I expect you could say Olga had been another who died as a result of what Custer done at the Washita, but he was beyond my holding anything further against him, and anyway she had not been my woman for quite a time. Poor Swede girl: she had a strange life.
As to Gus, in afteryears I looked for him throughout the central plains, but there wasn’t no white men nor Indians who ever heard of Medicine Bird Creek, which must have been its Cheyenne name. So I could not get a line on him. But I should still today like to find my boy, and would pay a twenty-five-dollar gold piece to the person who can give me information on him.
And Little Horse gone too, never again to wear them beaded dresses and show his graceful ways.
“I guess it was Younger Bear who conked my head up on the ridge today,” I says.
“Yes,” says Old Lodge Skins. “Then threw a blanket over you and carried you across the river to my tepee. That was not easy to do, for our people went crazy with joy when the last soldier fell, and in the confusion, Indian was killing Indian, and many hands clutched at Younger Bear’s burden so as to rip you apart, but he owed the debt, and also I have no other sons left now but you.”
Finally I fell into a sleep of some hours, the first real rest in a couple of days of hardship and bloodshed. It might sound odd, but I felt safe and right in that tepee with the blind old man a-droning on, though outside, the savage exultation was ever mounting, and I reckon there was more than one Indian who had a sore throat next day and stiffer limbs from dancing than he had got in battle.
But they was most of them up again bright and early to invest that hill where Reno and Benteen was holding on. There wasn’t nothing I could do about that at present though I didn’t like to think of the fact that Lavender, Charley Reynolds, Bottsy, and my other friends was with Reno, unless they had been killed in the valley. But I was confined to Old Lodge Skins’s tepee by my own desire, one white man somewhere in the middle of that enormous assemblage of lodges me and Custer seen from the bluffs the day before.
I woke up remarkably improved as to physique, though, my shoulder right tender but a lot of the stiffness had gone already and I could almost feel that moss or whatever it was drawing the rest of it out. I had thought the ball-joint had been busted, but if it was, it somehow healed too in the succeeding days and give me fewer twinges throughout the years since than that old wound in my other shoulder where I got shot in Dodge City.
My facial crease also was knitting up under the mud plastered there, and I didn’t know I had it unless I laughed—which I wasn’t doing much of at present.
Old Lodge Skins was still sitting there when I awakened and investigated my hurts. It was another warm, bright day outside, the sun half penetrating the tepee cover, the fire gone to white ash.
“Who was the doctor?” I asks him.
“Younger Bear,” says he. “Do you want to eat now?”
One of them fat wives of his come in then from her cooking fire outside, bringing me a bowl of boiled buffalo. Everything was going on as normal, for Reno’s hill was across from the upper end of the camp, whereas the Cheyenne circle was furthest downstream and out of earshot of the firing—the village was that big.
I took the bowl from her who handed it to me without expression, and ate some, and then I said: “Grandfather, do you want to hear what I was doing with the soldiers?” For he never would have asked.
“I am sure you had a very good reason,” says he. “Let us smoke first.”
So we exchanged the pipe, and then I says: “Do you know who led the bluecoats? General Custer.”
He tried two or three times but was unable to pronounce the name, nor of course did it mean aught to him.
“Long Hair,” I says. “Only now it is cut short.”
“Now it is probably cut off,” says he, laughing at his typical Indian humor.
“The Washita,” I says. “He led the bluecoats there.”
“Oh, yes.” Old Lodge Skins nodded pleasantly. “I remember that fight. It was bad, but we rubbed out many soldiers in the tall grass.”
Well, I was stubborn as him, and persisted: “Did no one ever talk about who led the soldiers there?”
“A white man,” says the old chief. “They were all white, except for some Osage scouts, so it must have been a white man whom they followed, for nobody would follow an Osage.” Then he got to telling experiences of his own in fighting the Osages as a young man, and it was ever so long before I could get back to the subject.
“This man used to wear his hair down to his shoulders,” I says.
Old Lodge Skins asks: “Like a Human Being?”
“No, he didn’t braid it.”
“Then like a white woman,” says the chief. “Was he a heemaneh?”
I was sure getting the worst of it. Now it may seem funny, but I felt I owed something to Custer. After all I survived him, and by God he was not 100 per cent to my taste, but he had impressed me, dying the way he did. He had worked out a style and he stuck to it. He might have been a son of a bitch, but he was his own man, never whining nor sniveling nor sucking up to another, be it even the President of the United States.
But I guess I could never get that across to an Indian, for independence was the rule rather than the exception amongst them and thus not the occasion for any special merit. Nor could any one of them, no matter how exalted—not Crazy Horse not Sitting Bull nor Gall—order two hundred others to perish along with him. That was the difference. Whatever Custer believed, he did not die alone. So while as a Caucasian you could call him a man of principle, from the Indian point of view you might say he had no principles at all. Especially since soldiers, unlike savages, did not fight for fun.
I decided to drop the subject, but as I might have figured, Old Lodge Skins now got right interested in it. He says: “I want to go see this unusual man, or whatever is left of him, my son. Will you lead me to the ridge?”
I’d sooner have made my bed in a campfire. But Old Lodge Skins pointed out that the warriors was all miles upstream, and the women and children had got finished with most of their mutilating and stripping the bodies on the evening before, so it would be quiet there, and I could put on a buffalo hat like Younger Bear’s and leather shirt and leggings, painting my face. Not to mention I would be with him.
Well, them wives of his helped me into the new getup, cutting down an extra pair of the chief’s leggings, and a couple little kids was also there, his I reckon and only six-seven years old and him at least ninety by now, and I needed a breechclout, so one of them women handed me a company guidon of the Seventh Cavalry, which was a swallowtailed version of the Star and Stripes. I am happy to report for the sake of fellow patriots that I never employed it for this purpose. I don’t curse in front of ladies and don’t degrade the national colors, not even in an emergency: I used my old bandanna.
But those wives had got into the spirit of the thing now, giggling away as they disguised me as a proper savage, dropping necklaces and such over my head, and finally they come with a beaded belt to which they had just tied a number of fresh scalps.
I says, “No, no!” And they pushed it at me, with magpie noises, and my hand struck against one skull-cover, and it was real black and woolly of texture, and I caught it and held it up, asking: “Where did you get this?”
Traded it, they says, for a blond one which Younger Bear had give them, to a Hunkpapa Sioux who fought upstream in the valley against the first bluecoat attack.
I don’t know if you can appreciate what it feels like to hold the scalp of a friend.
“It came,” says the fattest wife, “from a Black White Man whom the Hunkpapa recognized as a person who once lived with his tribe and married a Lakota woman. ‘What are you doing here?’ asked the Hunkpapa in surprise. ‘I don’t know,’ the Black White Man said. His horse had thrown him and he was lying on the ground with a broken leg, his rifle some distance away. ‘Well, you were shooting at us, so I think I should kill you,’ said the Hunkpapa. ‘I think you should,’
said the Black White Man, so the Hunkpapa did.”
Even so, I reckon it was better than working your life long as a yardman back in Missouri.
Taking Old Lodge Skin’s arm, I left the tepee and walked through the Cheyenne camp towards the ford, which was not far, for the Minneconjou village was just next door. As the chief said, all the warriors was up at the current battle and nobody was around but women, children, and aged men sitting in the sunlight and chewing their toothless gums. Some of the women was working as usual, but others was loudly mourning their dead husbands, sons, and brothers, for the Indians had lost some men themselves, only they didn’t count them: maybe forty or fifty. They had erected a funeral tepee in the Cheyenne camp, with the bodies inside on scaffolds, and killed a number of horses, arranging the carcasses outside like spokes of a wheel.
The youngsters was playing in the sunshine. I seen a boy that had a little toy horse made from dried clay, and it wore a curious saddle blanket, a folded U.S. greenback. There was also other Seventh Cavalry souvenirs in evidence: one woman wore a blue jacket with a corporal’s chevrons, some other kids was skimming a campaign hat through the air, and lying on the ground at one point was a pair of Army underdrawers, which had the name of the late owner stenciled across the waist. Further on, a shirt stiff as parchment from dried gore, torn canvas cartridge belts, discarded boots. Near to the ford the volume of this stuff increased, and small boys was watering pony herds there, among them a few big bays and sorrels with the conspicuous brand “7USC.”
Nobody paid mind to us, not even among the Minneconjou women who was washing clothes in the Little Bighorn, and me and Old Lodge Skins entered the river, fast-flowing and waist-deep, and waded across. I have mentioned my outfit, but not his: the chief had donned his full war bonnet of eagle feathers, which was a little moth-eaten if you examined it close but for all that a magnificent piece of headgear, each plume tipped with a puff of white down and little round mirrors at the temples, and trailing a long tail of more feathers which brushed the earth back of his heels. His face was painted crimson, and yellow lightning flashed across the cheeks. In one hand he carried a large bow, a special one, unstrung and with an iron lancehead affixed to one end. In his other hand he had that old medicine bundle I remembered from the Washita and further back: its skin wrappings was rotting away to dust in one corner and a bird-foot good-luck charm was protruding. I kept an eye on it but did not poke it back, for you wasn’t supposed to touch another’s medicine nor even know what it consisted of.
I saw where we had rode down Medicine Tail Coulee less than a day before. The ground was tore up with hoofs, and there was the marks of iron-shoed cavalry horses going right down into the water, but we hadn’t got that far, so they must have been made by captured animals the Indians took across to their camp.
We walked a mile or more, up the diagonal ravine that Custer had took for his retreat, then onto the slope, proceeding ever higher towards that final ridge, and it was a good way before I seen the first body, though there might have been some that fell into the many gulches thereabout or been thrown there after being stripped and mutilated.
But soon they commenced to show up, at a distance pure white in the brilliant sun, like a field of boulders, one there, then two or three, others in groups of a dozen, lying where they fell and almost all by troops. Wasn’t no sign of disorganized panic; they had been whipped but not routed. And when you thought of the proportion of recruits, the exhaustion of two days without rest, and the overwhelming strength against them, they had done real well.
Now Old Lodge Skins says suddenly as we toiled up the rise: “This fight has given me a better opinion of white men. I did not understand before that they knew how to die properly.”
“Can you see them, Grandfather?”
“Almost,” he says. “Their bodies shine so.”
But as we come closer, the marble-white was not clear, but streaked and sometimes drowned in red which the heat turned brown, and the smell was starting up too, attended by millions of flies, and the birds rose in great circles at our approach and coyotes scampered off to a safe range. There was also maybe a hundred dead horses spread across that square mile.
I gritted my teeth and held my breath and trudged on, with the ground as it were sucking like quicksand at my moccasins though it was dry as ash. Yet I continued, for Old Lodge Skins had some high purpose in coming here. He was hardly a ghoul. And I guess I realized that it was only through him that I could ever come to accept the fact of that awful ridge and make it a part of normality.
“Yes,” he says, breathing deep through his ancient leathery nostrils, “they must be happy on the Other Side to have died as warriors rather than tenders-of-cattle or corn-growers or crazy diggers-of-yellow-dust or those-who-lay-down-iron-for-the-fire-wagon. I tell you, my son, I had thought for a long time that all white men were turning into women.”
He stopped for a minute so’s I could rest. True, that night’s sleep had done wonders for me, and also the dressing on my shoulder; but it was remarkable I could walk at all, let alone climb uphill. Old Lodge Skins himself showed no physical strain, though out there in the sunlight you could appreciate his advanced age: them ravines in his face was so deep that a fly would think twice about treading the bluffs above them. Indeed, his visage was a sort of miniature of the ground on which we stood. And his withered skin, wherever it could be seen for the paint, made the hide wrappings of his medicine bundle look almost new.
He turned now and seemed to take a view across the entire panorama, holding the bundle to his chest and pointing with the lancehead-end of the bow, from which two eagle feathers dangled.
“There came Gall with his many Hunkpapa,” he says, “and there Crow King. Down there, Lame White Man and the Human Beings, Minneconjou, and other Lakota peoples broke through the soldiers’ lines, while the great Crazy Horse and Two Moon went downriver, traveled through the encircling coulee, and swept up from the bluecoats’ rear.
“It was the greatest battle of all time, and there will never be another.” His thick voice broke slightly and two tears rolled down the troughs alongside his heavy, crimson, yellow-traced nose and vanished into the vertical traces of his upper lip, his mouth being like a river system with tributaries above and below.
And despite all I had been through, I felt sorry for him and says, “Surely there will be more,” though I did not consider what good they would do him since he was already too old to have been in this one.
“No,” said he. “This is the end.”
After a bit I gathered my strength and we climbed on, passing the remains of C Troop just below the knoll, and it ain’t my purpose to dwell upon the particulars of the carnage, for I think I have said enough about how the Indian women would come out after a battle and deal with the wounded. Well, they was served up with such a banquet following the Battle of the Little Bighorn as to surfeit the worst glutton. There was so many corpses to deface that they actually got tired of mutilating after a time; and so, many bodies stayed untouched, some not even stripped for the clothing.
But Tom Custer had got it real bad, resembling something on a butcher’s block. I would not have recognized him, except that his initials was tattooed upon one arm, along with an American flag and the goddess of liberty. His blond scalp had been ripped off down to the nape of the neck, his skull was crushed, his body opened from breastbone to groin, and his—I don’t want to say any more; just let his example stand for all those ravaged, though he was about the worst I seen. Remember Bottsy’s story that Rain in the Face swore to cut Tom’s heart out and eat it? By the looks of things he could have done that, though in later years he denied it.
So it was in the greatest dread that I gained the summit of the knoll, Old Lodge Skins more leading me than I him, for if they had done that to Tom, what horrors must have been the General’s lot?
We went up through the barricade of fallen horses, who was beginning to swell from the corruption, they having been dead for a day, the odo
r terrible, and there, strewn about like ears of corn, was the white bodies of the men who had died alongside me not twenty-four hours earlier. For a moment it was utter still, but I reckon that was an effect within my own head, for a light breeze blew up there and after a bit I heard a whispering flutter that traveled along the ground.
I seen what it was then: hundreds of dollars in greenback bills was scampering along the earth in the wind, now and again blowing over a naked corpse to give him some decency. It was that pay which Custer had held back from the men until they got a day out of Fort Lincoln. The Indians found it when stripping the bodies and flung it away as they did the other papers they come across, love-letters, orders, and the like, which added to the murmuring drift, giving the resemblance of an abandoned picnic ground to the area where none of the bodies had been violated and could have been sleeping but for the arrows erected from them.
One cheekful of Lieutenant Cooke’s mutton-chop whiskers had been scalped, along with his head. Kellogg, the newspaper fellow, was lying where I seen him fall, full-dressed, unmarred.
Old Lodge Skins said: “Take me to the formerly Long Hair.”
It ain’t easy to identify men who are both dead and naked. They tend to merge and blur, like the people in a Turkish bath, only rigid as well.
But finally I saw General Custer, arms still in the crucified extension in which he fell, resting across the bodies of two troopers, where I guess he had been flung when stripped. There was a neat hole in his left chest, and another on the same side of his temple, very little blood from the first, none at all from the second, which I expect had been received as the Indians rode about the field when everybody was down, shooting each so as to make certain of him.
He was not scalped nor mutilated. What got me was his expression. I swear it was still a faint smile, slightly derisive, utterly confident.
“There he is,” I told Old Lodge Skins, taking his hand in mine and pointing with both. And the chief went to Custer, stooped, and felt his head briefly. I would have opposed his doing anything nasty, but I knowed he wasn’t going to: he was simply looking at the late General in a blindman’s fashion.