Greasy Grass

by Johnny D. Boggs

  It was hot, and my temper grew shorter. I snapped at the cowardly Indians, told them to go home if such was there desire. I turned to Lieutenant Bradley, almost ready to send him back to the supply depot, but General Terry spoke mildly. “Gentlemen, we waste time bandying about theories. We are late for our rendezvous as it is, so I suggest we hold off on accusations and defenses until we ask General Custer himself what has happened.”

  General Terry was right, of course. Later, it struck me that he had not chastised Lieutenant Bradley, he had not even scolded the Indian scouts, or questioned our interpreter. I think the general knew what we would find on the Little Bighorn River.

  Even after I saw it with my own eyes, I could not believe it.

  * * * * *

  That night, the twenty-sixth of June, we camped. Smoke turned the gloaming into a haze, and the sun turned into a fiery sphere as it sank. Lieutenant Charles Roe had been on a scout, and he returned to our camp, reporting that he had spied a large column of dust. Thinking it to be Custer, he and his men rode into a party of Sioux Indians, who fired upon the soldiers before rushing off.

  The Indians, Lieutenant Roe said, wore the blue blouses of cavalry soldiers.

  Still, I did not believe.

  * * * * *

  On the morning of the twenty-seventh, we proceeded down the west bank of the Little Bighorn. When we came to the abandoned village, my anger at those Crow scouts, at Lieutenant Bradley, all but evaporated, replaced with a grim hope, a forlorn prayer, that those Indians, and my usually capable junior officer, had been mistaken.

  The village had been massive, three miles of empty lodge poles, two standing ones surrounded by dead horses. Inside, we discovered several dead Indians.

  “Their horses were killed for their masters to ride into the hereafter,” my interpreter told me.

  I was more focused on a hill across the river. Several men stood atop that ridge, staring directly at us.

  “Custer?” Major Brisbin asked.

  My head shook. “Or Sitting Bull?”

  A moment later, Lieutenant Bradley rode into the camp. Never had I seen any man so pale.

  “I have a very sad report to make.” His lips began trembling. “I have counted,” he stopped, stared at the reins in his shaking hands, could not look up at anyone, “one hundred and ninety-seven bodies lying in the hills.”

  “White men?” Major Brisbin inquired.

  “Yes.” Bradley sniffed. “White men.”

  My eyes closed. I cursed.

  “Damn you, Lieutenant,” I heard a strange voice, my own, whisper. “Damn those Crows. Damn George Armstrong Custer!”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Private

  Jacob Adams

  Well, I guaran-damn-tee you I never cried so many tears of joy when General Terry rode up our hill. The injuns was gone, and I was alive. Forty-two wounded, fourteen dead, but I was alive. Nary a scratch. Thank the Lord Almighty, I still breathed, and still had my topknot!

  We slapped one another on the back. Didn’t matter what troops we belonged to, didn’t matter if we hated one another, fought each other at the hog ranches and dram shots back around Fort Lincoln. We let out several hurrahs, and cheered our relief as soldiers come riding up that hill. There was General Terry. The general. By grab, for the past two nights I’d never thought I’d want to kiss any general’s boots, but I sure felt different when I saw him riding up with them beautiful boys in blue.

  Colonel Benteen, he asked, “General Terry, have you any idea where Custer has gone?”

  And the general, he looked up, and that good feeling left me of a sudden. Because the general, General Terry, tears went streaming down his face.

  “To the best of my knowledge and belief,” the general said, “he lies on this ridge about four miles below here with all of his command killed.”

  No one spoke for a moment. Then Benteen, he said, “I can hardly believe it.” He took a deep breath, exhaled, and said, “I think he is somewhere down the Bighorn grazing his horses. Why, at the Battle of the Washita, he went off and left part of his command, and I think he would do it again.”

  Terry wiped his face. He stared down at the colonel, and those eyes of his blazed with a fury. “I think you are mistaken,” the general said, and his voice wasn’t quaking, wasn’t sad, wasn’t anything but like a general’s supposed to sound like. “You will take your company and go down where the dead are lying and investigate for yourself. Lieutenant Bradley,” the general turned to one of his officers, “take Colonel Benteen to the site.”

  That was all the general had for us. He rode up a bit more, slid from his horse, and started shaking hands as he made his way to the hospital.

  “Come on,” my sergeant said to me. “Let’s go.”

  I didn’t get my hand shook by the general. Didn’t get to see him walking among our soldiers, sniffing, shaking hands, telling them they’d done a great job, singing their praises, crying like a kid.

  Me? I got to see something else. Druthers had gotten my hand shook.

  By the time we was mounted, a bunch of troopers was crying, but not tears of joy, of salvation. Old Neutriment, that sorry-ass piker Burkman, Custer’s house slave, was sobbing with the general’s dogs. Wailing like a crazy man, saying, “What’ll become of the hounds now? How can I make Bleuch and Tuck understand?”

  Others looked shocked, couldn’t believe Custer could be dead. Some couldn’t speak. Some was saying it wasn’t true, that General Terry was mistaken, that Colonel Benteen was right. Custer was gallivanting across the countryside.

  We followed Bradley, up on the ridge, then into a fair-size coulée, all over that rolling country. Damn, it was hot, hotter than the hinges of hell, and then we come to a dead man. A dead white man. Stripped naked.

  “By God,” someone said, “that’s Sergeant Butler!”

  Another boy vomited on his saddle.

  We moved about, from body to body. Some had been hacked to pieces. Heads chopped off. Limbs chopped off. The damned injuns had even mutilated some horses.

  “There’s that newspaper reporter!” someone shouted.

  I didn’t see him. Didn’t want to see him.

  On we rode, slower now, nobody talking. You kept your mouth shut. You didn’t want to breathe because of the stink, the flies. Nobody felt so happy no more. Well, maybe I felt some relief. On account that I’d been assigned to the pack train. That was the reason, the only reason, I wasn’t lying here, naked, scalped, dead.

  Somebody said, “Damn those lousy Sioux. That’s Doctor Lord. I swear to God, that’s Doctor Lord. At least … I think … it … was, er, used to be … him …”

  L Troop we found next. Most of them. Some scalped. Some stuck with so many arrows you could hardly tell that they once were human. Lieutenant Calhoun, the general’s brother-in-law, was dead. An arrow had smashed his glass eye. Lieutenant Crittenden was dead, too, but the injuns hadn’t scalped him. In a swale not far from them, we found that Irish captain, Keogh. The savages had left one of his socks on, and a medal remained on his naked, bloody chest.

  About then, Sergeant DeLacey heard something in one of the little ravines. He moved inside. We thought maybe it was a wounded trooper. We prayed it wasn’t no damned injun. DeLacey stayed in that ravine the longest time. He come out, leading a bloody claybank horse. “It’s Captain Keogh’s horse!” yelled some trooper. “It’s Comanche.”

  That horse was bleeding from a half-dozen wounds, covered with grass and dirt, his head hung down, his nose blowing out cakes of dust. Laboring he was. Half dead.

  “Put that horse out of its misery, Sergeant,” a dumbass officer said.

  Sergeant DeLacey, he just stared down that shavetail lieutenant. “The hell I will, sir,” he said.

  Back up the hill, we rode. The smell gagged us even worser than it had on all them other spots where we’d f
ound dead comrades. Took all I could muster to keep anything down in my stomach. Bunch of our horses wouldn’t go no further. At that point, I was all for being a horse holder, but my sergeant ordered somebody else.

  So I walked up, around the bodies.

  Lieutenant Cooke. He was there. Lieutenant Gibson was kneeling over his body, shaking his head, whispering, “Oh, Cookie. Oh, poor Cookie.” Those damned red fiends had scalped off one of Cooke’s Dundrearies, but left the other one alone. You just can’t figger no injun. Some boys was scalped. Some butchered. Others lay peaceful, hair still on their heads, just naked. Just naked. And dead.

  But, God, the stink. And the flies. All around me rose the smell of death. I heard my comrades vomiting. Every now and then, I’d hear a gunshot, and I’d cringe, knowing someone was putting a poor animal out of its misery.

  Brass casings was strewn everywhere like acorns back home in Stark County. Our boys had put up one hell of a fight.

  “Good God, who is that?” a sergeant said, then started gagging.

  “His face …” cried another trooper. “Lord have mercy, his face is smashed to …” And he started retching.

  Later, someone found the tattoo on that officer’s arm. That’s the only way anyone ever identified Major Tom Custer, the general’s devoted brother.

  I moved my way through grass stained with blood, covered with flies. Then I stopped, and looked down at the general.

  His body was swollen, ugly, nasty, but the savages hadn’t scalped him. They had slashed his thigh—why do injuns do that?—cut off one of his fingers, and shot an arrow up his pecker. They was cartridge casings scattered all around his body, too. He’d been shot in the temple, and in his chest, that bullet must have just missed his heart.

  But he didn’t look bad. I swear, he seemed to be smiling.

  Would have been just like the general.

  Captain Weir came up to me, and started choking out sobs. Though I don’t know who he was talking to, as he stormed off, he yelled, “Libbie doesn’t hear about this! Do you hear me? She never knows this. He was not mutilated. He died without pain. He … he … he …” He fell to his knees, head bowed, bawling.

  But, hell, most of us was crying, crying from the stink, crying from the sight, crying for all our dead friends.

  I cleared my throat, had to spit out the bile, and turned. The colonel come riding over. I yelled out his name, waved my hat, waited, not wanting to look back at the dead man I’d just found.

  Colonel Benteen swung down, handing his reins to another trooper, and stepped beside me. I give him a little nod, toward the body, and the colonel … well … for the longest while, he just stared. Like he couldn’t believe it.

  Hell, none of us believed it.

  “By God,” Colonel Benteen said at last. “That is him.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Rain-In-The-Face

  Many of my people act like women.

  Twice, we have crushed Mila Hanska. Long Hair is dead. I might have killed him. I remember shooting a man in the head with his own pistol, shooting him so that his face was blackened. I remember cutting out a wasicu’s heart. I remember killing many, many Mila Hanska, counting many coup. Many scalps hang in my lodge. We have crushed the spirit of the wasicus. We could have killed them all.

  We should have!

  Instead, we ride toward the Shining Mountains. We ride south. The great village that we had made on the Greasy Grass? It is no more. Mahpiya To have gone to their own circles. Our Sahiyela friends, they ride in another direction.

  Instead of planning war, instead of continuing our great victories, the old leaders, our holy men, even some of our younger warriors, they talk of peace. Many say they want to go back and live near the soldier forts. They fear Mila Hanska. Fear retribution from the pale-eyed fools.

  Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Gall, and me. We warned against this. We told them we should remain together. Strong. That was how we had defeated those wasicus. They could have brought twice as many with them, and we would have slain them all.

  But no more. Now, we are small.

  Crazy Horse has taken his people to Bear Butte.

  Even Sitting Bull, he thinks he shall go to the Grandmother’s Country. Up there, Mila Hanska will not track him down and punish him. Besides, he says, we did not listen to him. We took the wasicu items after we killed all the wasicus who fell into our camp, like his vision predicted. His vision forbade taking such trophies. We did not listen.

  Wakan Tanka, Sitting Bull says, might frown upon the People of the Buffalo Nation for doing such things. Wakan Tanka might punish all Lakotas.

  Women.

  Cowards.

  They think the wasicus will simply return Paha Sapa to us. The wasicus will not do this. They do not give. They only take.

  But I have no choice. I cannot fight the wasicus by myself. I go with Sitting Bull. I leave my country. I wonder if ever I will see it again.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Captain

  Grant Marsh

  For two days, I had known the wounded were coming, and had tried my best to prepare the Far West. Yet nothing could prepare me, could prepare anyone, for the sight of those wretched, worn-out men as they came down to the east bank of the Bighorn River.

  Pine torches lit up my ship, and the deck smelled of fresh grass, from which the crew had manufactured a bed on our ship’s main deck.

  My cargo arrived before dawn, sad, mostly silent, ashen-faced men carried on litters. Forty white men, two Indians, and a horse. A claybank horse.

  “You gotta get this horse back to Fort Lincoln,” a soldier—one whose right leg had been amputated—demanded. “Leave me behind, Capt’n, but make room for this horse.”

  “He’s the sole survivor!” another wounded man shouted. “I can walk. I swear, I can walk. Take the horse instead of me.”

  “We’ll make room for the horse,” I assured them.

  Which we did.

  Between the rudders, we put up something that might have passed for a stall. I had two crewmen haul aboard more fresh-cut grass, piling it down. Then I watched as a sergeant led in the claybank—Comanche was his name—and my heart ached when that terribly wounded but magnificent animal lay on its grass bed and snorted.

  Just after the horse had found its quarters, General Terry personally requested my presence in his stateroom, and, while many duties needed my attention, I followed the general up to his small cabin. He walked like a beaten man, and when he sank into his chair, I noticed the bags under his eyes, the wrinkles in his forehead. He must have aged twenty years since I’d last seen him, marching off to meet up with Custer and Crook.

  “Captain,” he said, his voice tired, “you are about to start on a trip with forty-two wounded men on your boat. This is a bad river to navigate, and accidents are liable to happen. I wish to ask of you that you use all of the skill you possess, all of the caution you can command, to make the journey safely.” Tears welled in his eyes. Indeed, they formed in mine as well. “Captain, you have on board the most precious cargo a boat ever carried. Every soldier here who is suffering with wounds is the victim of …” Here he paused, closed his eyes, and finished while shaking his head, “The victim of a terrible blunder.”

  A tear rolled down his cheek.

  “A sad and terrible blunder.”

  He need not have given me those instructions. I knew my duty, and I had sailed up these treacherous waters many a time. All the rivers in this territory put even the best and most cunning skippers at risk, testing, or sinking, our wits … testing, or sinking, our ships.

  But, well, I captained the Far West.

  One hundred ninety feet long, only thirty-three feet wide, two engines, three boilers, and a fine stern wheel. I picked the Far West myself. Light, fast, magnificent, she could navigate on a heavy dew.

  It had started rai
ning five minutes past noon when we shoved off on the thirtieth of June. Raining. That seemed fitting. Like all the angels above were crying for what had happened on the Little Bighorn.

  So we sailed, fifty-three miles on the Bighorn to the Yellowstone, and eastward toward Bismarck, where the world would learn of a great disaster, a horrible blow to our army, to our nation.

  First, we had to make it through hard sailing. Sandbars and snags, rapids and islands, spots so shallow I still don’t know how we managed to get the Far West across.

  On July 2, the load got lighter.

  Standing at attention with my crew along the starboard, I watched soldiers carry the canvas-wrapped body of another victim of what Terry had called “a sad and terrible blunder.” Corporal George H. King, A Troop, had died from a shoulder wound. He was only twenty-eight years old when they buried him on the north bank of the Yellowstone.

  At 4:00 a.m. on July 3, Private William George died. We would reach the supply depot the next morning, so General Terry decided to bury this soldier there. As we steamed along the Yellowstone, I thought of poor Mrs. Custer, remembered her begging me to take her up the river, just so she could see her husband again. Now, I wished I had obliged that poor, beautiful, wonderful woman. I remembered the soldiers, could see their faces. General Custer, blond hair shorn but eyes so alive. I remembered the scout aboard this ship, his hand swollen and throbbing with pain, and Dr. Porter and me telling him that he should stay aboard the Far West, and him, looking like a child told he could not have cake for his birthday, saying, “I’ve been waiting and getting ready for this expedition for two years, and I would sooner be dead than miss it.” Now Charley Reynolds was dead.

  So was the newspaper reporter, who had entrusted me with some of his dispatches to Bismarck, to Omaha, to New York City.

  Dead.

  More than two hundred men. Dead.

  Derrick and jack staff draped in black and the flag waving at half mast, the Far West would reach Bismarck at 11:00 p.m. on July 5. Newspapers would proclaim that I had set a record, covering the seven hundred and ten miles in just fifty-four hours. The Far West accomplished this. Not me.