CRAZY HORSE

by Kingsley M Bray

  The events of the next minutes decided the fate of Custer’s battalion. Over a century of speculation has failed to reconstruct Custer’s strategy categorically, but his officers likely agreed to a compromise that would characterize the next hour’s action: an increasingly awkward juggling of offensive and defensive priorities. The battalion was divided into two wings. Two troops, the gray-horse Company E, ubiquitous in Indian accounts of the battle, and Company F, led by Captain George W. Yates, would trot down the coulee and secure approaches to the ford. Custer and the other three companies, under immediate command of Captain Myles W. Keogh, would climb onto the next ridge downstream and view the unfolding tactical situation as reserves. Should Benteen’s support materialize, or conditions otherwise permit, the option to charge via the ford could be exercised. The two wings separated, and Yates began his descent to the ford.31

  As he trotted down the coulee, Yates learned that the village was not as undefended as it had appeared. A light Indian fire opened from behind the riverbank. Yates returned fire. Company E, leading its distinctive grays, pressed forward to a high cutbank at the downstream end of the bottom. More dismounted warriors opened a heavier fire from across the river. Mounted warriors began crossing the low ridge south of the coulee, threatening to outflank Yates’s position.32

  Other warriors, joined by early arrivals from Reno’s retreat, probed Keogh’s new position atop the ridge. At both points, individual warriors made brave runs along the soldier lines, drawing fire and frightening the horses of the dismounted troops. About 4:25 Keogh’s wing fired two volleys. This new decision reflected developments visible from Keogh’s position. As Yates approached the ford and skirmishing began, a new flow of noncombatants drained from the lower villages, fleeing downstream along the west side of the Little Bighorn. As their flight peaked, hundreds of women, children, and old men would have been in sight from the ridge. Ever since making his battalion divisions, Custer’s overriding concern had been the “scatteration” of his quarry. His plan now was to reunite the battalion and, following the ridgetops downstream, find an uncontested crossing and cut off the noncombatants’ retreat.33

  Still only lightly engaged, Custer was not yet prepared to yield his famous luck. Instead, he and Keogh had the double volley fired: dissuading their attackers; rousing Reno; and alerting Yates to disengage. Then they ordered their three companies to mount and parallel the valley downstream, intending to regroup along a ridge that extended toward the river one and one-half miles northwest. At the ford, Yates’s two companies competently disengaged, Company E covering the withdrawal up a second coulee, angling northeast. As Yates withdrew uphill, many more warriors galloped across the river to pursue and flank his retreat.34

  About 4:35 Crazy Horse rode to the village ford, between the deserted Cheyenne and Sans Arc circles. Soldiers were visible withdrawing up the coulee, pursued by a stream of warriors, “stringing up the gulch like ants rushing out of a hill.” Crazy Horse and other war leaders conferred. The Cheyennes present advised Crazy Horse of Yates’s approach and the skirmish across the river. In conference with the Cheyennes and Crow King, the Hunkpapa war leader, Crazy Horse reviewed these developments and assessed Custer’s strategy.35

  Several hundred yards uphill from Yates, Custer’s three companies were descending from the eastern ridges. Increasing warrior numbers had paralleled Custer’s rapid march, compelling his wing to fire volleys repeatedly from the saddle as they traversed the ridges. To Flying Hawk, watching beside Crazy Horse, the three companies seemed to pause to view the evolving tactical situation as they approached the coulee. Downstream, the flight of noncombatants was still visible. Sitting Bull had secured the rear of the exodus in a defensive position on the benchland west of the village, but the vanguard was hurrying north. Assessing army strategy, Crazy Horse and his companions came to a quick decision.36

  “Custer,” stated Horned Horse, in an 1877 press interview as spokesman for Crazy Horse, “seeing so numerous a body, mistook them for the main body of Indians retreating and abandoning their villages, and immediately gave pursuit. The warriors in the village, seeing this, divided their forces into two parts, one intercepting Custer between their non-combat[ant]s and him, and the other getting in his rear.” Ten years later, Gall told photographer David F. Barry how the Indian force divided. While Crow King led his Hunkpapa contingent up the coulee in pursuit of Yates, Crazy Horse acted to secure the protection of the women and children. Keeping between Custer and the refugees, he would cross at a second ford north of the village and seek to envelop the command, pressing it against Crow King’s warriors.37

  The leaders turned to address the warriors gathering behind them: “Crazy Horse and Gall and Knife Chief were haranguing the Indians to get together so they could make another charge on the soldiers,” recalled Red Hawk. Then Crazy Horse galloped 1.25 miles downstream, followed by Flying Hawk and a knot of Oglala comrades. A stream of Cheyenne warriors followed the war chief’s party as Crazy Horse splashed through the shallows of the Little Bighorn and urged his pony up another coulee. Called Deep Ravine from its sharply cut, brush-filled lower banks, the gully drains a long rolling hillside, forking into a fan of shallow draws. To Short Bull, viewing from the village, Crazy Horse looked as self-possessed as ever. “I saw him on his pinto pony leading his men across the ford. He was the first man to cross the river [at Deep Ravine]. I saw he had the business well in hand. They rode up the draw, and then there was too much dust. I could not see any more.”38

  Flying Hawk recalled, “Crazy Horse and I. . . came to a ravine; then we followed up the gulch to a place in the rear of the soldiers.” After ascending the ravine, the pair turned right up the long shallow cut of what would be known as Calhoun Coulee. From there, Custer’s battalion would be visible as it topped Calhoun Ridge at the reunion point. Crazy Horse and Flying Hawk dismounted, and the war chief “gave his horse to me to hold along with my horse. He crawled up the ravine to where he could see the soldiers.” After his customary scan of the enemy position, Crazy Horse sighted along his Winchester and began levering off a rapid series of shots at the ridge. According to Flying Hawk, each shot dropped a trooper from his saddle: “He shot them as fast as he could load his gun. They fell off their horses as fast as he could shoot.” Hyperbole aside, as those shots rang out and Crazy Horse scrambled for cover, the final phase of the Battle of the Little Bighorn was opening.39

  While Crazy Horse accessed the battlefield from downstream, Custer’s five companies had reunited along Calhoun Ridge about 4:45. Of approximately 210 men, only one would survive the next hour. Curley, a young Crow scout, would leave the command within the next ten minutes to take news of the battle to General Terry. Curley’s recollections of these crucial minutes as Custer rethought his tactics offer critical insights into the commander’s evolving strategy.40

  A party of warriors crested the ridge and galloped east, just as warriors had decoyed Royall from Crook’s support eight days previously. The main body of warriors threatened from the rear, constantly reinforced by new arrivals from the Reno fight. After officer’s call was sounded, Custer and his subalterns debated the position. The ridge they commanded extended east one-half mile to its terminus at Calhoun Hill. From there a long hogback ridge reached north one mile to terminate at another low hill, their angles framing the Deep Ravine drainage that Crazy Horse’s warriors were beginning to infiltrate. From the hogback, Custer might launch an attack that would envelop the refugees. Considering defensive priorities, the officers could have concluded that this broken high ground offered the best position to reunite the command and to protect the horses. Custer detailed a squad of troopers to ride hurriedly in advance. The troopers turned north, riding along the riverward side of the hogback. After several hundred yards, they deployed beneath the ridge crest.41

  The main command followed along Calhoun Ridge, leaving a second squad at the reunion point. Within a minute or so, however, new fire combed the ridge. A detachment was ordered to fall
out of line, dismount, and fire into the coulee, briefly pinning down the warriors. But a second flurry of shots from the draws “quickly killed” the squad left at the end of the ridge, Curley observed—echoing Flying Hawk’s observation of Crazy Horse’s sniping. These developments forced another consultation as the command paused on Calhoun Hill.42

  A plan to charge and clear the coulees “had to be given up” when substantial Indian reinforcements, advancing from the village, swept into the draws of Calhoun Coulee. Crazy Horse and his followers began to fan up the hillside, creeping from cover to cover or leading their ponies at a walk. Even more than the Rosebud, this would be in an action in which Crazy Horse unpredictably alternated infiltration tactics with sudden sweeping charges. Once again, Custer divided his battalion into two wings. He would accompany Yates’s left wing of Companies E and F in a probe north along the hogback ridge, the dual objectives of securing a crossing and a defensive position in uneasy balance. To maintain communication lines south to Reno, Keogh’s right wing, Companies C, I, and L, would hold the south end of the ridge against the warriors still massing from the village approaches.43

  As Custer’s wing departed, about 4:55, two volleys were fired. Then, with E Company in the lead, Custer’s left wing trotted smartly along the east side of the hogback, leaving a nervous right wing to deploy. Many men seemed reluctant to dismount, and as Curley saddled for departure, he noticed a few panicked troopers actually run after Custer’s wing. Almost immediately, they came under fire “from a ravine full of warriors” east of the hogback. A sudden crossfire poured in from “a large force of Indians shooting” from the riverward side of the ridgetop—Crazy Horse’s warriors, switching from infiltration to frontal advance. These warriors suddenly “charged up from the direction of the river,” driving the small advance squad over the ridgetop. The squad, like the panicked stragglers from the right wing, hurried to catch up with Custer as his wing approached the hill marking the northern termination of the hogback ridge.44

  Captain Keogh deployed his three companies along the half-mile stretch of the hogback terminating at Calhoun Hill. At that point, Company L formed a dismounted skirmish line fronting the main threat: the hundreds of warriors from the south, infiltrating the gullies fanning the gentle slope up to the ridge. Opportunistic warriors soon began sniping at L’s skirmish line, shooting arrows or snapping blankets at nervous horse holders to startle the four mounts each man controlled, stampeding thirsty horses—and their precious ammunition saddlebags—downhill toward the river.45

  A sudden Indian charge rushed up from the draws, lacing through L Company’s line to overrun the ridge, stampeding more horses over the ridgetop. Company commander Lieutenant James Calhoun ordered a volley fired. Many warriors melted back into the draws, immediately seeking new avenues for attack. Some turned east to seek new positions on the right wing’s flank. Cheyennes veered left down the flank of Calhoun Ridge.46

  To counter the Cheyenne threat, a squadron from Lieutenant Henry M. Harrington’s Company C was deployed to resume the position at the reunion point near the riverward end of Calhoun Ridge. A trumpet sounded, and I and L Company horse holders were repositioned in the upper draws of Calhoun Coulee, covered by Harrington’s company and away from the main threat from the south. For the right wing, there followed ten or more minutes of low-key action. The precarious lull overlaid mounting tension as warriors—constantly reinforced by late arrivals from the Reno action—infiltrated the draws, occupying every nook of cover, crawling in a tightening ring from coulee to sagebrush clump to draw.47

  Meanwhile, Custer’s left wing had passed beyond the hill defining the northern terminus of the hogback, swinging west toward the river. Lieutenant Algernon E. Smith’s E Company paused while Custer and his headquarters staff accompanied Yates and F Company in a probe to the river. Curley, who had departed the command five or ten minutes earlier, observed some of these maneuvers from the hills. He described the battalion wings deploying, one “circularly to the left, and the remainder similarly to the right,” suggesting that Custer’s descent to the river synchronized with the right-wing redeployment down Calhoun Ridge. As he descended into the valley, Custer’s quarry was in clear sight, barely one-half mile across the river. Custer, observed Flying Hawk, “was right above the women who had collected down the river.”48

  The refugees had gathered in the brush-lined bottom of Squaw Creek, opposite a ford offering Custer instant access to the exhausted fugitives. A scattering of Cheyenne youths and old men had crossed the ford to protect their exhausted families, and as Custer’s company approached the bottoms, they opened ragged fire from the willows that emptied one or two saddles, perhaps killing New York Herald correspondent Mark Kellogg. Custer ordered F Company back uphill. Events quickly accelerated. Scores of warriors—chiefly Cheyennes and Hunkpapas—crossed at Deep Ravine and veered left onto the flats below Custer’s position on the long ridge. They opened fire on the left wing. Warriors engaged in brave runs across Custer’s front—no serious threat, but compelling the troopers to take up skirmish lines. In a V-formation, F Company fronted the river, while E—its gray horses highly visible to warriors viewing from the right-wing siege—faced the threat from Deep Ravine and the flats. In the following minutes, both wings of the battalion were held in suspension, forced to assume defensive positions that would shortly face critical pressure.49

  Meanwhile, Crazy Horse and his followers crested the hogback ridge and dropped into the gullies beyond, where a long coulee drains northward, framing the hogback. Along it, warriors infiltrated the flanks of both battalion wings. As the battle climaxed, warriors accessing the field from the Squaw Creek crossing would feed around the nose of the battle ridge, meeting up with Crazy Horse’s warriors along the coulee to effect a complete encirclement of Custer’s battalion. Right now, a thin screen of warriors tracked Custer’s progress around the ridge, opening up a light fire from the hill at the rear of his skirmish lines, and sending a party that rushed through the gap between the companies, stampeding a number of cavalry horses into the valley.50

  Crazy Horse, however, continued flanking the right wing. Indeed, he rode farther up the ravine to a position perhaps four hundred yards northeast of Calhoun’s L Company. The growing body of warriors was able to snipe at the rear of Calhoun’s position atop Calhoun Hill and at Keogh’s I Company, dismounted as reserves along the east slope of the hogback. After the L Company volley at the charge from the south, more warriors from that sector worked east to reinforce Crazy Horse. One of these was White Bull, the Miniconjou. Impatient at Crazy Horse’s long-range sniping, he began to urge a charge, but the Oglala war chief would not be drawn into premature action. Crazy Horse knew that the right-wing position held the key to the battlefield. It held open Custer’s line of communication to Reno and Benteen. From the encirclement strategy expounded at the village ford, Crazy Horse had been forced to trim his tactics—but, in stark contrast to Custer’s inflexible strategy, he proved himself master of a fluid tactical environment. He hoped that warriors in the northern sector could pin Custer’s left wing east of the river and isolate the two battalion wings. With many more warriors fronting the right wing, Crazy Horse awaited a critical moment when the wing could be overwhelmed by a series of interlocking assaults from the coulees. The Indian force could then envelop the weaker left wing and save the exhausted, frightened women and children waiting in the brush along Squaw Creek.51

  That moment neared. Warriors gradually infested the riverward hillside to within forty yards of the Company I position. Two Moons recalled that sixteen right-wing horse holders were the first victims as the battle climaxed. To counter the coulee infiltrators, Company C charged from its position at the west end of Calhoun Ridge, flushing warriors like quail. After five hundred yards, the company halted, dismounted, and drew up a skirmish line. Their expected volley was never fired. Almost simultaneously, a double blow struck. In the lower coulee, the Cheyenne Lame White Man rallied the retreating warriors and led
a charge that overran Company C, while Yellow Nose’s Cheyennes opened a sustained fire from Greasy Grass Ridge. A “great roll of smoke seemed to go down the ravine,” remembered the Two Kettle Runs the Enemy.52 Moving Robe Woman, a Hunkpapa widow fighting to avenge the deaths of her brother and husband, saw the soldiers “running up a ravine, firing as they ran. The valley was dense with powder smoke. I never heard such whooping and shouting.” Company C fell back hurriedly to its position atop Calhoun Ridge, leaving at least four men dead in the coulee.53

  On Calhoun Hill, Company L turned its skirmish line to face riverward, firing a volley to cover their comrades’ retreat. As Harrington’s company won back to the ridge, it sought to reestablish a defensive position, mounted troopers holding the horses of dismounted skirmishers. Yellow Nose drove a hard charge over the ridge that sent Company C running to join Company L, leaving another dozen or so troopers dead. Under an intensifying fire from all quarters—including Crazy Horse’s party in the eastern ravine—L Company’s firm skirmish line broke as C Company survivors joined them at Calhoun Hill. Troopers broke ranks to form little knots of comrades firing haphazardly. At this moment of critical danger, the warriors from the south formed for another charge. Behind a shock barrage from their Winchester and Henry repeaters, the warriors, led by Gall, poured up the south slope of Calhoun Hill and overran the position. Twenty or more troopers were killed; their comrades fled along the west side of the hogback toward Company I’s position.54