Little Big Man (61 page)

I whipped the Ree pony into a gallop and was halfway towards rescuing him when I recognized he was merely talking with the Crow scouts. By time I reached the bluff, Custer had gone off again, but the Crow was still there: White Man Runs Him, Half Yellow Face, Goes Ahead, and a young fellow named Curly. Also the guide and interpreter Mitch Bouyer, who was a breed of Crow and white.

I felt uneasy around the Crow, owing to my memories, and White Man Runs Him was old enough to have been a grown warrior in the days when I fought them. Indeed, he studied me from time to time, and while it was unlikely he really had my number, he must have Indianlike sensed something.

So I was glad to see the chief white scout come riding up from the other side of the bluff. This was a man named Charley Reynolds, a stocky, round-shouldered fellow, one of the few real good white scouts I ever knowed and no long-haired blowhard like Buffalo Bill Cody and some of them others.

The only trouble so far as talking to Reynolds went was that he was terrible quiet, keeping his own counsel to the degree that he got the nickname “Lonesome Charley.”

“Charley,” I says, and he immediately looks at the ground as was his custom when addressed, “have you told Custer how many Indians made this trail?”

He says: “Yep.”

I says: “Because some of the officers think it is just a small band.”

Charley shrugs and just keeps staring embarrassed-like into the ground while his horse stands dead still.

Mitch Bouyer comes alongside then and says, right rude if you
considered him white, though understandably if you was conscious of his Indian blood: “What do you want?”

I answers: “To save my hair.”

He says very factual: “That will be hard to do, for we are going to have a goddam big fight.” He turned and rode back to the group of Crow a-sitting their horses all dejected.

Reynolds had looked up while Bouyer was talking, but when I turned back to him, he stared at the turf again.

“There’s too many for him to take on alone,” I says. “And I wager that’s what he’ll do. He won’t wait for Gibbon and Terry.”

“Nope,” says Charley, in his soft voice.

“God damn it, man, you got to make him understand. I hear he’ll listen to you.”

“He won’t,” Charley says and knees his horse so as to move along, and I seen his right hand was wrapped in a bandanna, and asked if he was hurt.

“Whitlow,” says he.

“Can you shoot?”

“Barely,” Charley says and, by now exhausted with so much talking, he got away from me.

“Reynolds is just a yellowbelly,” Sergeant Botts told me in camp that evening. “He begged Terry to let him off this campaign, claiming to have a pre-monition he would go under.”

“Bottsy,” I says, “you got a pretty poor opinion of most. I was wondering what you thought of me.”

“Jack,” says Botts, “there ain’t a lot of you, but what there is, is all white.”

Some men will get a great liking for you if you listen to them abuse others. At that moment, him and me was sitting within some bullberry bushes, getting drunk upon the contents of our canteens. I reckon it was the first real 100 per cent, lowdown, stinking, dirty case of inebriation I had been a party to since them days long ago as I wandered about the southern plains searching for Olga and Gus.

The result was that the next morning found me in very poor condition at the start of the longest day of my life.

CHAPTER
27
Greasy Grass

SATURDAY, JUNE 24
, was a mean hot day, and the south wind served only to choke the men behind with the dust of them in front. It got so bad after a time that the troops was obliged each to march along a separate trail, so as not to stifle them following, and also to diminish the great cloud that marked our progress. For we was getting close to the hostiles, and it was just after the noon halt that we crossed the place where another great Indian trail, coming from the south, joined the one we had been on so far.

That was not long after we found the enormous abandoned campsite where the lodgepoles for a sun-dance lodge was still standing. On the floor of the latter was some pictures traced in the sand: lines representing pony hoofmarks on one side and them of iron-shoed cavalry horses on the other; between, figures of white men falling headfirst towards the Indian ranks.

My head was thumping, and the smell of bacon at breakfast had made me go off and heave. I felt so miserable of body that, in compensation, my mind rested somewhat easier than it had been. The Ree and Crow, however, waxed even unhappier than before, while looking at them sand drawings, and chattered to Fred Girard and Mitch Bouyer, their respective interpreters, for being Indians they was much affected by symbols.

Up come Custer shortly, and Bouyer tells him that the pictures meant “many soldiers falling upside down into the Sioux camp,” which was to say, dead.

At that point I steps forward, saying: “General—”

But he interrrupts: “It’s the teamster, isn’t it? Well, teamster,” Custer says, looking down his sharp nose, “I understood your place was with the mules.” Yet he was not sore, but rather amused. “Or
do I have it wrong?” he goes on. “I am only the regimental commander.”

“Sir,” I says, wincing from my hangover, “I don’t know how good a job these scouts is doing. I believe the way they put their reports sounds to you like sheer superstition and you ignore it.” Bouyer and Girard was giving me dirty looks.

“Whereas,” I says, “the whole point of being an Indian lies in the practical combination of fact and fancy. These here drawings and bones was left purposely for you to find and be scared by. If you
are
frightened off, or go ahead and get whipped, then they will have constituted a prophecy. If you win, however, they will have been just another charm that never worked. But the important matter is that the hostiles know you are following them, and are herewith announcing they ain’t going to run.”

Custer had been showing a flickering smile. Now he throws back his head and makes a barking laugh. He once again seemed like his old self, rather than the sober figure he had become since leaving the Tongue.

“Teamster,” he says, “I have the reputation of being a severe man. But I am also surely the only commanding officer who could stand and listen to the recommendations of a mule skinner. I have a partiality for colorful characters—California Joe, Wild Bill Hickok, and so on—in whose company I should say you belong. Charley Reynolds is a splendid scout, but he is too quiet.”

He laughs again, taking off his gray hat and slapping his boots with it. “This campaign has been altogether too humorless! Very well,” he says, “you wanted to be a scout. You are one as of this moment. Your orders are to stay with me, to say whatever comes into your head, and not to bother these other fellows.”

So that’s how I was appointed official jester to the commander of the Seventh Cavalry, as a result of merely telling the truth. Now you might think I took offense at it, but you would be wrong. It meant that I might be even more ineffectual than when traveling with the mules, for everything said by a man who is an authorized idiot, so to speak, is naturally taken as idiotic. But I would be at the head rather than the tail of the column. Maybe I could even jolly Custer out of the worst mistakes. So I accepted the position, and that threw the General into another laugh, and Girard and Bouyer got the idea, too, and laughed, and so did the Crow and Ree without understanding, but Indians is always polite if possible.

Now my orders might have been to stay with Custer, but that was unlikely for any human being, even one without a hangover and riding a better mount than my half-lame pony, for the General’s reputation for energy had not been exaggerated. Back and forth he rode upon Vic and when he tired that animal out, the striker would bring up Dandy. Scouts was ever coming in with reports, but Custer would generally go out a mile or more to meet them. Then back he’d trot and maybe continue along the column to speak to one of the troop commanders. All the while, his adjutant, Lieutenant Cooke with the enormous muttonchop whiskers, was writing out orders and sending them hither and yon by means of couriers, and replies come back and Custer’d read them in his quick, impatient way sort of like an eagle.

His brother Tom, a carbon-copy of the General with the characteristics less authentic—like he was more impudent than truly arrogant, with his hat on the side of his head, etc.—Tom was generally in evidence at the head of the column rather than back with his troop, and to get in on the importance he would also send messages to the pack train and so on; and the other brother Boston as well as the nephew Armstrong Reed, both young fellows, they was usually to be seen acting as if we was on a picnic outing.

So I was largely ignored and never had no more chance to amuse the General, had I wanted such, the rest of the day, nor indeed didn’t talk to nobody except once or twice I tried to strike up a conversation with Custer’s striker—not the man from the Washita, but a fellow named Burkman, but he was almost a moron, wearing his cap way down to his eyes, and a butt for everybody’s wit.

We marched thirty mile and went into camp at eight o’clock of the evening, but in come the Crow scouts shortly with a report that the Sioux trail had swung west and crossed the Wolf Mountains in the direction of the Little Bighorn, or Greasy Grass as the Indians called it, so at about midnight we started to move again. I don’t believe anyone had got a wink of sleep in the interim, for the news had soon went around that the hostile village was expected to lie in the river valley, in which case we’d attack it at dawn.

Of course during that halt, I encountered Botts, who had ate a quick meal and went wandering about sticking his nose in everywhere.

“What did I tell you,” he says. “Hard Ass will pitch into the Indians tomorrow, a whole day before the junction with Terry and
Gibbon. And by the time they come up, he can deliver that village all skinned and gutted, compliments of the Seventh Cavalry. Curse his dirty heart,” he says, “but you gotta hand it to him.”

I warns Botts to keep his voice down, for we was right near the headquarters tent, but he says nobody would hear on account of Custer was holding a officer’s conference there and was deaf to anything but his own voice.

Then Bottsy says he had to get back to his troop and take care of the men. I don’t want you to have the idea he was not a good sergeant.

“Them recruits,” he says, “is already dragging their tails from these long marches and some ain’t fired a carbine more’n once or twice, nor seen a red excepting the coffee-coolers around the fort. If fired too fast, them Springfields heat up and the ejector sticks. I reckon the agents have fitted out the hostiles with repeaters, which can panic a man unless he realizes our pieces got twice the range of the Winchesters and Henrys.”

Them recruits made up about a third of our force. Some was Irish, and some was Germans who come over here to dodge the draft in the Old Country, couldn’t find no jobs, joined the U.S. Army, and was killed by savage Indians before they learned English: real peculiar experience.

As me and Bottsy was parting, we heard the officers in the tent sing some sad old songs: “Annie Laurie,” and the like, and then “Praise God from whom all blessings flow,” which took me back to my days at the Reverend Pendrake’s church. As singing, it wasn’t too good, I expect, but sounded very nice there in the wilderness and some of the enlisted men gathered around to listen.

Then, maybe to cheer people up after the plaintive and melancholic selections, they ended up with “He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

Bottsy says: “If they mean Hard Ass, then it’s sarcastic.”

So the column got into motion again and marched all night, going up a little creek off the Rosebud that led west towards the Wolf Mountains. It was right dark, without a moon, so them behind had to follow the leaders by the smell of dust and the sound of swinging equipment; whole troops kept getting lost, and there was shouts and curses and the banging of tin cups to locate them again, so when first light come about half-past two, we had done only some six miles and had not had no sleep since the night before.

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.