The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection
Page 218
Flashman students may be interested to know what Grouard looked like, in the light of Flashman’s description. He was six feet tall, swarthily handsome, weighed about sixteen stone, had a large head with black hair, large expressive eyes, prominent cheekbones, a kindly humorous mouth, firm chin, and large nose (See J. de Barthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, ed. Edgar I. Stewart, 1958; Finerty; Bourke; J. P. Beckworth, My Life and Adventures, 1856; Dictionary of American Biography).
APPENDIX II:
The Battle of the Little Bighorn
Perhaps the reason why so much has been written about this famous action is that no one is sure what happened; there is nothing like ignorance for fuelling argument. Because until now there has been no account from a white survivor of the Custer part of the fight, the speculators have had a free rein, and what one eminent writer has called the Great American Faker and the Great American Liar have flourished. This is the more extraordinary when one considers that Little Bighorn was not (except to the participants and their families) an important battle; it settled nothing, it changed nothing, it was, as Flashman says, not really a battle at all, but a big skirmish.
And yet, Little Bighorn has an aura of its own. It is impossible to stand on the Monument hill, looking down towards the pretty river among the trees, or walk across the ridges and gullies of Greasy Grass slope, with the little white markers scattered here and there, showing where the men of the 7th Cavalry died, or look up from the foot of the hill at the silently eloquent cluster of stones where the last stand was made, or the distant ridge where Butler’s marker stands solitary – it is impossible to look at all this, and listen to the river and grass blowing, without being deeply moved. Few battlefields are more haunted; perhaps this is because one can stand on it and (this is rare on old battlefields) see what happened, if not how. However they came, on whatever course, is unimportant; any soldier or civilian can envisage the retreat from the river and coulee to the ridge and hill, for here there are no complex manoeuvres or great distances to confuse the visitor – just a picture of two hundred men in blue shirts and a few in buckskin fighting their way across a sloping field, pursued and outflanked by overwhelming numbers of an enemy determined to fight them in their own way, man to man and hand to hand. Purists and propagandists alike dispute over terms needlessly; in the English language, it was indeed a massacre.
Flashman’s account, in fact, is not one for the controversialists. Apart from his eyewitness detail, he does not help much to clear up the questions (most of them fairly trivial) which have raised such heat and fury over the past century. The Great Reno Debate is not affected in any matter of fact; only in his opinion does he touch on it, and supports the majority view.
What did happen, then, at Little Bighorn? So far as one can see, after studying as much of the evidence as one can reasonably digest, Custer split his command into three as he approached the (roughly) southern end of the valley where the Indian camp lay; he sent Benteen to the left, went himself among the right flank of the valley, and ordered Reno to charge into the valley itself; the idea was that while Reno was attacking (and possibly sweeping through) the camp from end to end, Custer would fall on it at a convenient point from the right flank, or possibly rear. A reasonable plan, in view of Custer’s previous experience; reasonable, that is, on the assumption that he did not know the Indian strength.
Reno did not get far; he was checked, and eventually, with Benteen who had come up, established a position on the bluffs where they held out until the Indians withdrew. Custer, meanwhile, had seen the camp from above the valley, and determined to attack it. Here we enter the realm of uncertainty; looking from the bluffs today, and knowing how big the camp was, it strikes one that Custer was ambitious; his scout Boyer certainly thought so: “If we go in there, we won’t come out”, and a pretty little quarrel ensued before Custer followed his own judgement and went down towards the ford. How far he got, we do not know; the precise movements of his five troops, we do not know. These things do not really matter; we know where they ended up. In the event, Custer obviously mismanaged his last action; how far it was his fault – for not having got better information of the Indian strength, for failing to assess it properly when the village was in sight, for exceeding the spirit if not the letter of Terry’s orders – these are things we cannot fairly judge, without knowing what was in Custer’s mind. And that we can only guess at. It looks as though he was unjustifiably reckless in deciding to go in with his five troops; with hindsight we know he was. But how it looked to him from the bluffs? He was there, and we were not.
Looked at from the Indian side, it was a competently, even brilliantly handled action. For a people unused to war or battle in the conventional sense, the Sioux and Cheyenne fought Greasy Grass in a manner which would have been approved by any sound military theorist. They turned back the initial attack, held it, saw the danger on their own flank, and enveloped this in turn. Reviewing it from their side (and this is personal opinion) it seems to me that Flashman is right to give the main credit to Gall, although Crazy Horse’s circular movement was an inspired use of cavalry. Gall as the anvil and Crazy Horse as the hammer is a fair simile – but it was an extremely mobile anvil.
One other point it seems fair to make. Reno came under heavy and unjustified criticism, initially from Custer’s hero-worshipping biographer Whittaker, later from others. He was subsequently cleared officially. And barely a week after the battle, four-fifths of the surviving rank and file of the 7th Cavalry petitioned Congress asking that Reno be promoted to fill the dead Custer’s place. After that, what do critics matter?
The number of books and articles on Little Bighorn is literally uncountable. Those against which I have checked Flashman’s story, not only of the battle, but of related subjects, number close on a hundred, so I am listing here those which readers may find of particular interest. Foremost must be a work which, though outstanding, is curiously hard to come by: Fred Dustin’s The Custer Tragedy (1939); it and those two splendid works by Colonel W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth (1943) and The Story of the Little Bighorn (1926), are the three books which no one interested in the battle can do without. The research of these two authors has been prodigious; Colonel Graham’s collection of letters, memoirs, and interviews, and Dustin’s great bibliography, have been immensely helpful. Here, for example, one finds Gall’s account of the battle, given to General Godfrey in curiously touching circumstances, as the two old enemies walked over the battlefield ten years later; here, too, Mrs Spotted Horn Bull’s story, and Two Moon’s, and Benteen’s lively reminiscences, and Wooden Leg’s story, and the Crow scouts’, and the arguments of survivors and critics. Also: Whittaker, Custer’s Life; E. S. Godfrey, General G. A. Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, 1921; Bourke, On the Border with Crook; Miller, Custer’s Fall; Vestal, Sitting Bull, 1972; E. I. Stewart, Custer’s Luck, 1955; Miles, Personal Recollections; Dunn, Massacres; Finerty, Warpath and Bivouac; Hanson, Missouri; De Land’s Sioux Wars; Custer’s My Life, and Mrs Custer’s Boots and Saddles and Following the Guidon; P. R. Trobriand, Army Life in Dakota, 1941; O. G. Libby, Arikara Narrative of the Campaign of June 1876, 1920; P. Lowe, Five Years a Dragoon, 1926; A. F. Mulford, Fighting Indians in the US 7th Cavalry, 1879; Mrs O. B. Boyd, Cavalry Life in Tent and Field. But there are many others, and among them I should mention the late William Jones of Regina, Saskatchewan, former scout for the Northwest (later Royal Canadian) Mounted Police, who served in the Indian wars, and whom I interviewed almost forty years ago. And for those who want to know something of Little Bighorn that cannot be got from books, let them travel up the Yellowstone valley, past the Powder and Tongue to the mouth of Rosebud Creek, and then take the Lame Deer road, past the great modern mining works which Custer and Crazy Horse never dreamed of, and follow the Rosebud to Custer’s camp-site, and so to the bluffs and the river, and walk across the Greasy Grass.
Notes
1. Helen Hunt Jackson, author of A Century of Dishonour, a champion of
Indian rights, and a severe critic of American Indian policy.
2. From this, and other internal evidence, it appears that this packet of the memoirs was written in 1909 and 1910.
3. Pigs, i.e., police. An interesting example of how slang and cant repeat themselves across the centuries. The term is commonly thought of as a product of the 1960–70s, chiefly among protest groups; in fact it was current even before Flashman’s time, but seems to have vanished from the vulgar vocabulary for over a hundred years.
4. Hiram Young, a black, was the foremost wagon-maker and expert on prairie conveyances in Independence; Colonel Owens was one of the leading citizens. The stage run to Santa Fe began about this time, so it is quite possible that one of their new coaches was privately purchased for Susie’s caravan, no doubt at a high price, for they were as luxurious as Owens had described them. But travelling by them on the express run was anything but comfortable; Colonel Harry Inman, in The Old Santa Fe Trail (1896) writes with feeling of the non-stop journey, with horses changed every ten miles to keep up the high speed – this was at a later date, when the less troubled state of the plains enabled way-stations to be set up, and the journey from Westport to Santa Fe could be made in two weeks, weather and Indians permitting. The equipment of four revolvers and a repeating rifle, mentioned by Flashman, was standard for a stage-line guard.
5. The bill in Colonel Owens’ store was evidently a version of an advertisement which appeared in the New York Herald in December, 1848, advising emigrants on equipment for the gold-fields, including tombstones.
6. Throughout Flashman’s memoirs he never fails, when opportunity arises, to “name-drop”, and it is remarkable that he seems to have been unaware of the probable identity of the frontiersman in the Life Guards coat who examined him on Wootton’s behalf. For it is almost certain that this was the celebrated scout Jim Bridger. At least we know that Bridger received from his friend Sir William Drummond Stewart, the sportsman and traveller, a gift of a Life Guards cuirass and helmet – there exists a sketch of Bridger wearing them. It seems reasonable that he may have received a coat as well, and still had it in 1849. Whether he was at Westport in late May or early June 1849 cannot be established; it is said that he bought land there in 1848 and spent the next winter at the western fort which bore his name. But his movements in the months thereafter are uncertain; about mid-June, 1849, he was apparently at Fort Bridger, for an emigrant named William Kelly records in his journal that he met the great scout there; it is possible that Bridger had been east in Westport earlier. Certainly Flashman’s description of a tall, good-humoured, kind and patient man fits Bridger, so we may assume that Flashman met one of the legendary men of the West without knowing it. (See G. M. Dodge, James Bridger, 1905; J. Cecil Alter, James Bridger, 1925, and M. R. Porter and O. Davenport, Scotsman in Buckskins, 1963).
7. Flashman’s judgement was entirely sound. Although less famous than the Carsons and Bridgers, Richens Lacy Wootton, familiarly known as “Uncle Dick”, was unsurpassed among the trappers, scouts, and Indian fighters of his day. He spent a lifetime on the plains and in the mountains, and probably no one was more expert as a guide on the Santa Fe Trail. A genial, slightly eccentric character, he eventually conceived the idea of establishing a toll-gate on the Trail, where it crossed the Raton Pass on the Colorado-New Mexico border. He poineered a road across the summit, and although he had occasional difficulties persuading travellers that a toll was reasonable (“with the Indians, I didn’t care to have any controversy … whenever they came along, the toll-gate went up, and any other little thing I could do to hurry them on was done promptly and cheerfully”) he seems to have made it pay. He lived to a great age, and is commemorated on a tablet set in the rock where the modern highway crosses the Raton summit. (See Inman, and Uncle Dick Wootton, by H. L. Conard, 1890.)
8. “The earlies”. So many correspondents have asked about Flashman’s use of this expression in previous Papers that it seems worth a note. The only other literary allusion to it that I know is in Ethelreda Lewis’s Trader Horn, where it signifies the 1870s on the Ivory Coast; my own father used it in talking about the history of settlement in East Africa, and it seems to have meant “early pioneer days”, and been one of these pieces of Imperial slang which have long gone out of fashion. Flashman’s use of it invariably refers to the first half of the last century, usually the 1840s.
9. A rather cavalier description of one of the giants of New World exploration, Sir Alexander MacKenzie (1755–1820), who completed the first crossing of mainland North America in 1793. But what Flashman has to say of the misconceptions existing about the American West even in the middle of the last century, is true enough. Captain (later General) R. B. Marcy of the U.S. Army, who escorted emigrants from Fort Smith on the lower Arkansas to Santa Fe in 1849, wrote in his report that he had been given a “quite erroneous” notion of the country beforehand. “The best maps I could find” showed the great mountains and desert to which Flashman refers – in fact, they were not there, and Marcy remarked that he had never seen country where wagons could move so easily. (See Marcy’s Report on the Southern Route, in vol XIV, 1849–50, Senate Documents, 1st Session, 31st Congress.)
As to what Flashman says of the unknown nature of the trans-Mississippi country in general, he can hardly be faulted. The Santa Fe and Oregon routes were already well-trodden, and trappers and traders from MacKenzie and Lewis and Clark onwards had penetrated to the remotest parts of the continent; American armies had marched south to Mexico and west to the Pacific via the southern routes; but to the emigrant for all practical purposes it was terra incognita. The editor has two maps, made by geographers of the highest repute between 1845 and 1853; they are by no means entirely reliable for the western territories; even Johnson and Ward’s American Atlas of 1866 has a strange look beside the work of modern cartographers, and all three maps give a most striking impression of the emptiness of the country, with their vast white spaces marked only by rivers and mountains, and here and there a fort or settlement.
But then, it is difficult to grasp how suddenly western America happened. It is trite to say that in fifty years it was transformed from a wilderness into a settled countryside; consider rather that an infant could cross the plains by wagon train in the gold rush, and live to watch a programme about it on television; and somehow even that is not quite as sad as old Bronco Charlie Miller driving past filling-stations and movie theatres where once he had ridden for the Pony Express.
10. Flashman’s brief résumé of the Mexican-American war and the boundary changes needs a little enlargement. Until 1845, the U.S. western frontier ran (see map) up the Sabine and Red Rivers bordering Texas, and then due north to the Arkansas, which it followed to the Rocky Mountains. Here the Continental Divide became the frontier up to the Canadian border at the 49th parallel.
In 1845 Texas was annexed, and in the following year Oregon became fully American by agreement with Britain. Following the Mexican War (1846–1848), Mexico ceded to the U.S. all territory north of the Rio Grande and Gila Rivers. This to all intents and purposes established the mainland frontiers of the U.S. as they are today; the only major change took place in 1853 when, by the Gadsden Purchase, the U.S. obtained the area between Gila and the modern Mexican frontier. So in Flashman’s time the Rio Grande and the Gila were the effective boundaries, for what this was worth; American administration of the ceded areas had barely begun, the frontiers were still uncertain, and it was not until the Boundary Commission had completed their surveys in the early 1850s that the limits were determined. And, as he rightly says, New Mexico was still entirely Mexican in character.
11. There are many authorities for the conduct of wagon-trains, and prairie pioneering in general; most of them are infinitely more detailed than Flashman, but his descriptions are well supported by other early writers. His account of Westport-Independence is highly accurate, down to such details as the cost of wagons and supplies, the pay of guards and riders, and the appearance of the varied
multitude that thronged it in the spring and summer of 1849; the only point on which he seems slightly hazy is the internal geography of the area which later became Kansas City, and he was overcharged for claret in St Louis. On the details of travel, too, he is sound in his description of caravan order and discipline, equipment, mule-loading, guard-setting and the like. The best-known authority is Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail, 1847, but others include Marcy’s The Prairie Traveller, 1863; Josiah Gregg’s The Commerce of the Prairies, 1848; J. J. Webb’s Adventures in the Santa Fe Trade, 1844–47, ed. Ralph P. Beiber; Lewis H. Garrard, Wah-to-Yah and the Taos Trail, 1850; and a personal favourite, G. F. Ruxton’s Adventures in New Mexico and in the Rocky Mountains, 1847. Colonel Inman is excellent on the outfitting and equipment of trains on the Santa Fe route.
12. This cryptic remark must surely refer to the calling out of the militia in New York in May, 1849, to suppress rioting which followed the appearance of the actor Macready in Macbeth at the Astor Theatre – hardly the kind of social unrest Susie can have had in mind where the wagon guards were concerned, but her arch-conservative mind may have seen a parallel. The riots were extremely violent, twenty people being killed when the militia opened fire on a crowd. (See M. Minigerode, The Fabulous Forties, 1924.)
13. Among the Sioux, of whom the Brulé or Sichangu (Burned Thighs) were an important sect, the wearing and arrangement of head feathers were highly significant. An eagle feather denoted a scalp taken, a red-dotted feather an enemy killed (if the feather was notched, the enemy’s throat had been cut). Since much importance was attached to counting coup (touching, but not necessarily killing, an enemy), feathers could also indicate the order in which a brave had laid hands on an enemy’s body – notches on one side of a feather showed that he had been the third to touch the body; notches on both sides the fourth; a stripped quill with a tuft, the fifth. A feather split down the quill indicated a wound stripe, as did a red hand symbol on a brave’s robe; a black hand symbol stood for an enemy killed. Spotted Tail, the Brulé whom Flashman met (see also Note 55), was said to have counted coup 26 times; rumour also credited him with a hundred scalps, but this seems rather high, even for one of the greatest warriors of the Sioux nation. His name, originally Jumping Buffalo, is said to have been changed when, as a child, he was given a racoon tail by a white trapper, and attached it to his headdress; certainly he was wearing such a tail in the 1850s. (See Spotted Tail’s Folk, a history of the Brulé Sioux, by George E. Hyde, 1961; Handbook of American Indians, by F. W. Hodge, 2 vols 1907–10, and the great encylopedia of the Indian people, H. R. Schoolcraft’s Historical and Statistical Information Respecting … Indian Tribes of the U.S., 6 vols, 1851–60. Also Letters and Notes on the Manners and Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians, 1841, by George Catlin, the most famous illustrator of Indians; his work has run to many editions, and is essential for anyone who wants to know what the early Indians looked like; Our Wild Indians, R. I. Dodge, 1883; The Indian Races of North and South America, C. Brownell, 1857.) A minor point of interest is what Spotted Tail was doing so far east at this time; certainly the Sioux were hunting Pawnees that summer, and may have come so far as the Neosho.