Blood Brothers

by Deanne Stillman

  In 1874, gold was discovered in the Black Hills. Thirst for the yellow flakes that peeked through the gulches and valleys of the region intensified with a landmark Custer expedition of that year. Geologists and topographers accompanied the venture, to give it a veneer of respectability and to suggest that it was not driven by lust for riches. One of the soldiers had even brought along an “odometer cart,” charting the way into the hills and measuring the miles with a strange contraption that he rode. As the men advanced, the region became more beautiful. “An Eden in the clouds,” a reporter from the New York Tribune proclaimed along the steep banks of the Red Water. “How shall I describe it!” Taking in the expanse below, Custer named it Floral Valley, and the soldiers were overtaken by a certain spirit. “Teamsters picked blossoms to decorate the harness of their mules,” Donald Jackson wrote in Custer’s Gold. “Infantrymen plumed their hats; young officers slipped petals into their notebooks to take to their wives. On either side the limestone hills were thick with pine, and the woods rang with the cry of the sandhill crane.” As the men descended into the valley, the band played “How So Fair” and “The Mocking Bird,” and then Custer spotted a crane. He raised his arm to halt the column, and then went ahead and shot it. Soon his Arikara scouts spotted five Sioux lodges, and Custer dispatched interpreters to assure the Indians that he meant no harm. The expedition continued its foray into the hills. Somewhere in this region dwelled Sitting Bull. At the moment he could have been anywhere—in the mineral caves below, possibly a cool respite in the summer heat, or perhaps he was away hunting. Custer hoped that he might encounter him during his explorations, but for now, the most desired quarry was gold.

  As tales of gleaming veins over yonder began to circulate, reporters filed heated dispatches. On August 12, the Bismarck Tribune proclaimed Custer’s Valley as “The El Dorado of America.” “STRUCK IT AT LAST!” announced the Yankton Press and Dakotian on August 13. “Rich Mines of Gold and Silver Reported Found by Custer. PREPARE FOR LIVELY TIMES! Gold Expected to Fall 10 per Cent.—Spades and Picks Rising.—The National Debt to Be Paid When Custer Returns.” Two weeks later, the reporter from the New York Tribune cast doubt on such announcements. “Those who seek the Hills only for gold must be prepared to take their chances,” he wrote. “Let the over-confident study the history of Pike’s Peak. The Black Hills, too, are not without ready-made monuments for the martyrs who may perish in their parks.”

  But gold fever was sweeping the nation, and many a prospector was now buying supplies and heading to the heart of Lakota territory, advancing the course of empire with a pick and a mule. Across the country, financial markets were heating up. Native lands were seized by the government, and Indians who had not agreed to live on reservations continued their raids on settlers. Angered that the Treaty of Fort Laramie had been violated, Sitting Bull allied with the holdouts.

  “Give them whiskey,” said General William Tecumseh Sherman, Civil War hero whose name invoked a legendary Shawnee chief. “Kills them like flies.” General Phil Sheridan, also with valiant service in the Civil War, had another idea. “Obliterate the red man.” Indians who refused to surrender—“hostiles”—would be quelled with a massive, three-pronged attack. The plan was this: At Fort Abraham Lincoln, Custer would be met by General Alfred Howe Terry’s column, leading the Seventh Cavalry west and then north toward Montana Territory. There, they would hook up with General George Crook’s column from the south and General John Gibbon’s column from the west—and wipe out the enemy encampments of Sioux and Cheyenne led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.

  On May 17, the Seventh Cavalry marched off to war. As the column departed, guidons of each regiment snapped in the breeze. Custer was riding one of his favorite horses, and he was dressed in his signature buckskin pants and jacket. He also wore his trademark red silk cravat, which many men in his outfit sported in imitation. Custer’s wife, Libbie, joined her husband on horseback at the head of the column. When they passed the Indian quarters, where their allies from the Crow tribe were living, the squaws, old men, and children sang death songs, and when the column passed Laundress Row, wives and children of soldiers lined the road, and mothers held their babies aloft for a last look at their departing fathers.

  After fourteen miles, the column separated from camp followers and Custer leaned down from his horse to embrace his wife. “Watch for our return,” he said, but for now she stopped and watched the departure, “a scene of wonder and beauty,” she later wrote. A little while later on that fine spring morning, five weeks before the most famous cavalry and Indian battle in American history, Libbie Custer had an omen. The wife of the warrior with the long golden locks saw something that disturbed her as she watched the line of pack mules, ponies, cavalry, artillery, infantry, soldiers, orderlies, cooks, Indian scouts, veterinarians, and surgeons that stretched for two miles march off into the morning mist. As it vanished, there appeared a mirror image of the procession in midair, halfway between heaven and earth—a ghost train of horse and riders, swallowed by the sky.

  Unbeknownst to Custer, scores of Indians had been assembling in the Valley of the Little Bighorn, coming together as they often did just before summer began, in May, the Month When the Ponies Shed, for the annual Sun Dance. In previous years, they would meet elsewhere, but in 1876, things were different. Sitting Bull wanted the tribes to gather in a remote place while they discussed how to respond to the latest developments. They had camped at nearby Ash Creek, but their horses—perhaps as many as fifteen thousand—had grazed the grasses down, and a few days before the troops arrived, they moved into the valley, where the forage was lush and as high as a horse’s belly. It was the biggest encampment the tribes had known, with ten thousand Indians stretching for two miles along the western side of the Little Bighorn River.

  Two weeks before the battle, there was a Sun Dance ceremony at Deer Medicine Rocks. It was the ritual from which Tatanka Iyotake—Sitting Bull—and his people derived their power and demonstrated their union with the Great Mystery. This Sun Dance would be one for the annals. At the center of the Sun Dance lodge was a sacred tree. It had two hide cutouts of a man and a buffalo attached to the top. “Buffalo robes had been spread out around the tree,” Nathaniel Philbrick wrote in The Last Stand, “and Sitting Bull sat down with his back resting against the pole, his legs sticking out and his arms hanging down.”

  He was planning to give Wakan Tanka—the Great Mystery—a “scarlet letter,” fifty pieces of flesh from each arm. His adopted brother Jumping Bull began cutting Sitting Bull’s left arm with an awl, “starting just above the wrist and working his way up toward the shoulder,” Philbrick recounted, describing the painful process. “Fifty times, he inserted the awl, pulled up the skin, and cut off a piece of flesh. Soon Sitting Bull’s arm flowed with blood and he cried out that he wanted to be at peace with all, wanted plenty of food, wanted to live undisturbed in their own country. Jumping Bull repeated the cutting on Sitting Bull’s right arm, and soon, his limbs and fingers were covered in blood. He rose to his feet, and beneath a bright and punishing sun, his head encircled by a wreath of sage, he began to dance.” He danced for a day and a night, all the while with an eagle-bone whistle in his mouth, slowly breathing in and then slowly breathing out, and on the exhale, the whistle made a frantic sound that urged the celebrants on. “Around noon on the second day,” Philbrick wrote, “after more than 24 hours without food or water, he began to stagger.” Several warriors rushed to his side and laid him down, reviving him with drops of water. He whispered to Black Moon and then Black Moon made an announcement. Tatanka Iyotake had seen a vision—an echo of Libbie Custer’s, suggesting that when our senses are on high alert, especially when the winds of war are stirring, we are all dreaming a version of the same dream. Many soldiers and horses, along with some Indians, were falling upside down into a village, like grasshoppers. The soldiers did not have ears, which meant that they did not listen. But there was also a warning. The voice in Sitting Bull’s vision said that alt
hough victory was at hand, his people were not to remove objects from the battlefield, lest a terrible fate subsume them.

  During the summer of 1876, the campaign against the horse tribes of the Great Plains met with unexpected resistance. General George Crook was leading his troops toward the encampment at Ash Creek shortly before the Bighorn conflagration. When Crazy Horse got word from his scouts, he took off from the encampment with Cheyenne and Lakota warriors to confront the troops. After a long fight on June 17, the Indians routed the cavalry, shooting Crook’s horse from under him, killing a number of soldiers, seizing their weapons and horses, and sending survivors away on foot. The encounter became known as Battle of the Rosebud, an important victory for Native Americans. With plans for July 4th and the American centennial unfolding across the land, newspapers responded in kind. “This war is not bringing much honor to the national flag,” said the St. Louis Times. “The savages must be stopped.” The moment now fell to Custer, the Civil War hero.

  As Custer surveyed “the hostiles,” he split the Seventh into three battalions, one led by Major Marcus Reno, another by Captain Frederick Benteen, and the third by himself. Each battalion headed off into a different direction. Indian scouts quickly spotted signs of their advance, and word was passed up and down the riverbanks, from the Hunkpapas and the Oglalas to the Minneconjous, the Sans Arcs, the Blackfeet, the Cheyenne and the Yanktonais and the Santee. Crazy Horse readied for battle, riding either his prized bay or sorrel, and then stopped at a wall of sandstone near Ash Creek and carved a petroglyph. It depicted a horse—undecorated and on the move—with a snake hovering above. It is said that somewhere en route, he followed the information he had received in a vision, anointing himself and his animal with gopher dust and paint, and placing a stone pendant over his heart.

  Other warriors prepared in a similar fashion, grabbing their horses and applying war paint and items of power. The Oglala Standing Bear had killed a red bird shortly before the battle; now he placed it atop his head as an offering, and joined his fellows. But they were already under siege. Bullets were flying and women and children were running for safety. The men galloped past the timber and down into the valley. A young Hunkpapa named Iron Hawk hesitated for moment. “The earth is all that lasts,” Little Bear told him, and then he headed into the fray with his tribe. “Hoka hey!” people called out amid the dirt clouds kicked up by the ponies, and they made the wartime tremolo and the scream of eagle bone whistles was everywhere. Dust and smoke enveloped the land and shadows lurked and there was shouting and gunfire and the thunder of hooves.

  Down in the valley, the Seventh Cavalry began to collapse quickly. The horses had grown thirsty in the summer heat and they faltered; amid the battle, some stopped at a ford for a drink. Later, hungry mounts halted in their tracks and ripped snatches of prairie grass from the ground, no match for the fast-running and well-fed Indian ponies that swarmed them. Reno’s battalion was quickly surrounded. He ordered the soldiers to dismount and fight, with every fourth man taking the horses and heading for ravines as the others skirmished on foot. The men were overwhelmed. Some of the horses were spooked and ran back toward the water, where soldiers grabbed their tails and used them as life rafts. Others were run off by Indian women who waved buffalo hides. A bullet ripped through the Crow scout Bloody Knife’s skull and his brains splattered across Reno’s face. Reno issued a flurry of commands, some not even heard, and then quickly ordered another retreat. The battalion headed for the bluffs and was soon joined by Benteen and his men. There they would spend the night, their wounded in a hollow, tended by the only surviving doctor and surrounded by horses and mules for protection.

  At about 3:30 p.m., Custer passed through the Medicine Tail Coulee on the east side of the river, approaching what would soon be called Last Stand Hill. A figure was heading in from the southeast, alone and moving fast. “Crazy Horse is coming! Crazy Horse is coming!” someone cried out. When exactly he arrived at the fight is a mystery; perhaps, as per his vision, the gopher dust made him disappear until he galloped onto the battlefield.

  Custer was now leading his column north, followed by Captain Myles Keogh’s. Another battalion, heading east, was met by thirty Indians, who were soon joined by Sioux chief Gall and the warriors who had just finished off Reno’s brigade. “Our young men rained lead across the river,” Sitting Bull later recounted, “and drove the white braves back.” With Gall’s band in pursuit, Keogh led his men up a ridge, riding the battle-scarred steed Comanche, named for courage displayed while facing off with Comanche Indians years before. He gave orders to dismount and form a skirmish line; the battalion kept the Indians at bay for half an hour, then withdrew and headed up another ridge. Keogh again told his men to dismount and form a line. The Indians ran off a number of horses; with soldiers now on foot and without ammunition, they began fighting with pistols and retreated.

  Cheyenne warrior Lame White Man mounted a lightning raid, hitting Custer’s flank and forcing the soldiers back to Keogh’s position atop a hill. Within minutes, Custer and his men were surrounded, and the Indians launched arrows and blasted them with rifles, carbines, muskets, and pistols, felling dozens of troopers and horses. Then the Cheyenne attacked Keogh’s battalion head-on; from either side of the ridge, the Lakota raced in at the same time. The shooting was quick, and throughout the attack one man was galloping back and forth in front of the skirmish line, drawing fire until he was blasted from the saddle. This was Captain Keogh, who died on the field.

  By 4:30 in the afternoon, Custer was waging his final fight, on a ridge where he had planted his banner. He was joined by survivors of the other battalions as Crazy Horse and his men and warriors from the various tribes closed in. A large group of soldiers broke away, running down a gulley toward the river. They were finished off in a ravine, and so too were Custer and the remaining troops, fighting from behind a bulwark of horses that they had shot for protection.

  Exactly how Custer died is a question for the ages. Some say that he was done in by Crazy Horse, while others contend that he was killed by Rain-in-the-Face. According to various Native American accounts, he never really had a last stand. He was killed in the river before his battalion made it to the hill, then was later dragged there by the army to readjust the scene. Yet others believe that he killed himself.

  When the battle was over, Cheyenne participant Wooden Leg said that a crowd of old men and young boys rushed their ponies onto the field and began to move among the bodies. A wounded captain, dazed, raised himself on an elbow and glared wildly at the Indians. They thought he had returned from the spirit world. A Lakota warrior wrested the revolver from his weakened hand and shot him in the head. And so passed the last soldier to have fought with Custer, his identity unknown—although he’s believed by many to be Myles Keogh, the dashing, stouthearted warrior from Garryowen, Ireland, who had raced in front of the skirmish line to protect his men earlier in the day.

  Many of the soldiers were stripped of possessions and their bodies were mutilated. Out of respect for his bravery, Keogh’s was not. Custer’s body was left intact as well, save for a stick in the ear. According to Native American accounts, he was spared because one of the women on the field was a Cheyenne who had a child conceived by Custer in the aftermath of his attack on Black Kettle’s tribe ten years earlier on the banks of the Washita River. On the night after the battle, there was a celebration at Ash Creek, with big fires and kill songs and dances all night long. Years later, the Lakota Black Elk sang one of the songs for his biographer:

  Long Hair has never returned,

  So his woman is crying, crying.

  Looking over here, she cries.

  Long Hair, guns I had none.

  You brought me many. I thank you!

  You make me laugh!

  Long Hair, horses I had none.

  You brought me many. I thank you!

  You make me laugh!

  Long Hair, where he lies nobody knows.

  Crying, they seek him.
>
  He lies over here.

  Let go your holy irons.

  You are not men enough to do any harm.

  Let go your holy irons!

  After the victory celebration, Black Elk was so tired that he lay down on the spot where he was dancing and went to sleep. He was about ten years old.

  Soon after that, the Indians of the Great Plains dispersed, dressed in cavalry gear and adorned with pocket watches and other items, carrying saddles and weapons seized in victory—contrary to Sitting Bull’s warning about taking things of desire from the battlefield. They struck their vast impromptu village that had covered miles of prairie and faded into the wilderness, followed by thousands of ponies whose ranks now swelled with army horses. “Henceforth,” Sitting Bull said when he saw what had happened, “you shall always covet white people’s belongings.”

  When General Terry and his battalion arrived two days later, the field was baking in the summer furnace and strewn with bodies—the dead, mutilated, and scalped bodies of men and the bodies of dead and dying horses. The soldiers traversed the grounds and carried off their dead. The service of the men in this battle has been recounted in many places, from every point of view, exploring at length who may have died on what ridge, how long they may have fought after suffering the first wounds, the possibility that Custer’s last recorded message—“come quick—need help”—may have been improperly written down by the Italian bugler, who did not speak good English, what impetuous or self-destructive or inevitable plan of Custer’s the men of the Seventh may have been following. Scraps of their clothing, their riding gear, mementos they carried into battle were long ago gathered and held on to forever by the legions of people who have swarmed across these grounds looking for answers—soldiers, widows, sons, great-granddaughters, politicians, archaeologists, students of forensics, historians, citizens who partake of the Little Bighorn like the blood of Christ on a wafer. What secrets are here? they—I–want to know, for I too have traversed this field. If I stay here long enough, will I touch America’s heart?