by H. W. Brands
But he was merely president, and amid the economic depression that followed the financial panic, he faced overwhelming pressure to allow almost anything that would stimulate the American economy. Nothing would provide a kick like a new gold discovery. Grant grudgingly approved a federal expedition to determine the truth or falsity of the rumors of gold in the Black Hills.
COMMAND OF THE EXPEDITION WENT TO GEORGE ARMSTRONG Custer, of the army’s 7th Cavalry. Grant had doubts about Custer, a Civil War hero but also a prima donna. Yet the long-haired colonel had supporters, including many in Congress, and Grant yielded to their wishes to see Custer head the Black Hills exploration.
Custer played to his following. Besides soldiers to defend the expedition against Sioux attack, and scientists to extract and assay the ore they found, Custer brought newspapermen on the journey. He made every effort to give them material for stories—about him, whenever possible. The one thing they didn’t get, which would have suited him perfectly, was a fight against the Indians, who kept their distance.
Grant wished the expedition would disprove the existence of gold in paying quantities in the Black Hills. But geology was against him, and so was Custer. The scientists found gold, which Custer showed to the reporters that they might inform the world. “STRUCK IT AT LAST!” one local paper hurrahed, in full Sam Brannon mode. “MINES OF GOLD AND SILVER REPORTED FOUND BY CUSTER. PREPARE FOR LIVELY TIMES!” Another paper, slightly calmer but no less boosterish, declared, “This immense section bids fair to become the El Dorado of America.”
The headlines had the desired effect, and a rush to the Black Hills began. Grant vainly tried to stop it. He ordered violators of the treaty arrested, their outfits seized and their wagons burned. But the rushers drastically outnumbered the soldiers, and Grant recognized that it was politically impossible to order soldiers to shoot gold rushers, especially when most of the country thought the rushers were right and the president wrong.
As a fallback, Grant tried to negotiate the purchase of the Black Hills from the Sioux. Red Cloud was prepared to strike a bargain, having concluded that what the Sioux didn’t sell, the whites would simply take. But the negotiations bogged down over the price. Anyway, as even Red Cloud had to acknowledge, he didn’t speak for all the Sioux. Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, a powerful medicine man, publicly rejected his authority and made clear they were going to fight to defend the Sioux lands.
They forced Grant’s hand. By this time the gold rush to Dakota was in full roar. Ten thousand miners crowded the Black Hills seeking their fortunes. Their presence was illegal, but Grant, now facing complaints about corruption in his administration, in addition to the anger over the economy, was in no position to drive them out. He ordered the army to compel Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull and the other treaty opponents to recognize the authority of the government and move to the reservation.
Once more George Custer rode at the head of the 7th Cavalry. Reports placed Crazy Horse on the Yellowstone River; Custer pursued him there. Americans knew enough about Crazy Horse, and more than enough about Custer, to devour every news story of the coming clash between the wily war chief and the gallant cavalryman. Crow and Arikara scouts marched with Custer against the Sioux; Custer was heard to boast to them that there would soon be a new Great Father in Washington—Custer himself. It wasn’t an outlandish thought. America’s fondness for victorious soldiers was well known. Grant would leave office after his second term. William Sherman, the obvious one next in line, had repeatedly asserted his distaste for politics. The way seemed open for a new hero to ride into the White House.
ON THE MORNING OF JUNE 25, 1876, BLACK ELK’S FATHER warned him to be careful. The boy, thirteen years old, and several others his age were tending horses along the river they called the Greasy Grass—a stream the whites called the Little Bighorn. “If anything happens, you must bring the horses back as fast as you can,” Black Elk’s father said. “Keep your eyes on the camp.”
The camp, and the adjacent camps of other bands, were tense. Crazy Horse had gathered warriors for the showdown with Long Hair, as the Indians called Custer. Most were Sioux, either outright treaty rejectionists like himself and Sitting Bull, or tribe members who wintered on the reservation and decided to spend the summer reliving the old ways, perhaps for the last time. Some Cheyennes and Arapahos joined them in their stand against the white invaders.
As Custer approached, Crazy Horse made his preparations. A part of his army engaged Custer’s lieutenant, George Crook, then broke off and disappeared. Custer pursued them, uncertain how many warriors Crazy Horse had, but unworried by his ignorance. He was sure his men could rout several times their number of savages. His only concern was how to make Crazy Horse fight. He didn’t want to spend all summer chasing him.
Crazy Horse let the soldiers approach. Custer’s column made contact again, through his Crow scouts, who caught sight of the Sioux camps. The Crows were surprised at the size of the gathering; they warned Custer that there were more of the enemy than he had counted on. He waved aside their fretting. He was close; he would move in for the kill.
He aimed to attack the Sioux camps from two directions. Major Marcus Reno would ride directly toward the camps from the south. Custer would circle to the north with a second column and close off any escape. The hammer would meet the anvil, and the renegade Indians would be crushed.
The approach of the bluecoats was what prompted the warning of Black Elk’s father. The son heeded the words. All morning he and the boys watched for any sign that the Wasichus were at hand. Hours passed, and they saw nothing. The day’s heat and their youth caused their attention to flag. One suggested they swim in the river to cool off. Black Elk hesitated. “I did not feel well,” he said afterward. “I felt queer. It seemed that something terrible was going to happen.” But the laughter of the other boys caused him to dismiss the thought. He joined them in the cold water, which seemed to wash away his forebodings.
Suddenly they heard a cry from the nearest camp, of the Hunkpapas. “The chargers are coming!” the criers said. “They are charging! The chargers are coming!” The warning rapidly spread. “The crier of the Oglalas shouted the same words,” Black Elk recalled, “and we could hear the cry going from camp to camp northward clear to the Santees and Yanktonais.”
All the warriors ran for their horses. Black Elk and the other boys leaped on their own mounts. “My older brother had a sorrel, and he rode away fast toward the Hunkpapas,” Black Elk remembered. “I had a buckskin.” Black Elk’s brother was a warrior, but he had left behind a few guns. Black Elk’s father brought up the guns and told Black Elk to chase down the brother and give him the guns. “I took the guns, jumped on my pony and caught my brother.”
He discovered what all the shouting was about. “I could see a big dust rising just beyond the Hunkpapa camp and all the Hunkpapas were running around and yelling, and many were running wet from the river. Then out of the dust came the soldiers on their big horses. They looked big and strong and tall and they were all shooting.”
Reno’s column struck the Hunkpapa camp and inflicted sharp casualties. But a warrior named Gall, sometimes referred to as Pizi, rallied his comrades. “A cry went up,” Black Elk remembered: “‘Take courage! Don’t be a woman!’”
The counterattack knocked some of the white soldiers off their horses. The bluecoats took shelter in trees beside the river. The fighting grew more intense. “The valley went darker with dust and smoke,” Black Elk related. “There were only shadows and a big noise of many cries and hoofs and guns. On the left of where I was I could hear the shod hoofs of the soldiers’ horses going back into the brush, and there was shooting everywhere. Then the hoofs came out of the brush, and I came out and was in among men and horses weaving in and out and going upstream, and everybody was yelling, ‘Hurry! Hurry!’ The soldiers were running upstream and we were all mixed there in the twilight and the great noise. I did not see much, but once I saw a Lakota charge at a soldier who stayed behind and fought
and was a very brave man. The Lakota took the soldier’s horse by the bridle, but the soldier killed him with a six-shooter. I was small and could not crowd in to where the soldiers were, so I did not kill anybody. There were so many ahead of me, and it was all dark and mixed up.”
On one corner of the battlefield some of the Sioux were stripping dead and downed bluecoats of their weapons and uniforms. Black Elk watched in fascination. “There was a soldier on the ground and he was still kicking,” he recalled. “A Lakota rode up and said to me, ‘Boy, get off and scalp him.’ I got off and started to do it. He had short hair and my knife was not very sharp. He ground his teeth. Then I shot him in the forehead and got his scalp.”
BY NOW CUSTER REALIZED THAT HIS PLAN HAD MISCARRIED. The Indians were more numerous than he had imagined, and they fought better than he had thought they would. Reno’s troops, far from driving the Sioux into Custer’s fatal grasp, were pinned down and fighting for their own lives. What Custer met was not an Indian band in confusion but a disciplined force led by Crazy Horse himself. “Hoka hey!” the war chief cried, at the head of the charge. “It is a good day to fight! It is a good day to die!”
The Indians struck the bluecoats from the front, the sides and eventually the rear. Custer ordered his men to the highest ground in the area, where they dismounted and fired at the mass of Indians swirling around them. He hoped to hold off the Indians until reinforcements arrived or night fell. Then they might escape.
But Crazy Horse had no intention of letting them go. His only chance of victory, not just in this battle but in the longer struggle, was to inflict such a defeat on the invaders that they would back off and leave the Sioux in peace.
His warriors swirled closer and closer, raining gunfire and arrows on the surrounded soldiers. The latter fought with the courage of desperation. None wanted to be taken alive, knowing that torture awaited.
“We could not see much of the battle for the big dust,” Black Elk said. “But we knew there would be no soldiers left.”
Within half an hour, he was right. “We rode across the Greasy Grass to the mouth of a gulch that led up through the bluff to where the fighting was,” Black Elk remembered. “Before we got there, the Wasichus were all down, and most of them were dead, but some of them were still alive and kicking. Many other little boys had come up by this time, and we rode around shooting arrows into the Wasichus. There was one who was squirming around with arrows sticking in him, and I started to take his coat, but a man pushed me away and took the coat for himself. Then I saw something bright hanging on this soldier’s belt, and I pulled it out. It was round and bright and yellow and very beautiful, and I put it on me for a necklace. At first it ticked inside, and then it did not any more. I wore it around my neck a long time before I found out what it was and how to make it tick again.” Black Elk continued across the killing ground. “There was a soldier who was raising his arms and groaning. I shot an arrow into his forehead.”
39
ADOBE WALLS
IT WAS A BRILLIANT VICTORY FOR CRAZY HORSE AND THE Sioux, yet ultimately futile. The news of “Custer’s Last Stand,” as it was called in the popular press, reached the American East amid the festivities surrounding the centennial of American independence. The continuing economic depression took some of the shine off the celebration, making the country hungry for a demonstration that the American way remained the path to the future. Ulysses Grant thought Custer no hero. “I regard Custer’s massacre as a sacrifice of troops, brought on by Custer himself, that was wholly unnecessary, wholly unnecessary,” he told a reporter. But the lame-duck president couldn’t resist the pressure to avenge the 260 men lost on the Little Bighorn. The 7th Cavalry, now under George Crook, was reinforced and given orders to capture Crazy Horse and his followers. The chase filled the summer and autumn of 1876. Occasional skirmishes were indecisive. What finally defeated Crazy Horse was what defeated most other Indian resisters: the destruction of Indian villages and food stores. Crazy Horse and his band somehow survived the winter, but spring found them starving. Crazy Horse yielded to the inevitable and agreed to come onto the reservation. The war for the northern plains was over.
WHAT THE SIOUX WERE TO THE NORTHERN PLAINS, THE Comanches were to the southern. They had always been warlike. Their own name for themselves, like that of many Indian tribes, was simply “the People,” but to the Utes, whom the Comanches encountered upon emerging from the southern Rockies in the early eighteenth century, they were “anyone who wants to fight me all the time.” When the Ute word for this phrase was rendered by the Spanish, it became “Comanche.”
About the time they descended from the mountains, the Comanches acquired horses, which had an even more profound effect on their culture than horses had on the life of the Sioux. The Comanches became the utter equestrian people, roaming thousands of miles after buffalo and after more horses. Their skills at mounted warfare were legendary. “He makes but an awkward figure enough on foot,” an eyewitness said of the Comanche fighter, “though he is no sooner mounted than he is transformed, and with no other aid than that of the rein and heavy whip he makes his horse perform the most incredible feats.” Another observer drew a classical parallel, calling the Comanche warrior “the model of the fabled Thessalian centaur, half horse, half man, so closely joined and so dexterously managed that it appears but one animal, fleet and furious.”
The Comanches were divided into several bands, each with its own leaders and making its own decisions. The principal leader of the most formidable band was Quanah Parker, son of a Comanche chief and a white woman named Cynthia Ann Parker. Stolen from her family at the age of ten or eleven in an 1836 attack on Fort Parker, Texas, for the same reason Indians stole other children from the whites and from one another—in order to rebuild their disease-ravaged populations—Cynthia Ann grew up among the Comanches and assimilated into the tribe. She married and had children, whom she raised as Comanches. By the time Texas Rangers recaptured her in 1860, she considered herself a Comanche; she was repatriated to the white settlements only by force.
Her husband died trying to defend her, and so Quanah, then about fifteen, was effectively orphaned. As the boy became a man he exhibited traits of leadership and courage that won him a following among the Quahadis, the most independent of the Comanche bands. The Quahadis defied efforts by the federal government to confine them to a reservation, and they roamed at will across the Llano Estacado, living by hunting buffalo and raiding white settlements. The U.S. army sent expeditions in pursuit of Quanah and the Quahadis, but the troopers rarely even spotted the Indians. On one occasion the cavalrymen didn’t discover the Comanches’ proximity until Quanah and his warriors were riding off with the federals’ horses.
WHAT THE SOLDIERS COULDN’T ACCOMPLISH, THE BUFFALO hunters did. Seth Hathaway was a buffalo hunter who joined a hunting party from Colorado in the spring of 1874 for an expedition across the Llano Estacado. Hathaway made the fourth of a four-man group. Jerry Gardner, a veteran plains hunter, owned and directed the operation; the two other men were buffalo skinners. Hathaway and the two skinners would receive a monthly stipend and a percentage of the hides; as the junior member of the outfit, Hathaway was expected to tend the camp while the others were at work and to run errands as necessary. “When I told them I was no tenderfoot they only laughed,” he remembered. “So all I could do was to keep still and show them what I could do when the time came.”
The hunters were well-equipped. “For our ammunition we carried six or seven hundred pounds of lead, and two or three thousand shells with primers,” Hathaway said. “The arms of the party consisted of two 50-caliber three-band needle guns”—breech-loading rifles in which a steel needle penetrated the paper cartridge to ignite the powder—“for the wagon, and two 50-caliber 120-grain Sharp’s rifles, weighing sixteen and eighteen pounds, for hunting. A number of knives for skinning, one grindstone and our blankets completed the equipment.”
The hunters made their way to Willow Creek, where the
y encountered several other parties. They continued south toward Palo Duro Canyon, with its broken bluffs and red rimrock. They killed a few buffalo but ran short of salt. The four men expected to live on buffalo meat for months at a time, but they couldn’t stand it unsalted. Gardner told the others to keep hunting; he’d find someone to trade him salt. As he left, one of the skinners, Tom Cox, told Hathaway, “Kid, you have been talking about your killing buffaloes. Here is your chance. Show us what you can do.”
Hathaway hefted one of the needle guns and ran to a small gully from which a portion of the buffalo herd was emerging. “The herd came along at an easy lope, and when they were close enough I turned loose, killing five before they got out of range,” he said. Gardner heard the shooting from a distance and feared that Indians had jumped his crew; he hurried back to the camp. “When he rode up and found out what I had done,” Hathaway recalled, “he said, ‘You are a regular Seth Green on shooting.’ And from that day on I have been called Seth. I never found out who Seth Green was, but reckon he was a good shot, as Gardner named me after him.”
Gardner got his salt, and the party moved on. Eventually they found a spot Gardner liked. Hathaway considered himself a good buffalo hunter, but Gardner carried the craft to a higher level. Hathaway observed and learned. “This is very particular work,” he later explained, “and requires a great deal of experience to do it successfully, as every herd has a number of its members, more or less according to the size of the bunch, straggling out from the main herd from forty to sixty yards. These buffaloes act as sentinels. At the first sign of any danger they start and run. This action sets the whole herd in motion, and in a minute all you will see is rising and falling humps in a cloud of dust.”