by Dee Brown
For a long time, Crazy Horse had been waiting for a chance to test himself in battle with the Bluecoats. In the years since the Fetterman fight at Fort Phil Kearny, he had studied the soldiers and their ways of fighting. Each time he went into the Black Hills to seek visions, he had asked Wakantanka to give him secret powers so that he would know how to lead the Oglalas to victory if the white men ever came again to make war upon his people. Since the time of his youth, Crazy Horse had believed that the world men lived in was only a shadow of the real world. To get into the real world, he had to dream. When he was in the real world, everything seemed to float or dance. His horse danced as if it were wild or crazy, and this was why he called himself Crazy Horse. He had learned that if he dreamed himself into the real world before going into a fight, he could endure anything.
On this day, June 17, 1876, after Crazy Horse dreamed himself into the real world, he showed the Sioux how to do many things they had never done before while fighting the white man’s soldiers. When Crook sent his cavalry, the Sioux didn’t rush forward into the blaze of bullets—instead, they rode toward both ends of the Bluecoats’ lines and struck where the soldiers were weakest. Crazy Horse kept his warriors mounted and always moving. By the time the sun was in the top of the sky (noon), he had the soldiers mixed up in three separate fights. By making many darting charges on their swift ponies, the Sioux kept the soldiers apart and always on the defensive. When the Bluecoats’ gunfire grew too overwhelming, the Sioux would draw away, tantalize a few soldiers into pursuit, and then turn on them with a fury.
The Cheyenne also distinguished themselves that day, especially in the dangerous charges. A chief named Comes-in-Sight was the bravest of all, but as he was swinging his horse about after a charge into the soldiers’ flank, the animal was shot down in front of a Bluecoat infantry line. Suddenly another Cheyenne horse and rider galloped out and swerved to shield Chief Comes-in-Sight from the soldiers’ fire. In a moment Comes-in-Sight was up behind the rider. The rescuer was his sister Buffalo-Calf-Road-Woman, who had come along to help with the horse herds. That was why the Cheyennes always remembered this fight as the Battle Where the Girl Saved Her Brother. The white men called it the Battle of the Rosebud.
An 1876 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper woodcut drawing of a scene from the Battle of the Rosebud. [LOC, USZ62-54652]
When the sun went down, the fighting ended. The Indians knew they had given Three Stars a good fight, but they did not know until the next morning that they had whipped him. At first daylight, Sioux and Cheyenne scouts went out along the ridges, and they could see the Bluecoat column retreating to the south. General Crook was returning to his base camp on Goose Creek to await reinforcements or a message from Gibbon, Terry, or Custer. The Indians on the Rosebud were too strong for one column of soldiers.
The chiefs now decided to move west to the valley of the Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn River). Scouts had come in with reports of great herds of antelope west of there, and they said grass for the horses was plentiful. Soon the camp circles were spread along the west bank of the twisting Greasy Grass for almost three miles. No one knew how many Indians were there, but the number could not have been less than 10,000 people, including 3,000 or 4,000 warriors.
The time was early in the Moon When the Chokecherries Are Ripe (August). Hunting parties were coming and going in the direction of the nearby Bighorn Mountains, where they had found a few buffalo as well as antelope. The women were digging wild turnips out on the prairies. Every night one or more of the tribal circles held dances, and some nights the chiefs met in councils.
Sitting Bull did not believe the victory on the Rosebud had fulfilled his prophecy of soldiers falling into the Indian camp. Since the retreat of Three Stars, however, no hunting parties had sighted any Bluecoats between the Powder and the Bighorn rivers.
But Long Hair Custer was prowling along the Rosebud. On the morning of June 25, scouts reported that his soldiers had crossed the last high ridge between the Rosebud and the Indian camp and were marching toward the Little Bighorn River. When they got near the Indian camp, Long Hair divided his force into three groups. Long Hair commanded one group. Subordinates Major Marcus Reno and Major Frederick Benteen commanded the other two.
Pte-San-Waste-Win (Pretty Gray Cow), a cousin of Sitting Bull, was one of the young women digging turnips that morning. She remembered the soldiers were six to eight miles distant when first sighted. “We could see the flashing of their sabers and saw that there were very many soldiers in the party.” The soldiers seen by Pte-San-Waste-Win and other Indians in the middle of the camp were those in Custer’s force. These Indians were not aware of Major Marcus Reno’s attack against the south end of camp until they heard rifle fire from the direction of the Blackfoot Sioux lodges.
Black Elk, then a 13-year-old Oglala boy, was swimming with his companions in the Little Bighorn. The sun was straight above, and it was getting very hot when he heard a crier shouting in the Hunkpapa camp, “The chargers are coming! They are charging! The chargers are coming!” The warning was repeated by an Oglala crier, and Black Elk could hear the cry going from camp to camp northward to the Cheyennes.
Chief Iron Thunder, a brother of Hump, was in the Minneconjou camp. “I did not know anything about Reno’s attack until his men were so close that the bullets went through the camp, and everything was in confusion. The horses were so frightened we could not catch them.”
Crow King, one of Sitting Bull’s war chiefs who was in the Hunkpapa camp, said that Reno’s cavalry commenced firing at about 400 yards’ distance. The Hunkpapas and Blackfoot Sioux retreated slowly on foot to give the women and children time to go to a place of safety. At the same time, other warriors were gathering what horses they could for a cavalry charge counterattack. “By that time, we had warriors enough to turn upon the whites,” Crow King said.
Two Moon ordered the Cheyenne warriors to get their horses and then told the women to take cover away from the tepee village. “I rode swiftly toward Sitting Bull’s camp. Then I saw the white soldiers fighting in a line,” he said. The battle quickly became chaotic, with Sioux warriors and soldiers mixed together, and everyone shooting at one another. Two Moon said, “The air was full of smoke and dust. I saw the soldiers fall back and drop into the riverbed like buffalo fleeing.”
The war chief who rallied the Indians and turned back Reno’s attack was a muscular, full-chested, 36-year-old Hunkpapa—none other than Gall. Gall had grown up in the tribe as an orphan. While still a young man he had distinguished himself as a hunter and warrior, and Sitting Bull had adopted him as a younger brother. Some years before, while the commissioners were attempting to persuade the Sioux to take up farming as a part of the treaty of 1868, Gall went to Fort Rice to speak for the Hunkpapas. “We were born naked,” he said, “and have been taught to hunt and live on the game. You tell us that we must learn to farm, live in one house, and take on your ways. Suppose the people living beyond the great sea should come and tell you that you must stop farming and kill your cattle, and take your houses and lands, what would you do? Would you not fight them?” In the decade following that speech, nothing changed Gall’s opinion of the white man’s self-righteous arrogance, and by the summer of 1876, he was generally accepted by the Hunkpapas as Sitting Bull’s lieutenant, the war chief of the tribe.
Custer split his force into three parts to attack the Indian camp from different sides. But his attack was not coordinated, and the three individual forces were too small to defend themselves. Reno and his men survived only because they were able to retreat and rejoin Benteen’s force. Custer and his men, surrounded by Crazy Horse’s and Gall’s warriors, were wiped out.
Reno’s first onrush caught several women and children in the open, and the cavalry’s flying bullets wiped out Gall’s family. “It made my heart bad,” he told a newspaperman some years later. “After that I killed all my enemies with the hatchet.” His description of the tactics used to block Reno was equally blunt: “Sitting
Bull and I were at the point where Reno attacked. Sitting Bull was big medicine. The women and children were hastily moved downstream…. The women and children caught the horses for the bucks to mount them; the bucks mounted and charged back Reno and checked him, and drove him into the timber.”
Charles M. Russell’s 1903 painting of the Battle of Little Bighorn. [LOC, USZC4-7160]
In other words, Gall and his warriors overwhelmed one end of Reno’s defensive line. Reno tried to get his soldiers to retreat into some nearby woods. But Gall’s warriors quickly turned the organized retreat into a panic-stricken rush to safety. This made it possible for Gall to divert hundreds of warriors for a frontal attack against Custer’s column, while Crazy Horse and Two Moon struck the sides and rear.
Kill Eagle, a Blackfoot Sioux chief, later said that the movement of Indians toward Custer’s column was “like a hurricane … like bees swarming out of a hive.” Young Black Elk, watching from across the river, could see a big dust cloud whirling on the hill, and then horses began coming out of it with empty saddles.
Crow King said that all the soldiers dismounted when the Indians surrounded them. “We crowded them toward our main camp and killed them all. They kept in order and fought like brave warriors as long as they had a man left.”
According to Lakota chief Red Horse, toward the end of the fighting with Custer, “these soldiers became foolish, 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 all of them; none were alive for even a few minutes.”
Long after the battle, White Bull of the Minneconjou drew four pictographs showing himself grappling with and killing a soldier identified as Custer. Among others who claimed to have killed Custer were Rain-in-the-Face, Flat Hip, and Brave Bear. Red Horse said that an unidentified Santee warrior killed Custer. Most Indians who told of the battle said they never saw Custer and did not know who killed him.
In an interview later given in Canada, Sitting Bull said that he never saw Custer, but that other Indians had seen and recognized him just before he was killed. Sitting Bull did not say who killed Custer.
Custer’s death in the Battle of Little Bighorn inspired many illustrations of the event. Almost all were inaccurate, and the worst of them, like this 1878 lithograph titled General Custer’s Death Struggle, were highly romanticized interpretations of what happened. [LOC, DIG-pga-04166]
An Arapaho warrior who was riding with the Cheyenne said that Custer was killed by several Indians. “He was dressed in buckskin, coat and pants, and was on his hands and knees. He had been shot through the side, and there was blood coming from his mouth. He seemed to be watching the Indians moving around him. Four soldiers were sitting up around him, but they were all badly wounded. All the other soldiers were down. Then the Indians closed in around him, and I did not see any more.”
Regardless of who had killed him, Long Hair, who made the Thieves’ Road into the Black Hills, was dead with all his men. Reno’s soldiers, however, reinforced by those of Major Frederick Benteen, were dug in on a hill farther down the river. The Indians surrounded the hill and watched the soldiers through the night, and the next morning started fighting them again. During the day, scouts sent out by the chiefs came back with warnings of many more soldiers marching in the direction of the Little Bighorn.
After a council it was decided to break camp. The warriors had shot most of their ammunition, and they knew it would be foolish to try to fight so many soldiers with bows and arrows. Before sunset they started up the valley toward the Bighorn Mountains, the tribes separating along the way and taking different directions. Thus ended the Battle of Little Bighorn.
When the white men in the East heard of Long Hair’s defeat, they called it a massacre and went crazy with anger. Because they could not punish Sitting Bull and the war chiefs, the Great Council in Washington (Congress) decided to punish the Indians they could find—those who remained on the reservations and had taken no part in the fighting.
An 1893 photograph of Sioux chief Rain-in-the-Face, one of the warriors who fought in the Battle of Little Bighorn. His participation in the battle inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to write the poem “The Revenge of Rain-in-the-Face,” published in 1878. [LOC, USZ62-104681]
On July 22, 1876, Great Warrior Sherman received authority to assume military control of all reservations in the Sioux country and to treat the Indians there as prisoners of war. On August 15 the Great Council made a new law requiring the Indians to give up all rights to the Powder River country and the Black Hills. They did this without regard to the Sioux Treaty of 1868, claiming that the Indians had violated the treaty by going to war with the United States. This was difficult for the reservation Indians to understand because they had not attacked United States soldiers, nor had Sitting Bull’s followers attacked them until Custer sent Reno charging through the Sioux villages.
To keep the reservation Indians peaceful, a new commission was sent in September to flatter and threaten the chiefs and secure their signatures to legal documents transferring the great wealth of the Black Hills to white ownership. Several members of this commission were old hands at stealing Indian lands. They included Newton Edmunds, the Reverend Samuel D. Hinman, and Bishop Henry Whipple, who had also worked as a missionary among the Sioux. At the Red Cloud agency, Bishop Whipple opened the proceedings with a prayer, and then the chairman, who was named George Manypenny, read the new conditions laid down by Congress. Because these conditions were stated in the usual confusing language of lawmakers, Bishop Whipple attempted to explain them in phrases that could be used by the interpreters.
My heart has for many years been very warm toward the red man. We came here to bring a message to you from your Great Father, and there are certain things we have given to you in his exact words. We cannot alter them even to the scratch of a pen…. When the Great Council made the appropriation [spent money] this year to continue your supplies they made certain provisions, three in number, and unless they were complied with no more appropriations would be made by Congress. Those three provisions are: First, that you shall give up the Black Hills country and the country to the north; second, that you shall receive your rations on the Missouri River; and third, that the Great Father shall be permitted to locate three roads from the Missouri River across the reservation to that new country where the Black Hills are…. The Great Father said that his heart was full of tenderness for his red children, and he selected this commission of friends of the Indians that they might devise a plan, as he directed them, in order that the Indian nations might be saved, and that instead of growing smaller and smaller until the last Indian looks upon his own grave, they might become as the white man has become, a great and powerful people.
To Bishop Whipple’s listeners, this seemed a strange way indeed to save the Indian nations, taking their Black Hills and hunting grounds and moving their people far away to the Missouri River. Most of the chiefs knew that it was already too late to save the Black Hills. But they protested strongly against having their reservations moved to the Missouri River.
One chief remembered that the Great Father had promised that they would never be moved, yet they had been moved five times. “I think you had better put the Indians on wheels,” he said bitterly, “and you can run them about whenever you wish.”
Spotted Tail accused the government and the commissioners of betraying the Indians; he spoke of broken promises and false words. “This war did not spring up here in our land; this war was brought upon us by the children of the Great Father, who came to take our land from us without price, and who, in our land, do a great many evil things…. This war has come from robbery—from the stealing of our land.”
The commissioners gave the Indians a week to discuss the terms among themselves. It soon became evident that the Sioux were not going to sign anything. The chiefs pointed out that the Sioux Treaty of 1868 required the signatures of three-fourths of the m
ale adults of the Sioux tribes to change anything in it, and more than half of the warriors were in the north with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. In reply to this, the commissioners explained that only friendly reservation Indians were covered by the treaty. Most of the chiefs did not accept this. To break down their opposition, the commissioners dropped strong hints that unless they signed, the Great Council in its anger would cut off all rations immediately, they would be removed to the Indian Territory (Oklahoma) in the south, and the army would take all their guns and horses.
There was no way out. The Black Hills were stolen. The Powder River country and its herds of wild game were gone. Without either wild game or rations, the people would starve. The thought of moving far away to a strange country in the south was unbearable, and if the army took their guns and ponies, they would no longer be men.
Red Cloud and his subchiefs signed first, and then Spotted Tail and his people. After that the commissioners went to the other agencies and reservations and badgered the Sioux tribes there into signing. Thus did Paha Sapa, its spirits and its mysteries, its vast pine forests, and its billion dollars in gold, pass forever from the hands of the Indians into the domain of the United States.
TEN
The Death of Crazy Horse
One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk.
—CRAZY HORSE OF THE OGLALA SIOUX
MEANWHILE, UNITED STATES ARMY TROOPS under Three Stars Crook, thirsting for revenge, were prowling the country north and west of the Black Hills, killing Indians wherever they could be found. On September 9, 1876, near Slim Buttes, a force under the command of a captain named Anson Mills stumbled upon a village of Oglalas and Minneconjous. Captain Mills attacked, but all the Indians escaped except the village chief, American Horse, four warriors, and fifteen women and children, who were trapped in a cave at the end of a small canyon. American Horse and two others were killed; the rest were taken prisoner.
