Stone Song

by Win Blevins

  The general liked soldiering, he liked being in the field, he liked fighting, and he liked whist. He even liked his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Bourke. The man talked too much. He could charm the birds out of the trees with his stories, or revive a company of exhausted soldiers with his Irish wit. These barrages of talk were to the good, because the general spent words like a miser spends coins.

  This morning by 8:00 A.M. the general’s cavalry and mounted infantry had ridden for five hours. Here at the forks of Rosebud Creek they were giving the horses a little rest. When the general rested, he played whist with Bourke, even in Powder River country. Especially in places this wild.

  “What did you write in that damned diary of yours last night?” Crook asked, taking a trick. Bourke’s incessant writing at the end of the day, when other men couldn’t even sit up, was a standing joke among the officers.

  Bourke answered in the tone of a quotation, “ ‘We are now right in among the hostiles, and may strike or be struck at any hour.’ ”

  The general nodded. He lifted a commenting eyebrow. “Whether we find them or they find us,” he said unnecessarily, “for the record, we found them.” Six newspapermen accompanied the expedition.

  “Naturally, General,” answered Bourke. The two men understood the politics of army life intimately and played the game with ironic good humor.

  The aide-de-camp led a club and took the trick. The general realized he’d been snookered. His aide was going to run the club suit and win the game.

  Crook stalled. He thought he heard something. A few minutes ago some sporadic firing had come from the direction of the Crow and Snake scouts he had sent on to the north, looking for the big village of Sioux that was supposed to be here. He had assumed the Indians had found a few buffalo and were making meat. Now what he heard was … yes, pounding hooves. Fire and answering fire.

  Crook gave the lieutenant a small smile and laid down his cards. A lieutenant shouldn’t outsmart a general anyway.

  “Sioux, Sir,” said Bourke, “behind the scouts.”

  The man had a good pair of eyes.

  Calmly, Crook gave his orders. Captain Mills and four companies of cavalry to secure the hills along the river. Colonel Royall and his cavalry to the west beyond some rocky ledges. Himself and the mounted infantry to that hill at the end of the ridge.

  He didn’t add, “If we can mount and deploy before they overrun us.”

  He could see the scouts on the hill now. They were coming back fast. If they didn’t slow the Sioux down, five companies of infantry and fifteen troops of cavalry of the U.S. Army would be caught with their pants down. The general liked scatological humor, and the prospect of this sort of report amused him. He was the sort of man who, faced with imminent death, would be slightly amused and hugely curious.

  Now he was fascinated to see his Indian scouts turn, fire on the charging Sioux, and start to establish a position. That slowed the enemy down, for sure. The scouts were fighting hard, and Crook saw that his troops would have time to mount and get ready to fight before getting their tails shot off. This pleased him.

  It was time to start for the hill.

  Little Big Man was watching Jack Red Cloud’s full-length eagle-feather warbonnet flutter in the breeze behind him as the young man rode ahead. The warrior was in a sour mood about that—absurd for a young man who had done nothing to wear such a headdress. But the young men understood nothing and acted like fools. Little Big Man made a motion like spitting, but his mouth was too dry. At least Red Cloud’s son wasn’t hanging back behind everyone else. At least his foolishness took him to the front.

  “Goddamn it,” Little Big Man muttered in English. Jack’s pony had just gone down. Little Big Man kicked his horse hard toward the young man.

  Jack jumped clear and ran for his own line. He didn’t stop to take off the bridle, to show that he wasn’t afraid. He didn’t stop for anything but ran like a coward, the warbonnet drawing attention to his flight. Ridiculous.

  The Psatoka scouts bore down on young Red Cloud hard, and Little Big Man could see he wasn’t going to get there first. Maybe they would think it was an honor to kill the son of a great Oglala war leader and scalp him. Maybe they would think it was funny to steal the unearned warbonnet. Maybe they would send it back to Red Cloud with a caustic message. Little Big Man wished he’d spoken his mind to Jack. It was bad to die like a fool.

  The Psatoka rode alongside Jack and … It took Little Big Man a moment to see for sure that they’d unstrung their bows and were whipping the boy with the strings. Insulting. Better to be killed. If the boy had sense enough to know it.

  Little Big Man quirted his pony. He heard and felt and then saw Crazy Horse come up next to him.

  One of the Psatoka jerked the headdress off Jack. The others yelled that Jack had no right and …

  When Little Big Man and Crazy Horse got within arrow range, the Psatoka whipped their horses away. The two warriors led the youngster back to his own side, embarrassed to look him in the face.

  Crazy Horse didn’t like the way the fight was going. It washed back and forth across the valley, bluff to bluff, hill to hill. Each side would drive the other back into cover and then have to retreat. No one was going to take the field or rout the other side or kill many enemies. They were going to swirl around for a quarter- or half-day and quit because the horses were tired.

  He did like the way his warriors conducted themselves. Except for a few young men like Red Cloud’s son, they worked together nicely. When he whistled for an attack with his eagle-bone whistle, they charged hard and made the soldiers run like prairie dogs when the coyote comes. They took their time shooting and made their shells count. They thought tactically. They operated as a unit. This new style worked. But no lesson was going to be taught today.

  So, yes, he would lead a charge.

  Crazy Horse talked a little to his leaders. Then he kicked his horse out in front of everyone and galloped across the line and back. He called out war cries interspersed with, “Remember the helpless ones in the village!” He blew the bone whistle shrilly. “It is a good day to die!” he yelled, and finally he charged toward the cavalry line.

  The warriors came with him, crying “Hokahe!” Little Big Man, Bad Heart Bull, Good Weasel, and a hundred others. As Crazy Horse had suggested, they shot not at the fighting soldiers on the rise, but at the big American horses and the soldiers who held them, four mounts to a holder. They whipped their ponies hard. They would see if the whites’ hearts were big.

  Crazy Horse’s heart was huge. He felt the familiar tingle of excitement. He let it raise his bow and shoot the arrow toward the mounts and the men holding them.

  “Hokahe!” they shrieked, and bore down on the cavalry line.

  It was going to work. The horses were rearing and bolting. The soldiers, afraid of being left afoot facing a charge, jumped for their mounts and fled down the valley.

  Quickly the Lakota were on them, swinging war clubs, jabbing with lances, hitting with the stocks of their empty rifles. Warrior and foe rode hard toward the strong line where Three Stars stood with the walking soldiers. Some Lakota stopped to pick up dropped carbines, and they found the soldiers had had trouble with them—the empty shells wouldn’t eject. Other Lakota drove the soldiers toward their own line, laughing and yelling and hitting.

  When they came within range of the infantry rifles, which were accurate at longer distances than the carbines, the Lakota whipped the soldiers forward with mocking calls and fell back.

  The charge had worked, but it was a big risk for a small gain. The fight was getting difficult—the Lakota and Sahiyela had almost no shells—they’d used even the ones they got with the carbines they picked up.

  Crazy Horse decided to try one more trick, a decoy. He did it the old way, retreating with intermittent charges, as though to make the soldiers slow down the pursuit. So they came harder. If he could get them into the narrow beyond the bend of the creek, strung out, between lines of his warriors, in
a place where arrows would be effective …

  But the Psatoka and Susuni refused to go into the little canyon, and the decoy failed.

  The Lakota and Sahiyela backed off. The warriors were tired, the ponies exhausted. Even if they had killed many soldiers, they had lost some good men. It had been a tough fight, and it was time to go home.

  Not until the next day did they know they’d won something big. Three Stars had turned around and headed for his base camp or maybe for the fort.

  In council everyone spoke happily. The soldiers had turned around, the village was safe. A big victory, they said.

  But you could not dance a victory in a camp where dead warriors were laid out in their lodges. So they moved the camp down to the Greasy Grass, the river the whites called the Little Bighorn.

  When General Crook got back to his supply base two days later, he told his aide-de-camp to sit for dictation of messages to Lieutenant General Sherman. Impatient of niceties of every kind, Crook put things bluntly and left it up to the Irish wit Bourke to find fine words.

  “Tell him the Indians have got more starch than we thought,” he said. “Lots more.” Bourke nodded his head in irrelevant approval. It was good manners to praise an enemy and good politics to give his ability a high estimate. “Tell him I’ve ordered five more companies of infantry.” Crook shot Bourke a jaundiced look. “Tell him I won’t venture into the field until they arrive.”

  “But, General,” Bourke protested, trying to sound soft and gentle, “that means you can’t join Custer and Terry.”

  This was a small effrontery. All the top officers here were fully aware of the plan to close in on the Sioux from three sides.

  “Tell him,” said Crook with caustic emphasis, “that I won’t move until I have the infantry.”

  Bourke wrote it down.

  The general proved good as his word.

  CRAZY HORSE AND CUSTER

  It was yaspapi, the time of bitten-off moon, in the Moon When the Chokecherries Ripen, which the Sahiyela called the Moon When the Ponies Get Fat.

  It was a good time for the Lakota and Sahiyela. They had driven Three Stars off. Scouts spotted herds of antelope to the north of their camp. Friends and relatives were coming in from the agencies thick as ducks flying north in the spring. In the six days since the fight with Three Stars, the size of the village had more than doubled. Now about eighteen hundred fighting men were in camp. If they were strong against Three Stars, they would be overwhelming against any soldiers that would dare to come, even like storm clouds from the east. They were confident. Now everyone was seeing soldiers falling into camp.

  When they thought about it, they judged that the whites deserved what was coming. Had they not tried to steal Paha Sapa? Did they not kill women and children wantonly? Did they not act without honor?

  The big camp used up grass and firewood fast, so the village moved downstream one sleep, toward the antelope herds. There they put up seven big circles of lodges: at the upstream end along the river, Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa. At the downstream end, Sahiyela. Behind the Hunkpapa, Blackfeet. Along the river from upstream to down, Mniconjou, Itazipicola, Sicangu. In back of these, the Oglala of Crazy Horse. For the Lakota it was a stirring sight, one they hadn’t been treated to in a long time. Seven thousand of the people together, strong, unified, of one mind and heart. They smiled to think what the sight would do to the soldiers.

  Many of them thought the soldiers would steer clear. Even white people were not that dumb.

  That’s why the Lakota were spending a lazy afternoon when the wolves came dashing back. Soon the camp criers were bawling out the warning: “The soldiers are coming! From the east!”

  It was also a good time for Lt. Col. George A. Custer, commonly called by his brevet rank, General Custer. He was a man enraptured by his own vision, entranced by the blazing sight of himself in the heaven of military and political prominence in the summer of 1876, the nation’s centennial. He saw that good luck attended him at every turn, but it seemed far more than good luck, more a destiny of shining eminence. It lay seductively within the reach, Custer saw, of any white man with the vision and boldness to stick out a gauntleted hand and seize it, and the élan to wear it dashingly.

  Yes, he had been in trouble. Had been court-martialed and set down. Had gotten into trouble even this spring. But his difficulties came from passion, from burning desire. If this waywardness sometimes brought disapproval from his superiors, it was not a quality the army truly condemned. They tut-tutted but secretly admired it. Politicians admired it. The American public loved it.

  In fact, General Custer thought it might be about to vault him over the heads of those stuffy superiors and into highest office. The Democratic party would be holding its quadrennial convention next week, its main purpose to nominate new candidates for President and Vice President of the United States. Certain influential men had dropped a word to the wise: A young, chivalrous, dashing general of the army would make a good nominee for Vice President, certainly. In fact, many generals had become President in the last half-century.

  What could be more perfect! thought the lieutenant colonel in his heart of hearts. A really extraordinary man rewarded in the right way!

  What was needed, hinted these influential men, was a smashing victory against the Sioux. The American people were impatient with a government that could not keep savages in line. They would not tolerate letting the Sioux chase buffalo through the Black Hills, where millions of dollars’ worth of gold waited to be mined. Ridiculous. They would respond to a man who put a resounding end to such nonsense.

  So Custer listened to General Terry’s plan. Custer was to lead the Seventh Cavalry up the Rosebud and follow the lodge trail to wherever the big Sioux village was, probably on the Little Bighorn. Meanwhile Terry and Gibbon would get their soldiers, slowed by the infantry, into place. It wouldn’t do to hit the village and let the Indians run, as they always did. Custer was to strike from the east. If the Sioux fled downstream, Terry and Gibbon would be waiting. If upstream, they would be running into the arms of Crook.

  Custer was willing. He was eager. He was an experienced Indian fighter—the victor of the Washita—and knew what to expect.

  Custer believed he knew Indians. He even admired them, as a hunter admires the buffalo, the mountain lion, the grizzly bear. He didn’t think of them as men and women with children, people who got hungry and cold and loved the feeling of being alive. He thought of them as a slightly magnificent but utterly doomed species, more animal than human.

  Had someone told him that men of spiritual power were in the village he meant to destroy—Crazy Horse, Horn Chips, Sitting Bull, who saw soldiers falling into camp, the young Black Elk, beneficiary of a great vision—Custer would have smiled in amusement or rolled his eyes. He thought his job was finishing off a benighted people, a job Nature herself was doing, but too slowly.

  Yes, the only danger was indecision. The only issue was sufficient will. The only strategic concern was to force the Indians for once to choose fight, not flight.

  So when Terry spoke of caution, of coordination with the other forces, of prudence, Custer wasn’t listening. These were the worries of the official army. The truth was that neither the army nor the public loved such old-maidish stuff. They rewarded the men who were not afraid, men who saw opportunity and seized it, men with the courage to ignore such mutterings and win the day.

  He knew that he was such a man.

  The Seventh Cavalry found the lodge trail on the Rosebud and marched along it toward the Little Bighorn. All was going according to plan. Custer would rest his regiment on June 25 and attack the next day. On the morning of June 25 Custer’s scouts spotted the village to the northwest. They pointed out the campfire smoke to the general, and the pony herd on the hillsides beyond. A big village, they warned him. They also told Custer they thought the regiment had been spotted or would be spotted any moment.

  So the Indians might escape after all. Custer reacted with élan
. Instead of reconnoitering, he decided to gather information about the lay of the land and the nature of the enemy on the attack. He sent a battalion under Captain Benteen south to make sure no lodges sat down there. He sent another battalion under Major Reno down a creek with orders to attack the upstream end of the village. He kept a third battalion under his own command to ride north and hit the village right in what appeared to be its center.

  His only worry was that the bastards might get away.

  The plan: Reno would hit the upstream end of the village. The warriors would rush to that point. Then Custer would hit the downstream end, scatter them, and mop up.

  For the valiant, life was delicious.

  On the afternoon of June 25, 1876, guidons flying, his command cantered down Medicine Tail Coulee.

  Major Reno followed his orders, at least for a while. His battalion crossed the Little Bighorn and attacked the lodges at the south end of the big village.

  The warriors were scurrying—getting their horses, most of which had been turned out on the hillside. Getting their weapons. Painting themselves. Making medicine. Readying their spirits. So the soldiers came hard. When they got within rifle shot of the village, the warriors laid down such a fire that the soldiers got off and fought on foot.

  Still, gunfire damaged the village. These were Hunkpapa lodges, people led by Sitting Bull and Gall. As it happened, Reno’s soldiers killed some women and children in that initial fire. Among them were Gall’s two wives and three children. Up Gall’s gullet surged a murderous rage.

  Crazy Horse came riding with a strong bunch of Oglala warriors from their village downstream. He was dressed and painted as the man anointed Rider should be—his light hair hanging below his waist, shirtless, hailstones painted on his body, a streak of lightning on his face. Most important, the red-tailed hawk was on his head and Hawk flew above him. He could feel her like a throb in his blood, and without sound could hear her barbaric war cry, KEE-ur, KEE-ur.