, and then charge through it, pursuing the Indians who, it was presumed, would be in flight. Custer thus burdened Reno with his own deeply flawed analysis of the mission they were engaged in. Neither Reno nor Custer had any real sense of the size of the encampment they were attacking. Reno woke up only when he noticed that a solid wall of Indians were charging him, which was definitely not the way the attack was supposed to happen.

  ONE DEPICTION OF RENO'S RETREAT.