Since what we see in the Battle is largely something in us, it is natural that behavior on the Battlefield is varied, though patterned. Many make a point of touching the white grave markers as they walk by, others just as clearly avoid doing so, and I have seen several standing in tears and probably not for anyone buried here. Nearly everyone finds himself wishing that there were no high fence around the grave markers of Gen. Custer and the circle who made “the Last Stand,” and the guards are always on the watch against those, including perhaps you and me, who feel an impulse to carry away just a little piece of the hill with them, a chip of stone or a cactus plant beside a marker.
After the traffic of the day is gone and the gates are shut, the Hill takes on another appearance that again alters dimensions, proportions, and reality. In the moonlight, the Hill is very small, the sky enormous, and in a universe of white diffusion it is hard to tell where the Hill ends and the sky begins and there is no reason to. This is a reality more abstract than the others, in which geometry has almost faded except for the lines of white grave markers. Among the markers close by, rabbits appear moving like oval specters. An old friend, Major Edward S. Luce, formerly Superintendent of the Battlefield and formerly and forever of the 7th U.S. Cavalry, had names for all these rabbits, and they seemed to know him, too. In the moonlight, his National Park Service hat looked like an old cavalry campaign hat. The names he called them were the names of old cavalry troopers. “Hey, Horseface Klotz,” he would call, and an oval specter would appear from behind a grave marker, advance and tremble, and then fade back into white diffusion.
This, then, is Custer Battlefield, a slight and distant elevation on which men died in bloody socks and since have been transformed into a universe of other meanings by their own ashy soil, by identities established however irrelevantly with our own lives, and by a power that for a better word is here called spectral. It was the purpose of this chapter to record the transformations of the soil, but the Battle has two other histories far larger in scope and significance. The first is the alterations the Battle has made in the lives of individuals, families, and tribes connected with it, changes in many instances visible even in the present generation. The second is a history of the changes that we of the world at large have made in the Battle and in its participants as we have projected some part of ourselves into them, altering fact, feature, and tone for a gigantic image of something hidden in our own small lives. So the Hill as a hill we now leave behind, by preference in moonlight.
CHAPTER 2
The Sioux
“Then he whom we had followed showed us his hands and feet, and there were wounds in them which had been made by the whites when he went to them and they crucified him. And he told us that he was going to come again on earth, and this time he would remain and live with the Indians, who were his chosen people.”
—Kicking Bear, Sioux medicine man, reporting to his people
It is easy to point to spectacular illustrations of the power of the Battle over those who survived it—to Sitting Bull as he toured the country in Buffalo Bill’s circus which featured a re-enactment of Custer’s Last Stand, or to the 7th U.S. Cavalry in Korea, motorized but still advancing to “Garryowen,” as they entered Seoul led by Col. Wild Bill Harris in a jeep with a cavalry saddle cinched on its hood, etc. Although the Battle passes on its flair for the spectacular, its profounder meanings must not be lost in pictorial moments that overlook the linear course of ensuing events. The Battle’s marks are clear and deep in the outline of the succeeding history of the Sioux, the Cheyennes, the 7th Cavalry and the Custer family.
[1.]
When the Indians broke camp late on June 26, 1876 and moved majestically and indifferently up the valley of the Little Bighorn, the men on Reno Hill could scarcely believe what they saw in the sunset. The line was half a mile wide and three miles long, its pony herd estimated at twenty thousand.1 Reno’s men stood up one by one from their dead, many still fearful, some crying, but all finally uniting in three cheers as a salute to the Indians and themselves. The Indians were still in sight when darkness came.
This moment was indeed their sunset. They were illuminated with glory, but their power was soon to become a shadow and then to disappear. Few nations, however, even nations such as the Teton Sioux who regarded themselves as the chosen people,2 have collectively witnessed such a moment of self-glory, a glory evidently never to fade from our minds which almost instantly picture all Indians as mounted Indians of the Plains and most northern Plains Indians as feathered followers of Sitting Bull—at least in movies and TV few Indians go slipping through eastern forests on foot. Yet this moment of triumph was to have far different meanings to the Sioux who have left no songs, sagas, or dances to celebrate it.
With their twenty thousand ponies they continued up the valley toward the Bighorn Mountains. Then, in a short time, like other chosen people before, they began to disperse, although for special reasons of their own. It was too big a camp to feed except where grass and game were in superabundance; Indian organization was loose even at a tribal level and anything like a confederacy depended upon a crisis now seemingly passed; but it was also old Indian tactics to hit, run, and then disperse until the trouble was over and the Army got tired of looking and went somewhere else. So “agency” Indians in small groups slipped back to their reservations, trying to look as if they had been there all the time or had been gone a few days to call on relatives. Soon the “hostiles” were separating, the Sioux from the Cheyenne, and these in turn, breaking up into smaller camps, went hunting buffalo, for the most part back through the country where the Army had pursued them—down to Rosebud and across to the Tongue and Powder rivers. But this time when they dispersed they were going ways that in some senses were to be permanently separate, and such reassembly as they have since had has not been as chosen people. Their dispersal, though, did keep the image of their victory intact, frustrating a humiliated Army from ever delivering one blow that would dramatically restore the supremacy of civilization. The drama had been drained from the situation, at least for the white troops. The armies of Crook and Terry sat paralyzed on Goose Creek and the Yellowstone, waiting reinforcements, so for some weeks of a false summer all seemed as before to the buffalo hunters.
2.
While the Army was making its necessarily slow preparations, the public wanting full-scale drama did its best with the one dramatic incident it was furnished. In June, Buffalo Bill dropped all theatrical engagements and theatrically signed again as an Army scout; in July he was with Gen. Wesley Merritt’s 5th Cavalry on their way to reinforce Crook. At War Bonnet Creek,3 a party of Cheyenne attempting an ambush were themselves trapped by that able commander and probably Buffalo Bill killed the first Indian, whose name actually was Yellow Hair although it has nearly always been mistranslated as Yellow Hand to be more in keeping with his dramatic role of Buffalo Bill’s adversary.4 This, of course, is powerful dramatic material—Gen. Custer, Buffalo Bill, and the first dead Indian appropriately called Yellow Hand—and almost immediately the public transformed it into permanent legend by screening it, as we do much of life, through literary conventions combining the Feudal Age with the Far West. In legend Buffalo Bill, wearing one of the black velvet Mexican costumes he used for his theatrical engagements,5 rides out before the two armies, challenges Yellow Hand to a personal combat, topples his man and lifts his trophy with the shout, “First soul for Gen. Custer!” But for the rest of the summer the public was given little else it could dramatize.
It was August 5 before Crook broke camp and moved down the empty Rosebud, on the 10th meeting Terry’s forces who had made an equally empty march; then more or less together they continued on their empty way to the junction of the Yellowstone and the Powder rivers. Here Crook left the Yellowstone to be guarded by Terry who was supposed to keep the Indians from escaping north and himself continued east following Indian trails, but not before incurring several interesting losses that were returned by steamer to civilization. Bu
ffalo Bill left to resume his theatrical engagements, and during that winter, which “was probably the most profitable of his theatrical career,” he appeared in a dramatization of the Yellow Hand incident and added considerably to the receipts by show-window displays of Yellow Hand’s war bonnet, arms and shield.6 Also on the same steamboat with the returning hero were four of Crook’s cavalry troopers on whose minds “the Custer massacre had so preyed” that they were relieved from further service in the field.7
Crook’s column continued east on dispersing Indian trails discouraged by prairies left burning, then by cold September rains, and finally by starved horse-meat and dysentery. The column had called it quits and was heading south for the Black Hills when on September 8 the advance guard stumbled on a Sioux camp of about forty or fifty lodges under American Horse. What happened the next day when Crook arrived is called the Battle of Slim Buttes and is best known for the wild beauty of its setting,8 its colorful literary coverage,9 and the bravery of the Sioux warriors and women who made their last stand in a cave. American Horse finally surrendered, walking erectly from the cave with a squaw holding his intestines in a shawl. Crazy Horse, who was camped nearby, arrived too late to be of any real help, but he left a deep impression on Crook’s troops who discovered, as Crazy Horse’s warriors flashed by, that they were no longer in any condition to be looking for large numbers of well-mounted Indians.
3.
So the summer campaign ended, and what was to have produced a victory to compensate for Custer’s defeat instead looked much like any summer the Army had spent chasing Indians and with luck catching a few trapped in a ravine. But, if the Indians had a feeling that all was as before, they learned otherwise with the coming of winter. The Plains Indians of the northwest had never been exposed to the theory, developed by Sheridan and Custer in the southwest, that winter was the time to catch Indians when their ponies were in poor shape from eating cottonwood bark and they themselves were necessarily scattered in small camps and less watchful than usual because of their remoteness. The Army surrounded them with their best Indian fighters—“Bearcoat” Nelson A. Miles operating in the north from Ft. Keogh where the Tongue joins the Yellowstone river (present Miles City), and Crook and Ranald S. Mackenzie operating in the south from northwestern Nebraska and Wyoming. There was nothing brilliant about the campaign—it was just relentless. The weather was bitter and to the Indians so also was the fact that the troops were often led to their camps by their own relatives who had surrendered and had then signed up with the Army as scouts. There were small Washitas—camps that were surrounded; their inhabitants killed, captured, or scattered into the winter; their lodges burned and their ponies shot. 10 Even the big camps escaping destruction had to fight all winter until “peace parties” began to develop, threatening unity. A medicine man who took the name of “Long Hair,” claiming he was the bullet-proof spirit of Gen. Custer, was killed.11 Altogether, it was a bad winter for the Indians and when spring came many knew it was never going to be the same again. By May, Sitting Bull and Gall had led their Hunkpapas across the Canadian line, and early in the same month Crazy Horse with nearly a thousand of his Oglalas surrendered to Crook at Ft. Robinson.12 When soldiers there tried to photograph him, he replied, “My friend, why should you wish to shorten my life by taking from me my shadow?” Then on September 5 he was arrested because of rumors that he was planning to murder Crook and escape north to join Sitting Bull, rumors that well may have been started by a jealous Indian. At the cell door, he drew a hidden knife and came out of the guard house fighting for light. He was calling, but it was not his old battle call: “It is a good day to fight! A good day to die!” He kept saying, “Let me go! Let me go!” A soldier of the guard ran a bayonet through both his kidneys. It is generally said, that like Custer, he was thirty-six years old when he died.13
4.
North of the border, the old life lingered on, although it had no ultimate power of survival, even under the protection of the Queen and the Red Coats of the Canadian Northwestern Mounted Police. The buffalo were about gone, on alien soil dissension began to spread through the camp, and many, listening to the promises of Indians and priests sent from the agencies, began to slip back home. Besides, though treated with justice, understanding, and courage by the Canadian government, they created a situation that could not be tolerated long. They hunted on both sides of the border, and south of the border they stole horses and killed more beef than buffalo. With the attempt of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perces to escape to Canada in 1878, the Canadian government began to realize that, in granting protection to Sitting Bull and his followers, they had set an example for all the dissatisfied Indians of the northwest to follow. So they took quiet steps to hasten the inevitable—they denied the Sioux’ request for a reservation, in skillful ways they reduced Sitting Bull’s hold on his followers, etc. Early in 1881 Gall separated forever from Sitting Bull, and, taking the large body of the hostile Sioux with him, surrendered to Gen. Miles. On July 19, Sitting Bull with the few who had remained loyal (one hundred and eighty-seven men, women, and children) surrendered at Ft. Buford, but he also was placed under arrest and retained for two years at Ft. Randall, although now that the Sioux War was declared over he was a celebrity admired by the soldiers and deluged with fan mail from all over the world. In the spring of 1883, Capt. Grant Marsh (of Far West fame, now commanding the W. J. Behan) took Sitting Bull up the river to his permanent home on Standing Rock Agency. It was a trip the captain remembered in detail. The old chief sold hundreds of autographs at a dollar apiece, their value considerably increased by the fact that he spelled his name “Seitting Bull.” Capt. Marsh also noted a peculiarity of Indians—they stumbled when trying to walk up a white man’s staircase and could make no progress except by crawling on their hands and knees.14
5.
The Teton Sioux now had ahead of them the long staircase of civilization, and many of them, including Sitting Bull of course, still had no intention of getting down on their hands and knees, although for some years the struggle between “the forces of civilization” and what the Indian Bureau called “the ancient regime” stopped short of violence. In this struggle, almost necessarily one of the first aims of the Indian agents was to break the power of the war like chiefs and to keep the Indians scattered, the more remote and positive aims were to change the Sioux from hunters into farmers, to see that their children went to school, and to convert them to Christianity.
To break the power of the “hostile” chiefs, agents elevated minor chiefs who had become “friendlies.” Sitting Bull was pictured as a sly medicine man who had hidden in his lodge on the Little Bighorn while the Sioux were led to victory on the ridge above by Gall, now a Christian farmer. In fact, the Indian Bureau was so anxious to get Sitting Bull off the reservation that they encouraged exhibitions of him across the country. In 1883, accompanied by the wife and son of the agent at Standing Rock, he was taken on a tour of fifteen cities by Col. Alvaren Allen, who advertised him as “the slayer of General Custer,” a tour authorized by the Secretary of the Interior; he took another trip the next year; and in 1885 he was in the Wild West Show of Buffalo Bill, who took a liking to him and sent him back to the reservation with a number 8 white sombrero and a grey circus horse that would sit down and raise one hoof when a pistol was fired.15
A good part of the next problem—that of scattering the Indians—was taken care of by the encroachments of farmers, ranchers, and railroads so that by 1889 the once Great Sioux Reservation had been shrunken and broken into five separate reservations in the badland country of what is now southwestern South Dakota.16 It was a much slower job, however, to scatter the life centered about big villages and to disperse the Teton Sioux harmlessly and presumably profitably on 160-acre allotments, yet something deeper even than geography was separating the Teton Sioux. Many of them saw, or at least sensed, that the course of events since 1876 would not relent until they accepted another way of life; by the whites, these were called “progressi
ves.” Those who tried to maintain the old way of life and believed that the buffalo would return were called “conservatives,” white party-labels that cannot tell what went on among reservation-Indians. They distrusted each other, spied and told on each other, and enlisted against each other, even against their great chiefs. Crazy Horse was killed probably because of false information given to an Army interpreter by an Oglala, and Sitting Bull was to be shot by Sioux police. Such were the chosen people who had marched as one body past Reno Hill in the sunset of June 26, 1876.
About the time of the surrender of the last hostile Sioux, two other events occurred that took from the old way of life its most basic sources of strength. The great buffalo herd disappeared forever from the plains—the final great buffalo hunt was held in 1882, and the Teton Sioux killed their last buffalo in the following year.17 Earlier even, in 1881 when Sitting Bull returned from Canada, the Sun Dance was prohibited,18 and the Sun Dance had been almost as central to their religious life as the Buffalo had been to their economy. As compensations for the long way ahead, they were offered ploughs, compulsory education, and Christianity, and so, let it be said, they were given what nineteenth-century America regarded as the miracles that had produced its own miraculous success—miracles as yet producing no great wonders in the badlands of southwestern South Dakota, although they are distinguishable features of the mixed society of the present-day Sioux. At first, however, their impress was slight. When Sitting Bull and his people finally reached their reservation, they were presented with twelve acres of ploughed land and, so that Sitting Bull would feel what it was like to be an honest industrious American instead of an Indian letting the squaws do the work, he was ordered to pick up a hoe and it is said that he made a few motions with it. In the joke-book of history, this must be rated among the better laughs.
The Norman Maclean Reader Page 6