by H. W. Brands
Instead he authorized a campaign to bring Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the other holdouts—“non-treaty Indians”—to acknowledge the authority of the federal government. Their acknowledgment, Grant believed, would facilitate the negotiations with Red Cloud. Crazy Horse and the others were said to be in the valley of the Yellowstone; the president gave the order to pursue them there.
The planning for the campaign was complicated by the impeachment trial of War Secretary William Belknap, on charges of corruption. At a time when Custer should have been in Dakota preparing to march, he had to be in Washington testifying to Congress. Custer’s military record, his theatrical good looks, and his willingness to court reporters made him a favorite of the press and, through the press, of the American people. With scandal swirling about the War Department and the Grant administration generally, the dashing colonel commanded the nation’s attention.
The nation followed his progress from Washington, after his testimony, to Chicago, where he intended to catch another train, to Bismarck. But to his astonishment and that of the watching public, he was arrested at Chicago, on orders of the president. Grant hadn’t appreciated Custer’s revealing testimony before Congress, nor did he like the attention being lavished on the young officer. Custer, eager to rejoin his regiment, hadn’t received proper authorization before departing Washington, and Grant took the opportunity to remind him who commanded the army.
Grant’s critics, whose ranks were growing by the week amid the political scandals, employed the arrest to lambaste the administration yet again. Custer was lionized as the truth teller whom the administration sought to muzzle; the Democrats denounced the administration for playing politics with the security of the frontier and the lives of American soldiers.
The criticism forced Grant to release the colonel. Custer was allowed to continue west, although the War Department insisted that disciplinary action remained a possibility. When the Seventh Cavalry rode out of Fort Abraham Lincoln on the Missouri River below Bismarck in May 1876, Custer rode at their head, more famous than ever.
Custer reveled in his heightened celebrity. By one account, he told some Arikara and Crow scouts, enlisted for the campaign against their traditional Sioux enemies, that this would be his last western expedition. If they helped him defeat the Sioux, he would return to Washington and become the Great Father there. He added that he would remember his Indian friends. Whether Custer conjured a race for the presidency from thin air or was prompted by mischievous Democrats is unclear. But either way his mission against the Sioux acquired an importance a mere Indian fight would have lacked.31
“I WAS BORN in the Moon of the Popping Trees on the Little Powder River in the Winter When the Four Crows Were Killed,” Black Elk remembered. Black Elk was an Oglala Sioux, the Moon of the Popping Trees was December, and the four Crows were killed in 1863. “I was three years old when my father’s right leg was broken in the Battle of the Hundred Slain”—the ambush of Fetterman’s column. “I had never seen a Wasichu”—a white man—“then, and did not know what one looked like, but everyone was saying that the Wasichus were coming and that they were going to take our country and rub us all out and that we should all have to die fighting.” Black Elk was too young to fight, but he felt the presence of the invaders. “All this time I was not allowed to play very far away from our tepee, and my mother would say, ‘If you are not good the Wasichus will get you.’ ” He also felt the hardship the white pressure caused. “We were going away from where the soldiers were, and I do not know where we went, but it was west. It was a hungry winter, for the deep snow made it hard to find the elk, and also many of the people went snowblind. We wandered a long time, and some of the bands got lost from each other.”32
Black Elk’s father was a medicine man, as were several of his uncles. The boy suspected he shared their gift and on occasion heard voices from beyond the mortal realm. But not till the summer when he was nine and fell ill with fever did he experience a full-blown vision. He felt himself being carried up and out of his body, high among the clouds. The clouds became snowy hills. “I looked and saw a bay horse standing there, and he began to speak.” The bay horse told him to look to the west. “I looked, and there were twelve black horses yonder all abreast with necklaces of bison hoofs, and they were beautiful, but I was frightened because their manes were lightning and there was thunder in their nostrils.” The bay horse guided him to a council of the Grandfathers of the North, East, South, and West. “Younger brother,” said the Grandfather of the South, “with the powers of the four quarters you shall walk, a relative. Behold, the living center of a nation I shall give you, and with it many you shall save.” The Grandfather of the South extended his arm.
He was holding in his hand a bright red stick that was alive, and as I looked it sprouted at the top and sent forth branches, and on the branches many leaves came out and murmured, and in the leaves the birds began to sing. And then for just a little while I thought I saw beneath it in the shade the circled villages of people and every living thing with roots or legs or wings, and all were happy. “It shall stand in the center of the nation’s circle,” said the Grandfather, “a cane to walk with and a people’s heart, and by your powers you shall make it blossom.”
The horses began to speak to Black Elk, explaining what the Grandfathers had done. “They have given you the sacred stick and your nation’s hoop.… In the center of the hoop you shall set the stick and make it grow into a shielding tree, and bloom.”
The horses carried Black Elk among the clouds again. They came to a village filled with the sounds of mourning. “When I looked around I saw that in nearly every tepee the women and the children and the men lay dying.” Black Elk wanted to weep. But a voice told him to plant the stick and the hoop.
I took the bright red stick and at the center of the nation’s hoop I thrust it in the earth. As it touched the earth it leaped mightily in my hand and was a waga chun, the rustling tree, very tall and full of leafy branches and of all birds singing. And beneath it all the animals were mingling with the people like relatives and making happy cries. The women raised their tremolo of joy, and the men shouted all together: “Here we shall raise our children and be as little chickens under the mother sheo’s wing.”… Then, when the many little voices ceased, the great Voice said: “Behold the circle of the nation’s hoop, for it is holy, being endless, and thus all powers shall be one power in the people without end.”33
Black Elk’s vision of the nation’s hoop became the theme of his life. Others respected his vision, though they reserved judgment of its significance till he grew older and proved its power. In the meantime they were more impressed with Crazy Horse, Black Elk’s second cousin. Crazy Horse had a vision, too, one that convinced him that the real world existed behind the shadow world of everyday life. When Crazy Horse stepped into his real world, nothing in the shadow world could touch him. “It was this vision that gave him his great power,” Black Elk said, “for when he went into a fight, he had only to think of that world to be in it again, so that he could go through anything and not be hurt.” And in fact he never was hurt in battle.
Black Elk remembered Crazy Horse’s strange charisma. “He was a small man among the Lakotas and he was slender and had a thin face and his eyes looked through things and he always seemed to be thinking hard about something.” He would walk among the people of his village like a man in a trance. “In his own tepee he would joke, and when he was on the warpath with a small party he would joke to make his warriors feel good. But around the village he hardly ever noticed anybody, except little children. All the Lakotas like to dance and sing, but he never joined a dance, and they say nobody ever heard him sing.” Yet he obviously cared for his people. “He never wanted to have many things for himself, and did not have many ponies like a chief. They say that when game was scarce and the people were hungry, he would not eat at all.” His people loved and respected him. “They would do anything he wanted or go anywhere he said.”34
> DURING THE SPRING of 1876 Crazy Horse led his people to the Yellowstone country. They hunted and recovered their strength from the winter, and Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull gathered warriors for the fight against the Wasichus. Some of those who joined them were Cheyennes and Arapahos; others were Sioux who wintered on the reservation but now came north for what might be a last summer living the old, free life. Many were drawn by the reputation of Sitting Bull, who promised a Sun Dance for the month when the grass returned to the hillsides.
Perhaps Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull thought they could defeat the white soldiers. Unlike Red Cloud, who had been to the East and seen that the whites were a thousand times as many as the Sioux, neither Crazy Horse nor Sitting Bull had any clear idea what they were up against. Crazy Horse had his vision of the Wasichus as shadow soldiers, while Sitting Bull, after days of fasting, dancing, and self-mutilation (with the loss of considerable blood), reported a vision of his own, in which an army of white soldiers rode toward an Indian camp, but upside down, their horses’ hooves clawing the sky and the soldiers’ heads scraping the earth. This meant they would die, he said.35
The white soldiers had their own notions. During the first two weeks of June they hunted along the Yellowstone for Crazy Horse and the Indians. One column of troops, under General George Crook, made contact with a band of Sioux and Cheyennes on Rosebud Creek and fought a sharp battle there. But then they lost the trail. The officers argued among themselves as to how many warriors Crazy Horse had. Custer thought fifteen hundred; Crook said many fewer than that. In fact Crazy Horse had about three thousand. Custer meanwhile commanded about six hundred troops, while Crook had perhaps a thousand, as well as two or three hundred Crow and other Indian allies. But neither Custer nor Crook thought the numbers mattered much. The white soldiers were more powerfully armed than the enemy Indians, more stoutly mounted, and presumably more thoroughly disciplined. Custer in particular believed that if he could somehow corner Crazy Horse, he would certainly prevail.
In the last week of June, Custer’s Crow scouts spotted Crazy Horse’s camp on the west bank of the river the whites called the Little Big Horn and the Indians the Greasy Grass. The scouts warned Custer that the Sioux were far more numerous than he had guessed; Bloody Knife, the leader of the scouts, said Crazy Horse had more warriors than Custer’s men had bullets. Custer dismissed the warning as counsel expected of a people terrorized for generations by the Sioux. His only concern was that the Sioux might escape, and to prevent this he pushed forward with all speed. He ordered Major Marcus Reno to attack the Sioux camp from the south while he looped north to cut off the Indians’ escape. The trapped Indians would be forced to fight.36
BLACK ELK WAS thirteen now, and with several other boys he was tending horses along the Greasy Grass on the morning of June 25, 1876. His father had told him to be careful. “If anything happens,” he said, “you must bring the horses back as fast as you can.… Keep your eyes on the camp.” But nothing happened as the sun rose in the summer sky, and the boys grew hot and restless. They persuaded one of their number, a cousin of Black Elk, to mind the horses while they cooled off in the river. “I did not feel well,” Black Elk remembered afterward. “I felt queer. It seemed that something terrible was going to happen. But I went in with the boys anyway.” The river, running full with the snowmelt from the Bighorn Mountains, was bracingly cold, and Black Elk forgot his odd feeling. He and the others stayed in the water longer than they had planned; his cousin, impatient in their absence, brought the ponies down to the river’s edge.
“Just then we heard the crier shouting in the Hunkpapa camp, which was not very far from us, ‘The chargers are coming! They are charging! The chargers are coming!’ ” Black Elk remembered. The alarm spread to the other bands.
The crier of the Oglalas shouted the same words, and we could hear the cry going from camp to camp northward clear to the Santees and Yanktonais. Everybody was running now to catch the horses. We were lucky to have ours right there just at that time. My older brother had a sorrel, and he rode away fast toward the Hunkpapas. I had a buckskin. My father came running and said: “Your brother has gone to the Hunkpapas without his gun. Catch him and give it to him. Then come right back to me.” He had my six-shooter too, the one my aunt gave me. I took the guns, jumped on my pony and caught my brother. 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.37
As the women and children of the Hunkpapa camp scrambled to escape the bullets of the white soldiers, Gall, also called Pizi, an orphan whom Sitting Bull had adopted as a younger brother, rallied the Hunkpapa warriors for a counterattack. Eight years earlier Gall had spoken for the Hunkpapas to the Sherman peace commission. “We were born naked and have been taught to hunt and live on the game,” he said. “You tell us that we must learn to farm, live in one house, and take on your ways. Suppose the people living beyond the great sea should come and tell you that you must stop farming and kill your cattle, and take your houses and land. What would you do? Would you not fight them?” Gall’s words, and his actions since then, had won him the following of most of the Hunkpapas, who respected him behind only Sitting Bull.38
Reno’s attack killed several members of Gall’s immediate family. “It made my heart bad,” he explained later. “After that I killed all my enemies with the hatchet.” Gall’s example bolstered his comrades. “In the Hunkpapa camp a cry went up,” Black Elk remembered. “ ‘Take courage! Don’t be a woman! The helpless are out of breath!’ ” For several moments confusion covered the battlefield. “It was all dust and cries and thunder,” Black Elk said. “The women and children were running.… The warriors were coming on their ponies.”
Gall’s counterattack drove Reno’s column into the trees along the river, where the federal soldiers dismounted to fight afoot. “The valley went darker with dust and smoke,” Black Elk recalled.
And 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.
During a lull in the fighting, Black Elk saw his people stripping dead and wounded white soldiers of their arms and uniforms. “There was a soldier on the ground and he was still kicking. 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.”
Black Elk was old enough to mutilate an enemy but young enough to want his mother to be the first to know about it. He rode through the camp carrying the bloody prize till he found her on a hill overlooking the battlefield, where the women were singing encouragement to their husbands and sons. “My mother gave a big tremolo”—the song of celebration—“just for me when she saw my first scalp,” he said.39
By now the center of the battle had shifted. Custer’s column had appeared below the Indian camp, where the colonel expected to cut off the Indians he thought would be fleeing Reno’s attack. But he discovered to his shock that Gall had broken Reno’s attack and that Crazy Horse commanded twice the army he had guessed. The Sioux chief hurled his warriors against the federal cavalry, with himself in the lead. “
Hokahey!”—Take courage!—he cried. “It is a good day to fight! It is a good day to die!” Others echoed the cry. “They were yelling ‘Hokahey’ like a big wind roaring, and making the tremolo, and you could hear eagle bone whistles screaming,” Black Elk remembered.40
Custer found himself beset on all sides. He led his men to the highest point in the area, later called Custer Hill, where they dismounted and dug in. He might have thought his chances good, for though badly outnumbered he had better arms and the better position. And while Indians were known for their ambush and skirmishing abilities, they had shown little stomach for frontal assault. Custer knew that federal reinforcements were coming; if he and his men could hold out for several hours or overnight, they might escape.
Crazy Horse likewise knew there were other federals in the area. He also knew he would never have another such chance to strike a blow against the Wasichus. He probably couldn’t have restrained his warriors anyway; they were as eager as he to avenge past wrongs and forestall future injuries.
The warriors charged before Custer’s men were able to form a compact body. The Indian ponies slashed through the federal lines, such as they were. The bluecoats fell to bullets, arrows, lances, clubs, and hatchets. “The country was alive with Indians going in all directions, like swallows, yet the great body all the time moving down on Custer,” an Oglala warrior remembered. An Arapaho recalled Crazy Horse that day as “the bravest man I ever saw. He rode closest to the soldiers, yelling to his warriors. All the soldiers were shooting at him, but he was never hit.”41
The Indians knew Custer as “Long Hair,” for his flowing reddish-blond locks. But he had cut them recently, and so he was hard to pick out from the other white soldiers. “We did not know till the fight was over that he was the white chief,” one Indian warrior explained. All the bluecoats fought stubbornly. “They kept in order and fought like brave warriors as long as they had a man left,” Crow King, one of the Sioux leaders, said.42