Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  The General dismounted and walked to the pile of bones. A lot of troopers gathered around, and some said the poor devil must have been the man they lost in ’73 in this area. It threw a hush over the soldiers, who had just lately been grousing about being sent on a wild-goose chase, for they didn’t share the melancholy I had seen in Lavender and Bloody Knife. Not one Sioux nor Cheyenne had yet been seen in the flesh, and this campsite was half a year old.

  But I’ll swear this incident had its effect on Custer. I watched him as he looked at them bones. In the poor light of the tent I hadn’t seen how old he had become since the Washita. He was only thirty-seven years of age, yet you could have took him for ten more. He had not shaved on this campaign, and his face was covered with a considerable stubble, his mustache and eyebrows ragged. He took off his gray hat, in respect for the dead, and that short haircut was amazingly rough-clipped for a man of his usual natty habits. The lines running from the nose to his mouth was deep as coulees, and he had not yet had time to wash up, so a lot of trail dust lay upon him.

  As to me, it was now that for the first time I reflected that I might not want the Indians whipped, but neither was it my wish that these six hundred white men lost their lives, nor the Ree or Lavender, of course. It gets real complicated when you set out to monkey with mortality. If I tipped off the Indians, they might ambush Custer. If I did not, he would slaughter them.

  I was watching the detail gather together the dead soldier’s bones when Bloody Knife and another sloppy Ree called Stab come along and addressed me in the signs.

  “Your friend, the Black White Man,” says Bloody Knife, “threw the Lakota body into the river.”

  “Now,” says Stab, “he is fishing in the same place.”

  “We think,” Bloody Knife signals, “that he is using the corpse for bait.”

  The only thing you can do with an Indian in such a mood is what I says then: “I have heard you.” They went off.

  “You know what them Ree look like?” asks a voice at my shoulder. “Darky washerwomen.”

  I turned and seen a sergeant who looked familiar, I didn’t at first know why.

  He says: “Say, I could swear I seen you before. Did you ever serve with the cavalry?”

  I assured him I never, and then I recalled the man. He was that corporal what found me just after I changed into Army clothes in a bush at the Washita, and took me in to the village where Custer bawled me out for having my coat unbuttoned. He had been promoted since, and had some gray in his hair and put on a pound or two around his gut, but was the same person. He had saved my life, and you don’t generally forget that.

  Memory of the incident naturally made me feel friendly to him, so I stuck out my hand and give my name, and he says his name was Botts.

  “Well, Botts,” I asks, “do you think we’ll get a fight soon?”

  He was smoking a short black pipe, which had quite a filthy odor even in that Montana wind. He puffs out some smoke, and says: “I reckon not. I think they’ll run if they can, like the Cheyenne did at the Washita. Of course, nobody yet knows where they are at. Reno is out looking now, and Hard Ass is burning that Terry never sent him. He is afraid Reno will find and whip them afore he gets a chance, but I tell you he don’t have to worry over that. Reno never has fought Indians, and he ain’t got no stomach for doing it now. The only fighting he likes is between himself and a bottle. Hard Ass, on the other hand, will light into anything he finds with a red skin, be it a bunch of old squaws, so as to clear himself with Grant.”

  “I heard he might go for President himself,” says I.

  “Is that so?” Sergeant Botts give a horselaugh. “Well, he’d get two votes for sure: his own and Miz Custer’s. Oh, and of course his brother Tom’s—there’s another bastard. You seen that specimen? Wild Bill Hickok put a head on him once down in Kansas and Tom pulled in his horns. And old Rain in the Face, when he was arrested a couple year ago for murdering three white men, he blamed Tom Custer for it and swore he would one day cut out Tom’s heart and eat it. Tom’s been pissing his pants ever since that Indian escaped.”

  You can see what a high opinion members of the Seventh Cavalry still had of one another. The only officers for which Botts had any use was Captain Benteen, who I remembered from the Washita, and Captain Keogh, a mustachioed Irishman; and even in the case of the latter, Botts never cared for the Catholic religion, he let on, and in addition Keogh was also something of a drunk, although he was naturally brave rather than drinking to get his courage up as with Major Reno.

  I don’t know where Botts got off condemning everyone else for boozing, for during my association with him he was himself invariably hitting a canteen which he had the sutler keep filled with rotgut. On the other hand, one of the main reasons he hated Custer was the General didn’t drink nor smoke. He detested the whole Custer tribe and says the real menace on this campaign was getting surrounded by Custers rather than Indians, for in addition to the General and Tom, and that younger brother Boston and the nephew Armstrong Reed, Lieutenant Calhoun was married to the Custer sister.

  Next I reckon Botts would have started talking abusively of Mrs. Custer herself, but I could not stand for that, whether or not he had once saved my life. That lady was pretty as an angel.

  Most soldiers shared Botts’s opinions, I found. Now they might have been right to feel such, but you take them Indians we was on our way to fight: if they had not venerated Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and Gall, these individuals would not have been their chiefs. It never made no sense to redskins to be led by men they hated or contemned. That seems to be an exclusive white trick, and what it amounted to here was that the Seventh Cavalry had two formidable enemies at the Little Bighorn: the entire Sioux nation and—the Seventh Cavalry.

  A couple days after our arrival at the Tongue, scouts come in from Reno’s detachment which had reached the mouth of Rosebud Creek. He had found the Indians—or at least their tracks. A great trail half a mile wide, marked with the scratching of thousands of lodgepoles drug behind the ponies, led upstream in the Rosebud valley. So we all set out forthwith to join him where that creek emptied into the Yellowstone, the Seventh going by land and General Terry and his staff riding upon the Far West. Colonel Gibbon with his force was already in that area, on the Yellowstone’s north bank.

  It will help if you remember that the Yellowstone in this region flows southwest to northeast, and them tributary streams enter it from the south and are roughly parallel to one another. Proceeding westward, first comes the Powder, where I joined the campaign; then the Tongue, where we found the dead Sioux and the soldier’s skeleton; next the Rosebud, where Reno was now waiting; and finally the Bighorn. Twenty-five or thirty mile above the mouth of the last-named is the forks, the eastward branch of which is the Little Bighorn.

  Soon after everybody had collected at the mouth of the Rosebud, the leading officers, Terry, Custer, Gibbon, and their staffs, held a council on board the Far West, the results of which was circulated throughout the enlisted men on the bank before it was even over, for soldiers, like Indians, have their own mysterious means of getting news. I heard it from Botts.

  “Here’s the plan,” he says. “The Seventh, under Custer, will go up the Rosebud to its headwaters and light into the Indians if they are there. If not, then we’ll cross over to the Little Bighorn valley and come down it. Meanwhile, Terry and Gibbon will be coming upriver. If the Indians are there, they’ll be caught between the two commands.

  “But if I know Hard Ass, he won’t wait for the others. With that infantry, it’ll take them longer than us, and I’ll owe you a drink if we don’t have the Sioux whipped by time they show up.”

  That reminded him of his beloved canteen, and he took a shot from it, I refusing his proffer. “Maybe,” he says, wiping his lips, “you was right, and Hard Ass will be President. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Sioux had run off into the mountains. I never knew an Indin who had the stomach for a real fight. Down on the Washita �
��”

  The point is that he wasn’t alone in this idea. The Army still believed the Indians would run. What none of us knowed at this time was that while we was sitting there on the Tongue River, these very Sioux and Cheyenne had given General Crook’s command a bad beating on the upper Rosebud. But armies then didn’t have radios nor telegraphs, and we never knowed where Crook was located nor he us, though relatively close by, and he soon retired to the south.

  Some say it was from the council on that boat that Custer returned in a depressed state of mind so different from his usual assurance. But I had seen the change in him when he viewed the skeleton of the soldier tortured by the Sioux. However, as the years have gone by, I have since come to believe the alteration commenced further back—when he cut his childish curls, maybe, before starting out from Fort Lincoln. He could hardly be the Boy General any more. We all know the type of man who hasn’t no middle life; from a boyhood continued too long, he falls directly into old age, and it is pathetic.

  There was a suggestion of that in Son of the Morning Star, so long as you understand he wasn’t getting exactly humble yet. He refused an offer of Gibbon’s cavalry battalion as reinforcement and also spurned them Gatling guns. And in this regard, as in few others, he got the support of Botts, for the sergeant like most soldiers tended to close ranks when the regimental pride was at stake.

  “The Seventh don’t need no help,” Botts says. “I’ll stand by Hard Ass on that matter.”

  So there at the Rosebud mouth we commenced to ready for the move upstream, and Gibbon’s command marched off for the Bighorn, though the steamboat, which would haul the ranking officers, lingered awhile so the Seventh could be reviewed in parade. This was around noontime on that June day, a cold wind blowing from the north as we rode through the valley full of sagebrush, past black-bearded Terry and the others on the knoll, with all the buglers massed nearby a-playing the march while the mounts pranced and guidons fluttered.

  Yet it was not a grand occasion when seen against the vasty bleakness of the country, as the forward troops mounted the benchland above the valley in a thin string of blue. I rode at the end of the column with the pack mules and after us come only a little rear guard. Custer had dropped off to say goodbye to Terry, leaning across his mare to shake hands with him and Gibbon, and just as I passed at the foot of where they was, I heard the latter say: “Now, don’t be too greedy, Custer. Leave some Indians for us.” This was spoken half in jest, I thought.

  But Custer replied in sober face.

  “Yes,” he says, “yes,” salutes, and gallops towards the head of his column, which already was dipping over the farthermost bluff. When I got to the high land, I looked back and seen them officers, small as flies, a-riding to where the Far West was tethered to the shore small as a floating leaf.

  Well sir, the pack train started giving trouble when we was hardly out of camp. I was, by the way, still in my peculiar situation as to job, but now had more or less established myself, so far as the others went, as belonging to the little team of civilian packers. Looking at the way the supplies was lashed to the animals, you would have thought a woman had tied them on. Four or five packs fell off before we got twenty minutes out of camp. Now when you realize these mules was carrying ammunition that the Seventh was supposed to use against the Sioux, as well as the rations for a fifteen-day campaign, why, it was a serious deficiency, so Custer sent back a lieutenant to get things in order and in addition to the civilians there was a detachment of troopers to help out, but were the truth known, that pack train was never worth a damn from the minute it started.

  The Rosebud ain’t much of a waterway in quantity, being three or four foot wide and three inches deep throughout much of its length and even less in spots, but where we camped that evening was a deeper pool or two and some of the troopers went fishing in order to get a little change from the hardtack and bacon which was all that was provided in the way of food for the next two weeks. Hunting was not allowed from here on, for the discharge of a firearm can be heard great distances in wild country. But now that his favorite sport become so popular, Lavender of course abandoned its practice.

  That’s another example of the strange style of that man, as I have mentioned, and he was not getting any more normal as we proceeded further towards the Sioux. I’ll tell you how he bedded down at night: we had left all tenting behind, traveling light as we was now, and the soldiers slept upon the ground, maybe scratching out little hollows for their hips. Luckily the weather stayed dry.

  But Lavender, he made himself an Indian wickiup, which is a bush or a couple branches stuck into the ground and your blankets throwed over the top, creating a little hut therein. Now since it wasn’t raining he obviously done that for privacy; nor did he invite me to share it with him though I was what at least passed for his only friend.

  Wandering about that evening I spotted his establishment, off by itself. He had left the closure open at the top, and as I come up smoke was rising from inside. I thought he was cooking his bacon underneath, and thought: damn me, but he is right queer, for there was hardly room in that type of dwelling for a person to sit upright. But shortly I smelled tobacco rather than pork and figured: oh, he is just taking a smoke—still, I wouldn’t burst in upon him, but rather I stamped my foot and called out, and the blanket slowly opens to reveal his dark face a-shining sweaty, for it was warm enough even outside a wickiup.

  Lavender was holding an Indian pipe with two-three foot of wood stem and a red stone bowl, and he looks dully at me and never says a word.

  Now I took this lack of hospitality amiss, for I knowed him from away back and had lived with the Indians myself and felt just as strange about returning with an army sent to punish them. But he was in a more compromising position than me; I had joined up under false pretenses, but he was getting paid. So for his conscience’ sake he could play at Indian rituals, but in practical effect all that mattered was his membership in this command a-tracking down his former friends.… That’s what it seemed like to me at the time, but I guess you are smart enough to understand, as I then did not, that when I looked at Lavender, I was seeing myself.

  Yet right now I was annoyed, and says: “Well, if you are busy—” and starts to leave, but his eyes cleared and he says: “Come on and set.” So I did and we exchanged that Sioux pipe now and again, and at length I says: “I guess it wouldn’t do no good for us to run off.”

  “No,” he says, “no, it would not.”

  I blew out some spicy smoke. He had got the real Indian mix somewhere, maybe from the Ree scouts.

  “Look, Lavender,” I says. “I asked you once and you never really answered: Why did you come on this campaign?”

  He says: “I wanted to see this country again before I die.”

  I appreciated what he meant, though not everybody would have when they saw the cactus and sage and bullberry bushes, along with a few cottonwoods and box elders, which constituted the growth of that district, and the ravines and cutbanks of the terrain.

  “Say,” I asks, “did you ever find any descendants of that kin of yours who went with Lewis and Clark?”

  “Not a one,” Lavender says, “that I could verify, though some Sioux is right dark of skin. But I didn’t look much, for the thing is, when you join the Indians, you got all the relatives you need. There might be people in the band what ain’t overly fond of one another, but they save their real spite for the enemy.”

  Lavender had throwed back the blanket when I set with him, though that bush was still arched over us, and a tribe of mosquitoes was also sharing the wickiup. I had took several bites already.

  “It is otherwise with this here bunch,” I says.

  “Oh my yes,” says Lavender. “The way they hate General Custer, and they ain’t nobody thinks well of Major Reno, who was slapped once in the face by Captain Benteen at the officer club at Lincoln. And Captain Benteen wrote the newspapers a bad letter on what happened at the Washita. And General Custer was a-fixing to horsewhip
him for it, but the Captain put his hand onto his pistol and he say: ‘Come ahead,’ but the General decided not to.”

  Lavender shook his head. “I’ll tell you this about Captain Benteen. Did you ever know he come from a Southern family what was Rebel in the War and called him a traitor when he joined the Union Army? His old Daddy put a curse upon his head, hoping he’d be killed. So the Captain worked it that his Daddy was arrested and throwed into a Federal prison till the War was over. Think of it!”

  “The Cheyenne killed my Pa, but took me for a son.” I don’t know why I said that.

  “I never knowed my Daddy,” says Lavender. “My master sold him to another before I was born.”

  Then I got to telling him about Olga and Gus on the one hand, and Sunshine and Morning Star on the other, and as long as I had started, related the rest of it, Denver and Wild Bill and Amelia and, yes, the Washita.

  “Well,” says Lavender when I had finished, “I never knowed being white was so complicated.”

  “I don’t reckon it is for everybody,” I allowed. “Take General Custer. He not only knows who his family is, but he takes most of them along when he goes to war.”

  “That’s right,” Lavender says, and he looks uneasy.

  I says: “You like him don’t you.”

  His pipe had went out and he scraped the ash from it and took his time. Finally he says: “He has always treated me well, Jack. That’s all I got to go on. You got to remember he is a soldier.”

  “Good at killing,” I says.

  “And dying, if it comes to that,” says Lavender. He puts the pipe away into a buckskin bag, then says: “I wonder if you would write out a will for me.”