Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (60 page)

Whether they saw each other or not, it was a dramatic instant, each side wondering what to do next. Custer was tempted to smash
the Indians to bits, to ride into their ambush deliberately and show them what cavalry fire power could do—but he couldn’t do it with just two men, nor even with the twenty Tom Custer had in nearby reserve. He would have to wait for the rest of the troopers to catch up; meanwhile he watched, fascinated, as the decoys pulled out their bag of tricks. It was a test of nerves, will, and skill.

But we will never know how it might have come out, for among the warriors in the trees were a few Cheyennes, survivors of Black Kettle’s camp on the Washita. They recognized Custer—“Long Hair,” as they called him—the hated Custer who had killed their wives and children and brothers, then slaughtered their ponies in November 1868; as soon as they saw him the Cheyennes charged, the other warriors quickly joining them. Whatever chance the ambush had had, it was gone now.

Custer took one look at the oncoming mass of three hundred warriors, all yelling, screaming, firing arrows before them, and he turned and ran. His thoroughbred, called Dandy, outsped the pintos and he reunited with Tom’s twenty-man detachment. Leaping to the ground and throwing Dandy’s reins to a horse holder, Custer ordered Tom to dismount his troopers and throw them forward into a skirmish line. The grass was tall and they could hide in it.

The Indians came on strong, hoping to get at Custer and his men before they could take up a defensive position. “As the Sioux came dashing forward,” Custer wrote in his report, “expecting to ride down the squadron, a line of dismounted cavalrymen rose from the grass and delivered almost in the faces of the warriors a volley of carbine bullets which broke and scattered their ranks in all directions, and sent more than one Sioux reeling from his saddle.”
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Crazy Horse helped hold the Indians back after that rout and especially after the remainder of Custer’s eighty-five men joined him and completed the defensive perimeter, their backs to the Yellowstone. But neither Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, nor anyone else could do anything to stop the Cheyennes, so hot were they to fight Custer. So while the Sioux circled around cautiously, firing an occasional arrow or bullet at the whites, the Cheyennes rode back and forth between the lines, firing wildly.

Custer called to Bloody Knife, his Rhee scout and increasingly a favorite of his, and together they crawled to a position from which they might get a shot. Lying in the grass, they heard a pony’s hoofs galloping toward the soldiers’ line. The daring Cheyenne warrior fired, then dashed away.

“If he does that again,” Custer said to Bloody Knife, “let’s see who’s the best shot!”

Again the Cheyenne came on. Both Custer and Bloody Knife rose up and fired simultaneously. The Indian hit the ground with a thud. Each man claimed credit for the lucky shot; Bloody Knife was a saucy fellow with a sharp tongue who delighted in twitting the whites, and he said Custer could not hit a tent from the inside. Custer returned the compliment. Later, in his report, Custer gave the credit to Bloody Knife.
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Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the other Sioux leaders knew that they were never going to get anywhere this way, with the warriors dashing out one by one only to get picked off. They decided to set fire to the grass and smoke Custer out, but the wind died, the fire petered out, and nothing came of it. By this time a confident Custer’s only worry was that he would run out of ammunition, and in any event he was hardly the soldier to stand and receive an attack when he had an opportunity to take the offensive. So he ordered his men to mount up, then led them on a charge. The Indians, naturally, broke and ran in the face of the awesome fire power of a compact mass of well-armed cavalrymen. Custer called them “cowardly” for doing so, an astonishing judgment but one that was by now firmly established in his mind. He once again concluded that where Indians are concerned, attack, attack, and then attack again—they will always break and run. Custer’s losses were three men killed, the Indians’ about the same.
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Four days later, on August 8, Bloody Knife discovered the trail of a large village. Crazy Horse and the other warriors had gathered together their people and were making their way west, moving upstream along the Yellowstone. They were not running away or retreating, merely following their habitual routine. It is doubtful that they even knew Custer was following; they probably felt that, as had happened the previous summer, the expedition would turn around and go back once it had been challenged.

But Custer did follow their trail, as eagerly as he had followed Black Kettle’s warriors back to camp in 1868. With four squadrons of the 7th Cavalry, leaving all tents and wagons behind, he marched through the night of August 8, making thirty miles. He hoped to stumble onto a sleeping village, but had no luck. After a brief halt he took up the pursuit again the following day, reaching the mouth of the Bighorn River as darkness fell. This was about as far west as the Sioux usually went—beyond was Crow territory—and the Indians had crossed to the south bank of the Yellowstone. Custer tried
to follow, but the swift current was too much for the white man’s horses, and after a full day of effort, with Custer putting his driving energy, his West Point engineering lessons, and the labor of one hundred men into it, they still could not get across. The hostiles, meanwhile, had discovered Custer’s presence. They made camp on the south bank, intending to attack the next morning.

At dawn, August 11, the Indians appeared on the bluffs on the south bank and began firing at Custer’s camp a few hundred yards across the river. Indian women and children, Black Shawl and They-Are-Afraid-of-Her among them, appeared on the bluffs too. The women wanted to watch Long Hair get rubbed out. Crazy Horse and a couple of hundred warriors, meanwhile, swam the river above and below Custer’s position—the feat that had stymied Custer and the cavalry, fording the Yellowstone, was no problem to the Indians— and they began to close in. Sharpshooting across the river continued, with each side taking casualties.

The Indians planned to pin down Custer and overwhelm him with arrow and bullet fire, but most of the warriors who had guns were on the south bank and Custer’s men had dug in, so the Indians were being careful. Custer noticed them getting closer to his lines and decided that the time had come for him to charge the enemy on his side of the river. If he could get them on the run, he knew the day would be his, but he had to move fast to disrupt their plans. He rode to the front and started giving orders for the men to mount up and prepare to charge. An Indian bullet picked off his horse (not Dandy), but he calmly took another and remounted.
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Tom Rosser was there, and he later told Libbie about it. “The time I would rather have had a picture of George was on the Yellowstone Campaign, when he had a horse shot under him. As the orders were issued and he was making a charge George sat on his horse out in advance, calmly looking the Indians over, full of suppressed excitement, but also with calculating judgment and strength of purpose in his face.” In a final tribute to Custer, Rosser, who had fought under Robert E. Lee, declared, “I thought him then one of the finest specimens of a soldier I had ever seen.”
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Custer ordered the band to strike up “Garry Owen” and away they went. The charge confounded the hostiles, who fled in every direction. Custer chased them for nine miles but came up empty-handed; the warriors recrossed the Yellowstone and that afternoon the big Indian village moved up the Bighorn River, heading south. Custer estimated that he had faced between eight hundred and one thousand warriors, about triple the number that were actually there, and
claimed forty killed, which was a grossly inflated figure. His own losses were four killed and four wounded. “The Indians were made up of different bands of Sioux,” he reported, “principally Uncpapas [
sic
]
,
the whole under command of ‘Sitting Bull,’ who participated in the fight, and who for once has been taught a lesson he will not soon forget.”
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After this skirmish the two sides disengaged. Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and their Indians went back to the Powder River country, where they spent a quiet fall and winter. Custer marched overland to the Musselshell River, down that stream to its junction with the Missouri, and then down the Missouri to Fort Abraham Lincoln. There in the fall of 1873 Libbie joined him and they moved into their recently completed home, a handsome frame house built especially for the commanding officer at the fort (Custer), the first home of their own the Custers had occupied.

Both sides were satisfied with the summer’s work. The Indians figured they had turned Custer and the advancing whites back, a conclusion reinforced by the fact that for the next two years there were no Army expeditions into the Yellowstone country. (Actually, the reason for the pause in building of the Northern Pacific was the Panic of 1873, which had thrown the stock market into turmoil and led to a bankruptcy of the railroad. Until it was reorganized and refunded, there would be no more railroad building.) Custer figured that he had driven the Indians out of the path of the railroad and taught them a lesson they would not soon forget. Both Custer and Crazy Horse, in short, still had much to learn about each other.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Panic of 1873 and the Black Hills Expedition of 1874

“More beautiful wild country could not be imagined.”

William Ludlow, chief engineer of the expedition

“An Eden in the clouds—how shall I describe it! As well try to paint the flavor of a peach or the odor of a rose.”

Samuel Barrows, reporter for the New York
Tribune

“It is hardly possible to exaggerate in describing this flowery richness. Some said they would give a hundred dollars just to have their wives see the floral richness for even one Hour.”

Professor A. B. Donaldson, the expedition’s botanist

“One of the most beautiful spots on God’s green earth. No wonder the Indians regard this as the home of the Great Spirit and guard it with jealous care.”

Nathan Knappen, reporter for the Bismarck
Tribune

“In no private or public park have I ever seen such a profuse display of flowers. Every step of our march that day was amid flowers of the most exquisite color and perfume. … On some of the water courses almost every panful of earth produced gold. … The miners report that they found gold among the grass roots.”

George Armstrong Custer, writing from Crazy Horse’s birthplace at the foot of Bear Butte

America had never seen anything like it. There had been ups and downs in the economy before the Civil War, but the slumps were relatively short and comparatively mild. Besides, prewar America was
overwhelmingly rural and thus more or less immune to the crushing effects of an economic depression. By 1873 the country was more urbanized, more industrialized, and therefore more vulnerable. It was also unprepared for any bad economic news.

Since the war the stock market had been on what appeared to be a permanent boom. Railroad stocks led the way; speculation in the stock of the Kansas Pacific, the Union Pacific, the Northern Pacific, and other lines was unprecedented and unrestrained. Infant industries were becoming more mature and there was profitable speculation in their stock, too. Cities were growing, with young men coming in from American farms and from Europe to provide a cheap labor force for the new factories. Growth, prosperity, and progress went hand in hand and most Americans acted as if the boom would last forever.

Then, on September 18, 1873, the banking house of Jay Cooke failed. Other firms quickly followed, including the company of the father of George Bird Grinnell, which had been involved in the manipulation of huge amounts of stock. The crash “came on out of a clear sky,” Grinnell later wrote.
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‘Trusted officers of banks and corporations disappeared with the money of the institutions; the stock market promptly fell to pieces; prices dropped almost to nothing; and the Stock Exchange, to put a period to the ruin that seemed impending, closed its doors.”
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All of this confused and frightened the American people, who hardly understood what was happening to them. Their reaction is best summed up in the name they gave to this depression (which lasted from 1873 to 1877); they called it the “Panic of 1873.”