Eating Crow 3

 
             ‘There are three kinds of men: The ones that learn by reading. The few
              who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric
              fence.’
                                                                                                   Will Rogers

 
It was a clear and sunny morning, like it had been. The sunrise on June 25, 1876, brought reports of a massive pony herd and Indian encampment in the distance, and news that Custer’s own trail had been discovered. He didn’t know that the group that had found his tracks was leaving, and hadn’t alerted the village. Custer had planned to wait another day before attacking, but his first priority was to prevent a scattered southern escape by any of the tribes, and he decided to carry out an assault on the south end of their camp without further delay. His Crow scouts warned him about the size of the settlement.
“General, I have been with these Indians for 30 years, and this is the largest village I have ever heard of.” Said Mitch Bouyer.
Custer’s field strategy had soared into the psychological. His initial objective was the capture of noncombatant women, children, elderly and disabled, to serve as hostages and human shields. He had described the tactics in his book, My Life on the Plains, published just two years before the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

   ‘Indians contemplating a battle, either offensive or defensive, are
    always anxious to have their women and children removed from all
    danger…For this reason I decided to locate our camp as close as
    convenient to the village, knowing that the close proximity of their
    women and children, and their necessary exposure in case of conflict,
    would operate as a powerful argument in favor of peace, when the
    question of peace or war came to be discussed… ride into the camp
    and secure noncombatant hostages and force the warriors to
    surrender… would be obliged to surrender, because if they started to
    fight, they would be shooting their own families.’

Custer prepared to attack in full daylight, and divided his regiment into three battalions. Major Marcus Reno’s companies would be sent west across the Little Bighorn River to launch a direct northern attack on the southern end of the encampment. Captain Frederick Benteen was instructed to head northwest to intercept any attempted escape, and force fleeing noncombatants up the bluffs above the river. Custer would make a wide detour to the east, and capture the women and children at the top. They left at noon.
Major Reno crossed the Little Bighorn at the mouth of what is today Reno Creek around 3:00 pm. He began his charge northwest, without any accurate knowledge of the village's size, location, or its disposition to stand and fight.
The thick bramble of trees along the southern banks of the Little Bighorn not only screened his men’s rapid advance across the wide meadow, they blocked any view of the Indian encampment they were racing toward. The scene around the river bend almost stopped him dead in his tracks. Neither was far off. The river always runs one way, and it runs to something bigger.
Five hundred yards short of the village, Reno ordered his men to halt and dismount, and deploy in a skirmish line. Every fourth rider held the horses for the others to assume firing positions at ten-yard intervals, officers to their rear and the troopers holding the horses behind the officers. This formation reduced Reno's firepower by twenty-five percent. The soldiers began firing into the camp, killing several wives and children of the Sioux leader, Chief Gall.
More than five hundred mounted Lakota and Cheyenne warriors streamed out en masse to meet the attack, riding hard against Reno's exposed left and rear flanks, forcing the entire regiment to take hasty cover in the trees along the bend in the river. The very earth seemed to grow Indians. Reno’s assessment that they were present ‘in force and not running away,’ was not even close. This is a good day to die. Follow me!… I give you these because they have no ears.
The Indians set fire to the brush. Reno's scout, Bloody Knife, sitting on his horse next to him, was shot in the head. His blood and brains splattered the side of Reno's face.
“All those who wish to make their escape.” Said Reno. “Follow me.” He led a disorderly rout across the river toward the cliffs on the other side, immediately disrupted by Cheyenne attacks at close quarters. Reno’s bloody retreat, up and onto the same bluffs that Custer had planned for Indian women and children, cost him a quarter of his command. Captain Benteen’s column, meanwhile, had been summoned by Custer’s bugler with a handwritten message. Come on...big village… be quick...bring ammunition. But it came as he arrived from the south to encounter Reno’s badly shaken and wounded troops, atop the bluffs now known as Reno Hill, just in time to save them from annihilation.
Rather than continuing on toward Custer’s summons, and despite hearing heavy gunfire from the north, Benteen’s regiment helped Reno’s troopers dig rifle pits with knives, eating utensils, mess plates, pans, and whatever other implements they had.
Around 5:00 pm, Capt. Thomas Weir and Company D moved out against orders to make contact with Custer. They advanced a mile, to a distant view of mounted Native warriors shooting at objects on the ground. They returned to their comrades entrenched on the bluffs, to be pinned down for another day, until General Terry's brought relief on June 27. And news.
Robyn and I read the names on the tall white obelisk. There were no Indian names. On the near slope opposite was a ‘Danger’ sign with a crude embossed diamond-back rattlesnake, and a concentration of stone markers, scattered like a handful of corn kernels on a dirt floor. One had a badge-shaped black patch and a spate of periods. G.A.Custer BVT. Maj. Gen. Lt. Col. 7th Cav. Fell Here June 25 1876.
What happened to Custer on the ridge that day remains in the air among the markers, since none of the 208 men, in the five companies under his immediate command, survived the battle.
We know he rode north in a wide circular detour, hidden from the encampment by the cliffs, planning to sandwich and ‘seize women and children’ fleeing to the bluffs between his attacking troopers and Reno's command, in a ‘hammer and anvil’ maneuver.
He came to a crossing which provided ‘access to the women and children fugitives,’ within ‘striking distance of the refugees,’ before Indian sharpshooters firing from the brush along the west bank, and hundreds of warriors massing around the bluffs, repulsed and forced him back to Custer Ridge. If your horse doesn’t want to go there, neither should you.
The young man who helped decoy William Fetterman to his death a decade earlier led the surprise charge that Custer had thought uniquely belonged to him. Whichever way your luck is running, it’s bound to change. The sun doesn’t shine on the same dog’s tail all the time.
The Indians fielded over 3,500 warriors that day, and Crazy Horse’s charge delivered a swarming Lakota and Cheyenne cluster to Custer, completely overwhelming the iron-butted, hard-assed, ringleted boy general glory hunter, and his calvarymen. No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that’s in the right and
keeps on a-comin’.                                        
“Hurrah boys, we've got them!” Said Custer. “We'll finish them up and then go home to our station.” Our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.
Myles Keogh's men fought and died where they stood but pandemonium broke down the command structure everywhere else. Many orders were given, but few obeyed. Soldiers threw down their weapons, dismounted, held or hobbled their horses, or turned them loose. After that the fight did not last long enough to light a pipe.
About forty men made a desperate stand around Custer on Last Stand Hill, delivering volley fire. The space was too small to secure a defensive position, too small to accommodate the wounded, the dying, and the dead. With no doubts about prospects for survival, surviving troopers put up their most dogged defence, shooting their remaining horses to use as breastworks for a final stand. When your horse dies, get off. There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man. They shot the great majority of the Indian casualties on Custer Hill, far more here than anywhere else. At the end they shot each other, and themselves.
“We circled all around them.” The warrior Two Moons said. “Swirling like water round a stone.”
Indian warriors rode down the fleeing troopers with lances, coup sticks, and quirts. Almost thirty troopers ended up in a deep ravine three hundred yards away, their deaths the battle's final actions. Deep Ravine Trail… Stay on gravel trail… No smoking… Violators will be fined…Steep grades/Uneven surfaces… Rattlesnakes. It was, a running fight, a panicked rout, a buffalo run. Indian women ran up from the village, waving blankets to scare off the soldiers' horses, and used stone mallets, ten pounds of round cobble on a rawhide handle, to finish off the wounded.
Crazy Horse’s warriors annihilated every man in Custer's command in less than one-half hour, as long as it takes a hungry man to eat a meal. The only survivors were a Crow scout, Curley, and Captain Keogh's horse, Comanche. A Michigan yell and a Hokey Hey.



               'One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk.'
                                                           Tashunka Inyanke (Crazy Horse)