Bill Dugan_War Chiefs 03 (26 page)

“The valley of the Rosebud River is alive with Long Knives,” he said. “They are like ants, everywhere you look.”

Sitting Bull did not seem upset by the information. He believed in his vision, and he had been waiting patiently for the Long Knives to arrive. Their numbers did not matter. What mattered was the truth of the vision. As soon as Yellow Nose left the lodge, Sitting Bull got to his feet and went outside. He looked at the village stretching away up and down the creek bank, farther than he could see in either direction. He looked up at the sky, his lips pursed. So, he thought, they have come at last.

With the enemy that close there was no time to lose, and he called the chiefs together to tell them what Yellow Nose had reported. Word spread through the camp that something was happening. The chiefs were hurrying to see Sitting Bull; that
was all anyone knew for certain. But it must mean soldiers were coming. Nothing else would get them to move so fast.

By the time all the chiefs had gathered, Sitting Bull knew what had to be done. He wanted a war party, a large one, a thousand men or more. But he wanted a large force kept in reserve at the village. He had seen too many times what havoc could be visited on defenseless lodges, seen too many slaughtered women and children. He was not going to let that happen again. This was a time for discipline, a time to fight as the white man fought.

Some of the best chiefs were to lead their men in the war party, chiefs who thought as he did, chiefs who understood that a new way to fight was their only chance to protect the old way to live. Crazy Horse was the principal chief, and he waited patiently for the warriors to paint themselves and their horses, gather their weapons, and mount their ponies. By the time they were ready to ride, it was after sundown.

The following morning, Crazy Horse and his Oglalas ran into a band of Crow scouts, and the first shots were exchanged. The Crows retreated, awed by the huge war party. Crook and his men were camped along the Rosebud, their horses unsaddled even though it was eight o’clock in the morning. Both men and animals were exhausted from the steady march which had begun on June 1. And they had risen at three that morning for yet another leg.

Surveying the deployment, Crazy Horse decided that he had the perfect opportunity to practice
what he and Sitting Bull had been so fervently preaching. Rather than sending his entire force in a headlong charge against the massed weapons of the Long Knives, he would try to decoy them, sending small groups of his own men out to probe, make contact, and lure smaller bands of soldiers in pursuit. The decoys would lead their pursuers toward larger masses of hidden warriors. This was the best chance to neutralize the overwhelming advantage in firepower belonging to Crook’s column.

In addition, Crazy Horse took advantage of his knowledge of the terrain, deploying a significant number of warriors downstream, along both banks of the Rosebud where it passed through a narrow channel between high rock walls on both sides. The land atop the ravine on both sides was studded with boulders and fallen timber and patches of pine forest that gave his warriors ample cover, both to conceal themselves while they waited and for safety once the shooting started.

He had two things in mind in this deployment. If the Long Knives tried to move on the village, either as a way to escape or because they managed to defeat the initial assault force, the trap would safeguard the village. Similarly, if he could force the column in that direction, he could close in on it from both sides and from the rear, making escape all but impossible. But it remained to be seen whether the warriors had enough discipline to work toward the larger goals he had in mind.

When Crazy Horse and his warriors made their first contact, they were driven back by heavy rifle fire, and rather than hurl themselves at the enemy
as they usually did, they seemed disposed to follow the plan. Crook, surveying the land around him, realized that there was a bit of high ground that would give him a commanding sweep of the entire valley, and dispatched Colonel William Royall with instructions to capture the hill.

But Crazy Horse had seen how the white men fought. He knew what Royall wanted, and he was determined that he would not have it. A quick charge by the Lakota nearly cut Royall off from the rest of the column. But Royall managed to take the high ground without losing direct contact with the main body of soldiers. Crazy Horse tried three times to retake the hill, but the combination of the soldiers’ vantage point and rapid fire was more than the Lakota could cope with.

Fewer than half of the warriors had guns at all, and those who did were more often than not armed with museum pieces forty or fifty years out of date, many of them held together with wire and rawhide thongs. Ammunition was limited, too, and much of it was short-loaded, reducing both range and impact. Gunpowder was scarce and expensive, and the Lakota had learned to stretch it as far as it could be stretched. The consequences were few when you were shooting at buffalo, but when you were facing a large force of trained soldiers who were fully equipped with vastly superior weaponry, the disadvantage was all but insuperable.

Nevertheless, Crazy Horse stood his ground. And he was pleased to see that the warriors were less interested in counting coup than they used to be. As Sitting Bull had so often noted, the Long
Knives fought to kill, and they did not stop fighting to cry or to celebrate. If the Lakota were going to withstand the white assault, they were going to have to forget about glory and concentrate on disposing of the enemy, soldier by soldier, until they were forced to withdraw.

The plan seemed to be working. Again and again, Crazy Horse led a charge toward the army line, baiting the Long Knives, teasing them, daring them to follow him and his warriors. And again and again the Long Knives took the bait, chasing after him, extending their lines to the breaking point, making them vulnerable to counterattack. But they always stopped just in time, before the Lakota could cut them off and surround them.

General Crook seemed to realize what was happening, but he was powerless to do anything about it. He knew that there were two more columns in the field, under General Terry and Colonel Gibbons, but he did not know where they were. Worse still was his ignorance of the exact size of the Lakota force facing him. The relentless hit-and-run tactics which Crazy Horse had devised made it impossible for Crook to guess how many warriors were in the field, and he had no idea whether there might be more lying in wait on the far side of the hills. He had no choice but to fight a conservative, defensive battle.

For the moment, he would not characterize his situation as desperate, but difficult it certainly was, and the longer it lasted, the more danger there was of being overrun. If there were more warriors in the field and they joined the fight, the
soldiers’ advantage of firepower, already largely neutralized by Crazy Horse’s generalship, would be rendered totally ineffective. As the day wore on, he considered one plan after another, dismissing each in turn, until he finally decided that he would have to break the stalemate no matter what it took.

Crook decided that he had to bring pressure to bear on the main village, which he knew to be somewhere downstream, although he did not know exactly where—or how large it might be. He sent a detachment under the command of Captain Anson Mills down the river, intending to follow with the balance of his command after first feinting in the opposite direction.

But once Mills left, the tide turned. Crook’s command was stressed to the breaking point now. Every move he made was countered by Crazy Horse; any attempt to charge the massed Lakota warriors was swiftly repelled. And Royall had his hands full keeping his hilltop.

Mills was having his own difficulties. The valley of the Rosebud suddenly narrowed, and the sheer walls on either side made defense against attack from above difficult, and in some places, impossible. The Lakota waited patiently along both sides of the ravine downstream, but before Mills could reach the trap, he received word from Crook that he had to return to relieve the main command, which was under serious attack.

Mills led his men up out of the ravine and found himself behind and on the flank of the Lakota line. But as soon as he pressured them, the warriors broke off their attack and vanished into the hills

and ravines surrounding the Rosebud. The Lakota knew the terrain better than the soldiers, and better than the Crow and Shoshone scouts attached to Crook’s column.

With his forces reunited, Crook made one more attempt to fight his way downstream to take the village. But when the column reached the narrow ravine, the Crow and Shoshone refused to enter it. The general was angry, but decided that if the scouts would not take the risk, it was with good reason.

The general took stock and realized that his men were worn out. Their ammunition was low, and their supplies of food virtually exhausted. He had intended to replenish food stocks from the captured village, but that was now impossible. He had no choice but to retreat. Returning to the scene of the battle, he issued orders to camp for the night. Rest was essential for his men, and it gave the command the opportunity to treat the wounded and bury the dead.

Crook hated to give up, but there were so many wounded men, and the only way to move them over the rough terrain was by travois. Rather than subject the wounded to such agony, he decided to give up the field. Splitting the command was out of the question. Split into equal parts, neither half could hold off the Lakota. A small detachment charged with transporting the wounded would be torn to ribbons as soon as it separated from the column.

As soon as Crook reached his main camp on Goose Creek, all but a handful of his Indian scouts
defected. The Crows were angry that he had been slow to support them in their first encounter with the Lakota and fearful for their families, who were not far away. The Shoshone, too, were disaffected, resentful, and concerned for the safety of their families, who were living on the Wind River Reservation. Both groups feared that the vengeful Lakota might turn their wrath on the Indian allies of the Long Knives, and they were not willing to take that chance.

The Lakota returned to their village, where Sitting Bull anxiously awaited news of the battle. Crazy Horse paid him a visit, and the two discussed the battle in great detail well into the night.

Crazy Horse was pleased that the new tactics had worked, but disappointed that they had worked only to a point. “If we could have surrounded the Long Knives on the hill, we could have beaten them,” he said. “But their guns shoot so much faster than ours, and they kill at greater distance.”

“But you lost very few warriors,” Sitting Bull reminded him. “And you forced the Long Knives to turn back. That is a victory.”

Crazy Horse nodded. “Yes, one victory, but not the war. They will come again. And we have to find a way to control them. I had set a trap for them, and it was working well. They had sent some soldiers down the Rosebud, and they were almost where we wanted them, but then another soldier came and they turned back.”

“That is because they have discipline. This is something the Lakota still do not have, something
we have to teach them. If one warrior came up to a band and told them to follow him back the way they had come, some would follow and some would not. That is the difference between the Long Knives and ourselves. You see it and I see it, but we have to make the others see it—especially the younger men. They are so anxious to make a name for themselves that they think only of themselves in battle. Unless we can change them, we will not win.”

“What about your vision? Don’t you believe it is true?”

Sitting Bull thought for a moment before answering. “Yes, I believe it is true, but I do not know
how
it is true. Just as you say you won the battle today but not the war, my vision could be one battle. We should be glad that we won that battle, and it should give us heart for the war, but still the war must be fought; it is not won in dreams alone.”

“There are rumors that more Long Knives are coming this way.”

“I have heard them. But we will not run, not now. I don’t know what will happen, but I know it is better to let it happen. A man can’t run away from what is meant to happen, even if he wants to. We are here, and we will stay here. This is our land, and if the Long Knives want to take it from us, they will have to pay for it in blood.”

Little Bighorn River Valley
1876

T
HEY HAD MOVED THE CAMP AGAIN.
It was so big now that no one, not even Sitting Bull, knew exactly how large it was. There could be two thousand warriors and there could just as easily be five thousand. But the victory over General Crook’s column was filling the camp, especially the younger warriors, with a sense of euphoria. The sheer size of the village, something none of them had ever seen before, and none could have imagined, combined with the defeat of Crook to create a sense of invincibility. Some even thought that the battle on the Rosebud had been the great victory that Sitting Bull had prophesied at the sun dance, and that the Long Knives had been defeated once and for all.

But Sitting Bull was worried. He knew that other Long Knives were coming, but until his scouts were able to find them, he would not be able to convince the warriors that they had to be vigilant.

And while the Lakota and Cheyenne celebrated prematurely, General Alfred Terry and Colonel John Gibbon, the second and third prongs of the three-column assault, continued to push deeper and deeper into Lakota territory. They were already closing in on the village, because a scouting party led by Major Marcus Reno had discovered a trail made by several hundred lodges being dragged to a campsite. As soon as Reno was certain of what he had discovered, he headed back to the main column under General Terry with the news.

Reno met with Terry as soon as he reached the commander’s camp. “As near as we can tell, General,” he told Terry, “there were about three hundred and fifty lodges. We did a rough count of the number of campfires. The Crow scouts think the trail was about three weeks old when we came across it. We followed the trail up the Rosebud River for nearly forty miles, but we didn’t see a single Indian.”