Following the gray horses of Company E, Custer has pulled back toward the top of the ridge. A group of Cheyenne and Sioux warriors calling themselves the “Suicide Boys” are waging guerrilla warfare, sowing confusion in the lines. From ravines and ridges, Indian arrows and rifle fire pour into the American position. Some white soldiers become confused, even as others form into small fighting positions.
General Custer and his remaining men are atop a high grassy knoll. Those soldiers who can’t reach them are butchered. “They were making their arms go as though they were running, but they were only walking,” the young boy Black Elk will remember.
There are no trees or rocks to offer protection, so Custer and his men shoot the remaining thirty-nine horses, putting a single bullet in each of their heads. The corpses provide protection from Indian fire. There are roughly fifty American soldiers still alive.
Custer knows the time for desperate measures has come.
Suddenly, Tom Custer falls at his brother’s side.
Seeing that, Boston Custer and Autie Reed make a run for it and are quickly shot dead.
Then, a single bullet strikes George Custer in the chest but does not kill him. He drops his Remington rifle, now using only his pistols. Dust is everywhere, as the confused screams and cries of the dying fill the air.
Crazy Horse gallops in a circle around the American position, blowing a whistle made of eagle bone to encourage the Indians to advance closer to the trapped Americans.
The war chief’s signal finally brings the battle to a bitter end, as hundreds of warriors overrun Custer’s position. It is 5:30 p.m. The final few moments of the fighting are a hectic cacophony of pistol shots, scalping, hand-to-hand fighting, and skulls shattering as heads are clubbed. The war whoops of the Indians punctuate their victory, marking the end of Custer’s Last Stand.
Soon, there is silence.
* * *
The body of General George Custer will be found naked, his thigh cut, an arrow shot through his penis, his scalp and famous mane still attached to his head. “He did not wear his long hair as he used to wear it,” Sitting Bull will observe. “It was short, but the color of the grass when the frost comes … where the last stand was made, Long Hair stood like a sheaf of corn with all the ears fallen around him.”
Before the whites can come and bury Custer’s body, two Indian women will pierce his ears with sharp implements so that he might hear better in the afterworld—since he clearly did not hear the warnings in this lifetime to stay off Indian lands.
General George Custer is thirty-six at the time of his death. His battlefield opponent, Crazy Horse, is the same age. The American loss on this day is 268 dead and 55 wounded, but every man in Custer’s direct command dies—all 210 of them.
The Indian numbers are not known, but in later years Sitting Bull stated that 138 Native Americans were killed or wounded. However, some historians estimate that as many as 300 warriors perished.1
* * *
Custer’s men do not all die at once, or even all together. Some soldiers are killed hundreds of yards away as they try to escape. A number of troopers shoot themselves, their bodies later found with a single bullet hole in the skull. Among these is George Custer, though it is unlikely he committed suicide, for the general was right-handed and the bullet wound was in the left side of his skull.
A few soldiers were not killed in the battle. “These soldiers became foolish,” the warrior Red Horse later recalls, “many throwing away their guns and raising their hands, saying ‘Sioux, pity us. Take us prisoners.’ The Sioux did not take a single soldier prisoner, but killed them all. None of them were alive for even a few minutes.”
The bodies of George Custer and his brother Tom are found close together. Their younger brother, Boston, and nephew Autie Reed are one hundred yards away. Tom Custer’s corpse, in particular, is so completely ravaged that he is almost unrecognizable. One year ago, he allegedly arrested a reservation warrior named Rain-in-the-Face for murder. Many believe the Indian got his revenge on this day. Tom Custer’s skull is bashed in, his eyes are gouged from his skull, and his tongue is cut out. If not for a telltale tattoo of the Goddess of Liberty on his arm, Tom Custer’s body would have gone unidentified.
Curley, the Crow scout, will never find General Alfred Terry or his advancing column. Instead, he will race to the confluence of the Yellowstone and Rosebud Rivers, where he will use sign language to share news of the massacre with the crew of the army supply steamship, Far West. After traveling upriver to load wounded survivors of the fight General Reno supervised, the steamship races back to Fort Abraham Lincoln—traveling 710 miles in just fifty-four hours to report the annihilation of Custer and his Seventh Cavalry.
* * *
The news of Crazy Horse’s great victory finally reaches Washington by telegraph on July 4, 1876—the centennial anniversary of America’s Declaration of Independence. It was President Ulysses S. Grant’s decision to crush the Sioux nation once and for all, but even as a devastated Libbie Custer grieves over the shocking loss of her husband, Grant wastes little time in placing blame.
“I regard Custer’s massacre as a sacrifice of troops, brought on by Custer himself, that was wholly unnecessary,” the president states publicly. “Wholly unnecessary.”2
* * *
Captain Frederick Benteen personally identifies the soldiers’ remains on the Little Bighorn battlefield in the days after the fight. He later testifies on behalf of Major Marcus Reno before an army court of inquiry. Both men are cleared of all charges of incompetence.
Custer Hill markers where Seventh Cavalry bodies were found, Little Bighorn battlefield, Montana.
Captain Benteen writes home to his wife: “Custer disobeyed orders, and thereby lost his life.”
Benteen omits that he had also refused to obey orders.3
By July 4—which proves to be the first true moment since the Civil War that citizens from the North and South unite to celebrate the founding of America—Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the Indian tribes have completely scattered. The great encampment along the Little Bighorn River is no more. The tribes packed up and left just one day after the massacre.
But even though Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull go their separate ways, the chiefs both know one thing: the whites will be back with a vengeance.
Chapter Twenty-Four
AUGUST 2, 1876
DEADWOOD, DAKOTA TERRITORY
3:00 P.M.
Less than two months after George Custer is killed, 230 miles southeast of the Little Bighorn, a man with just a minute to live is playing cards.
Wild Bill Hickok entered the Saloon No. 10 at noon. A scale to weigh out gold dust rests atop the far end of bar. Painted wainscoting lines the walls, and four chandeliers hang from the ceiling. A game of draw poker is in progress at a low table in the center of the room, ringed by four chairs—three of them occupied by intense men who make card playing their business. The open seat is positioned with its back to the tavern’s rear door. Hickok does not like that, knowing he has enemies everywhere. But the other three players refuse to let him sit in a more secure seat, so he reluctantly places himself in a vulnerable position.
In the two short years since George Custer found gold in the Black Hills, Deadwood has sprung into being. What was once a small gulch is now a prosperous, seedy boomtown. It is the sort of place where miners drink themselves to death after striking it rich. The town is lined with well-appointed saloons, whorehouses, a muddy Main Street, and even a new luxury palace aptly named the Gen’l Custer Hotel.
Like most men who have chosen to make Deadwood their home since the Custer expedition of 1874, the six-foot-tall Hickok says he is here for the gold. But in reality, he is among those hustlers who does not work the mines or stand in a cold stream panning silt. Instead, Wild Bill is a card sharp who follows the money around the American frontier, whether it be gold or buffalo hunting or driving cattle. Wherever there is wealth, there are stupid men willing to part with it throu
gh drink and cards. James Butler Hickok knows this fact all too well, having witnessed the “opening” of the American frontier for two decades as a gunfighter and lawman. Along the way, Bill Hickok has kept the peace in towns stretching from Abilene, Kansas, all the way north to Cheyenne, Wyoming.
With the Indians on the run, Deadwood and other new Black Hills towns like Custer City and Crook City are perfectly situated for business owners to enrich themselves fortifying and resupplying the hordes of miners. Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull are furious over the denuding of the landscape. As miners seek deep deposits of gold in the streams, the lodgepole pines that once covered the nearby hills are disappearing as newcomers chop them down to build homes and businesses. Even as Wild Bill sits down for an afternoon of cards, a group of Pony Express riders are racing through the Black Hills from Fort Laramie, two hundred miles south. Again, not fearing Indian interference at all, the local government has launched a contest wherein the fastest riders will get a contract to deliver the mail.
If ever there was a sign that the Native Americans have lost the Black Hills, it is Deadwood. The debauchery and decadence stand in vivid contrast to the once-sacred Sioux lands.
The wood-framed Saloon No. 10 is named for a gold claim. The building is just twenty feet wide, its depth extending back sixty feet from the street entrance. The bar is on the right as Hickok enters.
“Wild Bill” is a name the gunman gave himself, rather than live with the dubious moniker “Duck Bill,” once bestowed upon him for his large lips and nose. He has long, wavy hair and an unkempt mustache spreading wide over his cheeks, and is losing his vision to glaucoma at age thirty-nine. The camp follower Calamity Jane, well known among the Seventh Cavalry for her “skills” and penchant for whiskey, likes to claim she is Hickok’s wife, even though Wild Bill is married to another woman. Despite her fondness for Hickok, Calamity Jane is not above taking work from a local madam when she is short of cash and in need of a drink.
Hickok won big at the table last night, taking a bag of gold from a drunken and unlucky miner. But the amount of dusty golden flakes in the sack was not enough to cover the man’s losses. So Hickok demanded that the miner make it up to him by producing more gold—which the miner did. However, when Wild Bill realized that the man had given him his last cent, the gunfighter returned a small portion so that the miner might buy himself breakfast. The man in question claims that his name is Bill Sutherland, but in fact he is Jack McCall, a twenty-three-year-old former buffalo hunter from Kentucky.
Still angry from losing so heavily the night before, McCall enters the Saloon No. 10. The time is 3:00 p.m. as bartender Harry Young steps out from behind the bar to deliver $50 in chips to Hickok, who has been losing steadily for the past three hours. Hickok observes McCall but does not perceive him as a threat. As always, Wild Bill drinks and draws cards with his left hand, leaving his right hand free to pull his Smith & Wesson five-shot pistol, now holstered snugly against his left hip. The butt faces out, per Wild Bill’s preference for a “cavalry draw.”
McCall walks the length of the bar, toward the saloon’s rear entrance. Hickok’s focus is on the hand he was just dealt, two black aces and two black eights. The hole card is still a matter of debate, but it is not enough to win the hand. “The old duffer,” Hickok says of riverboat captain William Massie, “he broke me.”
By now, Jack McCall has moved directly behind Hickok, who cannot see him. McCall pulls a long-barreled Colt Model 1873 army revolver and shoots the legendary lawman in the back of the head.
Wild Bill dies instantly.1
Jack McCall runs but is soon caught. The jury for his first trial is a group of sympathetic miners. Incredibly, he is found not guilty.
In the United States of America, a citizen cannot be tried twice for the same crime. But Deadwood is not in the United States—it is still Indian Territory. So the first trial is invalid. When McCall makes the mistake of bragging about the murder, believing he cannot be tried again, authorities arrest him and transport him four hundred miles east to Yankton, capital of the Dakota Territory, which is part of the United States.
This time Jack McCall is found guilty. Six months after he murdered Hickok, McCall is hanged by the neck until dead. McCall is buried with the noose still tight around his throat.
Chapter Twenty-Five
SEPTEMBER 9, 1876
SLIM BUTTES, DAKOTA TERRITORY
4:45 P.M.
The man with less than a year to live is on the run.
Marauding soldiers under the command of General George Crook pillage a small Sioux village looking for Crazy Horse, who humiliated Crook at the Battle of the Rosebud. Crook is now obsessed with the war chief and is pushing his two-thousand-man force to its limit, practicing scorched-earth tactics on any Sioux band he finds. The result is that General Crook’s men are now themselves starving—the force so low on food they have been reduced to eating their horses and mules. They are traveling south to Deadwood in search of supplies but have stumbled upon the thirty-seven lodges of a band led by American Horse, the same Indian who personally killed Captain William Fetterman ten years ago.
After Crook’s attack, American Horse is dead, his entrails hanging out the front of his torso as soldiers mutilate him. However, most of his band escapes, leaving behind food stockpiled for the freezing winter months soon to come. Now, as pounds of dried meat and nuts are being greedily consumed by the famished soldiers, the troops are stunned to find the Seventh Cavalry’s Company I battle flag affixed to the side of one tepee, along with $11,000 in cash and the leather riding gloves of Captain Myles Keogh—all confiscated after the Little Bighorn massacre.1
* * *
The hunt for Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull has turned into a disaster for the army. Hardened soldiers actually break into tears after hours slogging through thick mud, overcome by the hardship and the overwhelming hunger they have experienced. But General Crook will not be deterred. Crazy Horse embarrassed him and then annihilated Custer. The U.S. Army has not won a battle against the Sioux all summer, a situation Crook intends to change.
Today’s fighting was over by early morning, and as the day stretches into afternoon there is no hurry to press on for Deadwood since food has been discovered. By 4:45 p.m. two soldiers killed in the action are buried and the men have settled down to warm themselves by campfires, set to stay the night in the shadow of the stony outcroppings inspiring the location’s name of Slim Buttes.
A few miles away, Crazy Horse is not resting. Warriors from the fight with Crook traveled quickly to give the war chief the news. Others from American Horse’s tribe flee farther north to Sitting Bull’s encampment. Both chiefs now assemble warriors to counterattack, but it is Crazy Horse who strikes first. Ringing Crook’s encampment, knowing that the setting sun will soon be in the soldiers’ eyes, the Indians open fire. The bluecoats quickly scramble for their weapons to shoot back.
Crazy Horse and his warriors are outnumbered four to one. Riding about the battlefield on his white charger, the war chief directs the action. When it is clear that the army encampment cannot be overrun, he orders his fighters to fall back.
The next morning, watched from a distance by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, General Crook orders the captured Indian tepees burned. Then the soldiers resume their march to Deadwood. Along the way, the Indians harass them in small skirmishes, attacking from places of concealment in a driving rain, giving the appearance that they are everywhere at once.
* * *
Meanwhile, as the season changes to autumn, and the month known by the Sioux as the Moon of Falling Leaves has arrived, a group of chiefs led by Red Cloud is forced to sign over the Black Hills to the U.S. government. Under threats of destruction, the Indians also give away the Unceded Territories, which the tribes of the Northern Plains depend upon so greatly for hunting buffalo and other wild game. Finally, under orders from the U.S. Army, which has taken control of all reservation activities since the death of Custer, Sioux and Cheyenne warriors curr
ently living on the reservation are stripped of their guns and ponies. Adding to the insult, the army chooses to give these confiscated horses to the Pawnee tribe—a major enemy of the Sioux—which has aligned with the United States.
Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull are angered by Red Cloud’s capitulation and refuse to go to the reservation. They decide to winter far to the north, as they have throughout their lifetimes. At the end of September, Sitting Bull leads almost five hundred warriors and their families toward Canada. He will spend the winter going back and forth across the border into “Grandmother’s Country,” as the Sioux call the land controlled by Great Britain’s Queen Victoria.
The band led by Crazy Horse now has fewer than three hundred lodges, and heads west, toward the Little Bighorn. By early November, Crazy Horse has imposed Sioux dominance over the region by raiding a Crow village and taking many scalps from the tribe’s longtime enemy. Among the dead is a woman whose husband swears revenge.
Adding to Crazy Horse’s troubles is the terrible news that the U.S. Army is building a new fort in this region. Although it is not yet completed, a force of cavalry and infantry under the command of Colonel Nelson Miles has already arrived. The Indians call Miles “Bear Coat,” due to his preference for wearing a fur garment on cold days. He has been specifically tasked by the government with hunting down Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. A second force led by a now resupplied General Crook marches north from Fort Fetterman to join the search for the legendary chiefs.
But while the Sioux are keeping a close watch on the soldiers, they are not overly concerned. It is well known that the Americans have no stomach for winter warfare and will remain sheltered in their stockades until the green grass returns. In this way, the tribes can live off the supplies of buffalo and game they have stored for those hard months, spending the winter in peace after a summer of combat.
Killing Crazy Horse Page 22
