Greasy Grass

by Johnny D. Boggs

  All night I had worked. Almost thirty wounded. More than a dozen dead. Some three hundred others also worked through the night, digging pits with whatever tools they had, even their fingers. Colonel Benteen had given me two assistants, a couple of well-meaning privates named Harry Abbotts and William Robinson. Robinson had carried my bandages and medicine during Major Reno’s charge. Abbotts had been assisting Dr. James DeWolf.

  Now Jim was dead. Yesterday, I had found his body on a nearby ravine after most of the Indians had raced off to the north, leaving us atop this hill. One bullet through Jim’s stomach; another six in his head. For what seemed an eternity, I just sat there and stared at what once had been a young doctor with a promising career ahead of him. Dr. James DeWolf had graduated from Harvard Medical School only a year ago. He had a wife, talked of her all the time. Just a few nights earlier, he had laughed as he read aloud a line he had just penned to Fanny: I think it is very clear that we shall not see an Indian this summer. Now, Fanny was a widow, and I … I have not the words.

  Worse, the Indians had taken Jim’s medical bag, which I desperately could have used.

  “Doc,” Private Robinson had told me, cocking his carbine and aiming at some rustling bushes several rods below, “we best get back up this hill.”

  I had found Jim’s diary, had packed it inside my own medical bag, had promised myself that I would write Fanny.

  If I lived.

  The Indians had soon returned, pinning us down, killing more, wounding more, till nightfall brought some relief. For the soldiers. Not me.

  George Lord was the Seventh Cavalry’s other surgeon, but Dr. Lord had ridden off with General Custer. With Dr. Lord suffering from trail colic, I was supposed to have been assigned to Custer’s immediate command. The good doctor, however, was not only a surgeon, but an officer, and he refused to let bowel cramps and diarrhea keep him from his duty. He went with Custer. Now I was alone, surrounded by the dying, the dead, and the soon to be dead.

  Fortune, I thought, must be smiling down upon Dr. Lord now as he was likely riding along with George Custer and his troops, bound for General Terry or General Crook, leaving us on a hilltop surrounded by thousands of hostile Indians who wanted our hair.

  As I ran carrying weapon and medicine on the already hot morning of the twenty-sixth, I almost cried.

  I do not belong in this army, I told myself. I am a contract surgeon, not a soldier. Why in God’s name am I here? Why did God let me reach this hilltop alive, and send Jim DeWolf up another ravine to be shot to death by savage Indians?

  I was twenty-eight years old, making a hundred dollars a month, but an extra twenty-five dollars for field duty.

  There was no time for tears. I had too much work to do.

  Kneeling by another patient, I calmly told my other assistant, who was treating the man’s gunshot wound, “Private Abbotts, spitting tobacco juice into a bullet wound does not prevent infection.”

  “But we always figgered …”

  “It is all right,” I said, and poured the ever so thinly diluted carbolic acid mixture into the shoulder wound.

  “How ’bout a sip of whiskey, Doc?” the wounded man said through clenched teeth.

  “I would like one myself, Trooper,” I said, and moved to the next patient.

  I thought of last night, when all around me, I could hear soldiers dragging dead mules and horses to the top of the depression that formed my hospital. It was surrounded by picketed mules and horses. I could not see much. By God, I could not even see my trembling hands, could not see the faces of the men I worked on. I could hear them, though. Hear their cries and moans, their begging for whiskey, for water, for death.

  That night turned cold. Men shivered, yet others sweated profusely from their grievous wounds. Private Moore began screaming again. The laudanum had worn off. I stumbled through the blackness, felt inside the bag, produced what I hoped was the appropriate bottle.

  “Someone kill that son of a bitch already!” another wounded man called out.

  “Die like a man!” yelled another.

  “Shut up!” snapped Benteen, who, like me, like most of us, did not sleep that night. “Save your strength, your voices, for tomorrow.”

  Private Moore continued to wail, until I found his face, brought the uncorked bottle to his lips, and let him swallow a bit more of the precious fluid.

  When he fell silent again, I moved to the next patient.

  “Hello, son,” I said softly, but he did not answer. My hand fumbled across the blood-soaked bandage across his abdomen, and rested on his hairy chest. It did not move. Slowly I brought my fingers up to his throat, pressed against the artery, and detected no pulse.

  He was dead. But it was too dark to see who it was.

  My hand slipped to the new corpse’s side, and rested on something cold, hard, iron. I realized it was his revolver. Oh, he had not used it to take his own life. There had been hardly any gunfire since the sun sank. Yet it dawned on me that every wounded man in this “hospital” had a weapon by his side. Not necessarily to kill the enemy, but to kill themselves when the Indians charged after dawn.

  Through the night I had worked, and then dawn came, ushered in not by the sound of “Reveille,” but of gunfire. The Indians were back. Arrows whistled through the air, but mostly the Indians fired carbines and revolvers. The animals pulled at their picket ropes. They screamed. They stamped their hoofs. Some died.

  My heart sank as two troopers hurried in with another solider. They lay him on his overcoat, and I hurried to him.

  “He just rolled over to take off his coat,” one said.

  The bullet had torn through the back of his skull. Likely he never knew what killed him.

  “He is dead,” I said, and hurried to another patient.

  Now, as I explored a trooper’s thigh with my silver probe, a horse screamed. I raised my head to see a horse staggering in the makeshift corral, scaring the other horses, throwing his head back, spraying blood all over the place. A soldier ran to the horse, cut the tether, and then the soldier catapulted backward, leaving a trail of bloody mist that the wind carried away. A sergeant ran to the fallen soldier. The horse fell over dead. The sergeant picked up the trooper’s carbine, and left the soldier where he had fallen.

  I knew not to waste my time checking on him.

  The air smelled of death again, of gun smoke. Dust blew across the hillside. It was maybe 4:00 a.m., and the sun was barely up. Already, the hill felt like a furnace.

  “Try to keep the wounds clean,” I instructed my orderlies. “That seems about all we can do. For now.”

  “With …” Robinson had to clear his throat, “what?”

  He brought around the canteen draped over his shoulder. For the first time, I realized how parched my own throat was, how swollen my tongue felt. I fell onto my buttocks, ran a dry tongue across chapped lips.

  “Here, Doc,” said Abbotts, spraying the dust between his boots with a river of brown juice. He placed two pebbles in my hand. “Put ’em in your mouth, Doc. They’ll stir up a little moisture in your mouth.”

  Doing this, I felt some, though not much, relief. Private Abbotts grinned. Here was an uncouth New Yorker who I had rebuked for following that old soldier’s superstition that tobacco juice could stave off infection. Yet I had just learned something from him that no one ever thought to teach me at Georgetown Medical School. Even my own father, a physician from New York Mills, had never told me about this.

  Then I heard the moans, the piteous cries for water. “Give the patients some pebbles, boys,” I said.

  No longer did I carry Corporal Lell’s rifle and ammunition. I moved away, thinking of the river, not far from our hill, but, with the Indians guarding it, it might as well have been at Niagara Falls.

  More wounds were probed, sometimes with that silver probe, more often with just my fingers, picking out t
he bits of cloth, cleaning the bullet holes as best I could, then covering the hole with water-saturated lint, topped with oiled silk, and covered with a bandage. Until I was out of bandages. Then I used handkerchiefs. Sometimes all I had was a rag.

  I made my way back to Corporal Lell.

  Still he declined laudanum, but, as I changed his bandage, I pulled out a tincture, and sprinkled a bit of opium onto the lint, which I then placed on the bloody hole in his abdomen.

  I had no chloroform, no ether, and other than digging out a bullet that had not penetrated too deeply, or securing an arrowhead with a wire loop and carefully withdrawing it, I could not, dared not, perform any surgeries. Yet.

  The heat became even more oppressive. Yesterday, I had estimated that the mercury had risen to ninety degrees. As the sun rose this day, the heat intensified, perhaps coupled by the cannonade of rifle fire coming in all directions. Many of the wounded no longer sweated, for they had no water inside them to sweat out.

  Another volley came from the Indians. Bullets struck the dead horses and mules, followed by the hissing of foul gas from the bloating animals. The stink would never leave my nostrils.

  I knelt by another wounded soldier, brought my canteen to his thigh wound, tried to wet down the lint, but … I sighed. The canteen was dry. The soldier tried to speak, but his lips were so cracked and bloody, his tongue so swollen, I shook my head.

  “Do not talk,” I told him. My own voice sounded foreign.

  “Herr Doctor,” whispered a sergeant lying next to him, his face masked in pain, his right elbow bloody and swollen. “Herr Doctor … reach into my saddlebag … there.” His head tilted to the leather pouches next to his unfired Colt revolver.

  My aching fingers struggled with the buckles, but finally managed to work the metal, and pull open the leather pouch. Inside, my hand reached, found a jar wrapped in paper and a bandanna. As I pulled away the protective covering, the sergeant smiled.

  “It is jelly,” the sergeant said in a thick Saxony accent. “Bought it at Bismarck before we rode out.”

  “What is your name, Sergeant?”

  “Weihe. Charles Weihe. M Troop.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant Charles Weihe. I will never forget your name or your generosity.” After unscrewing the lid, I found a spoon in my bag, and returned to the wounded soldier at Sergeant Weihe’s left. The soldier’s cracked lips opened just a hair—even that took tremendous effort—and I eased the spoonful of jelly into his mouth.

  He grinned as he slowly rolled the jelly over his tongue, as if I had served him ice cream.

  Turning to Sergeant Weihe, I dipped the spoon inside the jar, and brought it toward the sergeant’s dry lips. His head shook, and his lips tightened. After I returned the spoon to the jar, he whispered, “For the boys, Herr Doctor. For the boys.”

  When you are desperate, you will try anything, and not just jelly.

  We fed grass roots to some of the men, trying to excite the glands, to get some moisture in their mouths, their throats. Others chewed prickly pear cactus, abundant on the hill, the sharp spines removed, of course. Instead of pebbles, some stuck bullets in their mouths. Anything.

  A few even dared try the tasteless, disgusting, and rock-hard bread this man’s army seems to think is nourishing. Soldiers chewed on the bread a while, then spit, or more accurately, coughed it out. Out of their mouths, it flew like clumps of flour.

  Which proved, I guess, to be my breaking point.

  I rose.

  “Herr Doctor!” Sergeant Weihe called out. “Get down.”

  Ignoring him, I strode out of the depression, between two foul-smelling horses, and looked around the perimeter. A bullet slammed into the nearest dead mule, and escaping gas almost made me vomit.

  “Get down, Doc!” yelled the scout, Herendeen, but I ignored him, making a beeline for Colonel Benteen.

  Benteen, too, walked calmly about the field, unprotected, uncaring about the arrows and bullets that flew across the hilltop. Benteen, of course, was a hero, a soldier, trying his best to inspire his men. I doubt if he cared a whit for his own life. I was a contract surgeon, a doctor, trying to keep my patients alive.

  The colonel stopped when he saw me approaching. Major Reno appeared from a shallow hole in the ground, and rose to stand beside Benteen.

  “Doctor,” Benteen said coolly, “how can I assist you?”

  “How are the men faring?” Reno asked.

  A bullet clipped the branch off a piece of scrub.

  “That was close, Fred,” Reno said.

  “The savages need not fire another shot,” I said. “We will all be dead of thirst before long.”

  The two officers knew this. They were as thirsty as everyone else up here.

  “The wounded need water,” I said. “We must have water. It is that simple, Colonel. It is that simple, Major. We get water. Else, we die.”

  The two officers glanced at each other. “Some troopers tried that yesterday evening, before the sun set,” Major Reno said. “Indians drove them back. It was a forlorn hope.”

  Benteen sighed. Another bullet hissed well over our heads.

  “I can’t order men to that river, Doctor Porter,” Benteen said, “but will ask for volunteers.”

  “Thank you, gentlemen.” I coughed. My own voice sounded horrible, like the rasping of a dying man. Quickly I returned to the stinking, miserable hole that served as my hospital.

  Picking up my bag, I made my way to another soldier, then heard Corporal George Lell call out to troopers Abbotts and Robinson, who were treating another wounded soldier nearby.

  “Lift me up,” he said. “I want to see the boys again before I go.”

  I had to stop whatever treatment I was trying on another wounded lad to watch. They lifted Lell up ever so gently, into a sitting position, and, lips tight against the pain, Lell looked right to left, then left to right. His head nodded slowly, and my two assistants lowered the corporal down.

  He was still smiling weakly when I reached him five minutes later, but now his eyes were closed.

  They never opened again.

  Chapter Forty

  Long Road

  My brother is dead. Killed when we fought Mila Hanska on the Rosebud. Soon, I must join him. My brother, more than anything, I loved. Now he is gone. On this earth, nothing is left for me. I have nothing to live for, so soon, really soon, I shall die.

  Hokay hey. It is a good day to die.

  We are coming up the ravine. As an Itazipacola, I lead my friends—Hunkpapas, Oglalas, Sahiyelas, and other Itazipacolas. This I do to honor my brother. This I do so that the Lakotas and Sahiyelas will remember me. They will know how brave I was when I died.

  Along the ravines we climb. This country is good. It hides us well from the wasicus above. I can stop, lift my head, and fire one of the two holy irons I have taken from dead wasicus at the fools on the top of the hill, and duck. This I do many times, as bullets whip over my head, but miss. Soon, I know, the bullets will not miss.

  I wait for the other Indians to catch up, but, before another can move on, I am already crouching and running, leading the way. I stop, shove a holy iron into my breechclout. “Hiyupo!” I yell, unsheathe my knife, put it in my mouth, biting down hard on the blade. Again, I draw the holy iron, and run, harder this time, a wasicu soldier belt draped over my shoulders, carrying more bullets for the holy irons.

  We are close now. Close to Mila Hanska. Close to my death.

  My comrades below, they cry out to me. They tell me not to do this. Not to be so brave. Not to be so foolish.

  I do not listen.

  I can see the flag of my enemies. It hangs dead, for there is no wind. Soon, all of these bad men will be dead. Like my brother. Like me.

  I am running, firing. I can see the white puffs from the wasicu long guns. I can hear the bullets striking, whining of
f rocks. My friends shoot back at the wasicus.

  One hundred and twenty feet, and I will be at the top of this hill.

  One hundred ten.

  One hundred.

  Ninety.

  Eighty.

  “Arghhhh!” The wasicu bullet has slammed through my chest. The knife, I spit into the dirt. I pull the triggers of the holy irons as I fall. Bullets dig up the earth that rushes to greet me. I land hard.

  My lungs will not work.

  I hear the wasicus shouting.

  I hear my friends shouting.

  My mother, my father, soon they will mourn again, but not for long. Because they know that this is what I desired. And I died bravely, as a Lakota.

  I push myself up.

  If I can just crawl the rest of the way. If I can count coup on some wasicu before I die.

  But I cannot even breathe. I can feel nothing but the blood flowing down my stomach, across my back where the bullet has gone through. I can taste the blood in my mouth.

  No longer can I hear the wasicus shouting.

  No longer do I hear my friends calling out my name.

  I hear my brother, and I smile as I sink back onto the ground.

  My brother calls my name. He is proud of me.

  Now I can see him, beckoning me.

  “Hokay hey,” he says. “It is a good day to die.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  Captain

  Frederick Benteen

  Parched as I was, as precarious as our position, I could not send even volunteers down to the Little Bighorn. Not right now. The Indians were up to something.

  I left Reno to return to H Troop.

  “I got that red bastard!” Private Pigford lifted his right hand, pumped it in the air, then dropped it to ram a fresh cartridge into his Springfield.

  I spit out a piece of potato I had popped in my mouth to stimulate the glands, and continued to walk up and down the lines.

  “Colonel!” Lieutenant Hare called out. “Get down, sir. Please. Stop trying to draw the hostiles’ fire.”