by Tatjana Soli
—When I give the signal, I want a charge. Go with a rush, he said.
—General, suppose we find more Indians there than we can handle?
—All I am afraid of is we won’t find half enough. There are not Indians enough in the country to whip the Seventh Cav.
* * *
THEY MOVED OUT, and then there was nothing for the companies under him to do but wait through the night as the others positioned themselves. He gave orders for absolute silence, down to removing sabers in case of clanking metal. Although they were allowed to dismount, no walking, talking, smoking, or campfires were permitted. In the subzero temperatures, it was agony.
He saw that Golden Buffalo had now allied himself with the Osage scouts, and he went over to him. Custer knew the Osage were jumpy. They whispered among themselves of the probability that they might be traded as hostages if a pact were struck. He worried over their loyalty.
—Be careful they don’t mistake you for the enemy down there. Once the fighting starts, stay back.
* * *
THERE WAS NO WAY to overemphasize the importance of victory, but Custer knew it wasn’t as clear-cut as during the War. The army was caught smack between two rocks and would likely be smashed to pieces no matter what they did. He wished for a decisive victory that would weaken Indian resolve. The goal was to have the Cheyenne and Arapaho safely on reservation land so the railroads and settlers could move unimpeded.
The problem was that the people living on the frontier were terrified by the latest depredations and demanded vengeance. The politicians and newspapers back east, safe from danger, nursed romantic notions of the Indians roaming freely. There was no discussion of withdrawing from the plains, but they wanted a humane conquering, to turn the Indians into Christian farmers. Any student of history—Custer was making himself a fairly knowledgeable one—knew it was an impossible expectation.
Frontier perception was that the army had failed during the last years. A Kansas militia of volunteers was drummed up to ensure punishment for the latest crimes on the Saline and Solomon, as well as the captivity of two white women settlers. From Custer’s point of view the problem was that the volunteers’ training did not match their ambitions. He worried they would unleash another Sand Creek under his watch.
Luckily for him they had gotten lost and arrived too late to Camp Supply. Almost a thousand of their horses died from starvation on the way. Hopefully he would have the entire campaign over before they managed to catch up. Besides, if rumors were correct that this camp held the hostages Clara Blinn and her young son, their rescue would make him a national hero, and he did not need to share the spotlight.
It was common knowledge that the Medicine Lodge Treaty the previous year would be disastrous to the Plains tribes for the simple reason that the U.S. government began breaking it almost before the ink was dry. Still, tribal leaders took the proceedings—set deep in their hunting grounds—seriously, stretching the signings over two weeks in their desire to gain some assurances for their people’s future. The full import of being forced to give up their hunting grounds and traditional ways, being consigned to live at a remove on a bleak reservation, would soon be all too clear. Those who refused to sign were arrested and given nothing while their land was taken. The rub was that even those who cooperated were cheated of what they were promised. The government honored nothing, and the army had to deal with the resentment that caused. War was preordained.
* * *
DOGS ALWAYS FOLLOWED THE ARMY, including Custer’s own, but an Osage scout cautioned that a bark was the most common way Indians were alerted to army attack. Terrified that he would lose the painstaking advantage he’d worked so hard to achieve, he regretfully ordered the canines killed. For silence the animals were muzzled with rope, then stabbed or strangled. Two of his own hounds had followed, and he moved away to not see the violence done to these loyal pets. Herculean were the sacrifices victory demanded.
After hours spent immobile in the freezing night, at last dawn lightened the horizon. The trees were like tombstones, gloomy with cold. The glow of a few teepees illuminated the darkness as fires were lit for morning. The light through buffalo hide was inviting, like sun against eyelids, illuminating dreams. Custer wished to be inside their close animal warmth, the fur smell of unshorn hide blanketing him.
Through the fog a more insistent light rose and pulsed, haloing icy motes in the air. Officers panicked, thinking this was caused by lighted arrows signaling the army’s presence. Custer almost cried that the dogs had been killed for nothing, but then observed that the object was too long in its ascent for either arrow or firework. The light climbed higher and stayed aloft, freed of gravity, finally identifying itself as the morning star. It rose crystalline and remote from human concerns, golden at first and then all the colors of the rainbow. A sign, a portent of luck? He would not mention another name for the star: Lucifer, the fallen angel.
A shot rang across the village. From them or the enemy? He wondered for the briefest minute if it could have been fired by Golden Buffalo to alert his people but dismissed the idea.
The moment of attack had shied out from under him, a skittish mount, but he regained mastery of it. He yelled the charge, told the band to strike up, but their first notes died a frozen spittle death within their instruments. Past caring, the men roared a big cheer as they charged. His overriding fear was that the village might still have somehow emptied like it had for Hancock. He nodded at his officers, spurring his horse.
—The ball has begun, gentlemen!
The hammering of iron hooves, running horses rousing the first inhabitants, who came out of teepees half undressed, rifles loaded. Within minutes the cold was forgotten. The smoke of fireearms and the screams of women and children replaced it. Orders were shouted demanding surrender, but surrender was unnatural when ordered at the end of a long gun.
Riding through the center of the village at Custer’s side, Hamilton, the regimental favorite, was struck by a bullet. Grandson of one of the founding fathers of the country, Hamilton had begged and received permission to trade guard duties at the supply train in order to be part of the battle.
He was known for his fine caricatures. Good-natured, he always threw the drawings away after getting a laugh. The previous night Custer had stolen Hamilton’s drawing of him and folded it away as a keepsake in his saddlebag.
Denying this claim on his mortality, Hamilton now rode carefully ahead as the blood rosetted at his back, an image not capable of being crumpled and thrown away. He slumped to the side and rolled off his horse.
A group of women and children fled the village, running down the valley as a company veered to chase them, opening fire when they refused surrender. One of the scouts and a wild-eyed Golden Buffalo hurried to Custer, asking if that was his order.
—No, not my intention. Stop them shooting!
They took off to halt the soldiers.
In ten minutes the cavalry controlled the village, gathering more than fifty women and children together as prisoners. They panicked over their fate, and he told Golden Buffalo to explain things to calm them. His troops were now being attacked by warriors from the perimeter. He ordered the troopers to hold fire as another group fled down the valley. On his own initiative, Major Elliott pursued with a posse of nineteen soldiers.
Time moved queerly during battle.
A blur of motion, then moments of stillness and great clarity. On a small lookout point while directing the battle, Custer’s attention was caught by a red-tailed hawk skying through the morning. Was it a trick of the light, its surreal beauty? The screams from the village were muffled, and fell flat like leaves to the ground, leaving no impression on the soaring bird. Custer fell deep in study of each detail of the whirling, feathered body as it rode the air currents. How small, how inconsequential from such a lofty perspective were the agonies caused by man.
An officer in great agitation reported to him that in pursuit of fleeing Indians, he’d ridden downstream
.
—Far as I could see down the valley, teepees! Not only that, but warriors coming in our direction. My men barely made it back alive.
—Are you sure? You’re not exaggerating?
—No, sir. And I heard shooting down in the valley. Maybe Elliott’s men?
Custer shook his head.
—Myers’s men went that way. Heard nothing.
* * *
CUSTER WALKED the muddied village ground now mysteriously littered with the bodies of women and children—he’d given express orders to use extraordinary restraint to forbid it—in addition to warriors contorted in positions of violent death. How had it all happened with such speed? He gave orders to question the surrendered women and children to find out if the white hostages remained in camp. Indian custom was to kill captives when attacked, so the possibility was slight.
He ordered the firing of the village, razing everything that the Indians needed to survive the winter. During the War, Sherman had learned the trick of destroying an enemy’s habitat and thus defeating him, and he relied on it still. Custer rationalized that depriving the enemy thus ended the violence more quickly.
Ruination of the village began at the upper end, troops tearing down lodges and using the poles as fuel, throwing goods on top. Custer was relieved when they found spoils from the murders along the Solomon and Saline, confirming that the killers had sheltered in this village. This would go far in his report to defend the attack.
Despite his orders, the Osage had taken out their personal vengeance on their enemies. Custer saw one walk by with a scalp on his belt but knew better than to reprimand him. He would lose their loyalty thus. His favorite dog, Blucher, having somehow escaped the first slaughter, was found with an arrow stuck in his side. Weary, Custer rode out of the village to await the finish. The mopping-up part of battle never appealed to him.
The sun rested warm on his shoulders. Snow had melted along the shaded banks as if in grief. Hoarfrost sighed off tree limbs. Dismounted, he grazed his horse, laved his hands in the icy waters. Reddened by the extreme cold, still they remained unclean. The weight of the gray men on the other side of the river, their black caved-in eyes, stood in accusation, and already his Hamilton had joined them.
He turned sharply and spotted Golden Buffalo, his face so grave it could only be that he saw Custer’s haunting. Or his own.
—You still with me? Custer yelled out.
Golden Buffalo nodded, but would not come closer.
* * *
THE WIND-SCOURED BLUE SKY, the stain of dark smoke from the burning village rifling its purity, was unconnected to him. Custer felt no absolving succor or reprieve. He knew this thing and its coming toll, how even now that same column of smoke would engender more violence from the Indians who witnessed its burning. The hecatomb of war would drive him to ground. Mortal men were not created to shoulder such burdens. Sand Creek begat the Saline and Solomon. The rape and massacre of settlers begat this holocaust morning. Did it matter if vengeance was wreaked on the right men, or were all men guilty, all men worthy of punishment, him most certainly?
When he returned to the village the adjutant informed him of a small group of warriors spotted along the bluffs. They sat mounted on ponies, joined by more even as they watched the destruction being wreaked by the army. If they had been inclined to peace before, now it could only be vengeance. Was that the meaning of the gray men?
He ordered that the prisoners be allowed to choose mounts from the herd and then the remaining stock killed. He had learned well from his mentors. A warrior on horseback was worth ten dismounted. To kill a horse was the most difficult thing for a cavalryman, but his orders were clear: kill all warriors, capture surrendered women and children, destroy the village and ponies.
Soldiers were given the hellish task of cutting the throats of more than eight hundred horses. In terror at the look and smell of the white men, the ponies ran, making them difficult to capture. Custer went to the Osage scouts, but their disgust was so evident he did not ask for aid.
The soldiers closed in on the ponies in sad mimicry of the human slaughter hours before. Warriors watching from the clifftops yelled curses, pounded their own chests in agony. Horses were considered treasure, sacred.
There was the trouble of slow blood loss, the unbearable sound of equine screams. Horses returned to their fallen in camaraderie, then, smelling death, ran away in panic. When the soldiers’ arms grew too weary as darkness approached, guns were brought out to finish the job, despite the dear cost in bullets. The whole snowy field turned rust-colored, cinerary. Wounded horses moaned like humans.
As evening fell the hills were thick with warriors many times more than the number at noon. Danger increased with the minutes. Camps downriver had been alerted by the sounds of gunfire. Interviewing the female prisoners, the scouts learned that larger camps of Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa lay several miles farther along the river.
* * *
A TEMPORARY HOSPITAL set up in the middle of the village took care of the wounded. As Custer rode by, he saw the bugle boy sitting outside the medical tent on a pile of buffalo robes, his face covered in blood. The sight of children harmed undid him. He knew the boy, had let him come to his tent to eat sweets sent from Libbie and play with the dogs. Although he was too young to serve, he had replaced his fallen father to support their family. Once he was out in the field, Custer did not have the heart to return him. He stopped now.
—You okay, son?
—Got an arrow through me, General.
The boy pointed out the trajectory from above his eye and out the ear. A fraction of difference would have been enough to send him to the eternal rest. The barbed arrows were incapable of being backed out, so the surgeon had cut off the head and pulled the rest through.
—Fine job. You see the one did it to you?
The boy fished in a deep pocket and brought out a bloodied hank of hair and scalp.
—Not only saw him, but shot him, then scalped him, too.
Custer burst out laughing, the child was so preternaturally beyond his years. War did that.
—The injury is slight?
—Reckon I’ll survive.
—I’m most assured you will.
—Say I do survive, General, maybe you was to put me on your staff?
Little devil. Custer bit down on his lip so as not to mar the seriousness of the boy’s request. The child had small, close-set eyes, high, slatted cheekbones, and a common mien when not covered in his own blood, but he had an uncommon confidence that Custer warmed to.
—You partial to dogs, young man?
—I could be, sir.
A genuine Machiavelli.
—Report to my adjutant when you’re healed up.
When they returned to the fort, he would put the boy in charge of the dogs, out of harm’s way, in Hamilton’s memory. Maybe train him to become a groomsman.
The child was promptly forgotten as a detachment of warriors came off the bluff and tried to break through army lines on the other side of the river. Custer ordered that the captives be brought as a buffer. As expected, the women’s cries stopped the warriors from firing.
Village burned, ponies slain, military and civilian dead on both sides tallied, a quick search within the perimeter failed to account for Elliott and his party, and an assessment was made that they had been cut off by this new, encircling enemy. The wagon with the reserve ammunition had barely made it through the warriors, its wheels set on fire. If the main supply wagons were discovered and attacked, the regiment would be without food enough to return to Camp Supply.
As evening fell he organized the men in full formation, band playing, flags flying, and moved out in the direction from which the warriors had come. He knew, if the others didn’t, that boldness was the true caution of the cavalry.
Convinced that their own villages would be next under attack, the warriors on the bluffs dispersed to defend them. Hours later, the feint successful, Custer gave the command to reverse a
nd go back over the same territory covered, past the morning’s death field, to rejoin the main supply train the next day.
He had been in a slumber since the War, his best instincts unused, but now he was come to life again.
* * *
KILLED: 103 WARRIORS. Captured: 53 women and children. Killed: 875 ponies. Village property destroyed: 241 saddles, 573 buffalo robes, 290 buffalo skins for lodges, 160 untanned robes, 210 axes, 140 hatchets, 35 revolvers, 47 rifles, 535 pounds of powder, 1,050 pounds of lead, 4,000 arrows and arrowheads, 75 spears, 90 bullet molds, 35 bows and quivers, 12 shields, 300 pounds of bullets, 775 lariats, 940 buckskin saddlebags, 470 blankets, 93 coats, 700 pounds of tobacco, immense quantities of dried meat and other provisions.
Loss to the 7th Cavalry: 2 officers, 19 enlisted men, 3 officers wounded.
He sent word of victory back to Sheridan:
We have cleaned Black Kettle and his band out so thoroughly that they can neither fight, dress, sleep, eat or ride without sponging upon their friends. It was a regular Indian “Sailor’s Creek.”
They rode for two days back to Camp Supply.
At one newly established ranch, Golden Buffalo stopped and stared at a barbed-wire fence, his eyes glassed as if he’d seen a ghost.
—What’s wrong with you, boy? Too much whiskey?
* * *
EACH NIGHT WHEN THEY BIVOUACKED, a scout made selections from among the captive women and delivered them like choice cuts of meat to officers’ tents. Custer had watched the women carefully during the daylight as they rode the saved ponies from the herd. One in particular stood out both for her pleasing face and the deference paid her by the others. She rode a superior horse and mounted it well. He ordered another prisoner brought and had Golden Buffalo question her as to the girl’s identity.
She was the daughter of a chief. Monahsetah had fetched a high price in ponies from the warrior who married her. But the duties of a wife did not suit her, nor did said warrior. She shot him in the knee and had just returned to her family village in time to witness this: her father slain, she herself taken prisoner.