By contrast, a Cheyenne maiden riding to assist her brother won immortal honor when his horse was also brought down. Ignoring a closing line of enemy scouts, Buffalo Calf Road Woman galloped through the gap, hauled her brother across her pony’s withers, then whipped uphill amid a hail of lead from Crook’s right. From the boulders and crevices above the east slope of the gap, dismounted warriors poured heavy fire into this dangerous unit, pinning down the bluecoat line until Captain Anson Mills’s determined cavalry countercharge swept uphill and secured the rocks. Crazy Horse and his comrades ordered disengagement, the Indian line unraveling to re-form atop a bluff one mile west. Many Cheyennes infiltrated a long ridge extending from the bluffs into the valley bottom, commanding Crook’s left.
Sensing the advantage, Crook ordered Mills to reprise his charge and take the peak. Crazy Horse, implementing his own fallback strategy—. “to lead detachments in pursuit of his people, and turning quickly cut them to pieces in detail,” according to campaign diarist John G. Bourke—urged retreat, and the Indian resistance again melted away. As Crazy Horse’s warriors regrouped on a conical hill three quarters of a mile northwest, staccato mirror flashes signaled the presence of a strategic leader, one that newsman observer John F. Finerty surmised was Crazy Horse. Crazy Horse’s men opened a desultory fire on Mills’s six companies. They galloped across the ridge, slapping their buttocks in derisive provocation. Mills dismounted his men and took up skirmish lines around the hill crest, where Crook hurried to establish his headquarters, joined by his infantry and civilian auxiliaries.26
Simultaneously with Mills’s action, Lieutenant Colonel William B. Royall launched a second cavalry charge, countering the growing presence along the high ridge on Crook’s left. In a series of stirring charges, Royall’s five companies pushed the warriors back, then regrouped along the contested ridge. “In the Rosebud fight the soldiers first got the Sioux and Cheyennes on the run,” Short Bull said of the first half of the engagement.27 After almost two hours of action, the Battle of the Rosebud seemed over.
“This was a pitiful long stretched-out battle,” remembered one Hunkpapa youth. With fatigue setting in, the war chiefs rallied their followers. From the conical peak, Sitting Bull harangued, “Steady men! Remember how to hold a gun! Brace up, now! Brace up!” Crazy Horse rode among the warriors, holding aloft his Winchester and calling for courage: “Hold on, my friends! Be strong! Remember the helpless! This is a good day to die!.” He saw that Royall’s charge had dangerously extended Crook’s line across a mile of broken terrain. The strategy he had formulated over ten years, of isolating troop units and breaking them piecemeal, was beginning to crystallize. Sensing the key to the battle, Crazy Horse called for renewed pressure on Royall. Oglala subordinates—Bad Heart Bull, Black Deer, Kicking Bear—echoed the war chief’s resolve. Akicita Good Weasel, shadowing his war chief over the field, added coercive persuasion to Crazy Horse’s words. “When these five commenced to rally their men,” recalled Short Bull, “that was as far as the soldiers got.”28
Like Crazy Horse, Crook perceived a defining moment. He hurried couriers to recall Royall. With Indians developing around his left front, the general wished to consolidate his command and advance obliquely right, where scout intelligence— and fierce resistance—indicated that the enemy village was located. Moreover, the wide coulee separating Royall from the headquarters position was a potential avenue for attack. Repeated couriers ordered Royall to close the gap, but mounting pressure from the heights slowed disengagement. Crook still viewed the Indian maneuvers as more irritant than threat. He detailed Mills to push speedily down Rosebud Creek with eight companies and seize the (nonexistent) village. The Indian allies would flank his movement, and the whole command would follow as soon as Royall disengaged.
On the bluffs, Crazy Horse observed Mills’s departure with grim satisfaction. While Crook’s command regrouped to fill the line, he and his war leaders ordered a charge to stampede the horses picketed in the valley, with sharpshooters pinning down the troops. Warriors started the herd, but fire from the southern heights forced them to abandon it. Once more, the Crows and Shoshones responded magnificently, pushing back the enemy in a flanking charge that, if supported, could have secured the field. Instead, as the auxiliaries topped the western bluff, their pursuit came to a halt—and a precipitate reverse downhill.
While Crook continued to consolidate his hold on the center of the field, pressure mounted on Royall, still isolated across the coulee. As many as five hundred warriors were swarming over the ridge, encircling the blue skirmish lines. Every fourth trooper fell out as a horse holder while his comrades formed a segmented skirmish line stretched along the ridge. Each time Royall attempted a withdrawal, warriors poured charge after charge against his position. Zigzag lines of riders rippled across the field, striking obliquely at an unprotected flank, dissolving into the rolling terrain, levering their Winchester and Henry repeaters from the saddle. The desperate troopers threw back a blistering fire, but Crazy Horse would not give ground. In some of the hardest fighting army veterans had seen since the Civil War, Crazy Horse pressed Royall downhill, away from Crook’s support. From the headquarters hill, Crook detailed two infantry companies to support Royall. Throughout the battle, Crazy Horse’s men had given the infantry a wide berth, testimony to the foot soldiers’ deadly accuracy. As the “walk-a-heaps” deployed, the warriors redoubled their assault on Royall’s line.
Warriors tore through the position of Captain Peter D. Vroom, leaping from their ponies to fight hand to hand, killing five troopers outright. To prevent the infantry deployment from uniting Crook’s divided command, Crazy Horse and the other war leaders atop the bluffs poured in a broad charge that pressed everywhere along Crook’s lines. Part swept down the coulee at Royall. Another raced for Crook’s headquarters position.
Chanting in unison, warriors led by Crazy Horse swept around the north side of Crook’s ridgetop defenses. Guide Bat Pourier vividly remembered the war chief’s presence and his miraculous survival of a hail of bullets—. “they couldn’t even hit his horse.”29 With the Cheyennes taking the riverward side of the ridge, the charge swept on, tangling in hand-to-hand combat with the desperate defenders, pressing to envelop the center. Only the timely deployment of Crook’s reserve companies, exposing the Lakota assault to a withering crossfire, dissipated the charge. Many warriors veered downhill toward Royall. Taunting Crook, one party raced down the coulee, crossed his morning bivouac, and galloped around the Rosebud bend to reappear along the northern bluffs. Vividly assured of imminent encirclement, Crook sent a courier to recall Mills and consolidate the command.
The beleaguered Royall ordered his men to mount. Taking advantage of the moment of critical imbalance—the kicamnayan tactic of the Thunder Beings— Crazy Horse unleashed a final charge from the northwest. In a riot of dust, panicked horseflesh, gunfire, whoops, and curses, the lines collided. Some bluecoats were unhorsed by lance thrusts and swinging knife clubs. Panic gripped the soldiers. One trooper surrendered his pistol, only to be clubbed down. Another, one foot in his stirrup, was clubbed to the ground and his revolver wrested away by another warrior. As he crawled, stunned, the first rider shot him dead. Cavalry mounts spun away as their riders were forced into desperate close-quarters struggle. Warriors raced in to kill and coup. Troopers ran in panic, dropping carbines in their flight. The prospect of utter rout loomed. Only when the infantry relief opened a bull-throated volley from their Long Tom rifles did Royall manage to extricate his crippled battalion. With many troopers doubled up, he managed the sudden dash to Crook.
Crazy Horse’s men melted back onto the bluffs, persistently hemming the general’s north front. After the rush of action, a stalemate of sniping ensued. Then, about 2:30, dust across the tableland signaled the return of Mills at the Indians’ rear, cutting the angle of the creek. For the warriors it was enough. “It was a [hot] day like this,” recalled young Iron Hawk, “and they announced they should quit and go back and t
ake care of their women.”30 Knowing that Crook had been fought to a standstill, Crazy Horse had no wish for further casualties. At least eight warriors were dead, and many more seriously wounded. He detailed scouts to shadow Crook and led a final triumphant charge down the coulee. As it melted back into the hills, the Battle of the Rosebud was over.
A stunned command was left to regroup. At least nine troopers lay dead. Twenty-three were wounded, most from Royall’s mauled skirmish line, whose dire predicament would foreshadow the fate of another command barely one week later. One Indian scout was killed and seven of his comrades wounded. Crook withdrew to his Goose Creek base camp. His Indian auxiliaries decamped for home, anxious to block Lakota reprisals. Crook claimed a victory for holding the field in a battle of the Indians’ own choosing, but for six weeks, his command was demoralized by the strength, verve, and conviction of the Indian force. Crook’s role in Sheridan’s pincer campaign had been neutralized.
Crazy Horse had fought with accustomed dash—na hel ake Tasunke Witko lila wohitika, summed up Black Twin’s son Thunder Tail: “and there again Crazy Horse was very brave.”31 The new armament, particularly Winchesters and Henrys, had been critical to warrior confidence. If proportionate to their deployment in the Custer battle, the guns were probably in the hands of fewer than one hundred warriors, but the men used them with stunning effect. Unlike the flintlocks of old, the new sixteen-shot shock weapons transformed set-piece charges into deadly blows. Instead of loosely circling enemy positions, warriors could strike the soldiers headon or smash into the flanks of company lines, unraveling whole units.
Once army units were isolated, the command structure that was its chief asset broke down. Unlike Indian warriors, who would fight desperately but coolly to the end, or else independently disengage to fight again, troops stripped of command cohesion panicked. This, Crazy Horse knew, was what he must build on. The battle had been a laboratory for the new tactics. Unlike the campaigning along the Bozeman Trail, the Great Sioux War saw huge armies on the offensive. Lakotas were faced not with besieged forts, tiny patrols, or trapped detachments, but with whole regiments marching openly through their hunting grounds. As the first phase of the Rosebud demonstrated, the old decoy tactic, relying on massed warriors in fixed positions, was unworkable in this mobile warfare. Instead, Crazy Horse and his comrades had perfected—literally on the hoof—a more elastic tactic, retreating to draw out units, stretching troop lines until critical pressure could snap their strained connections. The battle had not gone all their way. Crook’s men fought with solid professionalism, and his Indian auxiliaries with a resolve that saved the day at least once for the embattled general. Yet, despite being significantly outnumbered, the Lakotas and Cheyennes had bested the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition. It was a victory of which High Backbone would have been proud.
Three days after the battle, the last of Crazy Horse’s scouts returned from Goose Creek to assure him that Crook did not intend to test again the courage of the Northern Nation. Still, Crazy Horse was reluctant to be drawn into the victory celebrations. He remained convinced that this was not the victory promised in Sitting Bull’s visions—the victory over the dust storm from the east, the soldiers falling upside down into the village. Until that challenge was overcome, he could not rest.
In the week following the Battle of the Rosebud, camps rode into the village daily, leaving the trail from the Rosebud scratched and overlain with hoofprints and travois tracks, until the village comprised about one thousand lodges.32 About June 20 a party arrived from Spotted Tail Agency. They had seen Terry’s Dakota column marching west along Heart River three weeks earlier. For two days, Hollow Horn Bear had followed the troops as they negotiated the Badlands. Combined with Hunkpapa reports of a new steamboat landing on the Yellowstone, stacked with supplies and forage, the news led Crazy Horse and the chiefs to conclude that while Gibbon’s Montana column pegged the Yellowstone, the Dakota column would be outfitted to push against the Northern Nation from the east. At last the dusty whirl of prophecy was hardening into fact.33
With buffalo dispersing south, decisions had to be made about meat. Briefly, the councils favored a move toward the mountains, defying Crook at Goose Creek. Then scouts sighted concentrations of pronghorn antelope northwest, grazing the flats across the Bighorn, and the councils decided to move down the Little Bighorn two short days’ travel. The move was risky, nearer any army movements based from the Yellowstone. In the atmosphere of uncertainty, holy men in both the Sans Arc and Cheyenne circles announced predictions of imminent attack, but early on June 24, the village decamped.
After crossing the Little Bighorn to the west bank, the great procession of six thousand people moved eight miles down the bottomland. Warriors flanked the clustered line of striding elders, packed travois, and grandmothers striking recalcitrant pack dogs to their duty. Mothers marshaled their families; groups of maidens astride pacing ponies struck attitudes for the brash youths shadowing warrior idols or riding in noisy gangs of cousins. As they approached the campground agreed on by the Deciders, heralds pointed out the spaces for each circle. Cheyennes pressed ahead to anchor their camp, 113 lodges, on the riverbank at a ford opposite the mouths of two coulees. Next rose the Sans Arc circle, 110 lodges, and behind them the 150 tipis of Miniconjous. Holding the rear of the village, one mile upstream of the Cheyennes, rose the largest circle, the Hunkpapa camp, at 260 lodges. Filling in the gaps, the tipis of less well-represented Lakota divisions stood irregularly next to the larger circles.
Away from the cottonwood-lined bottomland, angled one-half mile northwest of the Hunkpapa circle, the Oglala hoop rose. Augmented by Brule visitors, it counted about 240 tipis. This year’s ranking Decider, Big Road, had selected the site, and the herald Iron Hawk announced band locations within the circle. By noon, the village was returning to everyday activities.34
Late in the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, three scouts rode in, their ponies jaded after a fifty-mile ride. Two days earlier, explained Owns Bobtail Horse in the council tipi, his party had seen a strong party of troops marching up the Rosebud, which the scouts shadowed until 6:30 that morning, when they left the soldier force at the Sun Dance site. The evidence was clear: here was the dust storm of soldiers promised them. The village must be ready, for the soldiers could follow its tracks and be in place for attack by the morning of June 26. If marched through the night, Crazy Horse probably reflected, they could arrive by noon the next day.35
According to one oral tradition, he seemed nervous and preoccupied as he left the council tipi. With dusk settling, he rode quickly from circle to circle, briefly visiting at the tipis of key leaders to urge total vigilance. But many seemed unconcerned. Assembling in the early evening in the Cheyenne circle, the intertribal elders’ council optimistically declared that the new soldiers might wish to talk, not fight. A war chief in an uncharitable mood might well have reflected that, between warrior complacency and the senility of elders, his work was cut out for him. The elders agreed to post the Kit Fox Society as night sentries, but Crazy Horse was still frustrated when he called on his Hunkpapa counterpart. Privately, Sitting Bull advised Crazy Horse that after darkness, he intended to climb the hills to commune with the wakan powers.
As Crazy Horse hosted a feast for Elk Head and other leaders, dry lightning played over the western benchlands, and thunder rolled above the village. Pitifully sounding through the rumble, a human voice cried and sang from the ridges across the river—the voice of Sitting Bull, imploring that Wakan Tanka aid his people once more.36
The column located by Crazy Horse’s scouts had left Terry and Gibbon’s base at the junction of Rosebud Creek with the Yellowstone at noon on June 22. Comprising 597 officers and men of the Seventh Cavalry, it was commanded by Crazy Horse’s old opponent, George Armstrong Custer. Sacrificing firepower for mobility, Custer declined to take along the Gatling guns hauled from Fort Abraham Lincoln. Accompanied by fifty civilian and Indian scouts, the regiment was under orders to pr
obe west along the Rosebud, into the upper valley of the Little Bighorn. There, the latest intelligence suggested, the “hostiles” were currently located. As Custer advanced, the Terry and Gibbon commands would ascend the Yellowstone and lower Bighorn rivers, expecting to crush the Indian alliance between them. Although a coordinated campaign was projected, Custer’s orders left him sufficient latitude to strike alone should the situation dictate.
Just as Crazy Horse had probably feared, Custer pressed a hard day’s march, halting where the village trail swung west out of the Rosebud valley, then impatiently rousing his command at midnight. At 12:30 A.M., June 25, 1876, the grumbling, cursing men were under way again, following a screen of Crow and Arikara scouts over the difficult terrain of the Wolf Mountains. The scouts were filled with misgivings. In one of the sweat lodges at the Sun Dance site, the Arikaras had inspected a mound of sand imprinted with marks depicting two rows of hoofprints, between them scratches that signified soldiers with their heads upside down, falling toward the Lakota camp.
17
A GOOD DAY TO DIE
Sunday, June 25, 1876, found a people at play along the Little Bighorn River. Victory dances had continued through the night, many young people returning to their beds only as dawn paled the sky. In the tipi next to Crazy Horse’s, the night had been punctuated by occasional cries and the bustle of female relatives: Red Feather’s wife was going into labor with their first child.1
Although the Kit Fox warriors continued to ride the hills, even key akicita such as Low Dog continued to be openly skeptical of an attack. Anticipating another short remove in the afternoon, some of the more enterprising women began the work of packing and dismantling tipis, but most people scattered to other activities.
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