Little Big Man

I haven’t mentioned my own wounds, though I had received a couple. I had been struck in the left shoulder by a ball from a muzzle-loader, I reckon, for it had enormous power behind it, lifting me right off the prone position, reversing my head with my boots, so my spine whomped onto the ground and I couldn’t breathe for a minute. But I returned to place directly and got the Indian who done it, for he seen me go over and confidently exposed himself while reloading and nobody else was left to fire at him for thirty yards on either side of me. I give him one in the breastbone and let it go at that, having to conserve ammunition; down he went, and his pals pulled him back into the grass to die or recover, I would never know.

They done the same with all their casualties, whereas ours lay around us, and the dead horses, and owing to the heat the latter was ready to ripen soon, the laid-open flesh already growing dark, and there was even more flies on that hill than Indians, for commotion don’t touch that miserable little beast. I had a few at my bleeding shoulder, feeling their tiny feet where I still could sense no pain. I had also been scored across the cheek by an arrow, at an angle so that the blood trickled into the corner of my mouth, from which salty taste I discovered it in the first place.

But that hangover, now, that was altogether gone, along with the depreciating effect of no sleep for two days: nothing like a massacre to clear your head. I don’t believe my sight was ever keener, before nor since. Too bad there was nothing to use it on but savage enemies and sage, since I figured my seeing would soon end along with everything else. There couldn’t have been over thirty-forty of us left. I don’t know how long we had fought so far; sometimes it seemed like a whole lifetime and at others as brief as a sneeze since that gallop down Medicine Tail Coulee and then up onto the ridge.

I was conscious of somebody falling nearby and turned and seen it was Lieutenant Cooke, his magnificent whiskers a-swimming in gore; had been crawling along the line and got up too high for a second, his last. Then Custer come along, erect no more but his belly scraping the gravel. There was blood on him, too, splattered from someone else, I believe, for he was not yet wounded.

“Cooke,” he says, and nudged the adjutant’s lifeless form. “Cooke, take an order for Benteen.” And then spitting the dust and stones out of his mouth, he says, “Cooke, write this down: ‘Come quickly, and the day is ours.’… Have you got that, Cooke?”

“He’s dead, General,” I says.

“Get the name of the man who said that, Cooke,” Custer snapped, his eyes red-veined and not looking either at me or the adjutant but towards the head of my fallen pony.

I don’t know, I guess I felt sorry for him then, so I took up the role of Cooke and he never detected the difference.

I says: “Yes sir, I’ll take care of it.” And Custer mumbled some and rolled over on his back, his hands behind his neck, and looked into the sky and smiled as if at secret knowledge. Another of them great arrow-masses vaulted overhead, catching sunlight on the ground edges of their iron points, and coming down like sleet through his field of vision.

He never wavered—and as it happened, these was doing less damage now, for there wasn’t many targets left to hit—but says in an easy tone of voice, like a genial scholar:

“Taking him as we find him, at peace or at war”—them arrows come swooshing down to stick upright all over dead men and horses—“at home or abroad,” Custer goes amiably on, “waiving all prejudices, and laying aside all partiality, we will discover in the Indian a subject for thoughtful study and investigation.”

I took time to discourage about fifty savages from advancing for a minute or two; I was fast running out of shells, for as our number dwindled I fired more frequently in compensation. And while I was so doing, Custer lay a-chattering away to himself.

As I reloaded, I heard him say: “It is to be regretted that the character of the Indian as described in Cooper’s interesting novels is not the true one. Stripped of the beautiful romance with which we have been so long willing to envelop him, transferred from the inviting pages of the novelist to the localities where we are compelled to meet him, the Indian forfeits his claim to the appellation of the noble red man.”

A rift opened up above him, and he smiled at the blue sky there revealed, lecturing at it with a dirty finger.

“We see him as he is, and, so far as all knowledge goes, as he ever has been, a savage in every sense of the word.”

Well, he had an altogether appropriate subject, you could not deny him that, and his discourse was being embellished by the gunfire and howling of five thousand individuals of the very race; and I thought I could hear the devilish screeching of the women from the quarter nearest the river, and knowed what they was up to: clubbing the last sparks of life from our boys who lay wounded there, and mutilating all.