"How the Battle of Little Bighorn Was Won" Part 1 of 3
Jun 25, 2017 14:23:22 #
"How the Battle of Little Bighorn Was Won" Part 1 of 3
Editors Note: "In 1874, an Army expedition led by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer found gold in the Black Hills, in present-day South Dakota. At the time, the United States recognized the hills as property of the Sioux Nation, under a treaty the two parties had signed six years before. The Grant administration tried to buy the hills, but the Sioux, considering them sacred ground, refused to sell; in 1876, federal troops were dispatched to force the Sioux onto reservations and pacify the Great Plains. That June, Custer attacked an encampment of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho on the Little Bighorn River, in what is now Montana.
The Battle of the Little Bighorn is one of the most studied actions in U.S. military history, and the immense literature on the subject is devoted primarily to answering questions about Custer’s generalship during the fighting. But neither he nor the 209 men in his immediate command survived the day, and an Indian counterattack would pin down seven companies of their fellow 7th Cavalrymen on a hilltop over four miles away. (Of about 400 soldiers on the hilltop, 53 were killed and 60 were wounded before the Indians ended their siege the next day.) The experience of Custer and his men can be reconstructed only by inference.
This is not true of the Indian version of the battle. Long-neglected accounts given by more than 50 Indian participants or witnesses provide a means of tracking the fight from the first warning to the killing of the last of Custer’s troopers - a period of about two hours and 15 minutes. In his book, “The Killing of Crazy Horse”, veteran reporter Thomas Powers draws on these accounts to present a comprehensive narrative account of the battle as the Indians experienced it. Crazy Horse’s stunning victory over Custer, which both angered and frightened the Army, led to the killing of the chief a year later. “My purpose in telling the story as I did,” Powers says, “was to let the Indians describe what happened, and to identify the moment when Custer’s men disintegrated as a fighting unit and their defeat became inevitable.”
"How the Battle of Little Bighorn Was Won"
By Thomas Powers
"The sun was just cracking over the horizon that Sunday, June 25, 1876, as men and boys began taking the horses out to graze. First light was also the time for the women to poke up last night’s cooking fire. The Hunkpapa woman known as Good White Buffalo Woman said later she had often been in camps when war was in the air, but this day was not like that. “The Sioux that morning had no thought of fighting,” she said. “We expected no attack.”
Those who saw the assembled encampment said they had never seen one larger. It had come together in March or April, even before the plains started to green up, according to the Oglala warrior He Dog. Indians arriving from distant reservations on the Missouri River had reported that soldiers were coming out to fight, so the various camps made a point of keeping close together. There were at least six, perhaps seven, cheek by jowl, with the Cheyennes at the northern, or downriver, end near the broad ford where Medicine Tail Coulee and Muskrat Creek emptied into the Little Bighorn River. Among the Sioux, the Hunkpapas were at the southern end. Between them along the river’s bends and loops were the Sans Arc, Brulé, Minneconjou, Santee and Oglala. Some said the Oglala were the biggest group, the Hunkpapa next, with perhaps 700 lodges between them. The other circles might have totaled 500 to 600 lodges. That would suggest as many as 6,000 to 7,000 people in all, a third of them men or boys of fighting age. Confusing the question of numbers was the constant arrival and departure of people from the reservations. Those travelers - plus hunters from the camps, women out gathering roots and herbs and seekers of lost horses - were part of an informal early-warning system.
There were many late risers this morning because dances the previous night had ended only at first light. One very large tent near the center of the village - probably two lodges raised side by side - was filled with the elders, called chiefs by the whites but “short hairs,” “silent eaters” or “big bellies” by the Indians. As the morning turned hot and sultry, large numbers of adults and children went swimming in the river. The water would have been cold; Black Elk, the future Oglala holy man, then 12, would remember that the river was high with snowmelt from the mountains.
It was approaching midafternoon when a report arrived that U.S. troops had been spotted approaching the camp. “We could hardly believe that soldiers were so near,” the Oglala elder Runs the Enemy said later. It made no sense to him or the other men in the big lodge. For one thing, whites never attacked in the middle of the day. For several moments more, Runs the Enemy recalled, “We sat there smoking.”
Other reports followed. White Bull, a Minneconjou, was watching over horses near camp when scouts rode down from Ash Creek with news that soldiers had shot and killed an Indian boy at the fork of the creek two or three miles back. Women who had been digging turnips across the river some miles to the east “came riding in all out of breath and reported that soldiers were coming,” said the Oglala chief Thunder Bear. “The country, they said, looked as if filled with smoke, so much dust was there.” The soldiers had shot and killed one of the women. Fast Horn, an Oglala, came in to say he had been shot at by soldiers he saw near the high divide on the way over into the Rosebud valley.
But the first warning to bring warriors on the run probably occurred at the Hunkpapa camp around 3 o’clock, when some horse raiders - Arikara (or Ree) Indians working for the soldiers, as it turned out - were seen making a dash for animals grazing in a ravine not far from the camp. Within moments shooting could be heard at the south end of camp. Peace quickly gave way to pandemonium - shouts and cries of women and children, men calling for horses or guns, boys sent to find mothers or sisters, swimmers rushing from the river, men trying to organize resistance, looking to their weapons, painting themselves or tying up their horses’ tails.
As warriors rushed out to confront the horse thieves, people at the southernmost end of the Hunkpapa camp were shouting alarm at the sight of approaching soldiers, first glimpsed in a line on horseback a mile or two away. By 10 or 15 minutes past 3 o’clock, Indians had boiled out of the lodges to meet them. Now came the first shots heard back at the council lodge, convincing Runs the Enemy to put his pipe aside at last. “Bullets sounded like hail on tepees and tree tops,” said Little Soldier, a Hunkpapa warrior. The family of chief Gall - two wives and their three children - were shot to death near their lodge at the edge of the camp.
But now the Indians were rushing out and shooting back, making show enough to check the attack. The whites dismounted. Every fourth man took the reins of three other horses and led them along with his own into the trees near the river. The other soldiers deployed in a skirmish line of perhaps 100 men. It was all happening very quickly.
As the Indians came out to meet the skirmish line, straight ahead, the river was to their left, obscured by thick timber and undergrowth. To the right was open prairie rising away to the west, and beyond the end of the line, a force of mounted Indians rapidly accumulated. These warriors were swinging wide, swooping around the end of the line. Some of the Indians, He Dog and Brave Heart among them, rode out still farther, circling a small hill behind the soldiers.
By then the soldiers had begun to bend back around to face the Indians behind them. In effect the line had halted; firing was heavy and rapid, but the Indians racing their ponies were hard to hit. Ever-growing numbers of men were rushing out to meet the soldiers while women and children fled. No more than 15 or 20 minutes into the fight the Indians were gaining control of the field; the soldiers were pulling back into the trees that lined the river.
The pattern of the Battle of the Little Bighorn was already established - moments of intense fighting, rapid movement, close engagement with men falling dead or wounded, followed by sudden relative quiet as the two sides organized, took stock and prepared for the next clash. As the soldiers disappeared into the trees, Indians by ones and twos cautiously went in after them while others gathered nearby. Shooting fell away but never halted.
Two large movements were unfolding simultaneously - most of the women and children were moving north down the river, leaving the Hunkpapa camp behind, while a growing stream of men passed them on the way to the fighting - “where the excitement was going on,” said Eagle Elk, a friend of Red Feather, Crazy Horse’s brother-in-law. Crazy Horse himself, already renowned among the Oglala for his battle prowess, was approaching the scene of the fighting at about the same time.
Crazy Horse had been swimming in the river with his friend Yellow Nose when they heard shots. Moments later, horseless, he met Red Feather bridling his pony. “Take any horse,” said Red Feather as he prepared to dash off, but Crazy Horse waited for his own mount. Red Feather didn’t see him again until 10 or 15 minutes later, when the Indians had gathered in force near the woods where the soldiers had taken refuge.
It was probably during those minutes that Crazy Horse had prepared himself for war. In the emergency of the moment many men grabbed their weapons and ran toward the shooting, but not all. War was too dangerous to treat casually; a man wanted to be properly dressed and painted before charging the enemy. Without his medicine and time for a prayer or song, he would be weak. A 17-year-old Oglala named Standing Bear reported that after the first warnings Crazy Horse had called on a wicasa wakan (medicine man) to invoke the spirits and then took so much time over his preparations “that many of his warriors became impatient.”
Ten young men who had sworn to follow Crazy Horse “anywhere in battle” were standing nearby. He dusted himself and his companions with a fistful of dry earth gathered up from a hill left by a mole or gopher, a young Oglala named Spider would recall. Into his hair Crazy Horse wove some long stems of grass, according to Spider. Then he opened the medicine bag he carried about his neck, took from it a pinch of stuff “and burned it as a sacrifice upon a fire of buffalo chips which another warrior had prepared.” The wisp of smoke, he believed, carried his prayer to the heavens. (Others reported that Crazy Horse painted his face with hail spots and dusted his horse with the dry earth.) Now, according to Spider and Standing Bear, he was ready to fight.
By the time Crazy Horse caught up with his cousin Kicking Bear and Red Feather, it was hard to see the soldiers in the woods, but there was a lot of shooting; bullets clattered through tree limbs and sent leaves fluttering to the ground. Several Indians had already been killed, and others were wounded. There was shouting and singing; some women who had stayed behind were calling out the high-pitched, ululating cry called the tremolo. Iron Hawk, a leading man of Crazy Horse’s band of Oglala, said his aunt was urging on the arriving warriors with a song:
"Brothers-in-law, now your friends have come.
Take courage.
Would you see me taken captive?"
At just this moment someone near the timber cried out, “Crazy Horse is coming!” From the Indians circling around behind the soldiers came the charge word—“Hokahey!” Many Indians near the woods said that Crazy Horse repeatedly raced his pony past the soldiers, drawing their fire - an act of daring sometimes called a brave run. Red Feather remembered that “some Indian shouted, ‘Give way; let the soldiers out. We can’t get at them in there.’ Soon the soldiers came out and tried to go to the river.” As they bolted out of the woods, Crazy Horse called to the men near him: “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!”
Crazy Horse and all the rest now raced their horses directly into the soldiers. “Right among them we rode,” said Thunder Bear, “shooting them down as in a buffalo drive.” Horses were shot and soldiers tumbled to the ground; a few managed to pull up behind friends, but on foot most were quickly killed. “All mixed up,” said the Cheyenne Two Moons of the melee. “Sioux, then soldiers, then more Sioux, and all shooting.” Flying Hawk, an Oglala, said it was hard to know exactly what was happening: “The dust was thick and we could hardly see. We got right among the soldiers and killed a lot with our bows and arrows and tomahawks. Crazy Horse was ahead of all, and he killed a lot of them with his war club.”
Editors Note: "In 1874, an Army expedition led by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer found gold in the Black Hills, in present-day South Dakota. At the time, the United States recognized the hills as property of the Sioux Nation, under a treaty the two parties had signed six years before. The Grant administration tried to buy the hills, but the Sioux, considering them sacred ground, refused to sell; in 1876, federal troops were dispatched to force the Sioux onto reservations and pacify the Great Plains. That June, Custer attacked an encampment of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho on the Little Bighorn River, in what is now Montana.
The Battle of the Little Bighorn is one of the most studied actions in U.S. military history, and the immense literature on the subject is devoted primarily to answering questions about Custer’s generalship during the fighting. But neither he nor the 209 men in his immediate command survived the day, and an Indian counterattack would pin down seven companies of their fellow 7th Cavalrymen on a hilltop over four miles away. (Of about 400 soldiers on the hilltop, 53 were killed and 60 were wounded before the Indians ended their siege the next day.) The experience of Custer and his men can be reconstructed only by inference.
This is not true of the Indian version of the battle. Long-neglected accounts given by more than 50 Indian participants or witnesses provide a means of tracking the fight from the first warning to the killing of the last of Custer’s troopers - a period of about two hours and 15 minutes. In his book, “The Killing of Crazy Horse”, veteran reporter Thomas Powers draws on these accounts to present a comprehensive narrative account of the battle as the Indians experienced it. Crazy Horse’s stunning victory over Custer, which both angered and frightened the Army, led to the killing of the chief a year later. “My purpose in telling the story as I did,” Powers says, “was to let the Indians describe what happened, and to identify the moment when Custer’s men disintegrated as a fighting unit and their defeat became inevitable.”
"How the Battle of Little Bighorn Was Won"
By Thomas Powers
"The sun was just cracking over the horizon that Sunday, June 25, 1876, as men and boys began taking the horses out to graze. First light was also the time for the women to poke up last night’s cooking fire. The Hunkpapa woman known as Good White Buffalo Woman said later she had often been in camps when war was in the air, but this day was not like that. “The Sioux that morning had no thought of fighting,” she said. “We expected no attack.”
Those who saw the assembled encampment said they had never seen one larger. It had come together in March or April, even before the plains started to green up, according to the Oglala warrior He Dog. Indians arriving from distant reservations on the Missouri River had reported that soldiers were coming out to fight, so the various camps made a point of keeping close together. There were at least six, perhaps seven, cheek by jowl, with the Cheyennes at the northern, or downriver, end near the broad ford where Medicine Tail Coulee and Muskrat Creek emptied into the Little Bighorn River. Among the Sioux, the Hunkpapas were at the southern end. Between them along the river’s bends and loops were the Sans Arc, Brulé, Minneconjou, Santee and Oglala. Some said the Oglala were the biggest group, the Hunkpapa next, with perhaps 700 lodges between them. The other circles might have totaled 500 to 600 lodges. That would suggest as many as 6,000 to 7,000 people in all, a third of them men or boys of fighting age. Confusing the question of numbers was the constant arrival and departure of people from the reservations. Those travelers - plus hunters from the camps, women out gathering roots and herbs and seekers of lost horses - were part of an informal early-warning system.
There were many late risers this morning because dances the previous night had ended only at first light. One very large tent near the center of the village - probably two lodges raised side by side - was filled with the elders, called chiefs by the whites but “short hairs,” “silent eaters” or “big bellies” by the Indians. As the morning turned hot and sultry, large numbers of adults and children went swimming in the river. The water would have been cold; Black Elk, the future Oglala holy man, then 12, would remember that the river was high with snowmelt from the mountains.
It was approaching midafternoon when a report arrived that U.S. troops had been spotted approaching the camp. “We could hardly believe that soldiers were so near,” the Oglala elder Runs the Enemy said later. It made no sense to him or the other men in the big lodge. For one thing, whites never attacked in the middle of the day. For several moments more, Runs the Enemy recalled, “We sat there smoking.”
Other reports followed. White Bull, a Minneconjou, was watching over horses near camp when scouts rode down from Ash Creek with news that soldiers had shot and killed an Indian boy at the fork of the creek two or three miles back. Women who had been digging turnips across the river some miles to the east “came riding in all out of breath and reported that soldiers were coming,” said the Oglala chief Thunder Bear. “The country, they said, looked as if filled with smoke, so much dust was there.” The soldiers had shot and killed one of the women. Fast Horn, an Oglala, came in to say he had been shot at by soldiers he saw near the high divide on the way over into the Rosebud valley.
But the first warning to bring warriors on the run probably occurred at the Hunkpapa camp around 3 o’clock, when some horse raiders - Arikara (or Ree) Indians working for the soldiers, as it turned out - were seen making a dash for animals grazing in a ravine not far from the camp. Within moments shooting could be heard at the south end of camp. Peace quickly gave way to pandemonium - shouts and cries of women and children, men calling for horses or guns, boys sent to find mothers or sisters, swimmers rushing from the river, men trying to organize resistance, looking to their weapons, painting themselves or tying up their horses’ tails.
As warriors rushed out to confront the horse thieves, people at the southernmost end of the Hunkpapa camp were shouting alarm at the sight of approaching soldiers, first glimpsed in a line on horseback a mile or two away. By 10 or 15 minutes past 3 o’clock, Indians had boiled out of the lodges to meet them. Now came the first shots heard back at the council lodge, convincing Runs the Enemy to put his pipe aside at last. “Bullets sounded like hail on tepees and tree tops,” said Little Soldier, a Hunkpapa warrior. The family of chief Gall - two wives and their three children - were shot to death near their lodge at the edge of the camp.
But now the Indians were rushing out and shooting back, making show enough to check the attack. The whites dismounted. Every fourth man took the reins of three other horses and led them along with his own into the trees near the river. The other soldiers deployed in a skirmish line of perhaps 100 men. It was all happening very quickly.
As the Indians came out to meet the skirmish line, straight ahead, the river was to their left, obscured by thick timber and undergrowth. To the right was open prairie rising away to the west, and beyond the end of the line, a force of mounted Indians rapidly accumulated. These warriors were swinging wide, swooping around the end of the line. Some of the Indians, He Dog and Brave Heart among them, rode out still farther, circling a small hill behind the soldiers.
By then the soldiers had begun to bend back around to face the Indians behind them. In effect the line had halted; firing was heavy and rapid, but the Indians racing their ponies were hard to hit. Ever-growing numbers of men were rushing out to meet the soldiers while women and children fled. No more than 15 or 20 minutes into the fight the Indians were gaining control of the field; the soldiers were pulling back into the trees that lined the river.
The pattern of the Battle of the Little Bighorn was already established - moments of intense fighting, rapid movement, close engagement with men falling dead or wounded, followed by sudden relative quiet as the two sides organized, took stock and prepared for the next clash. As the soldiers disappeared into the trees, Indians by ones and twos cautiously went in after them while others gathered nearby. Shooting fell away but never halted.
Two large movements were unfolding simultaneously - most of the women and children were moving north down the river, leaving the Hunkpapa camp behind, while a growing stream of men passed them on the way to the fighting - “where the excitement was going on,” said Eagle Elk, a friend of Red Feather, Crazy Horse’s brother-in-law. Crazy Horse himself, already renowned among the Oglala for his battle prowess, was approaching the scene of the fighting at about the same time.
Crazy Horse had been swimming in the river with his friend Yellow Nose when they heard shots. Moments later, horseless, he met Red Feather bridling his pony. “Take any horse,” said Red Feather as he prepared to dash off, but Crazy Horse waited for his own mount. Red Feather didn’t see him again until 10 or 15 minutes later, when the Indians had gathered in force near the woods where the soldiers had taken refuge.
It was probably during those minutes that Crazy Horse had prepared himself for war. In the emergency of the moment many men grabbed their weapons and ran toward the shooting, but not all. War was too dangerous to treat casually; a man wanted to be properly dressed and painted before charging the enemy. Without his medicine and time for a prayer or song, he would be weak. A 17-year-old Oglala named Standing Bear reported that after the first warnings Crazy Horse had called on a wicasa wakan (medicine man) to invoke the spirits and then took so much time over his preparations “that many of his warriors became impatient.”
Ten young men who had sworn to follow Crazy Horse “anywhere in battle” were standing nearby. He dusted himself and his companions with a fistful of dry earth gathered up from a hill left by a mole or gopher, a young Oglala named Spider would recall. Into his hair Crazy Horse wove some long stems of grass, according to Spider. Then he opened the medicine bag he carried about his neck, took from it a pinch of stuff “and burned it as a sacrifice upon a fire of buffalo chips which another warrior had prepared.” The wisp of smoke, he believed, carried his prayer to the heavens. (Others reported that Crazy Horse painted his face with hail spots and dusted his horse with the dry earth.) Now, according to Spider and Standing Bear, he was ready to fight.
By the time Crazy Horse caught up with his cousin Kicking Bear and Red Feather, it was hard to see the soldiers in the woods, but there was a lot of shooting; bullets clattered through tree limbs and sent leaves fluttering to the ground. Several Indians had already been killed, and others were wounded. There was shouting and singing; some women who had stayed behind were calling out the high-pitched, ululating cry called the tremolo. Iron Hawk, a leading man of Crazy Horse’s band of Oglala, said his aunt was urging on the arriving warriors with a song:
"Brothers-in-law, now your friends have come.
Take courage.
Would you see me taken captive?"
At just this moment someone near the timber cried out, “Crazy Horse is coming!” From the Indians circling around behind the soldiers came the charge word—“Hokahey!” Many Indians near the woods said that Crazy Horse repeatedly raced his pony past the soldiers, drawing their fire - an act of daring sometimes called a brave run. Red Feather remembered that “some Indian shouted, ‘Give way; let the soldiers out. We can’t get at them in there.’ Soon the soldiers came out and tried to go to the river.” As they bolted out of the woods, Crazy Horse called to the men near him: “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!”
Crazy Horse and all the rest now raced their horses directly into the soldiers. “Right among them we rode,” said Thunder Bear, “shooting them down as in a buffalo drive.” Horses were shot and soldiers tumbled to the ground; a few managed to pull up behind friends, but on foot most were quickly killed. “All mixed up,” said the Cheyenne Two Moons of the melee. “Sioux, then soldiers, then more Sioux, and all shooting.” Flying Hawk, an Oglala, said it was hard to know exactly what was happening: “The dust was thick and we could hardly see. We got right among the soldiers and killed a lot with our bows and arrows and tomahawks. Crazy Horse was ahead of all, and he killed a lot of them with his war club.”
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