by Clay Fisher
The truce-flag bearers swung their runted ponies and were gone. The seven white men took a community deep breath, started their mounts forward. Behind them, Captain Snyder’s sergeants were already barking the “about face and fall in.” A bend in the trail quickly cut off both sight and sound of the retreating column. The stillness of late October lay over the sere and russet land. The only sounds were the grunts and snafflings of their horses, the squeak and jingle of their saddle leathers and bit chains. One dead-still mile fell behind. Then two. Still nothing. The silence became menacing. The trail began to narrow and grow bad. Mile three was walked under by the growingly restive horses. Noting the swing and prick of his own mount’s ears, Kelly wetted a finger and held it up. The wind was into them. The next moment Miles’ thoroughbred flung up his head and neighed challengingly. Instantly, Kelly checked him and dropped him back. “Hold up,” he said to Miles. “Yonder they come.” The white group spaced its horses instinctively across the trail. Miles and Bailey loosened the flaps on their belt holsters. The four troopers looked to their Springfields. Kelly watched the trail ahead and the ridges flanking that trail. It was not a good spot to meet Sitting Bull, but scouts could only suggest, they could not command.
Kelly pulled his Winchester, threw its lever half down, partially opening the breech to check the loading chamber. The cartridge’s dull brass winked comfortingly in the pale October sun. He closed the action.
As he did, Sitting Bull’s group rode into view.
The Hunkpapa leader had chosen well. Black Fox, Frog Belly, Buffalo Child, Whistling Horse, and Yellow Hand were his warriors. His chief was Gall.
It seemed to Kelly as though it took the Sioux an hour to ride over the hundred yards of trail separating them from the white men. Probably it took them thirty seconds. To which had to be appended the additional thirty seconds they sat with their horses’ muzzles not six feet from those of the white truce group, staring at Miles and his men through the eternity of an intentional stillness which would have cracked the nerve of nine out of ten frontier officers, before ever a word was said.
Miles, however, had sat and been stared at by a good many tough Indians in his time. He knew exactly what to do and did it. He kept his mouth shut and his eyes open.
It was Sitting Bull who said the first word.
“What are you doing here? Why are your troops remaining in this country? Why do they not go back to their posts or into winter camp somewhere?”
“We are here to bring you and your people in. We do not want to do this by war, but you cannot be allowed to continue roaming over the country, sending out war parties to devastate the settlements.” Miles broke off, giving him time to accept this, then went on. “If you insist on war, such a war can end only one way for you. Do you know of a single war which the Indians have won when the last rifle has been fired?”
Sitting Bull frowned and spoke rapidly to Gall in Sioux. The latter barked his reply angrily, and Sitting Bull nodded.
“This country belongs to us and not the white men,” he told Miles, apparently repeating Gall’s sentiments. “We have nothing to do with the white men and wish only to be left alone in peace.”
“What do you mean by that?” demanded Miles.
Again Gall growled his guttural comment to the Hunkpapa leader, and again the latter nodded scowlingly.
“I mean you must leave the country entirely to the Indians. The white man never lived who loved an Indian, and no true Indian ever lived that did not hate the white man. God Almighty has made me an Indian, and he has not made me an agency Indian either. Neither will I ever be one.”
The talk went on a little way from there, while Kelly watched Sitting Bull closely.
The Sioux messiah had aged greatly since Kelly had seen him in the camp of the Red River half-breeds nine years before. But the powerful squat physique, huge head, great bony nose, sunken glittering eyes, uncompromising mouth, and prognathous jaw were still cast of the same indestructible, belligerent red iron. And the shifty, unsure, wild mind had not been stabilized a single degree through those intervening years. A man could tell that by the swift, dangerous drift the talk was suddenly taking.
“How did you know I was here where I am?” Sitting Bull asked Miles sharply, breaking in on the white officer to put the apparently innocent question.
“Be careful of that one, General,” Kelly muttered quickly. “I don’t like the way this is going.”
Miles acknowledged his comment, but ignored it.
“All the Sioux are not our enemies. I not only knew you were here; I know where you came from and where you are going.”
“Tell me,” said Sitting Bull quietly. “Where am I going?”
“Watch it, General—!” hissed Kelly, but Miles again overrode the warning.
“You intend to remain here three days and then move to the Big Dry and hunt buffaloes.”
The change in Sitting Bull was incredible. The words turned him from a quiet-spoken human being to a dumbly furious brute. As it would any commander, the thought of spies and traitors in his own camp sickened him, the resultant nausea poisoning his good judgment. Kelly saw him throw up his arm in an apparently prearranged signal and advised Miles that they had best begin getting out of there at once.
The latter was by now alerted, but it was a little late in the morning. Singly and by twos and threes, armed warriors began to appear along the ridge-sides behind the meeting place and to drift silently in toward it. Behind these converging few, the ponies of at least two hundred braves began to silhouette themselves against the raw blue of the ridgetop sky. It was a very bad time in a very bad place. And it was transparently clear by now that Sitting Bull had planned it exactly that way.
Miles calmly warned the latter that he must either stop the inward movement of the near warriors or the talk was at an end for all time.
Kelly, thinking furiously, knew that it would take more than that. Even as Miles was threatening war, a young brave slipped up to Sitting Bull and brazenly handed him a carbine, which the latter made a patent show of hiding beneath his buffalo robe. For a moment, the Irish scout thought of trying a cold bluff—saying, perhaps, that the ridges behind them were as acrawl with soldiers as were those behind the Sioux with warriors—but Sitting Bull had at least one thousand braves and it was no time for begging him to prove it. No. Their one chance lay with Gall. And with Kelly’s knowledge of the war chief’s savage pride in race and person.
He touched Belshazzar with his heels, jumping the thoroughbred forward. The big horse stopped with his shoulder a foot from that of Gall’s roan. Kelly kept his voice down. He made no impassioned accusations or appeals. He merely said, “This is treachery, my brother. I know it is not your doing and that you will not be a party to it. We are going to turn around now and go back to our camp. We ask to go in peace. Woyuonihan.”
Gall returned his salute of respect without a word, then, unexpectedly, called softly after him. “She is well, my brother, and not unhappy; the child was a fine boy. Woyuonihan.”
Kelly did not turn but rode straight to Miles. “Don’t hurry and don’t drag your feet either,” he muttered, side-mouthed, to the latter and young Bailey. “Just salute them as though we lad an honorable understanding, turn your horses and ride but slow. Do you men hear that?” he queried, standing a little in his stirrups to catch the troopers’ attention. They nodded that they had, and he finished tersely. “All right, let’s go. And for the love of God, whatever you do, don’t look back once we’ve started.”
Miles and Bailey saluted Sitting Bull as Gall rode up to him growling out some Sioux gutturals and tapping the breech of his rifle meaningfully. The Hunkpapa leader glared at him a moment, then wheeled and flung an arm-signal up toward the backing ridges. At once all Sioux movement ceased. The white officers turned their mounts away, followed by the four troopers and Luther S. (for scared) Kelly. They rode slowly and with g
ood straight backs. In all the long way it took them to travel beyond the Sioux eyesight, not one of them looked back. And in all the long time of watching them go, not a solitary red man nor shaggy Indian mount moved to follow them.
Gall was still the war chief of all the Hunkpapa.
Miles was a man of his word. With dawn of the next day, October 22, he had his column on the move again. This time he did not halt it until its head was within a mile—and plain view—of the Hunkpapa village. At this point Sitting Bull rode out with a flag of truce. He came alone and Miles stopped long enough to hear what he had to say. The commander of the Fifth Infantry was no squaw-killer like the late head of the Seventh Cavalry. He clearly meant, as he had told Kelly at the start that morning, to clean out the village. But if Sitting Bull had meanwhile decided to come in peaceably, he would still be given the opportunity, with honor.
Such was not the Hunkpapa’s intent.
His sole conception and condition of peace was that all white works and settlements, including military posts, railroads, wagon trails and telegraph lines, be abandoned at once and the entire country, save for selected trading posts, be turned back to the Indians. This pathetic defiance was delivered with savage hauteur and positive hostility. Miles let him finish his threatening tirade, then said quietly. “You will either accept our terms of government and place your people under our laws, as the other Sioux have, or I shall pursue you until I kill you or you kill me, or until one of us has driven the other out of the country.”
Sitting Bull was stunned. He could not seem to grasp Miles’ meaning and asked to have his words restated.
The General obliged.
“I will give you fifteen minutes to surrender. At the end of that time I shall attack your camp,” he said, biting off each word now as though he were angry at it. “I am tired of talking to you.”
Sitting Bull blustered darkly. He was much stronger than Bear Coat. He had a thousand men, Bear Coat only a few hundred. Bear Coat had better not talk to him that way. He had better be nice. Say something peaceful.
“You have fifteen minutes,” said Miles.
Now the ill-famed Sioux leader understood. He put on no more. He dropped his mask of reasonable negotiator and revealed the true face of the incorrigible white-hater beneath it. As with the day before, when Miles had hinted at his agency spy system, Sitting Bull’s speechless reaction of black anger ended the meeting. Without another word he spun his spotted war pony about and raced toward the watching circle of braves which had formed behind him while he talked to Miles. The whole group immediately wheeled and ran for the village. Within seconds of the first hoarse cries of warning, the huge camp was in an uproar. Warriors by the hundreds began to stream out onto the plain between their lodges and the white troops, riding furiously back and forth across the enemy front to mask the miraculous panic of the retreat beginning behind the towering dust thrown up by their desperate galloping camouflage. Squaws screamed, little children wailed, dogs yelped, horses neighed and squealed, war cries echoed everywhere. And somehow, despite the apparent wild confusion, the lodges were emptied, pack ponies run up and loaded, riding mounts secured, and the general evacuation of women, children, and old ones which any plains warrior will secure, to the death if need be, before looking to his own safety, was begun, coordinated and carried out in something less than Miles’ seemingly impossible fifteen minutes.
For his part the white commander sat his mount, calmly dividing his attention between the activity in the Sioux camp and the movement of the minute hand on the fine double-cased hunting watch which he held in his left hand, the while quietly discussing the developing situation with Luther Kelly, Clubfoot Boyd, Liver-eating Johnson, Charley Bass, and half-breed Billy LeBeau, the five-man elite of his large scout corps.
Neither Kelly nor any of the others had taken part in that second morning’s meeting, save as spectators. Now they all agreed with their Irish chief, in response to Miles’ query as to their opinions of his decision to attack. “Well, General,” Kelly had said, “when it comes right down to it, I agree with Bill Cody. He always said that in treating with Indians, the whole secret is to be honest with them and do as you agree. Now it looks to me as though you’ve agreed to run Sitting Bull out of the country. I’d say you’d best go right ahead and start running him the minute that big hand hits the mark.”
Since Captain Snyder and Captain Frank Baldwin had already set up the skirmish line for the advance and since his scouts were ready and eager to lead it in, Miles could now give his whole attention to the inexorable creep of the minute hand toward a quarter after ten a.m.
Precisely upon the moment of its arrival, and not an instant before, he raised his yellow gauntlet.
It was 10:15.
An advance of highly trained infantry against wild-riding, disordered native cavalry can be a devastating thing. Miles’ troops were highly trained.
Nothing the hostiles could do deterred them. They fired the grass entirely around the white command. Miles’ men marched straight ahead. They ate the smoke, jumped the flames, stomped through the cinders. And they kept coming. In twenty minutes they had taken the village. In thirty, the skies were black with the greasy smoke of burning cowhide lodges. In an hour they had driven the Indians several miles north. In twenty-four hours they had pursued them fifteen miles, and in forty-eight hours had driven them forty miles, all without allowing them stopping time enough to even water their horses. And that was the end of it. Another desperate half hour and two more demoralized miles of white rifle fire and artillery pounding broke the spirit of the Border People. Nohetto. They could do no more. Bear Coat had won.
A third and final flag of truce came forward.
In the following terse interview, Nelson Miles accepted the surrender of two thousand Hunkpapa, Miniconjou, and Sans Arc Sioux, over four-fifths of Sitting Bull’s entire war strength. Five well-known chiefs were given up as hostages against the faithful execution of the agreement. Within the hour these chiefs were on their way south to the reservation under armed guard of Lieutenant Forbes and a strong force of Fifth Infantry.
There proved to be only one flaw in the merciless brilliance of the forty-eight hour operation.
It came apparent when the last of the surrendering hostiles had been identified and checked off against Kelly’s list of the important Sioux in Sitting Bull’s big camp as of October 20, two days before the battle.
Three large red fish and some four hundred faithfully following smaller fry had slipped through Miles’ hastily flung Hunkpapa net. The four hundred were fingerlings and could be forgotten. The three were something else again. They were:
Pretty Bear.
Sitting Bull.
Gall …
37
Eight days of hard marching and hot fighting had worn the Fifth a little thin. When the weather turned severely cold on the twenty-sixth, Miles took a good look at his shivering men and ordered the column back to the Yellowstone. Here he put in the rest of October and the early part of November doing something no other white commander in the north had done before him—properly outfitting his troops for winter campaigning in the dread cold of the Montana high country.
Within a matter of days, and while Kelly and his four picked scouts were maintaining contact with Sitting Bull’s escapees, he was ready. When the Irish scout returned to report the Hunkpapa fleeing up the Big Dry toward the Missouri, he was completely amazed at the scope and detail of Bear Coat’s preparations.
Miles had indeed equipped his command as though readying it for an arctic expedition. This was not an idle comparison on Kelly’s part, either, but an exact description tallying with Miles’ own later personal recollections.
“In respect to climatic effects,” wrote the General, “the record during that time and since has demonstrated that the severity of the cold of winter there was nearly equal to anything encountered by Schwatka, Greely, or other
explorers. During the winter campaigns of 1876 and ’77 all the mercurial thermometers we had with us were frozen solid. The following winter a spirit thermometer registered between fifty-five and sixty degrees below, and the lowest record was on Poplar Creek where the command crossed in 1876, and where the thermometer subsequently registered sixty-six degrees below zero; which was equal to the cold of the Arctic regions.”
Continuing, Miles states tersely, “that temperature is simply appalling. Even when the air was perfectly still and all the moisture of the atmosphere was frozen, the air was filled with frozen jets, or little shining crystals.”
Kelly and his four case-hardened cronies had to laugh, even so, at the extent of the commander’s cautions and concerns over the thermal welfare of his troops. To men of their own Indian-like indifference to exposure, the appearance of the Fifth Infantry on the eve of its November departure northward from the Tongue cantonment was nothing less than “downright comical.” As half-breed Billy LeBeau put it, “By Gar, him look like heap damn Eskimo!” and here again the opinion of one of his rawhide-tough scouts coincided almost precisely with the General’s own eventual erudite summation.
“Both officers and men,” remembered Nelson Miles, some twenty years removed, “profited by the experience they had been through in the winter campaigns in the Indian Territory, and applied themselves zealously to their equipment in every possible way. In addition to the usual strong woolen clothing furnished for the uniform, they cut up woolen blankets and made themselves heavy and warm underclothing. They were abundantly supplied with mittens and with arctics or buffalo overshoes, and whenever it was possible, they had buffalo moccasins made and frequently cut up grain sacks to bind about their feet in order to keep them from freezing. They made woolen masks that covered the entire head, leaving openings for the eyes and to breathe through, and nearly all had buffalo overcoats.
