Little Big Man

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.

Yet it was not a grand occasion when seen against the vasty bleakness of the country, as the forward troops mounted the benchland above the valley in a thin string of blue. I rode at the end of the column with the pack mules and after us come only a little rear guard. Custer had dropped off to say goodbye to Terry, leaning across his mare to shake hands with him and Gibbon, and just as I passed at the foot of where they was, I heard the latter say: “Now, don’t be too greedy, Custer. Leave some Indians for us.” This was spoken half in jest, I thought.

But Custer replied in sober face.

“Yes,” he says, “yes,” salutes, and gallops towards the head of his column, which already was dipping over the farthermost bluff. When I got to the high land, I looked back and seen them officers, small as flies, a-riding to where the Far West

was tethered to the shore small as a floating leaf.

Well sir, the pack train started giving trouble when we was hardly out of camp. I was, by the way, still in my peculiar situation as to job, but now had more or less established myself, so far as the others went, as belonging to the little team of civilian packers. Looking at the way the supplies was lashed to the animals, you would have thought a woman had tied them on. Four or five packs fell off before we got twenty minutes out of camp. Now when you realize these mules was carrying ammunition that the Seventh was supposed to use against the Sioux, as well as the rations for a fifteen-day campaign, why, it was a serious deficiency, so Custer sent back a lieutenant to get things in order and in addition to the civilians there was a detachment of troopers to help out, but were the truth known, that pack train was never worth a damn from the minute it started.

The Rosebud ain’t much of a waterway in quantity, being three or four foot wide and three inches deep throughout much of its length and even less in spots, but where we camped that evening was a deeper pool or two and some of the troopers went fishing in order to get a little change from the hardtack and bacon which was all that was provided in the way of food for the next two weeks. Hunting was not allowed from here on, for the discharge of a firearm can be heard great distances in wild country. But now that his favorite sport become so popular, Lavender of course abandoned its practice.

That’s another example of the strange style of that man, as I have mentioned, and he was not getting any more normal as we proceeded further towards the Sioux. I’ll tell you how he bedded down at night: we had left all tenting behind, traveling light as we was now, and the soldiers slept upon the ground, maybe scratching out little hollows for their hips. Luckily the weather stayed dry.