Seize the Sky: Son of the Plains-Volume 2 (47 page)

The other, wailing and shrieking her grief to the heavens in an ancient, primitive dirge, a song of prayer and longing that went back beyond summers to the womb of time. A song that went back to a long winter gone.

Both women prayed to the same God; both mourned the same man. Suffering the same loss. That loss of love and a man who always smiled when times were darkest.

His passing, their greatest loss.

Now Yellow Hair belonged to the ages.

I
T
was a time of romance with a capital
R
. A time in our country when adventure and the mysterious lure of the West had captured the Republic’s attention.

At no other time could the Battle of the Little Bighorn have happened—a tragedy that struck during the very celebration of our nation’s centennial. No novelist could hope to dream up any better drama. Nor any deeper tragedy.

As my friend Will Henry said of the last stand, “Its story has been told in more wrong ways than any other adventure of the Western past.” Considering his deep appreciation of the native culture that found itself in conflict with an onrushing white migration, along with his lifelong dedication to historically portraying the tragic drama of that conflict played out during the Indian Wars, I think Will would approve of this telling of the story.

This novel is the first to deal with the Indian side of the Custer fight itself.

While there have been numerous historical novels dealing
with the Reno fight and hilltop seige, with details lifted from the testimony of white survivors, and though there have been some novels devoted to imagining what took place on Battle Ridge—this is the first novel to reconcile the latest in archeological data with the most cogent of “Custer movement” theories, coupling that empirical information with the testimony taken from the only survivors of the day.

The Sioux and the Cheyenne themselves.

For too long white historians and writers have ignored the overwhelming Indian testimony of what happened on Battle Ridge. Simply because they found that testimony at times contradictory! Yet those same battle enthusiasts neglect to apply the same standards to the testimony given by white survivors from Reno’s and Benteen’s battalions. Their accounts evidenced glaring conflicts—both immediately following the fight and years later during the Reno Inquiry.

I don’t find myself alone, therefore, in agreeing with Stanley Vestal (whom I quote at the beginning of this novel), when he called the plains warrior an astute and practiced observer of war. War was, after all, the very focus of his way of life. To listen to a warrior’s rendition of a battle is to see that fight through the eyes of a keen and objective observer, one who views his role in the conflict only through the lens of a very particular microscope: his entry into the fracas, his coups, his wounds.

By piecing together the many of these stories collected over the decades from veterans of that fight against the soldiers along the Greasy Grass River, I have constructed what I believe to be the most plausible rendition of that battle which left no white survivors. In addition to the testimony of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors used in this novel, I relied heavily on the latest archeological and historical research completed as recent as 1990—even while this novel is being prepared for the publisher. So by combining the best that historical research has offered with the results of that methodical combing of the battlefield during the recent research summers, and by painstakingly sifting through the Indian testimony—plotting it all on a
tabletop topographical map—I am confident that what I present here is a most plausible scenario to take much of what has been a mystery out of that hot afternoon on Battle Ridge.

Mystery and tragedy both marked George Armstrong Custer’s short life. Mystery and tragedy had been his life long companions even before the moment he led his five regiments away from Major Marcus Reno, marching into history and myth. Many questions and their unspoken answers have gone to the grave with Custer’s two hundred. Even more answers to the puzzling contradictions of his life have gone to the grave with his officers who survived the disaster at the Little Bighorn, but who remained silent out of some nineteenth century code of honor that would not allow them to utter the truth while Elizabeth Custer still lived.

Ironic that Libbie Custer outlived all but one of them!

Gentlemen they were, carrying to their graves their gloomy story of the outcome of Custer’s tragic affair in Indian Territory and how it led him to the banks of the Greasy Grass some seven years later. We amateur historians could not blame these men for their chivalrous silence. It was, after all, a time when soldiers gone off to war were permitted their dalliance with foreign women. A gentleman always kept quiet, for that Gilded Age was, after all, an era when the keeping of a mistress was widely accepted and generally practiced.

Custer had been sexually active as a young man in Monroe, Michigan, before marrying his Libbie.

Following the Civil War he was assigned leadership to clean out the nests of Confederates and hangers-on in Texas, 1865. It is generally believed Custer had a dalliance there with a daughter of the Old South.

Before coming to Fort Riley, Kansas, with Libbie the following year, Custer journeyed through St. Louis, where he shared another indiscretion with the wife of a fellow officer, one of Sheridan’s staff.

And following his court martial and one-year suspension from active duty, Custer returned to the plains in the fall of 1868—only to continue his practice of infidelity, this time
with a young Cheyenne woman taken prisoner at the defeat of Black Kettle’s village.
^*

Finally, during those years Custer was stationed in the northern plains at Fort Abraham Lincoln, he not only appears to have continued his extramarital dalliances, but in fact flaunted them before his wife. Time and again he tells her of his indiscretions and improprieties during his visits to New York without Libbie.

To better understand our culture’s continuing fascination with the man we must remember that Custer was a young hero who had captured the nation’s attention and fancy during a most dramatic time in our collective history: the Civil War. After remarkable yet tumultous years of service on the plains, he became the nation’s darling, a hero cut down at a particular and tragic moment in what had been a brilliant, meteoric career. Cut down in the company of two brothers and a nephew, a brother-in-law and his closest of friends: the Custer inner circle.

The entire family gone in one hot breath of red fury on that yellow hillside.

Perhaps the primary reason this battle remains so vividly etched for all time in the American psyche is that no white survivor lived to tell the story. Yet as dramatic as that may be, history has recorded other military tragedies of far greater magnitude and consequence: the British charge of their light cavalry during the Crimean War, when over six hundred rode hell-bent to their destruction into the fiery maw of enemy cannon; and, the three-hundred Spartans who sacrificed themselves at Thermopylae. Down through our history, there were other, many lesser-known battles in which no man survived.

Most of us in this closing decade of our 20th Century look back on 1876 as a time when
“the cavalry to the rescue!”
was the stirring watchword of not only the frontier … but a call exciting the pulse of Easterners as well. Still, to put that era in perspective, we must not fail to realize what exciting exhibits thrilled visitors to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia that same summer. Not only a device
that prepared a “ready-roll,” or tailor-made, cigarette, but Alexander Graham Bell unveiled for the world his improved telephone. On and on, one could list the electronic and scientific marvels that astounded the world that summer. Yet with all that magic accompanying our nation’s headlong rush into its second century, the citizens of the Republic nonetheless turned their eyes to their past, if not focusing their attention on the startling contradictions of their present.

All the more ironic, wasn’t it, that the most popular, well-attended exhibit at the Centennial Exposition proved to be one sponsored by the Central Pacific Railroad—an authentic reconstruction of an 1876 buffalo-hunters’ camp in the Colorado Rockies. The average citizen, east coast or west, trained his eye on the frontier West for glory and romance back then … every bit as much as we do to this day.

While the white man celebrated the Republic’s one-hundredth birthday back East during that fateful summer, the Indian celebrated his most stunning victory for but two days—then disbanded, never to gather again in such strength or numbers. Never to share between them such accord and harmony, such
medicine
, as they had experienced that hot afternoon in Montana Territory when they ably defended their way of life. What had been the brief high-water mark recorded on every band’s winter count, was for the white man an ugly, gaping, bloody interruption to the self-absorbed celebration back East—a terrible, annoying reminder to the white man of what he had to do before he would truly call this land his.

He had to recommit himself to subduing, if not crushing once and for all, the native cultures of the plains.

The Army of the West reaffirmed its dedication to doing just that only weeks after discovering the bloated, stinking carcasses of some two hundred twenty-five white soldiers on that yellow hillside. With a renewed fervor and blood-vengeance so strong that it echoed shrilly behind the chants of “Remember Custer! Remember the Seventh!”—the Army of the West hammered away relentlessly at the
now-divided and conquerable bands dispersing across the plains on the four winds.

Why such fury on the part of the Army? The destruction of Custer’s men at the Little Bighorn decided nothing. More men had been killed in other engagements. So, it was not simply that soldiers had been killed, even that there were no survivors. There were other instances of no white survivors on the Western frontier.

No, instead, what fascinated then and fascinates us still is that
he
was killed there on that hot afternoon.
He
alone conjures up specific, myth-loaded images in us all. Say
his
name aloud and our imaginations dance on cue—bobbing and weaving to the eerie scream of eagle wing-bone whistles and hand-held rawhide drums. Perhaps instead our imaginations march in formation to the rollicking but plaintive battle-cry of
his
favorite fighting song “Garry Owen.”

Because of those images, so many who hear the word
Custer
or the name of the place where he was killed will never be able to sort myth from reality. Over the years, this much-discussed battle has taken on truly Olympic proportions. The historic Custer who was a genuine hero coming out of the Civil War gave way to the frontier Custer who struggled hard in that Washita winter of 1868—1869 to redeem himself and his standing before both his superiors and the American public.

But on that hot Montana hillside reeking with death, Custer’s fate was sealed. Not that he would die by the hands of Cheyenne and Sioux—or even by the hand of his own brother—but that the frontier Custer was fated to become for all time the mythic Custer.

The man and the myth were to be caught up forever in a swirl of debate between those for whom Custer was a much-maligned, unsung demigod, and those for whom he was a strutting, arrogant, egotistical martinet.

In this novel I wanted only to have, in some way, the real Custer emerge—the man who was a little of all those things they say he is. More than anything, I wanted to make him seem a little more human than either plaster saint or devil incarnate—to show him as a man with the same hopes and
fears, dreams and regrets, chat we all know. Custer was, ultimately, a man who walked on stage at the most opportune moment, remaining for every curtain call.

Custer had feet of clay.

Like you, and like me.

In closing I want most to express my indebtedness to the primary sources used in writing my story of the Custer fight. After years of research done for this trilogy, from the reading of hundreds of books, articles and monographs written about the man and this battle, I have naturally come to some of my own conclusions. Do not curse the following for what they have contributed to this scenario of that bloody summer Sunday afternoon.

Both Dr. Thomas B. Marquis (in his
Keep the Last Bullet for Yourself
) and David Humphreys Miller (who wrote
Custer’s Fall: The Indian Side of the Story
) invested lifetimes interviewing the Indian participants of the battle. While some continue to ignore those accounts, I am indebted not only to Marquis and Miller, but to those warriors who chose to tell their stories in the truthful, objective manner described by no less a scholar of the plains Indian than Stanley Vestal (Walter S. Campbell) himself.

If a reader were to ask me to suggest one book that would discuss both the climate of the times and the battle itself—making sense of the startling complexities, I would have to suggest three: telling them to devour
Custer’s Luck
by Edgar I. Stewart; John S. Gray’s
Centennial Campaign—The Sioux War of 1876;
and,
Cavalier in Buckskin—George Armstrong Custer and the Western Military Frontier
by Robert M. Utley.

Yet Stewart published his work in 1955, and much of the search for the truth of that bloody afternoon has since continued. John Gray picked up the torch with his most thoughtful and dispassionate search, resulting in a book that was first published in the battle’s centennial year, 1976. The banner has since been hoisted by my esteemed friend and Western scholar, Robert M. Utley, who (besides writing very readable history) has, like Stewart and Gray, devoted his life to the quest of historic truth of that battle, using the finest of research methods, based on empirical
data, to arrive at his own cogent thesis on the movement of Custer’s troops and a scenario of the Custer fight.