Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  Custer was still acting well. He throwed Calhoun’s company against Gall as dismounted skirmishers, but them Sioux forthwith left their own ponies and advanced crawling through the sage, shooting arrows from concealment, hundreds at a time, which having reached the limit of their lofty arcs, descended in fearful volleys, piercing men who could not see an enemy to fire at.

  Some Indians encircled the troopers detailed as horse-holders, every fourth man in the company, and leaping forth stampeded the mounts with screams and flapping blankets. So Calhoun was henceforth pinned in place. They then begun to diminish his line from both ends towards the center, knocking off the skirmishers one by one, and at last come out of the grass in a great naked brown wave, yelling Hoka Hey!, the Sioux war cry, from a multitude of guttural throats, and washed over him.

  That’s what struck me, the sight of savage flesh, for the Indians was stripped to the breechclout and most was not painted nor wearing their bonnets and other gewgaws usual to their battle costume, and taking no coups except upon the dead. Most fought afoot, with no frenzied displays of courage, and taking every advantage of cover. My God, there was a lot of the latter on that awful field: it was like a big sponge, with its gulches and draws, and now and again as if a mighty hand was a-squeezing it, it seemed to heave and savages would well out of every nook, drowning another portion of the command, then be absorbed once more into concealment.

  But they took quite as much toll upon us when in hiding, with them arrow-volleys swishing through the sky, and had their rifle sharpshooters too, though there wasn’t near as many guns on the Indian side as some people think; they simply used well the few they had, most of them not repeaters, either.

  I had a seven-shot Winchester carbine, but would have give anything to trade it for the old Sharps single with which I had hunted buffalo, for we in Custer’s party was now upon the summit of the ridge, farthest distant from the enemy as befits a general in defensive action. Below us and on a lower rise was Tom Custer’s sorrel-mounted troop, and to the left, Keogh riding to fill the gap caused by Calhoun’s collapse; then that deep draw into which the Gray Horse Troop had been run and slaughtered, and farther to the right, one platoon of Captain Yates’s F Company, at this moment being rolled up by a great press of savages who shortly spilled through and engaged Tom and the remaining platoon of F.

  So there was much to watch of the meanest kind of sight, and nought to do at that range. I mean for me: for Custer there was plenty, and he was so far doing it fine, though at the disadvantage of being by personality and training a cavalryman to the core, which is to say, having the offensive character. He had never been backed up this way before and denied the possibility of his beloved charge. Our horses was worthless here, and some of the men in headquarters detail had started to shoot theirs and make a breastwork of their carcasses, for any fool could see the ridge would soon be engaged. And to show you how normal the General was at this time, he had Lieutenant Cooke take down the names of the troopers who did this and swore to court-martial them on the return to Fort Lincoln.

  This was the next second after sending a courier to move Keogh against the Sioux what had run over Calhoun, who was after all Custer’s brother-in-law and now evidently deceased, though as the time passed we could see less and less through the gigantic pall of gunsmoke and milling dust that was turning the middle afternoon into late twilight.

  So when Keogh in turn got his, we knowed it mainly from the volume of hostile yells, and then come Tom Custer’s men, dismounted and their horses lost, backing foot by foot up the rise towards our position.

  Right about then, the first shot sounded from behind us, where there was a sharp slope to the northwest which fell into an encircling ravine. No one had paid that ground much mind, what with thousands of hostiles on the other three sides, so it had filled up unopposed with Indians who had traveled the long way around, another thousand if there was one, and now advancing up against us, they commenced to sound their cries: Hoka Hey, Hoka Hey, and some yelled the name of their great people, Lakota! Lakota! The Men! The Men!—but predominant even over these was the simple, throaty Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey that started like a funeral drum and then increased in tempo to where it was a madman’s raving, though without disorder, a directed passion if you can imagine that, the wild and merciless fixed upon a single aim and undistracted. They was Cheyenne, and they was at the center of the world.

  That first shot killed Custer’s horse, hit white-stockinged Vic in her pretty sorrel head, under the left eye. She fell gradually, front legs as if in a dainty bow, giving the General time to step off before the hindquarters toppled over and crashed.

  The most glorious cavalryman of all was now unhorsed. He looked a little bewildered, but was soon brung straight by the sight of the oncoming Cheyenne, so ordered the troops to do what he had but lately condemned: shoot the remaining mounts and arrange them into a breastwork. Before that was done, we had several casualties.

  Utterly surrounded now, with C Troop backed up against a cutbank below our knoll and nothing in Keogh’s direction but smoke and, when that parted occasionally in the slow wind, Indians, Indians, Indians, ever closer and in greater amount, the wonder being that there was ground enough to hold them, and I thought of Bouyer’s prediction that they exceeded the number of our bullets. He had been a wise man and a brave one, and I seen him fall as we swung away from the ford, closest any member of the command ever got to the big village on the Greasy Grass, and him a breed.

  The other Crow was long gone back to their people, though maybe that Curly watched part of our fight from a distant rise, for the next day he reached the Far West upriver and give a story of the massacre that no one believed. But he was not there upon our ridge. We had no friendly Indians left, the Ree having went with Reno. Nor did the Sioux and Cheyenne have any whites on their side, as has sometimes been said by them who wouldn’t believe savages could fight so well: bitter ex-Confederate officers, squaw men, renegades, etc. Not so. Our adversary was 100 per cent red. It was simply that they no longer fought for fun, but was out to kill us in the most effective manner, with the least damage to themselves. Despite their swelling numbers, with your rifle at the shoulder you had hardly a target. They was creeping and crawling, and could vanish behind a tuft of grass no larger than your hat; a scrawny sagebush hid a score. But then go to reload and see them gain thirty yards.

  Nevertheless, our boys was keeping the Springfields busy, until what Bottsy had mentioned as the weakness of that piece commenced to show: the action heated up under constant use, and the fiery sun, though blotted out by the blue murk, contributed no little, and them ejectors stuck, the spent shell locking in the breech. Some worked at it with their knives, breaking off the blades to no purpose. That type of thing might make for a panic while a hundred Indians slither towards you personally, but the fact is that I never saw no disorder among our troops once the situation turned desperate. The Sioux later claimed that a whole platoon down on Keogh and Calhoun’s front committed suicide; I never saw such and won’t believe it happened.

  There wasn’t no cowards up on the ridge. When the carbines jammed, the men used their revolvers, about as effective as spit-balls like the schoolboys throwed back in Missouri. And the Indians being so numerous, it was hard to see a casualty among them when we dropped one, so had no encouragement from whatever toll we took.

  Counting what was left of Troop C below the cutbank and those of us up top, I reckon we now numbered seventy-five to a hundred. No more firing could be heard from the direction of Keogh, and it had long since been silent towards the right, where Yates’s command and the Gray Horse Troop had obviously gone under, though you couldn’t see through the pall.

  I was working my Winchester constantly towards the Cheyenne and might have hit a few from behind the carcass of that Ree pony, who I had shot in the forehead in necessity but regret, for he done a a fine job when the chips was down. I didn’t know then that his old master Bloody Knife had been rubbed out down in the va
lley with Reno, but on looking back, I reckon he did: his big sad eyes showed a willingness to go when I pushed the Colt’s barrel between them, and them saddle sores had rubbed open again in the course of that wild ride, so it was in several ways a favor to him. He continued right useful in death, being soon all porcupined with arrows, which in his absence would have perforated yours truly, now half under his belly, for them high-arching volleys was on the increase, hundreds of steel points descending through the murk, like it was raining razors. Fellow near me, sprawling flat, got stapled down in two, three places, but never killed until threshing about to free himself he fetched his head high enough for a bullet, collecting several, expiring still fastened.

  That was the trouble: lay flat and you’d get pinned, stand up and you faced gunfire, roll under a horse’s belly and you was temporarily safe but out of action, letting the Indians advance to where they eventually could walk in and kill you like a snake.

  Now General Custer did not consider such a decision for himself. He was walking about through all this and had so far come untouched. And I don’t mean crouching, but striding erect and pointing, sometimes with both arms out in different directions like a standing cross, in which case he must have been a target of maximum visibility against the sky for them Indians lower down. Occasionally he’d fire his Bulldog pistols, always with a classic stance he must have learned at West Point, elbow bending like a steel hinge, forearm rigid. Arrows flashing by him, lead singing, he was as if upon the firing range of some quiet fort.

  He was a spectacle for fair, though strewn with dust from short-cropped head to leathern toe, sweat-streaked, blue shirt open at the neck, face like coarse stone from the stubble of beard. And smiling! By God if he was not, and you could hear his raspy voice going along the ridge, calling men to fill a gap here, commending some others for holding on there, ever confident and of good hope.

  “Splendid, splendid,” he says, standing there above me, and just as I took a breath, having missed a crawling Indian down the slope with the last three shots then in the magazine, and looked at him, a Cheyenne arrow come close enough by his neck to have feather-whipped it.

  I says: “General, won’t you get down?” But had no more luck with that than anything I had ever said to him in our whole history.

  He stared back with eyes like blue gems through the dust on his countenance, fanatic as an idol, and he says: “Splendid, boys! We have them on the run now!” And went along the skirmish line, kicking the troopers’ boots in encouragement, only some of them covered the feet of dead men.

  Well, his example might have been heartening to the ones who could see it. I recognized he had gone crazy again, like when charging the ford alone, which surely accounted for the failure of the arrows and lead to touch him, for missiles are reluctant to strike a man who has gone out of himself by reason of madness or medicine.

  I turned back to shooting Indians, or trying to, as they squirmed through the tall grass below and their serpent heads popped up briefly, always slightly elsewhere than anticipated, for they was expert from birth at this type of fighting and though I had been trained to it myself, the advantage was nullified by our position on that gravel-topped ridge with no cover but the fallen animals.

  Next we come under new fire from a neighboring rise sixty-seventy yards to the southwest, signifying that F Troop had definitely went under, for they had commanded that slope. The loud reports of Government carbines was heard everywhere, pointed towards us, quite a different sound from when they are with you, shooting away, and easy distinguished from the pop of weapons with a lighter load.

  The hostiles grew better-armed by what they captured, turning our own weapons against us, not even troubled with them ejectors: having all the time in the world, they wouldn’t fire so fast as to overheat the breech. They was getting plenty of ammunition from the saddlebags of the troops what had been rubbed out, whereas we was running low. The pack train was somewhere back the trail, and if you recall, Custer had sent it several messages to come on; but there was a nice problem in how it could get through the enemy host. Indeed, I supposed it had itself got wiped out by now, along with Reno and Benteen: not a stupid conclusion when you understand I reached it while riding a splinter, so to speak, on a roiling ocean of hostiles, amidst a smoke-fog which lifted now and again only to reveal a further loss.

  Now it was C Troop, there below, all gone except a handful what scrambled up to us and fell behind the horse-corpse barricade, some hit in the back while so doing and belching blood onto the present occupants who pulled them in to add to the growing mortuary. Tom Custer was not of that number, so had got his, I expect. And young Reed was near me, one minute a-working his expensive sporting rifle and the next stone dead with his mouth open and tongue turning black, and I never saw Boston at all: he had probably dropped on our ride up from the river.

  So as man, the General had lost two brothers, a nephew, and very likely his sister’s husband; as commanding officer, the better part of five troops; as cavalryman, his mount. In smaller things, his hat was gone and one revolver; the other he was firing, down on one knee now. His pants was tore, and most of the buttons off his double-breasted shirt, where he had ripped it further open to relieve the heat.

  Mark Kellogg, the journalist, lay on his face in the gravel, presumably gone under though there was not a tear on his back anywhere, and from his coat pocket protruded the rolled foolscap of his last dispatch, never sent. Sergeant Hughes, what carried Custer’s personal guidon, was terribly hurt from a gut-wound that curled him up on the ground like a caterpillar around the point of a sharp stick, yet somehow he kept the banner from touching dirt. It hung limp except when feebly stirred by the passing of arrows.

  I haven’t mentioned my own wounds, though I had received a couple. I had been struck in the left shoulder by a ball from a muzzle-loader, I reckon, for it had enormous power behind it, lifting me right off the prone position, reversing my head with my boots, so my spine whomped onto the ground and I couldn’t breathe for a minute. But I returned to place directly and got the Indian who done it, for he seen me go over and confidently exposed himself while reloading and nobody else was left to fire at him for thirty yards on either side of me. I give him one in the breastbone and let it go at that, having to conserve ammunition; down he went, and his pals pulled him back into the grass to die or recover, I would never know.

  They done the same with all their casualties, whereas ours lay around us, and the dead horses, and owing to the heat the latter was ready to ripen soon, the laid-open flesh already growing dark, and there was even more flies on that hill than Indians, for commotion don’t touch that miserable little beast. I had a few at my bleeding shoulder, feeling their tiny feet where I still could sense no pain. I had also been scored across the cheek by an arrow, at an angle so that the blood trickled into the corner of my mouth, from which salty taste I discovered it in the first place.

  But that hangover, now, that was altogether gone, along with the depreciating effect of no sleep for two days: nothing like a massacre to clear your head. I don’t believe my sight was ever keener, before nor since. Too bad there was nothing to use it on but savage enemies and sage, since I figured my seeing would soon end along with everything else. There couldn’t have been over thirty-forty of us left. I don’t know how long we had fought so far; sometimes it seemed like a whole lifetime and at others as brief as a sneeze since that gallop down Medicine Tail Coulee and then up onto the ridge.

  I was conscious of somebody falling nearby and turned and seen it was Lieutenant Cooke, his magnificent whiskers a-swimming in gore; had been crawling along the line and got up too high for a second, his last. Then Custer come along, erect no more but his belly scraping the gravel. There was blood on him, too, splattered from someone else, I believe, for he was not yet wounded.

  “Cooke,” he says, and nudged the adjutant’s lifeless form. “Cooke, take an order for Benteen.” And then spitting the dust and stones out of his mouth, he says, “Co
oke, write this down: ‘Come quickly, and the day is ours.’… Have you got that, Cooke?”

  “He’s dead, General,” I says.

  “Get the name of the man who said that, Cooke,” Custer snapped, his eyes red-veined and not looking either at me or the adjutant but towards the head of my fallen pony.

  I don’t know, I guess I felt sorry for him then, so I took up the role of Cooke and he never detected the difference.

  I says: “Yes sir, I’ll take care of it.” And Custer mumbled some and rolled over on his back, his hands behind his neck, and looked into the sky and smiled as if at secret knowledge. Another of them great arrow-masses vaulted overhead, catching sunlight on the ground edges of their iron points, and coming down like sleet through his field of vision.

  He never wavered—and as it happened, these was doing less damage now, for there wasn’t many targets left to hit—but says in an easy tone of voice, like a genial scholar:

  “Taking him as we find him, at peace or at war”—them arrows come swooshing down to stick upright all over dead men and horses—“at home or abroad,” Custer goes amiably on, “waiving all prejudices, and laying aside all partiality, we will discover in the Indian a subject for thoughtful study and investigation.”

  I took time to discourage about fifty savages from advancing for a minute or two; I was fast running out of shells, for as our number dwindled I fired more frequently in compensation. And while I was so doing, Custer lay a-chattering away to himself.

  As I reloaded, I heard him say: “It is to be regretted that the character of the Indian as described in Cooper’s interesting novels is not the true one. Stripped of the beautiful romance with which we have been so long willing to envelop him, transferred from the inviting pages of the novelist to the localities where we are compelled to meet him, the Indian forfeits his claim to the appellation of the noble red man.”