Which Way to the Wild West?

by Steve Sheinkin

  More than six thousand Lakota, Cheyenne, and other Indian allies—including about two thousand warriors—were camped along the Little Bighorn. They knew the Americans were out there somewhere. “I was thirteen years old and not very big for my age,” remembered Black Elk, “but I thought I should have to be a man anyway.” He was swimming with friends in the Little Bighorn when he heard sudden shouts:

  “The chargers are coming!”

  “They are charging!”

  Black Elk ran to his family’s lodge for his rifle. His friend Iron Hawk, who was fourteen, also prepared for battle. “I was so shaky that it took me a long time to braid an eagle feather into my hair,” he said.

  Nearby, young warriors ran into Sitting Bull’s lodge, shouting that Custer was attacking. “I jumped up and stepped out,” said Sitting Bull. He saw waves of blue-coated American soldiers blasting away as they charged on horses into camp. “The bullets were like humming bees,” he said. “We thought we were whipped.”

  “They came on us like a thunderbolt,” said a Lakota chief named Low Dog. “I never before nor since saw men so brave and fearless as those white warriors.”

  Crazy Horse helped rally the Indian forces, shouting: “It is a good day to fight! It is a good day to die! Strong hearts, brave hearts, to the front! Weak hearts and cowards to the rear!”

  “Then came the rush of the enemy,” said Billy Jackson, an American soldier who was part of Major Reno’s charge. Jackson and the other soldiers suddenly saw at least five hundred Indian warriors charging toward them. “Their shots, their war cries, the thunder of their horses’ feet were deafening,” Jackson said.

  Somewhere in the middle of this chaos, Custer was waving his hat and shouting, “Courage, boys, we’ve got them!” But now that Custer was in the Indian camp, he must have realized how badly outnumbered his soldiers were. It was too late to do anything but try to fight his way out.

  Witnesses described the next few minutes as a confusing mix of swirling dust, gunshots, and shouts of pain and fury. Custer’s soldiers split into smaller groups, but they were all quickly surrounded. “I think they were so scared that they didn’t know what they were doing,” Black Elk said. “The shooting was quick, quick, pop—pop—pop, very fast,” said a warrior named Two Moons. “We circled all around them—swirling like water round a stone.”

  With no time to reload, men swung their guns at each other like clubs. They wrestled and punched and bit. Many of Custer’s soldiers finally threw down their weapons. They were ready to surrender.

  But the Indians kept on attacking. Sitting Bull’s cousin watched Indian warriors shooting and stabbing Custer’s men after they tried to surrender. “The blood of the people was hot and their hearts bad,” she said, “and they took no prisoners that day.”

  Death All Around

  Major Reno and his surviving soldiers—who had attacked from the other side of the Indian camp—never saw what happened to Custer. They spent an endless night on a nearby hill, wondering why they received no messages or orders from Custer. “We felt terribly alone on that dangerous hilltop,” said a soldier named Charles Windolph. “We were a million miles from nowhere. And death was all around us.”

  When Reno’s men finally made it to safety, they found out why they hadn’t heard from Custer. “We had a closer view of Custer’s battlefield,” one of the soldiers said. “We saw a large number of objects that looked like white boulders scattered over the field.”

  As they walked nearer, they realized that these were not boulders. They were the bodies of Custer’s soldiers, stripped and badly cut up. The men wept as they walked among the bodies, looking for friends.

  Meanwhile, back at Fort Abraham Lincoln, the soldiers’ families were suffering through the hot summer of 1876, waiting for news. “Our little group of saddened women, borne down with one common weight of anxiety, sought solace in gathering together in our house,” said Elizabeth Custer.

  One day, while the women were singing to pass the time, a messenger arrived. It was an Indian named Horn Toad, one of Custer’s scouts. Panting from exhaustion, he delivered the news in short sentences: “Custer killed. Whole command killed.”

  Horn Toad’s report was accurate. Custer and every one of the 210 men he led into battle were dead. Another fifty men from Major Reno’s force had been killed. It was by far the biggest defeat the American military ever suffered in the Indian wars.

  The news from Little Bighorn shocked the entire nation—coming right at the moment Americans were celebrating the country’s one hundredth birthday. General William T. Sherman promised to send more soldiers west to crush the Lakota once and for all.

  After Little Bighorn

  Back at Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull and the other chiefs realized they had won a historic victory. They also knew Sherman. They knew he would come after them harder than ever now, and they were not really prepared. The recent fighting had left them nearly out of ammunition.

  The huge Indian camp on the Little Bighorn split up, with smaller groups marching off in different directions.

  Sherman’s forces went on the attack right away, just as the harsh northern plains winter began. “The worse it gets, the better,” said General George Crook, who led the attacks. “Always hunt Indians in bad weather.”

  Crook pushed his shivering soldiers on long marches across the frozen plains. “I know it looks hard, but we’ve got to do it, and it shall be done,” he said. “If necessary we can eat our horses.”

  “I’d as soon think of eating my brother,” grumbled a young officer (not loud enough for the general to hear).

  All winter Crook’s soldiers surprised Lakota and Cheyenne villages, capturing horses and destroying food supplies. Indians who survived the attacks were scattered in the snow without food or tents. After attacking one village, an American soldier reported: “The thermometer never got higher than 25 below … . Those poor Cheyenne were out there in that weather with nothing to eat, no shelter.”

  Sitting Bull led about one thousand people across the border into Canada, where they were safe from American attacks. But for those unable to escape, there was little chance of finding food on the plains. Buffalo were getting scarce now. As the winter dragged on, groups of Indians started coming in to reservations. “I am tired of being always on the watch for troops,” explained Red Horse, a Lakota chief. “My desire is to get my family where they can sleep without being continually in the expectation of an attack.”

  The Lakota teenager Black Elk felt the same way. “Wherever we went, the soldiers came to kill us,” he said of that winter. He and his family went in to a reservation. There, in May 1877, he watched the surrender of a leader he had grown up idolizing. “Crazy Horse came in with the rest of our people,” said Black Elk, “and the ponies that were only skin and bones.”

  American soldiers took the famous warrior’s weapon They handed him some beef and beans.

  “I want this peace to last forever,” Crazy Horse said.

  General Crook wanted peace too. But he had his own ideas about how to keep it—he wanted Crazy Horse locked up.

  Crazy Horse

  A group of soldiers surrounded Crazy Horse. They reached for his arms.

  “Don’t touch me!” he yelled.

  The soldiers started dragging him across the reservation. When he saw he was being taken toward a tiny jail cell, Crazy Horse yanked free and pulled out a knife.

  “Kill him! Kill him!” soldiers shouted.

  A soldier lunged forward and stabbed Crazy Horse with his bayonet. A few other soldiers reached for the fallen warrior.

  “Let me go, my friends,” Crazy Horse said. “You have got me hurt enough.” Crazy Horse died that night. “I cried all night, and so did my father,” Black Elk said.

  Chief Joseph’s Promise

  From his homeland in Oregon, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce watched the fall of the powerful Plains Indians. The message was clear: Indians could win battles against American soldiers. But even the mos
t powerful groups could not win wars against the United States.

  Joseph was determined to help the Nez Perce hold on to their traditional territory in Oregon’s Wallowa Valley. He had sworn to his dying father that he would never give up this land.

  “You must stop your ears whenever you are asked to sign a treaty selling your home,” Joseph’s father told him. “My son, never forget my dying words. This country holds your father’s body. Never sell the bones of your father and mother.”

  “I pressed my father’s hand and told him I would protect his grave with my life,” Joseph said.

  This promise put Joseph in an impossible position in 1877. Actually, it wasn’t the promise that caused trouble—it was that American settlers were moving onto Nez Perce land.

  How was Joseph supposed to defend this land once the United States decided to take it?

  The End of the Wild West

  In April 1877, General Oliver O. Howard left his headquarters in Portland, Oregon, and headed east. He had new orders: Clear the Nez Perce off their land and move them to a reservation in Idaho. Privately, Howard sympathized with the Indians, telling friends: “It is a great mistake to take from Joseph and his band of Nez Perce Indians that valley.” But Howard had his orders. He continued toward the Wallowa Valley to deliver the government’s demand.

  You’ve Heard This One

  It was the same old story. Gold had been found on the Nez Perce land, and settlers raced in. They started putting up cabins, fencing in farms, stealing Nez Perce cattle. Both sides were ready to fight for the land. Hoping to avoid another costly Indian war, the government offered the Nez Perce land on a reservation in nearby Idaho. It wasn’t really an offer.

  The Nez Perce realized this when General Oliver Howard showed up in May 1877. Howard told them to pack up and leave the Wallowa Valley. If they didn’t get moving, Howard warned, the army would come and give them a shove.

  Joseph and the other chiefs told Howard they had never agreed to be moved from their homeland. “Chief Toohoolhoolzote stood up to talk for the Indians,” remembered a young Nez Perce named Yellow Wolf. “He told how the land always belonged to the Indians.” This led to an angry argument with Howard:

  Howard: You know very well that the government has set apart a reservation, and that the Indians must go on it.

  Toohoolhoolzote: Who are you to tell me what to do? What person pretends to divide the land?

  Howard: I am that man. I stand here for the president. My orders are plain and will be executed.

  Toohoolhoolzote: We came from the earth, and our bodies must go back to the earth, our mother.

  Howard: I don’t want to offend your religion, but you must talk about practicable things. Twenty times over I hear that the earth is your mother … . I want to hear no more, but come to business at once.

  Toohoolhoolzote: Who can tell me what I must do in my own country? Are you the Great Spirit? Did you make the world? Did you make the sun?

  Howard finally got sick of arguing. He told the Nez Perce they had thirty days to leave their land.

  “Why are you in such a hurry?” Joseph asked. “I cannot get ready to move in thirty days.” He explained that they would need more time to gather their animals and collect supplies for the coming winter.

  “If you let the time run over one day,” Howard warned, “the soldiers will be there to drive you onto the reservation.”

  Howard’s threat sparked a fierce debate among the Nez Perce. “I did not want bloodshed,” Joseph said. “I did not want my people killed. I did not want anybody killed.” He argued that it would be better to move than to see their people killed in a war that could never be won.

  But many of the younger chiefs and warriors vowed to stay and fight. “Toohoolhoolzote talked for war,” Joseph remembered, “and made many of my young men willing to fight rather than be driven like dogs from the land where they were born.”

  While Joseph made preparations to leave, a group of young warriors left the village at night, marched to nearby cabins, and killed four settlers. “I would have given my own life if I could have undone the killing of white men by my people,” Joseph said.

  Now, he knew, General Howard would be sending his soldiers to fight the Nez Perce. Now there was no way to avoid war.

  The Flight of the Nez Perce

  “It was just like two bulldogs meeting,” Yellow Wolf said of the moment he and other Nez Perce warriors slammed into the American soldiers. “We drove them back across the mountain, down to near the town they came from.”

  Thirty-three Americans were killed in this quick battle. “I never went up against anything like the Nez Perces in all my life,” said one of the surviving soldiers.

  The young Nez Perce warriors celebrated. But Joseph and the other chiefs knew Howard would be back soon, and with a much bigger army. With only about 150 warriors, the Nez Perce could not simply wait here to be attacked. Their only choice was to start moving.

  “From that time, the Nez Perce had no more rest,” Yellow Wolf remembered.

  About seven hundred Nez Perce men, women, and children quickly packed everything they and their animals could carry. Then they headed east toward the open spaces of Montana. There they hoped to meet up with the Crow Indians, old allies of theirs.

  When he saw the Nez Perce moving, General Howard and his five hundred soldiers set off to catch them. They chased the Nez Perce out of Oregon and into the rugged Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho. As news of the chase spread, people in nearby towns panicked and locked themselves in their cabins (parents in one town locked their children in the vault of the local bank).

  In western Montana a small group of soldiers gathered to try to block the path of the oncoming Nez Perce. After laying logs across the road, the men declared: “You cannot get by us.”

  “We are going by you without fighting if you will let us,” Joseph answered. “But we are going by you, anyhow.”

  Suddenly feeling extremely outnumbered, the soldiers got out of the way. And the chase continued across Montana, then south back into Idaho, and east into Wyoming. “We rode on, always watching for enemies,” Yellow Wolf said. As one of the Nez Perce scouts, he had the vital job of watching for Howard’s army. Only during rare moments of rest did he allow himself to think about home:

  “Thoughts came of the Wallowa where I grew up. Of my own country when only Indians were there. Of tepees along the bending river. Of the blue, clear lake, wide meadows with horse and cattle herds.”

  Yellow Wolf

  Where was General Howard’s army meanwhile? That’s what the entire country was wondering. By now Americans everywhere were following the amazing chase in their newspapers. An increasingly irritated General Sherman sent Howard telegrams with orders such as: “That force of yours should pursue the Nez Perce to the death.”

  Race to the Border

  As Howard pushed his men harder, exhausted soldiers wore through their boots and had to tie rags around their bloody feet. They shivered through rainy nights, unable to start fires with only wet buffalo chips for fuel. And all they had to eat was rotting pork and biscuits so hard that they had to be soaked overnight before they were soft enough to chew.

  The Nez Perce were running out of food too. Some of the older men and women were getting too weak and tired to continue. When they couldn’t take another step, they asked to be wrapped in blankets and set in the shade. Everyone knew they would die there.

  By late August the Nez Perce finally met up with their Crow allies in Montana. It was a disappointing reunion. The Crows explained that they had seen what had just happened to the Lakota and Cheyenne after Little Bighorn. They were not willing to take sides against the United States.

  All alone now, and far from home, the Nez Perce had one last chance—they could make a run for Canada. If they could get across the border, they might be able to team up with Sitting Bull and the Lakota who had followed him north.

  The Nez Perce hurried in that direction, reaching the Bear Paw Mou
ntains in late September. After traveling more than 1,700 miles in three months, they were just two days from the Canadian border. “We knew General Howard was more than two suns back on our trail,” Yellow Wolf said. In fact, warriors started calling Howard “General Day-and-a-Half-Behind.”

  What they didn’t know was that another American army, commanded by Colonel Nelson Miles, was racing toward their camp from the east. As Joseph and the Nez Perce rested for their final march to Canada, Miles and his army were less than fifteen miles away.

  Fight No More

  The Nez Perce were packing up for their last march north when scouts came galloping into camp, shouting:

  “Soldiers! Soldiers!”

  “Enemies right on us!”

  Moments later Colonel Miles and his six hundred soldiers charged into camp.

  “My little daughter, twelve years old, was with me,” Joseph remembered. “I gave her a rope, and told her to catch a horse.”

  Joseph’s daughter and many others were able to get away while Joseph and the warriors tried to fight off the attack. “Six of my men were killed in one spot near me,” Joseph said. “I called my men to drive them back. We fought at close range, not more than twenty steps apart.”

  Many of the best Nez Perce warriors died in a bloody, daylong battle. Miles had the camp surrounded by nightfall. The next morning, as snow started falling, he began blasting shells into camp. The Nez Perce dug holes in the snow for protection from the bombs and the cold. But they were nearly out of food.