CRAZY HORSE

by Kingsley M Bray

  18

  WALKING THE BLACK ROAD

  Deep into the night, the people ascended the river, pausing at dawn to nap and break out a hurried meal from the food packs. At daylight, the camp heralds cried “Get ready, we are going,” and women hurried to reload packs and hitch travois. Having made sixteen miles from the battlefield, the two-mile procession neared the forks of the Little Bighorn midmorning on June 27. The well-watered flat made a favorable campsite, and the village was repitched for the night.1

  At noon on the 28th, the people broke camp and started south. Satellite camps fanned up the two easterly forks, searching for better prospects in game and pasture. The main body followed along Lodge Grass Creek, camping at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains. On the sacred fourth night after the victory, people prepared to celebrate. Crazy Horse still anxiously awaited news of Terry’s march, and in the evening, alarm briefly flared when the shout went up “The soldiers are coming!” A line of blue-coated men riding abreast neared, then broke into whoops of laughter at the excitement. The pranksters in looted uniforms declared, “Terry was not following us and everything was safe.” After relieving the huddled survivors of the Seventh Cavalry on the 27th, Terry’s and Gibbon’s men had spent this day burying the dead in shallow battlefield graves.2

  At this reassuring news, villagers lit bonfires and began victory dances. Some already knew that the slain commander was Pehin Hanska, Long Hair Custer, and singers extemporized satirical chants:

  Long Hair, guns I hadn’t any.

  You brought me some.

  I thank you.

  You make me laugh!3

  Over the next few days, intelligence continued to demonstrate that the Montana-Yellowstone commands were neutralized. Short Bull’s scouts arrived early on July 1, reporting that Terry and Gibbon had withdrawn down the Little Bighorn, carrying Reno’s wounded on horse-drawn litters to load aboard the steamboat Far West, along with Terry’s staff, at the junction with the Bighorn. Gibbon marched the command to Terry’s new headquarters at the civilian stockade Fort Pease. There, like Crook on Goose Creek, the stunned, demoralized command took stock amid the wreckage of Sheridan’s summer initiative.4

  Freed to restock the packs, hunters sought buffalo and small teams of uncles and cousins threaded into the mountains after deer and elk. Women and girls gathered early cherries, and boys scoured streams for fish, fowl, and small game. Family groups scattered to cut lodgepoles as the village moved slowly through the high country. For several nights, victory dances continued. One name was constantly sounded in the praise songs. “After the battle,” Standing Bear recalled, “I heard a lot about Crazy Horse.”5

  Over the following months, military commentators would also conclude that Crazy Horse’s contribution was crucial to the victory over Custer. Penning his summary report on the course of the Great Sioux War, after debriefing surrendering warriors, Lieutenant William P. Clark concluded that the Battle of the Little Bighorn “brought Crazy Horse more prominently before all the Indians than any one else.... Before this he had a great reputation[;] in it he gained a greater prestige than any other Indian in the camp.”6

  The most famous Lakota victory of all time was not Crazy Horse’s triumph alone. He was no Caesar or Napoleon, moving warrior brigades like chess pieces across the field. His life story has repeatedly demonstrated just how individualistic was Indian warfare. At the Little Bighorn, warriors knotted around a score of other tactical leaders. Gall helped coordinate the massed repeater volleys that broke the tactical integrity of Calhoun’s position. Elsewhere, One Bull, Knife Chief, Spotted Eagle, and Iron Star all distinguished themselves as “big braves.” Lame White Man, Yellow Nose, and other Cheyennes played significant roles on sections of the field.

  Other Oglala blotahunka, like Low Dog and Big Road, led parties distinct from Crazy Horse’s. Such groups rode into battle, ten, twenty, fifty men strong. One of the largest was the Hunkpapa Crow King’s group: eighty warriors. But one unfazed trooper witness estimated two hundred men in the party that followed Crazy Horse against Reno. As the battle progressed, it attracted new followers: significantly, given the clannish loyalties of Plains Indians, many Cheyenne warriors chose to follow Crazy Horse across the Little Bighorn. Like their Lakota counterparts, they trusted the Oglala war chief’s luck and medicine; his generosity in foregoing coups set up by his maneuvering; his reputation for cool bravery combined with tactical acumen; and not least, his ability to deliver results with minimal casualties. Just as at the Rosebud, Crazy Horse was the leader whose contribution at every stage of the battle evinced an overall grasp of strategy and tactics, implemented not at a single point or phase, but across the field. Even his notoriously deliberate preparations prior to repulsing Reno underwrote his exemplary authority, the compelling self-belief that this battle would run on his terms, at his speed.

  A war leader “might give orders to fight,” summed up one Hunkpapa, “but he does not direct how to proceed.”7 Orders might be given to a trusted lieutenant like Good Weasel, but they were implemented by example, not command. Followers, independent and used to taking the initiative, exploited the tactical configuration their leader shaped—or disengaged if circumstances deteriorated. Such a following, strong but flexible, loosely coordinated by a responsive core of subalterns like Kicking Bear, Bad Heart Bull, and Flying Hawk, could make the difference in a battle. Repeatedly, they did. In three separate phases of the Little Bighorn—the charge on Reno’s retreat; the overwhelming of Keogh and the severing of the right wing retreat; and the final overrunning of Last Stand Hill—Crazy Horse sensed the defining moments of the battle. At each of these turning points, he acted swiftly to inspire and encourage, so that the rawest youth present was animated to emulate him. And each time, devoted lieutenants delivered the backup that transformed a solitary brave’s run into an incremental, critical segment of the total victory.

  Those moments of crucial troop imbalance, intuited through Crazy Horse’s unraveling of Thunder’s revelation, demonstrate that the battle was a sequence of localized actions, fought on the terms that Crazy Horse had identified after the Bozeman Trail campaigning. Troop unit isolation, leading to tactical breakdown, command erosion, and demoralized panic were the responses Crazy Horse had observed on the frozen ridge of the Fetterman battle. For ten years he had worked to deliver another such victory. Fighting Crook’s brigade, Crazy Horse had achieved a dazzling tactical victory. Eight days later, on the Custer field, faced with a less wary foe, Crazy Horse was able to implement more fully the sort of mobile, strung-out strategy that had, midway through the Battle of the Rosebud, threatened to overrun Royall’s battalion and unravel Crook’s lines.

  As Custer’s lines of communication stretched between his battalion wings, Crazy Horse patiently awaited the right moment to sever them. He forcefully declined White Bull’s repeated taunts to lead a premature charge—until the bloody chaos of Gall’s onslaught reduced Harrington’s and Calhoun’s companies to a panicked shambles. Deprived of the leadership of their commissioned officers, the two troops collapsed, contrasting the brittle hierarchy of the army command structure with the flexible Indian leadership. Captain Keogh was able to rally his unit, but the surprise of Crazy Horse’s kicamnayan charge overwhelmed their position, perfecting the dry run he aimed at Royall eight days earlier. Varying momentary frontal charges with protracted infiltration phases, Crazy Horse was able to soften up Custer’s battalion as it belatedly consolidated a defensive position around Last Stand Hill. As the rate of fire from the hill deteriorated, Crazy Horse once more identified the crystallization of command breakdown, leading a last charge that poured over the hill to meet his circle run.

  Earlier commentators have adduced several technical factors, ascribing troop collapse to the blocking of carbines after overfiring caused cartridge ejection failure. Individual guns undoubtedly blocked, and Crazy Horse exhorted his warriors to get the soldiers’ “guns hot so they would not work so well.” Unfortunately for the sake of lite
rary neatness, one of the solid conclusions of the latest archaeological research is that breech mechanism failure was statistically insignificant.8 Similarly, the troops were not inadequately supplied with ammunition. Indian testimony confirms that, despite seizing many cartridges from the saddlebags of stampeded cavalry mounts, most slain troopers were found with ammunition to spare.

  Nor were the soldiers simply outgunned. The Springfield carbine was a sturdy arm, its single-shot mechanism rapidly reloaded, its range and power superior to most Indian armament. Statistical analysis of expended nonarmy shells on the Custer field suggests that about one in ten warriors—no more than about two hundred—was armed with a repeater. Building on the successful deployment of repeaters at the Rosebud, Indian leaders maximized their shock effect by concentrating groups of warriors armed with Winchesters and Henrys. Even a small group levering their carbines into a fixed troop position could have devastating effect— when Kicking Bear, Hard to Hit, and Bad Heart Bull opened fire into Reno’s column, their demoralizing barrage kicked off the rout from the timber. Similarly, archaeological work at Calhoun Hill demonstrates that the troop skirmish lines there came under blistering pressure from lines of infiltrating warriors armed with repeaters. As in the Reno fight, troops exposed to concerted rapid fire were ripe for panic and could be overrun.

  Custer’s collapse reveals larger issues. Commentators have suggested several scapegoats in the most famous defeat of U.S. arms in history, but the fact that stands out in assessing leadership on the ground is how inflexibly Custer pursued his single-minded determination to prevent at all costs Indian “scatteration.” Disregarding deficiencies in intelligence about the Indian strength, Custer repeatedly committed his regiment to pursuit of straggling parties of scouts and hunters. He was still skeptical of the presence of a sizeable village until after ordering Reno’s charge down the Little Bighorn. Even after witnessing Reno’s stalemate and realizing the full strength of the village, and following a lengthy pause that smacks of serious strategic reassessment, Custer elected to recommit his battalion to containing scatteration. Repeatedly dividing his immediate command into overextended wings deployed as strike force and reserve, he committed an inadequate force over a field that stretched like taffy—the ideal terrain for Crazy Horse to test his reading of army psychology.

  In the broadest sense, morale differentials were crucial to the outcome of the battle. Debates of Indian firepower and the technical shortcomings of military armament obscure a central structural fact: troops were inadequately trained in the use of firearms. Limited army appropriations were reflected in the premium on live ammunition. Crazy Horse was right to conclude that, facing critical pressure, ill-trained troops would collapse into aimless, haphazard fire. Older studies suggested that the Seventh Cavalry was an outfit dominated by raw recruits, but analysis of regimental composition suggests that the Seventh was not exceptionally green. But, excluding rest halts, the men and horses entering battle at 3:00 P.M. on June 25 had been on the march for all but five of the previous thirty-four hours. Fatigue had already worn down men’s physical and mental reserves. By contrast, the warriors rushing to meet them were fresh. Already fired with the justness of their cause and Sitting Bull’s assurance of total victory, the immediate threat to their families honed an edge to warrior conviction that even supremely professional troops could not blunt.

  Undoubtedly, the force that overran Last Stand Hill, or reduced Reno’s retreat to rout, vastly outnumbered Custer’s divided battalions. Man for man, the troops were outnumbered three to one. But that fact is subject to nuanced interpretation. One strength the Indian force distinctly lacked was rapid-response deployment: some Oglalas and Cheyennes were still awaiting the arrival of their ponies fully one and a half hours after the first alarm was cried. Consequently, Reno was bluffed into halting and forming a skirmish line by a fraction of the total warrior force. Perhaps nine hundred were engaged in the climax of action against Reno; and once Reno and Benteen consolidated, they faced up to six hundred. Even after these warriors disengaged to counter the threat from Custer, the defenders sat tight. They had been outfought, and key officers were demoralized by the sheer speed and conviction of Indian deployments.

  The same factors operated against Custer’s command. The idea that Custer was immediately crushed by some juggernaut of red warriors does not withstand inspection. During initial phases of the Custer battle, only scores of warriors were engaged. Once his battalion reunited along Calhoun Ridge, the majority of Indians on and accessing the field were at his rear, positioned between Custer and the village. Although this presence patently threatened his communications to Reno, Custer elected to extend another strung-out offensive—one that could net him the prize of two thousand unarmed fugitives, cowering and exhausted, across the river.

  Any true assessment of the Indian victory must take into account how the flight of the fugitives compromised Crazy Horse’s strategic response. At the village ford, he and Crow King had divided their forces. Pursuing Yates across the river, Crow King and Gall interposed their warriors between Custer and the village. Crazy Horse elected to screen the fugitives from Custer’s riverward probes. Infiltrating the drainage of Deep Ravine, Crazy Horse had to open a holding action rather than the retreat-and-regroup tactic with which he had threatened Royall at the Rosebud. Crazy Horse’s responsive flexibility to the evolving tactical situation contrasts starkly with Custer’s obsessive strategy of pursuit and containment. Only after Custer’s left-wing threat to the fugitives was neutralized by a new influx of warriors did Crazy Horse feel secure enough to unleash the offensive against the right-wing reserve.

  Fugitive safety opened the strategic configuration of the battle; minutes later, Gall’s onslaught on Calhoun Hill delivered the tactical initiative for Crazy Horse to unravel the right wing completely. Indian witnesses recognized his charge on Keogh’s position as pivotal.9

  Only after Crazy Horse’s charge at Keogh’s troops and the consolidation of Custer’s survivors on Last Stand Hill was the total warrior force brought to bear in the fearsome new odds of fifteen to one. Predictably, the battle barely lasted five more minutes, but the truth remains that the victory had been assured in a series of interlocking actions in which the odds had not been so one sided. No Indian generalissimo coordinated every battlefield maneuver as Hollywood and some earlier historians would have it. But, as Lieutenant Clark’s Lakota informants asserted, no war leader contributed more to the overall victory than Crazy Horse. The praise songs of victory dancers, and the proliferation of military reports singling out Crazy Horse as the key to Northern Nation resistance, faithfully reflect his incomparable example at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

  Victory dances wound up, and as buffalo disappeared, the people were forced to butcher horses. High country pasture was soon eaten off, and the southward movement placed the village within thirty miles of Crook’s becalmed base camp. This proximity was vividly illustrated on July 7, when a small scouting party including Flying Hawk tangled with twenty-five Second Cavalry troopers under Lieutenant Frederick W. Sibley.10

  The village chiefs decided to shift downcountry, but a screen of warriors continued to harry Crook’s pickets, torching the grass to deter pursuit. Their activities, compounded by the July 10 bombshell news of the Custer disaster, kept Crook confined to his base for another three and a half weeks. Free again from pursuit, on the eighth, the Northern Nation moved down the Little Bighorn toward the plains. The tempo of movement picked up, and the village swung down Rosebud Creek. Game was still scarce, and every day the people were compelled to move. With every military threat contained, meat, not warfare, became the overriding concern, and for the next two months, the war council that had coordinated Northern Nation activities yielded primacy to Deciders and hunt akicita. Outriders set fire to the plains behind them to promote grass growth and to lure the northward trending herds back across the Yellowstone in time for fall hunts.11

  On July 14 the village, approaching the a
mbit of Terry’s field of operations in the Yellowstone valley, swung east to camp on Tongue River. At last, the compelling logic of subsistence dictated dispersal, and several bands drifted south and east, some drifting toward the agencies. The main village swung down the Tongue, eventually catching up with the northering herds. For two weeks, removals slowed as hunters made successful surrounds and women labored to dry meat, prepare robes, and renew lodgeskins.

  Crazy Horse took pride in acting as provider not only for his own tipi, but for the lodge of his father and stepmothers. Assured of food, and with intelligence that neither Crook nor Terry had stirred from their bases, warriors looked for opportunities. Some war parties targeted the Black Hills miners. Crazy Horse, after looking eagerly around for a little late summer raiding, led a large party, two hundred strong, across the Yellowstone, targeting Assiniboin bands near Wolf Point Agency on the Missouri. Gall accompanied him, keen to have some of the Crazy Horse medicine rub off, as did the Miniconjou Flying By, a member of Crazy Horse’s bodyguard. Having stolen a herd of “nice horses,” the party moved to rejoin the village by the start of the Moon of Black Cherries, low on the Powder River.12

  On July 29 the war party whooped its herd homeward across the Yellowstone, stopping to camp and to inspect the remains of Terry’s former supply base. Sacks of corn and oats were still stacked on the landing stage, and Crazy Horse had his men load up until the shrill whistle of the steamboat Carroll alerted the party to danger ascending the river. Bluecoats lined the decks, and shots were exchanged across the water with Lieutenant Colonel Elwell S. Otis’s Twenty-second infantry detachment. One trooper fell, and Otis had the steamer pull to shore and land a company to chase the warriors. Disengaging, Crazy Horse led his men into the timber, hurrying homeward.13