Along the river, women and children swam, while some youths and boys sought quieter spots to fish, sending younger brothers to scour the banks for grasshoppers to use as bait. In the shade of the cottonwoods, a few young men were still sleeping off the activities of last night, and groups of young wives had gathered to gossip and exchange news.
June, the Moon of Making Fat, was a prime month for gathering activities, and gangs of women with dutiful daughters in tow had scattered to the western bench-lands to dig prairie turnips. As usual, a few older men, like Crazy Horse’s brother-in-law the Miniconjou headman Red Horse, accompanied them. East of the river, a few early risers had gone to hunt and locate stray horses. A party of six Red Cloud Agency Oglalas (one spiriting away an eloping sweetheart) had left the village during the nighttime dancing, crossing the divide toward Rosebud Creek soon after sunrise. Later in the morning, four or five lodges of agency Bad Faces also started home.2
Crazy Horse joined the spectators on the Oglala campground, where young men were playing the hoop and pole game. At noon, men and youths, singly or in gangs of friends and cousins, strolled far out on the western flats to drive the horse herds to water, then back to the village, raising a dust visible for miles. Crazy Horse’s cousin twelve-year-old Black Elk had herded several families’ stock to the river, and after eating, greased his body to join friends for a swim before bringing the ponies back to camp. It was now about 2:50 P.M.3
Crazy Horse remained alert to action outside the Oglala hoop. A commotion became palpable near the river. Opposite the Miniconjou circle, a Sans Arc rapidly circled his pony, crying a warning. Almost simultaneously, the Bad Face party raced into the upstream end of the village, shouting that soldiers were rapidly descending Sun Dance Creek, following the village’s trail.4
Dawdling toward his swim, Black Elk heard the commotion. “At the Hunkpapas I heard the crier saying: ‘They are charging, the chargers are coming.’” Children still naked from the river raced over the flats toward camp. On the benches, the turnip-digging gangs sighted dust upstream and the commotion in the village. Strings of women ran frantically for their families.5
In the Oglala circle, all was confusion as the first shots rang out beyond the Hunkpapa lodges. Elders spilled from the council tipi. Mothers screamed for children as naked youngsters raced in from the river. Crazy Horse shouted for the people to pack and move north, away from the gunfire. He called to youths to hurry in his ponies, then ran to grab weapons and bridle. The herald Iron Hawk gradually calmed the panic as he called warriors to ready their horses and prepare to defend the camp. As the first wave of Oglala warriors rode upstream to meet the attack, Iron Hawk could see a line of soldiers drawing up in skirmish formation beyond the Hunkpapa camp. By the soldiers’ chronometers, it was 3:18. They began to shoot, and Iron Hawk could see their company guidons flaring above the smoke. The herald hurried toward the action, joining youths and warriors, many without horses, who gathered near the riverbank between the Hunkpapa circle and the soldiers’ right flank.6
Red Feather, still sleeping off the victory celebrations, grumpily surfaced just as shots began to ring out. Hurrying outside, he too could see the line of dismounted soldiers about a mile upstream, “shooting at Sitting Bull’s camp. The people in Sitting Bull’s camp ran to the Oglala camp. The Oglalas ran, too.”7
On the campground, all was still confusion. From his tipi Crazy Horse emerged holding his bridle and a Winchester carbine. “Our ponies aren’t in yet,” he observed to his brother-in-law. Red Feather snapped back, “Take any horse.” Red Feather mounted and galloped toward a hill on the west side of the valley commanding the soldiers’ left flank. “The hill was covered with men, warriors congregating from the Oglala and Uncpapa camps.” Behind him, Red Feather recalled, “the other camps were now in commotion.” Ahead of him, the Battle of the Little Bighorn had opened.8
At first light on Sunday, June 25, Custer’s scouts had viewed the Little Bighorn valley from a vantage high on the divide, making out the smoke and pony herds that marked the Lakota and Cheyenne village as well as small parties of Indians who were plainly aware of Custer’s presence. Terry and Gibbon planned to be in place along the Little Bighorn by the 26th, sketching a timetable for coordinated action, but the prospect of losing the element of surprise convinced Custer of the imperative of immediate attack. He hurried his force over the divide, and as the men briefly nooned, divided his command by battalions. Mindful of Terry’s order to prevent the Indians scattering south, Custer ordered Captain Frederick W. Benteen to take three companies and probe the upstream approaches to the Little Bighorn. After leaving a single company to escort his packtrain, Custer organized a mobile strike force. He assigned a further three companies to Major Marcus A. Reno and took personal command of the remaining five: C, E, F, I, and L.9
Just after noon, Custer’s and Reno’s battalions began descending Sun Dance Creek on its twelve-mile course to the Little Bighorn. Fearful only that the Indians would escape, Custer ordered Reno to hurry forward and charge the village, promising the support of his own battalion and “the whole outfit.”10
Reno crossed the Little Bighorn and paused to water the horses and regroup. Through the mounting dust cloud above the village two miles north, warriors could be seen riding out—not in Custer’s dreaded “scatteration,” but to defend their families. Just after 3:00, Reno advanced down the west side of the valley in an accelerating charge. Arikara scouts swung left to drive off the horse herds; others raced for the timber just north of the Hunkpapa camp. Across the river, Custer received Reno’s advice at the same time as his own command sighted sixty or seventy-five Indians on the eastern bluffs. To prevent village dispersal, Custer ordered his battalion north along the bluffs. The change in tactics meant that Reno could expect no support from the rear, and committed Custer to a strategy of enveloping the village.11
As Reno’s charge neared the village, warriors continued to stream out across his front. Ordering a halt about six hundred yards short of the Hunkpapa circle, Reno dismounted to form a skirmish line across the valley, its right flank anchored in the timber but its left dangerously exposed in the open valley. Volleys smashed into tipis along the southern arc of the Hunkpapa circle. The Arikara scouts in the timber cut off several small groups of women and children, killing ten noncombatants, including two of Hunkpapa war chief Gall’s wives and three of his young children.12
These killings galvanized a warrior force already confident of its superiority. First, they forced Reno onto the defensive. Dauntless charges turned Reno’s left flank. The troopers moved into the bottomland timber, sketching out a rough defensive perimeter that reduced the next few minutes’ action to a stalemate of sniping. He Dog, slow to catch his pony, had joined Red Feather and the warriors massing on the hillside west of the valley. The Lakotas here were impatient, “getting ready for word to charge in a body on soldiers at timber.” One warrior shouted, “Give way; let the soldiers out. We can’t get at them in there.” Down in the bottoms, warriors and youths infiltrating the timber were also conscious of an impasse. Heralds harangued to keep up morale. By 3:45 a mood of tense expectation had settled over the warriors, anxious for a defining moment that would break the deadlock.13
Twenty-five minutes earlier, as Red Feather had galloped out to meet Reno, he had left Crazy Horse waiting for his horses to be driven in. As volley firing and whoops signaled the progress of the fight a mile upstream, Crazy Horse continued to prepare himself methodically for battle. A knot of the war chief’s bodyguard and his closest comrades, including the brothers Kicking Bear and Flying Hawk, awaited his preparations. Crazy Horse, naked but for moccasins and a short breechclout, painted his face and body solid yellow, over which he dabbed dots of white. He tied the stone wotawe charm under his left arm and fastened a single hawk feather in his loosened hair. Hanging the eagle wing-bone whistle around his neck, he selected his weapons, a Winchester carbine and a stone-headed war club that he pushed under the cartridge belt buckled
at his waist. He smoked and talked at length with the holy man Long Turd, invoking the aid of their patron Inyan, the Rock.
Then he gathered up some earth from pocket gopher burrows, sprinkling it over himself and a few key followers, rubbing it into his hair and body. With his horses driven up, he selected a white-faced pinto pony, streaking its flanks with the protective earth and tracing light blue wavy lines down its legs. He looped the bridle over the pinto’s ears and jaw, then sprang onto its bare back. These lengthy preparations had taken twenty minutes or more, but despite restive followers, Crazy Horse refused to be rushed, acting “very coolly” all the while.14
Extending his arms to the sun, Crazy Horse called on Wakan Tanka to help him. Then, signaling the critical significance of the day’s fighting, he addressed his followers. Riding along the line, his right hand raised in admonition, the left cradling the Winchester against his hip, Crazy Horse talked “calmly to them[,]. . . telling them to restrain their ardor till the right time when he should give the word; that he wanted Reno’s men to get their guns hot so they would not work so well.” Red Hawk remembered Crazy Horse closing his speech with the words “Here are some of the soldiers after us again. Do your best, and let us kill them all off today, that they may not trouble us anymore. All ready! Charge! [Hokahe!]” At about 3:45, Crazy Horse turned his pony toward the battle. Followed by Kicking Bear, he led a stream of Oglala warriors at a run.15
As Crazy Horse’s followers raced upstream, knots of women and children still fled across the valley toward the western benchlands. Other women, clustering on the hillsides, sounded the tremolo of praise, a note picked up by the shrill of war whistles as Crazy Horse approached the battlefield. Down in the timber, Black Elk heard, over the clamor, the “thunder of the ponies charging,” and voices shouting, “Crazy Horse is coming!” On the hillside, the cry for a charge was heard, “Hokahe!” and hundreds more warriors streamed toward the timber.16
Racing ahead, the front of Crazy Horse’s charge sliced into the timber. Three Oglala warriors, Kicking Bear, Hard to Hit, and Bad Heart Bull, almost collided with Reno’s right flank. The startled troopers had just mounted for a retreat. Hauling in their ponies, the three Oglalas levered a rapid fire from their repeaters into Reno’s front. According to one participant, Kicking Bear’s shot felled the Arikara scout Bloody Knife, spraying his brains into Major Reno’s face. The panicked commander cried out an order to dismount and then immediately to remount. Simultaneously, many dismounted warriors, infiltrating from the riverbank, burst through the timber and opened a withering crossfire. The troopers charged from the timber. By luck or design, Crazy Horse had struck Reno at the moment of critical imbalance, applying the kicamnayan tactic of his Thunder vision with devastating effect.17
The Battle of the Little Bighorn, June 25, 1876
The sudden emergence of Reno’s battalion from the timber actually threw some of Crazy Horse’s men into confusion. Private Roman Rutten, of Company M, was cool enough to observe the recoil of a line of up to two hundred whooping warriors, slicing in from the right—. “being about as badly excited as the soldiers and apparently undecided as to what movement the soldiers were about to execute.” It was the first test of Crazy Horse’s resolve. Acting quickly to galvanize the warriors, he shouted, “Come on! Die with me! It’s a good day to die! Cowards to the rear!” Hefting his war club, he urged the pinto along Reno’s line. If a story told Lieutenant Bourke is to be credited, Crazy Horse made the most of a movielike melodramatic moment and hurled himself at a trooper struggling with an unmanageable horse. In the shock of collision, Crazy Horse grappled the luckless foe from his saddle, brained him, and leapt astride the cavalry mount to the exultant cries of his followers. Inspired by Crazy Horse’s example, the warriors streamed along Reno’s right flank as the soldiers careered upstream.18
Within moments, whatever tactical cohesion Reno’s battalion had retained was lost: “It was like chasing buffalo,” more than one participant would remember. Warriors laced through the rout, selecting individual troopers as targets. Soldiers were shot out of their saddles, their horses gathered up by warriors pausing in the pursuit. One trooper riding a wounded horse made a target for Crazy Horse, who squeezed off a shot from his Winchester that hit the soldier squarely between the shoulder blades, pitching him forward out of the saddle.19
The war chief’s cousin Eagle Elk witnessed another assault that involved Crazy Horse during the race upstream. “There were two Indians, one on a black and the other on a white horse, chasing the soldiers. Suddenly, the man on the white horse got among the soldiers. He had a sword and used it to kill one soldier. The other Indian fell off his horse,” which fled toward the village. Crazy Horse caught the black pony as he galloped on and brought it to the unhorsed warrior. As Eagle Elk paused in the race, Crazy Horse continued in pursuit.20
Without pausing to cover the crossing, soldiers plunged their horses down the bank and into the river. “Crazy Horse was ahead of all, and he killed a lot of them with his war-club,” recalled Flying Hawk; “he pulled them off their horses when they tried to get across the river where the bank was steep. Kicking Bear was right beside him and he killed many too in the water.” Many warriors paused to snipe into the stream. “The Indians could kill the soldiers in the water as they tried to swim [across],” recalled Eagle Elk.21
Men and horses floundered over the river, scrambling up the high miry bank onto the east side of the Little Bighorn. The soldiers continued their flight up the steep hillside to the blufftop. The front of Reno’s rout reached the top at 4:10, the battered rear dragging and scrambling up the slope for several minutes under heavy fire. Leaving forty dead troopers on the field, Reno’s fight was a costly prelude to the main action at the Little Bighorn.22
The Indians too had sustained casualties. In addition to the ten women and children killed by Reno’s scouts, nine Lakota and two Cheyenne men had been killed in the first hour of the battle. Although most warriors stayed across the river to gather horses and loot clothing, arms, and ammunition, a sizeable force followed the rout over the Little Bighorn. Crazy Horse, followed by a group of Oglalas, scrambled his pony up the hillside just downstream of the soldiers. As the warriors topped the bluff, they saw the soldiers forming skirmish lines. A few long-distance shots were exchanged. Beyond Reno’s new position, more soldiers moved downstream: Captain Benteen’s battalion, having closed its futile scout for south-fleeing Indians, was approaching to reinforce Reno. Crazy Horse began to ride along the hilltop, scanning the line of bluffs downstream to assess the overall situation. His keen eyes suddenly noticed a larger body of troops climbing a ridge, two miles northward, that commanded the lower end of the village.23
Short Bull rode up to the war chief, bantering, “‘Too late! You’ve missed the fight!’”
“‘Sorry to miss this fight!’ [Crazy Horse] laughed. ‘But there’s a good fight coming over the hill.’” Pointing north, Crazy Horse said, “‘That’s where the big fight is going to be. We’ll not miss that one.’
“He was not a bit excited; he made a joke of it.”24
After the days of uncertainty, Crazy Horse had regained his composure in the heat of battle. Faced with the political task of maintaining Northern Nation unity, he had swung between anxious action and gloomy withdrawal: in combat, about to face his greatest test, he laughed. Wheeling his pony, Crazy Horse led his followers back across the river. They set their horses at a steady run for home, passing warriors and youths still herding away cavalry mounts or scalping and looting dead soldiers. As they neared the upstream camps, ragged fire became audible from the vicinity of the village ford; minutes later, a double volley sounded from the eastern ridge where Crazy Horse had first noticed the new soldier threat. From the Cheyenne and Sans Arc camps, a stream of women and children fled down the west side of the valley.25
Passing the Hunkpapa circle, Crazy Horse would have heard Sitting Bull haranguing his people. During the Reno fight, women had started dismantling tip
is in the Hunkpapa and Miniconjou circles. Returning from Reno’s rout, Sitting Bull rode his pony among the fearful families, calling for calm, before turning his pony west. With a coterie of trusted warriors, he hoped to establish the women and children in a strong place on the benchlands west of the Cheyenne camp.26
Sitting Bull was acting as a peace chief whose prime responsibility was the protection of the helpless. Crazy Horse, the Northern Nation’s first war chief, hurried into the almost deserted Oglala circle about 4:30 to prepare for more fighting. On the open campground, the holy man Long Turd had built a fire of buffalo chips. As Crazy Horse’s followers paused to gather fresh ponies, he briefly conferred again with Long Turd, praying and making offerings over the fire. At his tipi, he donned a white buckskin shirt and leggings before riding toward the gunfire at the village ford, followed by Flying Hawk and a cluster of comrades.27
One and a half hours before, Custer had led his five companies down the eastern bluffs at a fast trot. Pausing on the hilltop where Reno would later dig in, he viewed the valley and Reno’s charge toward the village. A first messenger was hurried down the back trail to hurry the ammunition packtrain across country to join Custer. Should Captain Benteen’s battalion also be met, “tell him to come quick— a big Indian camp.”28
The column trotted on for a few minutes before pausing in the shallow defile of Cedar Coulee. Scouts scrambled to view Reno’s action from the bluffs, scanning the back trail for sign of the packtrain and Benteen. The protracted pause in Cedar Coulee indicates tactical rethinking. Another courier was dispatched with an urgent written order for Benteen to “Come on. Big village. Be quick. Bring pacs. P.S. Bring pacs.”29
Expecting support at any moment, Custer continued to idle in Cedar Coulee, but each minute endangered Reno’s command. From the hilltops east of the valley, a score or two of Cheyenne warriors opened a long-range skirmishing action—no serious challenge, but a threat to any surprise attack from downstream. At last, Custer ordered the battalion to turn left into Medicine Tail Coulee, a long shallow draw draining northwest into the Little Bighorn at the village ford 1.25 miles away. Here a strong charge could secure the downstream end of the village and relieve the pressure on Reno. At the very least, capturing the village and the women and children would neutralize the Indian attackers, Custer’s successful strategy at the Battle of the Washita. But barely had he begun his advance when his scouts reported the worst: Reno’s precipitate flight from the timber. For Custer and his company commanders, several minutes of intense debate followed. Their options were clear: to press on with the attack without support, before warriors could reoccupy the village, or to withdraw and consolidate the regiment upstream.30
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