So I went through the twilit bivouac and the soldiers lounging about digesting their suppers, and now the fires was all extinguished for a flame can be seen many miles after dark, and I had to ask quite a few before I found a man who could lend me a pencil and even then he never had no paper except a letter from his wife which he carried for good luck in a pocket over his heart, so I saw two officers a-coming through the gloom and purposed to beg a blank page from the order books they generally carried.
They was Lieutenants McIntosh, Wallace, and Godfrey. I found out later from Botts that Custer had held a staff meeting that night, in total distinction to his usual practice of keeping his own counsel. He explained why he never took the Gatling guns and cavalry reinforcements, on the ground that the Gatlings being hard to transport would detain the column, and as to the other horsemen, he figured they would cause more jealousy between outfits than give help against the foe. Then he talked some more about the campaign and asked for suggestions from the officers.
Now this was an unprecedented thing for Custer to do. He had always told, in that raspy voice of his, and never asked. Bottsy says he had heard the General sounded almost pleading. “That mean son of a bitch. I wonder why.”
Anyway, this will make some sense of what I heard them officers say, as I remembered it later.
“Godfrey,” says Wallace, “I believe Custer is going to be killed.”
Lieutenant Godfrey asks: “What makes you think so?”
“Because I have never heard him talk in that way before.”
Mcintosh just looked from one to the other and didn’t utter a sound. He was a breed, his Ma being an Iroquois Indian back East, and was noted for his slow-moving, cautious ways. He was the only member of this trio who was himself soon to die. He must sometimes have had interesting thoughts.
Well, hearing that, I did not ask them officers for paper, but waited awhile and along came Captain Keogh by himself, with his big black mustache and little pointy underlip beard, so I put my request to him.
Keogh was an Irishman what had served in the personal guard of the Pope in Rome before coming to the U.S.A.
“Ah, sure,” he says, “go and tell Finnegan to give you a sheet from my writing case.”
Finnegan was his striker, who according to Botts kept all of Keogh’s money when they was at Fort Lincoln, lest the Captain drink himself to death on it. “Finnegan’s more like his guardian than striker,” Botts said.
I thanked him and started away, when Keogh put an odd question.
“Would you be writing your will?” he says.
“How’d you know that?”
He give a merry laugh, which was odd considering what he said then: “I made me own last night. But that was after Tom Custer and Calhoun took me at poker, so I don’t have much to leave behind.”
“Why then did you make it?” I asked humorlessly, for I was still under the influence of Lavender and them lieutenants.
“For the sheer hell of it,” says Captain Keogh, and his eyes was bright even in the dusk.
So I searched out Finnegan and got the paper and come back to Lavender, and him and me made out our wills, leaving such as we had to each other, and then the problem arose as to who should keep it, since we’d both be going into whatever fight occurred.
“Give it to Bloody Knife,” says Lavender. “Roll it up and stick it in a cartridge case and give it to him to keep.”
“Why,” I says, “he’ll be in the fight too, won’t he?”
“Not him,” says Lavender. “He’s a coward, like all Ree. At the first shot, he’ll turn and won’t stop till he sees the Missouri River.”
That just goes to show you there ain’t no race that has a monopoly on truth. In point of fact, Bloody Knife got shot in the head in the valley and his brains was blown all over Major Reno. However, that didn’t matter so far as our wills went, for I burned that paper. To have such a document in existence seemed bad medicine to me. I wasn’t the devil-may-care type of Captain Keogh, and maybe that’s why I didn’t get killed like he did.
Next day we marched thirty mile up the Rosebud, and within the first five we hit that Indian trail which Reno had found on his scout. Now I was still at the rear with them goddam mules, which was so slow that the main column would get miles on ahead, so when I seen the Indian trail, it had been overmarked in part by the iron shoes of the cavalry horses, but it was clear indeed that four-five thousand Lakota had made it, for it was. no less than three hundred yards wide and the abandoned campsites along it showed the circles from a thousand tepees, not to mention countless wickiups.
Less than half the total population would be full-fledged warriors; but as you know, an Indian boy from the age of twelve onward can be quite effective with a deadly weapon.
In addition to the Ree, we had acquired from Gibbon’s command a few Crow scouts—this area being home ground to that tribe. I figured Custer had plenty of advice on what could be read from the trail, so did not plan to offer my services again. Did not, that is, until I happened to speak to a lieutenant of the detachment that was guarding the pack train.
We had made one of our many stops so as to resecure the hardtack and cartridge boxes that was always slipping off the mules, and I says to the lieutenant in command, pointing to the Indian trail that extended so far in width beyond our own: “Big village.”
He smiles like I was a greenhorn and allows it showed a few hundred hostiles.
I asks if that was what the Crow and Ree scouts had reported.
“No, as a matter of fact it is not,” says he. “But when you have been on frontier duty as long as I have, you always divide by three any estimate you hear from a friendly Indian. These Crows are good boys, but fighting is not their strong point.”
Well, I have spoke about my worries for the Indians and then my disinclination to see these soldiers massacred, but I have so far not mentioned my growing concern for my own arse. I left that bastardly mule train pronto, and the lieutenant, figuring I was deserting, yells that I would never get my pay, but as usual he had the wrong slant, for I rode towards the head of the column.
Bloody Knife had sold me quite a broken-down pony. Indian-style, the animal was unshod and his hoofs had wore down real bad, so he was half-lame going over the rough terrain, the soil being flinty-hard and whatever grass had grown there was ate off by the immense pony herds of the Sioux. So it took me ever so long to pass the column and when I did, Custer wasn’t at the head of it but rather a mile or two still beyond. He was famous for riding away out on point, in front of the advance guard and sometimes the scouts as well, and on other campaigns, so I heard, damn if he might not do a bit of buffalo or antelope hunting while he was at it. But he was looking for Indians now, and when I seen him upon a bluff at about three-quarters of a mile from where I was, it looked as if he had found them and got personally surrounded.
I whipped the Ree pony into a gallop and was halfway towards rescuing him when I recognized he was merely talking with the Crow scouts. By time I reached the bluff, Custer had gone off again, but the Crow was still there: White Man Runs Him, Half Yellow Face, Goes Ahead, and a young fellow named Curly. Also the guide and interpreter Mitch Bouyer, who was a breed of Crow and white.
I felt uneasy around the Crow, owing to my memories, and White Man Runs Him was old enough to have been a grown warrior in the days when I fought them. Indeed, he studied me from time to time, and while it was unlikely he really had my number, he must have Indianlike sensed something.
So I was glad to see the chief white scout come riding up from the other side of the bluff. This was a man named Charley Reynolds, a stocky, round-shouldered fellow, one of the few real good white scouts I ever knowed and no long-haired blowhard like Buffalo Bill Cody and some of them others.
The only trouble so far as talking to Reynolds went was that he was terrible quiet, keeping his own counsel to the degree that he got the nickname “Lonesome Charley.”
“Charley,” I says, and he immediately looks
at the ground as was his custom when addressed, “have you told Custer how many Indians made this trail?”
He says: “Yep.”
I says: “Because some of the officers think it is just a small band.”
Charley shrugs and just keeps staring embarrassed-like into the ground while his horse stands dead still.
Mitch Bouyer comes alongside then and says, right rude if you considered him white, though understandably if you was conscious of his Indian blood: “What do you want?”
I answers: “To save my hair.”
He says very factual: “That will be hard to do, for we are going to have a goddam big fight.” He turned and rode back to the group of Crow a-sitting their horses all dejected.
Reynolds had looked up while Bouyer was talking, but when I turned back to him, he stared at the turf again.
“There’s too many for him to take on alone,” I says. “And I wager that’s what he’ll do. He won’t wait for Gibbon and Terry.”
“Nope,” says Charley, in his soft voice.
“God damn it, man, you got to make him understand. I hear he’ll listen to you.”
“He won’t,” Charley says and knees his horse so as to move along, and I seen his right hand was wrapped in a bandanna, and asked if he was hurt.
“Whitlow,” says he.
“Can you shoot?”
“Barely,” Charley says and, by now exhausted with so much talking, he got away from me.
“Reynolds is just a yellowbelly,” Sergeant Botts told me in camp that evening. “He begged Terry to let him off this campaign, claiming to have a pre-monition he would go under.”
“Bottsy,” I says, “you got a pretty poor opinion of most. I was wondering what you thought of me.”
“Jack,” says Botts, “there ain’t a lot of you, but what there is, is all white.”
Some men will get a great liking for you if you listen to them abuse others. At that moment, him and me was sitting within some bullberry bushes, getting drunk upon the contents of our canteens. I reckon it was the first real 100 per cent, lowdown, stinking, dirty case of inebriation I had been a party to since them days long ago as I wandered about the southern plains searching for Olga and Gus.
The result was that the next morning found me in very poor condition at the start of the longest day of my life.
CHAPTER 27 Greasy Grass
SATURDAY, JUNE 24, was a mean hot day, and the south wind served only to choke the men behind with the dust of them in front. It got so bad after a time that the troops was obliged each to march along a separate trail, so as not to stifle them following, and also to diminish the great cloud that marked our progress. For we was getting close to the hostiles, and it was just after the noon halt that we crossed the place where another great Indian trail, coming from the south, joined the one we had been on so far.
That was not long after we found the enormous abandoned campsite where the lodgepoles for a sun-dance lodge was still standing. On the floor of the latter was some pictures traced in the sand: lines representing pony hoofmarks on one side and them of iron-shoed cavalry horses on the other; between, figures of white men falling headfirst towards the Indian ranks.
My head was thumping, and the smell of bacon at breakfast had made me go off and heave. I felt so miserable of body that, in compensation, my mind rested somewhat easier than it had been. The Ree and Crow, however, waxed even unhappier than before, while looking at them sand drawings, and chattered to Fred Girard and Mitch Bouyer, their respective interpreters, for being Indians they was much affected by symbols.
Up come Custer shortly, and Bouyer tells him that the pictures meant “many soldiers falling upside down into the Sioux camp,” which was to say, dead.
At that point I steps forward, saying: “General—”
But he interrrupts: “It’s the teamster, isn’t it? Well, teamster,” Custer says, looking down his sharp nose, “I understood your place was with the mules.” Yet he was not sore, but rather amused. “Or do I have it wrong?” he goes on. “I am only the regimental commander.”
“Sir,” I says, wincing from my hangover, “I don’t know how good a job these scouts is doing. I believe the way they put their reports sounds to you like sheer superstition and you ignore it.” Bouyer and Girard was giving me dirty looks.
“Whereas,” I says, “the whole point of being an Indian lies in the practical combination of fact and fancy. These here drawings and bones was left purposely for you to find and be scared by. If you are frightened off, or go ahead and get whipped, then they will have constituted a prophecy. If you win, however, they will have been just another charm that never worked. But the important matter is that the hostiles know you are following them, and are herewith announcing they ain’t going to run.”
Custer had been showing a flickering smile. Now he throws back his head and makes a barking laugh. He once again seemed like his old self, rather than the sober figure he had become since leaving the Tongue.
“Teamster,” he says, “I have the reputation of being a severe man. But I am also surely the only commanding officer who could stand and listen to the recommendations of a mule skinner. I have a partiality for colorful characters—California Joe, Wild Bill Hickok, and so on—in whose company I should say you belong. Charley Reynolds is a splendid scout, but he is too quiet.”
He laughs again, taking off his gray hat and slapping his boots with it. “This campaign has been altogether too humorless! Very well,” he says, “you wanted to be a scout. You are one as of this moment. Your orders are to stay with me, to say whatever comes into your head, and not to bother these other fellows.”
So that’s how I was appointed official jester to the commander of the Seventh Cavalry, as a result of merely telling the truth. Now you might think I took offense at it, but you would be wrong. It meant that I might be even more ineffectual than when traveling with the mules, for everything said by a man who is an authorized idiot, so to speak, is naturally taken as idiotic. But I would be at the head rather than the tail of the column. Maybe I could even jolly Custer out of the worst mistakes. So I accepted the position, and that threw the General into another laugh, and Girard and Bouyer got the idea, too, and laughed, and so did the Crow and Ree without understanding, but Indians is always polite if possible.
Now my orders might have been to stay with Custer, but that was unlikely for any human being, even one without a hangover and riding a better mount than my half-lame pony, for the General’s reputation for energy had not been exaggerated. Back and forth he rode upon Vic and when he tired that animal out, the striker would bring up Dandy. Scouts was ever coming in with reports, but Custer would generally go out a mile or more to meet them. Then back he’d trot and maybe continue along the column to speak to one of the troop commanders. All the while, his adjutant, Lieutenant Cooke with the enormous mutton-chop whiskers, was writing out orders and sending them hither and yon by means of couriers, and replies come back and Custer’d read them in his quick, impatient way sort of like an eagle.
His brother Tom, a carbon-copy of the General with the characteristics less authentic—like he was more impudent than truly arrogant, with his hat on the side of his head, etc.—Tom was generally in evidence at the head of the column rather than back with his troop, and to get in on the importance he would also send messages to the pack train and so on; and the other brother Boston as well as the nephew Armstrong Reed, both young fellows, they was usually to be seen acting as if we was on a picnic outing.
So I was largely ignored and never had no more chance to amuse the General, had I wanted such, the rest of the day, nor indeed didn’t talk to nobody except once or twice I tried to strike up a conversation with Custer’s striker—not the man from the Washita, but a fellow named Burkman, but he was almost a moron, wearing his cap way down to his eyes, and a butt for everybody’s wit.
We marched thirty mile and went into camp at eight o’clock of the evening, but in come the Crow scouts shortly with a report t
hat the Sioux trail had swung west and crossed the Wolf Mountains in the direction of the Little Bighorn, or Greasy Grass as the Indians called it, so at about midnight we started to move again. I don’t believe anyone had got a wink of sleep in the interim, for the news had soon went around that the hostile village was expected to lie in the river valley, in which case we’d attack it at dawn.
Of course during that halt, I encountered Botts, who had ate a quick meal and went wandering about sticking his nose in everywhere.
“What did I tell you,” he says. “Hard Ass will pitch into the Indians tomorrow, a whole day before the junction with Terry and Gibbon. And by the time they come up, he can deliver that village all skinned and gutted, compliments of the Seventh Cavalry. Curse his dirty heart,” he says, “but you gotta hand it to him.”
I warns Botts to keep his voice down, for we was right near the headquarters tent, but he says nobody would hear on account of Custer was holding a officer’s conference there and was deaf to anything but his own voice.
Then Bottsy says he had to get back to his troop and take care of the men. I don’t want you to have the idea he was not a good sergeant.
“Them recruits,” he says, “is already dragging their tails from these long marches and some ain’t fired a carbine more’n once or twice, nor seen a red excepting the coffee-coolers around the fort. If fired too fast, them Springfields heat up and the ejector sticks. I reckon the agents have fitted out the hostiles with repeaters, which can panic a man unless he realizes our pieces got twice the range of the Winchesters and Henrys.”
Them recruits made up about a third of our force. Some was Irish, and some was Germans who come over here to dodge the draft in the Old Country, couldn’t find no jobs, joined the U.S. Army, and was killed by savage Indians before they learned English: real peculiar experience.
As me and Bottsy was parting, we heard the officers in the tent sing some sad old songs: “Annie Laurie,” and the like, and then “Praise God from whom all blessings flow,” which took me back to my days at the Reverend Pendrake’s church. As singing, it wasn’t too good, I expect, but sounded very nice there in the wilderness and some of the enlisted men gathered around to listen.
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