Little Big Man

However, we had reached the Wolf range by now, which really ain’t mountains but rather just bad country, steep hills and ravines and such between the Little Bighorn and Rosebud valleys, and went into camp in a coulee big enough to hide the whole regiment, where the idea was we could stay until the following morning, then cross the divide and at dawn strike the hostile camp which was expected to lie on the other side.

Now I had flopped upon the hard ground and tried to take a snooze, but never had no more success at it than most of the troopers. I wager to say that once again nobody slept during that halt: we was all too tired. The water thereby was so alkali the horses would not touch it; coffee made with such will take the skin off your tongue—which some of them recruits discovered there for the first time.

I don’t think Custer sat down, except upon his horse, at any time during that morning, nor took a bite of food. He wore buckskin pants with a long fringe down the leg, blue-gray shirt, gray hat, and boots that come to just below the knee. Around his waist was a canvas Army belt holding two holstered English Bulldog double-action pistols and a hunting knife in a beaded scabbard. The stubble on his cheeks was substantial now, for he had not shaved in ever so long; and being fair, it looked white. I mean because his face otherwise seemed so aged, them hitherto clear blue eyes being bloodshot from loss of sleep, with pouches beneath.

But he wasn’t slowing down none, and when word come in from the scouts that from a high point ahead they had spotted the Indian village fifteen mile upriver, he was washing the trail dust off his face from a bowl placed on a tripod. Quick he folded his collar back and leaped onto the bare back of Vic without even drying himself, for the air would do that as he rode: already in early morning you could feel it developing into a real scorcher. Off he went to alert the troop commanders, and within the hour we was on the trail again towards the pass across the divide.

The Crow and other scouts had stayed upon the butte from which they had made their observations, and when the column reached its vicinity, Lieutenant Varnum, the scout commander, come down and says: “General, our presence is known to the hostiles.”

“No,” says Custer. “No, it is not.” He spurs Vic into a trot up the slope.

Varnum goes after him, shouting: “Sir, we encountered six Sioux and gave chase, but they got away, riding towards the village.”

Soon the ground got so steep and rough we had to dismount and walk the rest of the way to the top of the butte, and Custer still outdistanced everybody else. Varnum looked utterly perplexed.

“He won’t believe there is a village,” he says.

On the summit was the Crow and Ree, Mitch Bouyer, most of the white scouts, and Lavender. The view to the northwest, down the Little Bighorn valley, must have been good were the air clear, but at this hour it was obscured by the midmorning summer haze you get in that country.

Nor had Custer brung his field glasses. The Crow, however, possessed an old battered brass telescope, and White Man Runs Him handed it to the General.

“Look for the smoke of their fires,” he says in Bouyer’s translation. “And the big horse herds on the benchland to the left of the river.”

Custer stares through the instrument for a minute. “I cannot see a thing,” he says.

Goes Ahead says: “Look for little worms. That is how ponies look at this distance, like maggots upon a buffalo hide that has not been fleshed.”

Custer gives the telescope back to White Man Runs Him. “No,” he says, “there is no village.”

Bouyer now speaks for himself, with an unhappy expression on his swart face: “General, there is more Sioux in that river bottom than I ever seen in thirty years out here. I swear it.”

“No,” says Custer, and walks briskly to where the orderly is holding his horse.

Back we went towards the column, and when still a half mile away, out rode Tom Custer and says to the General: “Armstrong, they have seen us!” A box of hardtack had fell off a mule, and when a detail of men went back the trail to fetch it, they found it being opened by a Sioux with his hatchet, had fired on him, but he escaped.

I don’t know if Custer then changed his mind about the village, but so long as his kin had reported it, I guess he at least believed there was hostiles in the neighborhood, so had the trumpeters call in the officers and told them to prepare to attack immediately since surprise was so longer possible and the Indians would have time to scatter if there was further delay.

The weary troopers mounted their tired horses again, and the Ree called Stab spit on some magic clay he carried and anointed the chests of his fellow tribesmen as a charm against misfortune, and shortly we moved out and across the divide.