by Win Blevins
Captain Wallace ran to his station at the rear of K Troop. As he got there, a bullet knocked the top of his head off.
Colonel Forsyth ran to the top of the knoll, perhaps to get a better view, perhaps to be near the cannons.
With Indian and white so mixed up, hand to hand, the Hotchkiss guns could not fire.
I went to Blue Crow. He was kneeling, working his Winchester quickly and beautifully, shooting soldiers.
The strapping Indian who stalked Philip Wells now pulled a well-honed knife, raised it above his head with both hands, and drove it at the interpreter’s face. Wells fell to one knee and blocked the knife with his rifle. His eyes grew with horror—the sharp point missed his forehead but slashed downward and sliced his nose nearly off.
The Indian drove the knife downward again. On his back, Wells once more blocked it with his rifle. When the Indian pulled the blade back, Wells smashed him in the head with the muzzle.
While the Indian was stunned, Wells jumped up and shot him in the side. A corporal ran up and finished the warrior with a shot in the back. Instantly the corporal fell to a shot from a soldier across the council ground.
Drenched in his own blood, mad with pain, in shock, Wells ran for the trader’s wagon. On the way he grabbed his nose, hanging by a thin bridge of skin, and tried to tear it off.
“My God, man,” cried an officer, “don’t do that! That can be saved!”
On the council ground, Wind Storm and Thunderstorm wrought pandemonium.
Seeing his father fall and Big Foot killed, Iron Hail charged the soldiers of B Troop. The swirl of smoke and dust attacked everyone’s eyes, ears, noses. Dewey could see little but the shiny brass buttons of the soldiers’ uniforms, and hurried toward those. A rifle went off next to his ear, deafening him. Iron Hail grabbed the rifle and twisted it away from the soldier. Then he thrust his knife into the man’s chest. The soldier clutched Iron Hail by the throat, and the Mniconjou drove his knife home, near the heart. The soldier crumpled. Iron Hail stabbed the man in the kidneys over and over, and over and over, until he stopped moving.
Seizing the soldier’s rifle, Iron Hail sprinted between the tipis toward the ravine. The village was a chaos of the screaming, the dying, and the dead. He was hit by a bullet in the arm, and as he leapt into the ravine, another struck him in the groin. Stunned, he looked back. Soldiers were rushing the ravine. He fired, reloaded, and fired several times.
The rifle fragmented in his hands. Realizing it had been hit by a bullet, he threw it away and hauled himself painfully to the bottom of the ravine.
On the council ground the magazines of those Indians left fighting were empty. Some red men dashed to the east, toward the creek. Troop G was a hundred yards off, firing. Most red men ran crazily toward the village. On the way they grappled one-on-one with soldiers. When they could, they seized weapons and fled.
In the council area now sprawled more than twenty of their fellows, dead, wearing dance shirts or not, indiscriminantly. Ringing these bodies lay more than thirty dead and wounded soldiers.
O, those Winchester repeating rifles!
I saw Blue Crow, miraculously unhurt, bolt through the K Troop line, within reach of two soldiers, and sprint toward the village. He is going to get Elk Medicine and run … to the ravine?
I wanted to cheer and vomit at the same time.
In the pandemonium on the council ground, the surrounding units did not shoot, the Hotchkiss crews did not fire, for fearing of hitting their comrades. They waited helpless, their fury mounting.
When the Indians fled in all directions, a dam holding back the guns of the other troops and Hotchkiss crews broke. Their fire raged down like lightning.
From the northwest end of the village the pony herd stampeded northwest, along a road. A group of women and children piled onto wagons and followed the ponies, right across the front of Troop E. Seeing that they were not combatants, the officers yelled for the men to hold their fire against the people, but to knock down the ponies.
The Hotchkiss guns took aim on the village. Each Hotchkiss could be fired fifty times a minute, and each shell flung shrapnel in every direction.
Blue Crow and other warriors dashed around the village, crying to their families to break for the ravine. Most Indians there were women, children, and old men, running frantically in every direction.
Elk Medicine trotted toward the ravine, herding the children with her hands and her voice. She kept looking back toward where Corn Woman lay….
Scurrying around the village, Blue Crow was stopped by a pile of rags, half-familiar, a tattered … body. Face down. Slowly now, gently, he turned the face to one side and looked at the profile of his wife, the mother of his children. He started to turn the body over, so he could see her fully one more time. He put his hands on her ribs. He drew them back in horror, and knew that body would not turn.
Elk Medicine pushed the children toward the ravine and sprinted back toward the village. I cannot lose sister and husband both.
Blue Crow jumped up screaming at the Hotchkiss crews. He flung wild shots at the batteries on the hill. He emptied his Winchester at them, and then hurled the most awful words he could think of.
Elk Medicine reached for her husband, screaming sense at him.
At that moment a Hotchkiss shell hit him square in the belly. It made a hole gaping wide enough for me to put my arm through.
My great-grandfather stood there for a long moment, and then slowly, stiffly, limb by limb, tottered to the ground.
Elk Medicine wailed her way to the ravine.
I felt like my skin was aflame.
I stood there in the village, bereft. Shells blew holes in the earth around me, and in my heart. They tossed human beings—what were once human beings—in the air and let them clomp to the ground. They tore the tipis to shreds. They knocked tripods and cook pots and medicine bags helter-skelter. They ripped flesh until bodies became odds and ends, scattered strangely, absurd remains of the games of evil gods.
Then the batteries turned their attention to clumps of people running away.
Having survived the hell on the council ground—somehow—Yellow Bird now got into a tipi on the edge of the silent village. Troops K and B, still in their positions, stood nearby. The medicine man slit the canvas and, one by one, took potshots at soldiers.
Some saw where the fire was coming from. “I’ll get the son of a bitch out of there,” yelled one private of K Troop, and ran at the tipi waving a knife. Yellow Bird shot him in the stomach.
“My God, he has shot me. I am killed, I am killed.” The private staggered back toward his outfit and fell, dead.
The soldier’s comrades raked the tipi with rifle fire. From the hill two Hotchkiss shells made direct hits on the lodge.
Still Yellow Bird lived. Their bullets will not penetrate you. His sight searched out targets. His rage blazed out the barrel.
Outside I saw angry troopers push a bale of hay against the tipi on the medicine man’s blind side. They lit it. Soon flame crackled up the canvas to where the lodgepoles jutted out. Black smoke smothered the lodge. I watched for Yellow Bird to come bursting out, into a hail of lead. He did not come. He chose to stay inside. The medicine of your dance shirt does not protect you against suffocation, or burning.
I did not need my spirit sight to know what happened to Yellow Bird within.
Now, suddenly, the whirlwind seemed to slow. Up to that moment the clash had been immense, titanic, worthy of elemental Powers. But here came a small lull, a slacking. Most Indians alive had made it to the half-shelter of the ravine, though some were in the creek or had fled elsewhere. Occasional shots came from the ravine, but nothing forceful.
With what mental strength I had left, I hurled a message at the mind of the officers. Pull your soldiers back, out of rifle range. Send an interpreter to talk to the Indians. You can end this horror.
But Iya was rampant on this ground, and his malice is lava that boils, bubbles, and erupts prodigiously.
He delighted in the white people’s four centuries of fear and hatred of Indians. Perhaps it was he who taught them to use “Indian fighter” as a term of honor. It was he who kept the acrid bitterness of the defeat at the Little Big Horn alive in the hearts of the officers here today. It was he who taught whites, from the beginning, to give their stories of Indians a dark and demonic face.
Iya needed to give no help to the rage of these Indian people. They had seen their relatives killed, their children shot, their homes blown to bits. Worst of all, they had seen their dream of a future, their beautiful picture of an ideal world returned, smashed to smithereens.
They were unspeakably sorrowful, unspeakably angry. One warrior said later that if he had eaten a soldier at this particular moment, it would not have satisfied his rage.
Therefore the evil god Wind Storm now ruled the killing ground: The batteries of artillery aimed their shells at the ravine.
Here huddled most of the survivors—warriors, old men, women, and children crouched in fear. The shells sent them scurrying.
Some ran along the ravine in both directions. Others bunched under an overhang, where the ravine made a sharp turn.
One big bunch burst out of the ravine and ran south, away from the fighting and toward the road to Pine Ridge. But this put them in front of the guns of C and D Troops. Stationed on the far side of the ravine, these soldiers had fallen back away from the shells, driving the Oglala scouts further from the action. When the officers saw the people run out of the ravine—Indian men, women, and children mixed up—they yelled, “Commence firing!”
One officer wrote later that the soldiers “fired rapidly, but it seemed only a few seconds till there was not a living thing before us; warriors, squaws, children, ponies, dogs—for they were all mixed together—went down before that unaimed fire. I believe over thirty bodies were found on our front.”
Meanwhile some of the scouts dropped into the ravine and started carrying surviving relatives to safety on the hilltops.
Wears Eagle despaired of finding Iron Hail, or anyone else in the family. Near the rim of the ravine she frantically dug a small hole in the earth. She intended to put Wet Feet in it.
Elk Medicine crouched beneath the north rim, and pulled the two remaining children to her. Her sister dead, her husband dead. Her eyes were vacant with death.
In a few minutes a Hotchkiss shell exploded on the floor of the ravine below them, and shrapnel ate the air in every direction.
The two children died in her arms. Elk Medicine felt a stabbing pain in the groin.
She held the children. She held them long past the time she knew they weren’t breathing.
She was far beyond thinking. Yet something within her, perhaps an instinct, perhaps the pulse of a person-to-be, reminded her. Save the child within.
She lurched to her feet, and the pain stabbed her. She grabbed her thigh near her elk medicine, near where the unborn child would emerge, must emerge.
She did not scream. She did not make a sound. She stood there. After a long time she thought to staunch the bleeding with her skirt. Then she staggered down the ravine, she didn’t know why or where.
Iron Hail limped along the ravine with his two wounds, calling, “Wears Eagle! Wears Eagle!” He heard no answer. In the din no ears could have heard an answer.
I looked for his wife and saw her. She was still there under the rim, where she’d been digging a place for Wet Feet. Below her right eyelid was a crusty red hole. The little boy, a few weeks old, nursed at his dead mother’s breast.
“Wears Eagle! Wears Eagle!” cried Iron Hail, wandering on.
Now soldiers ran to both rims and fired down directly at whatever appeared to stir—man, woman, child, or play doll.
An old man shoved a rifle at Iron Hail. With two others he climbed the south rim and charged some soldiers. His comrades fell, and Iron Hail was driven back.
He stumbled down the ravine in a chaos of flying bullets, dust, smoke, and the screams of the wounded.
In the haze he suddenly saw a woman’s figure staggering, about to fall but still on her feet. Suddenly he realized, Mother!
He ran to her. She was bleeding, walking like a drunk, swinging a pistol wildly. She said to her son, “Pass by me. I am going to fall down now.”
Suddenly bullets from both rims racked her body, and she fell dead.
Both mother and father dead!
He crawled, limped, and staggered on down the ravine, dazed, stunned, maddened. He cried, “Take courage! Take courage!”
Suddenly appeared in the murk his brother William, collapsed up on the bank next to his friend White Lance. Both were shot. William tried to speak but couldn’t. He bled from a wound in the chest.
Iron Hail and White Lance helped William to the bottom of the ravine, and he wheezed, “Shake hands with me, I am dizzy now.”
“Take courage!” cried Iron Hail. “Our father told us it is better that all of us should die together than we should die separately at different times!”
William clumped hard to the ground and sat, his eyes glazed.
Now the fire came thick as hail from the sky of Wind Storm and Thunderstorm.
Surely the word terrible was invented for this moment and the ones that followed.
Iron Hail dragged William to the overhang, which gave the best remaining protection. He and others crawled to the top and shot.
A corporal in one of the batteries saw that the overhang was the source of what little return fire still came. “Roll this gun!” he ordered his fellows. “Get ’er down there!”
The batterymen rolled the Hotchkiss downhill. A captain hollered for them to come back, but the corporal ignored him. They fired at the edge of the overhang.
Still return fire came.
“Get closer!” yelled the corporal. The men pushed the gun nearly to the ravine. A lieutenant ran down the hill yelling at them, but a bullet stopped him.
The gunners fired again.
Still fire came. Indian bullets tore the batterymen’s clothing. Their bullets bored holes in the gun’s big wheels. One shot knocked a live shell out of the corporal’s hand. Somehow the shell did not explode.
“Closer!” bellowed the corporal.
Crying “Remember Custer!” and “Remember the Little Big Horn!” the gunners pushed the cannon point-blank to the edge of the ravine.
At the rate of nearly one round a second, they shelled the ravine and the overhang itself.
When other artillerymen yelled for them to come back, they hollered, “Someone bring us a cool gun!”
They pummeled the overhang with their shells.
It collapsed on the Indians.
Men, women, and children squirted in every direction. Their last shelter was gone. Bullets and Hotchkiss shells hailed on them.
A bullet shrieked past Iron Hail’s head and whacked into a woman’s back. Her face brightened, she laughed out loud, sagged to her knees, and died.
I saw other incidents of horror, so many that even today I cannot bear to write them down.
Now, in this storm of gunfire, these dying people sent up their sacred death songs. The sound was wild, barbarous, heroic. Each song was grief and acceptance in one.
All together the voices rose to the Powers as one great wail. It was as though a thousand great bells rang out at once, and every leaf of every tree shrieked, and the rocks of the mountains themselves cried out in anguish.
The anguish was not only for themselves and their dying relatives, but for a people, and that people’s way of living, and their dream.
I wept, and wept, and wept.
As the songs rose stronger and stronger, my eyes dried. I entered the realm of sorrow that is beyond weeping.
Iron Hail was one of those few Mniconjou who survived the horror at the overhang. He scrambled out of the ravine, by luck hitting a spot that had no soldiers. Blind with pain, he staggered across flat ground.
And thus came Joseph, his brother, a ghostly figure mat
erializing impossibly in the haze of dust and smoke. Earlier, when Captain Wallace told Joseph to warn the women and children and get away, Joseph went to the village, and delivered that warning. While he was gone, the fighting erupted. Now, returned to help his family, he boosted Iron Hail onto a horse and led him away.
Deliverance often appears as miracle.
In the ravine, only faint stirrings of life.
The rank smell on the wind was death.
About that time, far too late, a thought struck the half-blood Philip Wells. More people, red and white, might survive this awful day. He walked to the edge of the ravine, his nose still swinging on a bridge of skin, and called in Lakota, “All of you who are still alive, get up and come on over! You will not be molested or shot anymore!”
One by one they emerged, walking and crawling. As they approached the soldiers, many still cast their death songs into the winter air. Some soldiers walked forward to help the afflicted.
Then Wells walked to the council ground, strewn with red and white bodies. He called out, “These white people came to save you, and you have brought death on yourselves. Still the white people are merciful to save the wounded enemy when he is harmless, so if some of you are alive, raise your heads. I am a man of your own blood who is talking to you.”
Perhaps a dozen figures began to struggle up from the ground.
From the west edge of the ravine came a burst of gunfire from E Troop. These soldiers had not heard the call for truce.
Colonel Forsyth, the officer in command, stalked down off the Hotchkiss gun hill, through the wreckage of the village, past mutilated bodies, through carnage, to the ravine. When he shouted his order, the screech in his voice gave him away. “Stop it!” he yelled. “For God’s sake! Stop shooting at them!”
But the soldiers stopped only slowly. Here and there shots split the air; other flesh was savaged. People hidden in a clump of brush were shot down like dogs. Another group at the head of the ravine came out only after several Oglala scouts talked to them for half an hour, and the soldiers backed off completely.
An Indian woman was found three miles away, shot in the back.
On and on went the slaughter, away from the central area. Most of the Mniconjou fighting men had died on the council ground or in the ravine, trying to defend their relations, a warrior’s death. Now few but women, children, and old men were left alive. The troopers tracked fleeing Indians across the plain, into brush, into ditches, over hilltops. There they took aim at cold, stunned, terrified people and slaughtered them. Skulls were hammered with rifle butts, stomachs slashed with sabers, dead bodies riddled with bullets. The butchery went on for hours, into the afternoon.
