Little Big Man (59 page)

A day or so later the rest of us moved forty mile up the Yellowstone to the mouth of the Tongue River. I got myself an Indian pony with a pad saddle and a rawhide halter from Bloody Knife, who had a few extra animals. As I recall the transaction, it cost me two or three canteenfuls of the sutler’s whiskey, not the worst deal, but then that pony had seen better days and wasn’t worth a whole lot more. He was a buckskin, right skinny and had a couple saddle
sores, which I treated with an old Cheyenne remedy of boiled tobacco, bitter grass, animal fat, and salt.

My last memory of the Powder River encampment is of the band, on a nearby bluff, playing for our march out. Naturally, their selection was “Garry Owen,” and it brung to my mind certain images of eight year before. I did not of course know that as the blare receded into the distance, it represented the fading out of Custer’s famous luck as well.

I was riding at the rear, with the pack mules that had now replaced the wagons as supply train, and on ahead stretched the mighty blue column.

CHAPTER
26
Trailing the Hostiles

AT THE MOUTH OF THE TONGUE
we found an abandoned Sioux village of the winter before, and the troopers poked about in it for trash, broken lodgepoles and the like, that they could use for campfires. Lavender found an old beat-up pair of discarded moccasins that he said he had known the owner thereof, recognizing the beading. I don’t know if he did or not, for he was getting gloomier as we proceeded westward and it may have affected his judgment.

A little later he located a burial scaffold raised on poles painted black and red, the body still upon it in its funeral wrappings along with the other truck the Indians include with the deceased so he won’t be naked and helpless on the Other Side: bow, moccasins, and suchlike; and as I come up, Lavender was a-standing there, one side of his hatbrim blown up against the crown by the persistent wind, for it was upon a barren bluff, and astaring at the platform with his mouth gone slack.

Then up come some of the cavalrymen and tore down the scaffold for fuel and they took the moccasins and bow as souvenirs and left the body rest upon the bare ground. While this was going on, Lavender just stood to the side, and then he says to me: “I’m a-going fishing.” That’s what I mean by his getting queer.

But the next moment Custer himself appeared upon his prancing mare with three white feet, what was called “Vic,” and he looks down upon the corpse and says to Lavender: “Uncover it.” Which my friend then did, upwrapping the skins, and inside was a dead Sioux brave all right, who had been dead for a while, no doubt about that, but you could still see a big wound in his shoulder.

Custer says: “Dispose of it.” Lavender lifted it into his arms and carried it like you would a small living person, a child or a girl,
except it was stiff and being withered never weighed much. Down to the bank of the Yellowstone he went and pitched it into the water.

I figured the kind of person Custer was, he would not recognize me though we had the conversation recently, but I was wrong. He says: “Hello, teamster,” and I touched my hat to him, instinctively respectful. I wouldn’t have done it if I had thought about it, but the point is that when you were around Custer for a while, even if you hated his guts, you had to acknowledge that authority came natural to him.

Next a soldier reported to the General that they had found the remains of a white man in the ashes of an old fire down in the campsite, so he spurred off on Vic, and as I was afoot, by the time I got there they had uncovered a skull and most of a skeleton, though the bones was all jumbled together, belonging apparently to a late member of the U.S. Cavalry, which could be told from the device upon a couple uniform buttons also in the same fire, and thereabout was some big stones and charred wood clubs with which he had been obviously beat to death. I saw the Ree scouts telling this to Custer in the signs.

The General dismounted and walked to the pile of bones. A lot of troopers gathered around, and some said the poor devil must have been the man they lost in ’73 in this area. It threw a hush over the soldiers, who had just lately been grousing about being sent on a wild-goose chase, for they didn’t share the melancholy I had seen in Lavender and Bloody Knife. Not one Sioux nor Cheyenne had yet been seen in the flesh, and this campsite was half a year old.

But I’ll swear this incident had its effect on Custer. I watched him as he looked at them bones. In the poor light of the tent I hadn’t seen how old he had become since the Washita. He was only thirty-seven years of age, yet you could have took him for ten more. He had not shaved on this campaign, and his face was covered with a considerable stubble, his mustache and eyebrows ragged. He took off his gray hat, in respect for the dead, and that short haircut was amazingly rough-clipped for a man of his usual natty habits. The lines running from the nose to his mouth was deep as coulees, and he had not yet had time to wash up, so a lot of trail dust lay upon him.

As to me, it was now that for the first time I reflected that I might not want the Indians whipped, but neither was it my wish that these six hundred white men lost their lives, nor the Ree or Lavender, of
course. It gets real complicated when you set out to monkey with mortality. If I tipped off the Indians, they might ambush Custer. If I did not, he would slaughter them.

I was watching the detail gather together the dead soldier’s bones when Bloody Knife and another sloppy Ree called Stab come along and addressed me in the signs.

“Your friend, the Black White Man,” says Bloody Knife, “threw the Lakota body into the river.”

“Now,” says Stab, “he is fishing in the same place.”

“We think,” Bloody Knife signals, “that he is using the corpse for bait.”

The only thing you can do with an Indian in such a mood is what I says then: “I have heard you.” They went off.

“You know what them Ree look like?” asks a voice at my shoulder. “Darky washerwomen.”

I turned and seen a sergeant who looked familiar, I didn’t at first know why.

He says: “Say, I could swear I seen you before. Did you ever serve with the cavalry?”

I assured him I never, and then I recalled the man. He was that corporal what found me just after I changed into Army clothes in a bush at the Washita, and took me in to the village where Custer bawled me out for having my coat unbuttoned. He had been promoted since, and had some gray in his hair and put on a pound or two around his gut, but was the same person. He had saved my life, and you don’t generally forget that.

Memory of the incident naturally made me feel friendly to him, so I stuck out my hand and give my name, and he says his name was Botts.

“Well, Botts,” I asks, “do you think we’ll get a fight soon?”

He was smoking a short black pipe, which had quite a filthy odor even in that Montana wind. He puffs out some smoke, and says: “I reckon not. I think they’ll run if they can, like the Cheyenne did at the Washita. Of course, nobody yet knows where they are at. Reno is out looking now, and Hard Ass is burning that Terry never sent
him
. He is afraid Reno will find and whip them afore he gets a chance, but I tell you he don’t have to worry over that. Reno never has fought Indians, and he ain’t got no stomach for doing it now. The only fighting he likes is between himself and a bottle. Hard Ass,
on the other hand, will light into anything he finds with a red skin, be it a bunch of old squaws, so as to clear himself with Grant.”

“I heard he might go for President himself,” says I.

“Is that so?” Sergeant Botts give a horselaugh. “Well, he’d get two votes for sure: his own and Miz Custer’s. Oh, and of course his brother Tom’s—there’s another bastard. You seen that specimen? Wild Bill Hickok put a head on him once down in Kansas and Tom pulled in his horns. And old Rain in the Face, when he was arrested a couple year ago for murdering three white men, he blamed Tom Custer for it and swore he would one day cut out Tom’s heart and eat it. Tom’s been pissing his pants ever since that Indian escaped.”

You can see what a high opinion members of the Seventh Cavalry still had of one another. The only officers for which Botts had any use was Captain Benteen, who I remembered from the Washita, and Captain Keogh, a mustachioed Irishman; and even in the case of the latter, Botts never cared for the Catholic religion, he let on, and in addition Keogh was also something of a drunk, although he was naturally brave rather than drinking to get his courage up as with Major Reno.

I don’t know where Botts got off condemning everyone else for boozing, for during my association with him he was himself invariably hitting a canteen which he had the sutler keep filled with rotgut. On the other hand, one of the main reasons he hated Custer was the General didn’t drink nor smoke. He detested the whole Custer tribe and says the real menace on this campaign was getting surrounded by Custers rather than Indians, for in addition to the General and Tom, and that younger brother Boston and the nephew Armstrong Reed, Lieutenant Calhoun was married to the Custer sister.

Next I reckon Botts would have started talking abusively of Mrs. Custer herself, but I could not stand for that, whether or not he had once saved my life. That lady was pretty as an angel.

Most soldiers shared Botts’s opinions, I found. Now they might have been right to feel such, but you take them Indians we was on our way to fight: if they had not venerated Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and Gall, these individuals would not have been their chiefs. It never made no sense to redskins to be led by men they hated or contemned. That seems to be an exclusive white trick, and what it amounted to here was that the Seventh Cavalry had two formidable enemies at the Little Bighorn: the entire Sioux nation and—the Seventh Cavalry.

A couple days after our arrival at the Tongue, scouts come in from Reno’s detachment which had reached the mouth of Rosebud Creek. He had found the Indians—or at least their tracks. A great trail half a mile wide, marked with the scratching of thousands of lodgepoles drug behind the ponies, led upstream in the Rosebud valley. So we all set out forthwith to join him where that creek emptied into the Yellowstone, the Seventh going by land and General Terry and his staff riding upon the
Far West
. Colonel Gibbon with his force was already in that area, on the Yellowstone’s north bank.

It will help if you remember that the Yellowstone in this region flows southwest to northeast, and them tributary streams enter it from the south and are roughly parallel to one another. Proceeding westward, first comes the Powder, where I joined the campaign; then the Tongue, where we found the dead Sioux and the soldier’s skeleton; next the Rosebud, where Reno was now waiting; and finally the Bighorn. Twenty-five or thirty mile above the mouth of the last-named is the forks, the eastward branch of which is the Little Bighorn.

Soon after everybody had collected at the mouth of the Rosebud, the leading officers, Terry, Custer, Gibbon, and their staffs, held a council on board the
Far West
, the results of which was circulated throughout the enlisted men on the bank before it was even over, for soldiers, like Indians, have their own mysterious means of getting news. I heard it from Botts.

“Here’s the plan,” he says. “The Seventh, under Custer, will go up the Rosebud to its headwaters and light into the Indians if they are there. If not, then we’ll cross over to the Little Bighorn valley and come down it. Meanwhile, Terry and Gibbon will be coming upriver. If the Indians are there, they’ll be caught between the two commands.

“But if I know Hard Ass, he won’t wait for the others. With that infantry, it’ll take them longer than us, and I’ll owe you a drink if we don’t have the Sioux whipped by time they show up.”

That reminded him of his beloved canteen, and he took a shot from it, I refusing his proffer. “Maybe,” he says, wiping his lips,
“you was right, and Hard Ass
will
be President. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Sioux had run off into the mountains. I never knew an Indin who had the stomach for a real fight. Down on the Washita …”

The point is that he wasn’t alone in this idea. The Army still believed the Indians would run. What none of us knowed at this time was that while we was sitting there on the Tongue River, these very Sioux and Cheyenne had given General Crook’s command a bad beating on the upper Rosebud. But armies then didn’t have radios nor telegraphs, and we never knowed where Crook was located nor he us, though relatively close by, and he soon retired to the south.

Some say it was from the council on that boat that Custer returned in a depressed state of mind so different from his usual assurance. But I had seen the change in him when he viewed the skeleton of the soldier tortured by the Sioux. However, as the years have gone by, I have since come to believe the alteration commenced further back—when he cut his childish curls, maybe, before starting out from Fort Lincoln. He could hardly be the Boy General any more. We all know the type of man who hasn’t no middle life; from a boyhood continued too long, he falls directly into old age, and it is pathetic.

There was a suggestion of that in Son of the Morning Star, so long as you understand he wasn’t getting exactly humble yet. He refused an offer of Gibbon’s cavalry battalion as reinforcement and also spurned them Gatling guns. And in this regard, as in few others, he got the support of Botts, for the sergeant like most soldiers tended to close ranks when the regimental pride was at stake.

“The Seventh don’t need no help,” Botts says. “I’ll stand by Hard Ass on that matter.”

So there at the Rosebud mouth we commenced to ready for the move upstream, and Gibbon’s command marched off for the Bighorn, though the steamboat, which would haul the ranking officers, lingered awhile so the Seventh could be reviewed in parade. This was around noontime on that June day, a cold wind blowing from the north as we rode through the valley full of sagebrush, past black-bearded Terry and the others on the knoll, with all the buglers massed nearby a-playing the march while the mounts pranced and guidons fluttered.