Killing Crazy Horse

by Bill O'Reilly

  The sun rises behind the Comanche, illuminating a sod-roofed saloon, corral, blacksmith shop, and two general stores on the grassy plain below. The buildings’ walls are made of adobe, giving the settlement its name. This small trading post exists solely to shelter the hated buffalo hunters now destroying the Comanche way of life. Utilizing their new Sharps “Big Fifty” long-range rifles, these aggressive men kill hundreds of animals a day. Whites have long been shooting buffalo for sport and to feed the laborers building the transcontinental railroad, but the decimation of the buffalo has now become a lucrative business. New technology developed in 1870 allows hides to be processed into fine leather, feeding a growing European demand for buffalo robes. Additionally, the buffalo tongue has become a delicacy, served in America’s finest restaurants—seven million pounds of this coarse meat was shipped east from Dodge City, Kansas, in 1872 alone.

  A single buffalo hide fetches $3.75. Multiply this by dozens of hides per day, and the only limits on a hunter’s ability to make money are locating a herd, skinning the animals, and transporting hides safely to market. The buffalo is an unusual beast, unwilling to run or stampede so long as there is no visual threat. Even if the animal next to it in the herd topples over dead, a buffalo will simply remain in the same place, as if nothing has happened. For this reason, the killers conceal themselves in blinds or under buffalo robes, taking steady aim and shooting from hundreds of yards away with the Sharps’s 600-grain bullet. The grisly task of slicing hides off the carcass is a small price the hunters pay for growing extremely wealthy.1

  This slaughter outrages Quanah. The Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 specifically forbids whites from hunting on lands between the Arkansas and Canadian Rivers. This is Comanche territory. Yet these hunters break the treaty every day, and the U.S. Army willfully allows the violations, knowing that killing buffalo destroys the Indians’ traditional way of life. Thus, the Comanche people, whose primary dietary staple is buffalo meat, go hungry.

  Which is why Quanah plans to drive these hunters from Comanche land, now and forever—shooting a few of these barbarians himself, should he be so lucky.

  The warlord commands seven hundred Comanche, Cheyenne, and Kiowa warriors who now spread out atop the bluff on both sides of him, their bodies and horses painted red, yellow, and blue. Human scalps dangle from their bridle reins. Many wear bonnets festooned with the feathers of a golden eagle, signifying previous courage in battle. Falcon and hawk plumes are tied into the tails of their horses. Four days ago, these warriors gathered north of here to prepare for battle by dancing and singing. The medicine man who led this “Sun Dance” is the renowned Comanche spiritual leader Eeshatai. He adapted the ceremony to inspire the tribe on the eve of battle.

  But the time for dancing is done. Quanah raises his lance toward the sky, the signal to attack. All seven hundred warriors prod their ponies forward, descending carefully from the mesa before quirting the animals to prod them into a full gallop.

  The warriors are armed with rifles, bows and arrows, tomahawks, and knives. There are just twenty-nine occupants of Adobe Walls. Among them is a twenty-year-old hunter named Bat Masterson, destined to go on to fame as a Dodge City lawman, and a twenty-three-year-old sharpshooter named Billy Dixon, well renowned for his ability to down buffalo from amazing distances. As is the custom on warm summer nights, these two men and the lone female resident of Adobe Walls had planned to sleep outside in the fresh air. But at 2:00 a.m. the sound of a breaking roof beam in the saloon roused almost everyone, forcing the men to rise and work all night repairing the problem. For this reason, the residents of Adobe Walls are awake as hundreds of Indians now ride hard to kill them.

  “Twenty-eight men and one woman would have been slaughtered if the ridge pole in Hanrahan’s saloon had not cracked like a rifle shot,” Dixon will later write in his memoirs.

  “There was never a more splendidly barbaric sight. In after years I was glad that I had seen it. Hundreds of warriors, the flower of the fighting men of the southwestern Plains tribes, mounted upon their finest horses, armed with guns and lances, and carrying heavy shields of thick buffalo hide, were coming like the wind.”

  Dixon will continue: “The bronzed, half-naked bodies of the riders glittered with ornaments of silver and brass. Behind this headlong charging host stretched the Plains, on whose horizon the rising sun was lifting its morning fires. The warriors seemed to emerge from this glowing background.”

  Quanah Parker, a Comanche chief, 1900

  The Indians fan out, letting loose enormous war whoops as they bear down on the town. “War-whooping had a very appreciable effect on the roots of a man’s hair,” Billy Dixon will long remember.

  At first, it seems the battle will become yet another bloody plains massacre. Quanah’s strategy of traditional Comanche terror is succeeding. The Indians swarm the small town, shooting out windows as the beleaguered residents hunker down inside. The doors have no locks, so hasty barricades of flour and grain sacks are constructed to keep the attackers at bay. Some of the defenders had gone back to bed after working through the night and now fight barefoot in their underwear. Two buffalo hunters asleep in their wagon are shot and scalped. A Newfoundland dog is also shot and scalped. Strangely, the sound of a stolen bugle wafts across the prairie, blown by an Indian mimicking the battle calls of the U.S. Cavalry.

  But even as the warriors ride close enough to hammer on the wooden doors, the buffalo hunters let loose a fusillade of bullets: the Sharps .50-caliber can do much more than hunt buffalo. Taking careful aim, they begin firing out the windows, picking off the attackers. At first, the shots are focused on the warriors who have dismounted and surrounded the buildings on foot. When these warriors are dead, the hunters start killing from long range.

  “The bugler was killed late in the afternoon of the first day’s fighting,” Bat Masterson will remember. “[Harry] Armitage shot him through the back with a .50-caliber Sharp’s rifle.”

  The battle soon becomes a siege. The hunters have plenty of ammunition and kill Indians and their horses with precision. Quanah himself is wounded and carried from the battlefield, where he directs the action from afar.

  Eventually, the shooting stops. But the Comanche and their allies remain, unwilling to retreat. The stalemate lasts into the night and through the next two days. Fearing the accuracy and range of the Sharps rifle, the Indians are reluctant to attack again at close range. Already, dozens of warriors have been killed. The medicine man Eeshatai, who encouraged the battle and predicted victory, is disgraced. His authority gone, several warriors take turns beating him.

  On the third day, with the Indians so far out of range that killing them seems impossible, Billy Dixon casually takes aim at a warrior one mile away. He fires. The Indian topples from his horse, never having heard the crack of rifle fire that killed him.

  Most of the buffalo hunters survive. In time, they and others will kill millions of buffalo, so many that there will no longer be any to shoot. When that day comes, the hunters will make their living collecting the sun-bleached buffalo skulls that litter the prairie, to be sold as fertilizer.

  The Comanche will disappear along with the buffalo. As Quanah oversees the battle, he does not yet realize that the attack at Adobe Walls will so infuriate the Great Father in Washington that Ulysses S. Grant will change the rules of engagement. From this day forward, the president will no longer pursue the “peace policy” he espoused in his inaugural address. President Grant orders that all Indians not on their reservations are to be considered an enemy of the United States of America and treated as such.

  Within a year, the U.S. Army will track down Quanah and his band, shoot more than one thousand of their ponies, and finally rid the plains of the dreaded Comanche after their undisputed three-hundred-year reign.

  * * *

  So it is that the last Comanche war leader, Quanah, leads his people onto a reservation, ironically located just a few miles from Adobe Walls. There the Comanche will learn white way
s and live a white lifestyle. Quanah will never again paint his body for battle or place another golden-eagle feather in his war bonnet. The whites will even anoint him as “chief” of the Comanche, a title not previously used by the tribe.

  Eventually, the new chief will live inside a proper white home, dressed in a suit, tie, and bowler hat.2

  This is by far the greatest victory the whites have ever known against the Native American tribes who once dominated the North American continent.

  Yet the Great Father in Washington is not content.3

  Chapter Twenty

  JULY 2, 1874

  FORT ABRAHAM LINCOLN, DAKOTA TERRITORY

  8:00 A.M.

  General George Armstrong Custer is ready to ride.

  The Sioux nation calls this time of summer “the moon when the chokeberries are ripe.” To Americans, the first week of July is synonymous with their nation’s birth. In fact, in just two years the United States will celebrate one hundred years since the Declaration of Independence.

  Custer embarks this morning on a two-month trip designed to neutralize the Northern Plains Indians. He will do so by illegally traveling into the Black Hills, a journey specifically denied to whites by the Fort Laramie treaty of 1868, which granted those lands to the Sioux. Publicly, Custer’s stated goal is to find a suitable location for a new U.S. Army fort to supervise the Indians. Secretly, the general is doing something much more devious.

  Known to the Plains Indians as Paha Sapa, the Black Hills is a mountainous oasis rising from the flat and treeless plains. This idyllic land of meadows, forests, and streams is sacred to the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. Deer, elk, and antelope are so abundant that the Indians call this land their “meat locker.” The tribes are extremely protective of the Black Hills—few white men venturing into this verdant landscape make it out alive.

  Americans once considered Paha Sapa worthless, which is why they had no problem offering it up at Fort Laramie. But now, rumors of gold in these hills have made their way back to Washington. And just as similar discoveries in California, Colorado, Arizona, and Montana dramatically worsened relations between the U.S. government and Indians in those regions, so the prospect of gold in the Black Hills could very well do a similar thing on the Northern Plains.

  The Seventh Cavalry’s sixteen-piece brass band strikes up “The Girl I Left Behind” as Custer kisses his wife, Libbie, goodbye on the steps of their white frame home. Throughout the fort, officers and their wives do the same. The general had hoped to bring Libbie along, even going to the extreme of preparing a special wagon for her personal travel, but the danger of this journey is too great. That notion has been set aside, sending Libbie into a deep depression.

  As Custer mounts his horse, Dandy, the general is clad in buckskin, a suede garment made of deer hide, which will keep away the dense clouds of mosquitoes but is sure to make him sweat throughout the long summer days. Custer doffs his hat one last time before galloping to the front of the waiting cavalry column, showing off the shoulder-length blond mane that has led the Sioux to give him the nickname Pahuska—“Long Hair.”

  “I expect to visit a region of the country as yet unseen by human eyes, except those of the Indians,” he bragged just days ago, penning the final paragraph of what will soon become his bestselling book, My Life on the Plains. “Abounding in game of all varieties, rich in scientific interest, and of surpassing beauty in natural scenery.”

  But there is much more on the mind of the thirty-four-year-old general than science and nature. Custer now leads 995 soldiers and civilians, 60 Native American scouts, 110 canvas-covered wagons being pulled by 660 mules, 700 horses, and a small herd of cattle soon to serve as the nightly meal. Each step of their path will be charted by sextant-toting engineers, the soils tested by a group of scientists, and their exploits written about in great detail by reporters from New York, Chicago, and the local Bismarck Tribune. Among Custer’s fellow officers are his twenty-seven-year-old brother Tom, who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor twice during the Civil War, and Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Grant, the racist son of the president.1 Custer’s youngest brother, twenty-five years old, has been declared medically unfit for military life due to tuberculosis, but the general has arranged for him to join the expedition as a civilian contractor in charge of foraging. Two individuals whose specialty is finding gold round out the party. All these travelers are men, save a black woman named Sarah Campbell, who serves as Custer’s personal cook, and a hard-drinking, lice-ridden twenty-two-year-old woman nicknamed Calamity Jane, who will do the soldiers’ laundry and provide sexual services in exchange for whiskey and food.

  The general’s hope about what lies ahead is not bluster, for he is genuinely curious. At a time in history when headlines are rife with tales of Victorian explorers charting the unknowns of Africa and the Far East, Custer has chosen to name this armed treaty violation an “expedition,” expecting to soak up similar glory. Like the most remote corners of Africa, the Black Hills are mythic to settlers of the frontier, the subject of legends and tall tales. It is Custer’s mission to see whether or not these stories are true.

  The Seventh Cavalry’s first day on the trail is short, just fifteen miles. Wagons get stuck in the Little Heart River two hours into the journey. The day ends with Custer riding ahead to scout the next morning’s route. The men call him “hard ass” for his ability to ride hour after hour in the saddle. Dinner is served at 10:00 p.m., with reveille scheduled for 2:45 a.m. Custer will sleep those few hours on a buffalo-skin robe. The caravan will feed the horses, strike their tents, and breakfast promptly at 4:00 a.m. “Boots and Saddles,” the bugle call signaling that all troops mount their horses and take their place in line, sounds at 5:00 a.m. The soldiers under Custer’s command chafe at the early start but know better than to complain aloud. Not so the civilians. Very often the grumbling happens as Custer stands incognito within earshot. “His campaigning dress was so like that of an enlisted man, and his insignia of rank so unnoticeable, that the tongues ran on, indifferent to his presence,” Libbie Custer will write, basing her words on her husband’s lengthy letters. “The civilians accused him of having something on his conscience, and declared that, not being able to sleep himself, he woke everyone else to an unearthly reveille. At this he choked with laughter, and to his dismay they discovered who he was.”

  The distance from Fort Abraham Lincoln to the Black Hills is a little more than three hundred miles. Ideally, Custer will be able to prove that area’s great forests are large enough to provide lumber for plains families seeking to build their new homes from wood instead of sod. The general would also like to report back that the rumored vast meadows are perfect forage to graze cattle and are full of game.

  However, none of that will matter if Custer can’t find gold. Rumors about enormous wealth hidden in these secret lands have inflamed frontier settlers. America has been rocked by a massive economic downturn. Hard times and a growing number of white people populating the plains means that anger toward the Treaty of Fort Laramie is reaching a crescendo, as settlers seek Indian land in order to prosper.

  “What shall be done with these Indian dogs in our manger?” writes the Yankton Press and Dakotan. “They will not dig the gold, or let others do it.… They are too lazy and too much like mere animals to cultivate the fertile soil, mine the coal, develop the salt mines, bore the petroleum wells, or wash the gold. Having all these things in their hands, they prefer to live as paupers, thieves, and beggars; fighting, torturing, hunting, gorging, yelling, and dancing all night to the beating of old tin kettles.

  “Anyone who knows how utterly they depend on the government for subsistence will see that if they have to be supported at all, they might far better occupy small reservations and be within military reach, than to have the exclusive control of a tract of country as large as the whole State of Pennsylvania or New York, which they can neither improve or utilize,” the brutal editorial concludes.

  Despite opposition to the F
ort Laramie treaty, the U.S. Army has been steadfast in upholding it. Miners attempting to travel into the Black Hills are stopped and threatened with arrest. However, a new railway line known as the Northern Pacific may change that circumstance. It begins at Lake Superior and is supposed to extend all the way to the Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast. Track has been laid westward from the Missouri River to Bismarck in the Dakota Territory, and also a short distance eastward from Tacoma, Washington. But the vast land in between—a distance of almost one thousand miles—is Indian Territory. The new railway is considered so vital to America’s growth that Custer and the Seventh Cavalry were relocated to the Dakota Territory one year ago to provide a military escort for railway surveyors searching for the best route to lay track. But there can be no railroad unless there is peace with the tribes who hold the land.

  Adding to the confusion, the Northern Pacific went bust ten months ago, its financiers overextended and out of money. President Grant publicly backs the sanctity of the Fort Laramie treaty but also needs that railroad to succeed. Thus, he authorized Custer’s expedition into the Black Hills at a White House meeting not long after the bankruptcy.

  Grant orders General Philip Sheridan to move Custer quickly into Indian Territory in search of gold. But Custer is not to make that public.

  President Grant has many problems, among them a staggering economic crisis known as the Panic of 1873. As Americans rich and poor struggle to stay financially solvent, the onus falls upon Grant to find a solution—and quickly. And though the president has had more than his share of personal financial emergencies and hardly qualifies as a monetary genius, he believes the answer to the panic and the moribund Northern Pacific can be found in the Black Hills—that is, if Custer can find vast amounts of gold.