The Dangerous Book of Heroes (19 page)

Copyright © 2009 by Matt Haley

Three days later an approaching column of twelve hundred men under General Crook was sighted by Sioux scouts, thirty miles down the Rosebud Valley. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, thinking these would become the falling soldiers of the vision, gathered half their warriors and rode overnight to meet them. Sitting Bull sent a warning to Crook that if he crossed the river, he would be attacked. On the morning of June 17, Crook crossed the river.

The Sioux were heavily outgunned by the rifle-carrying bluecoats. The battle, one of charges, feints, skirmishes, advances, retreats, and counterattacks, went on for nine hours before they disengaged.

The next day at first light, Sioux and Cheyenne scouts approached to find that the bluecoats had recrossed the river and were retreating southward. Crook's men had fired twenty-five thousand rounds of ammunition and lost about twenty-eight killed and fifty-six wounded (numbers vary). Later they were awarded three Congressional Medals of Honor, but they didn't fight again. The battle of the Rosebud was a strategic and tactical victory for the Sioux, but Sitting Bull decided it was not the victory of his vision. He had lost some thirty-eight men.

With reports of good grass and plentiful antelope to the west, Sitting Bull moved camp to the valley of the Greasy Grass—the Little Bighorn River. The new camp sprawled over three miles along the west bank. There were now about ten thousand Sioux, Cheyenne, and other Native Americans there, of whom two to three thousand were warriors. Black Elk, a thirteen-year-old Oglala Sioux, was one of them.

On June 24, scouts rode in to report to Sitting Bull that a second
group of bluecoats was advancing up the Rosebud Valley. It was Long Hair Custer and six hundred cavalry. After resting his men and horses that evening, Custer marched a further five hours overnight to reach the Sioux camp the next day.

On Sunday the twenty-fifth, Custer and one Seventh Cavalry column crossed the ridge separating the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn valleys and advanced on the Sioux. Not seen by the Sioux scouts was a second column led by Major Reno, riding to attack the southern end of the camp, or a third column under Captain Benteen, circling farther south to block any escape.

Chief Red Horse recalled the urgency at midday: “We came out of the council lodge and talked in all directions. The Sioux mount horses, take guns, and go fight the soldiers. Women and children mount horses and go, meaning to get out of the way.” Not all of them could.

Major Reno's surprise attack across the river caught women and children in the open. Almost all the family of Sitting Bull's adopted brother, Gall, was killed. “After that, I killed all my enemies with the hatchet,” Gall reported. In the south of the camp where Reno's cavalry attacked were the Hunkpapa with Sitting Bull; in the center were the Oglala with Crazy Horse.

“Sitting Bull was big medicine,” said Gall. “The women and children were hastily moved downstream…. [T]he women and children caught the horses for the bucks to mount them; the bucks mounted and charged back to Reno and checked him, and drove him into the timber.”

For whatever reason, Reno had stopped and dismounted when he might have charged further. Gall's counterattack turned his flank and forced the bluecoats into the trees, where horses could not operate freely. “They were brave men,” Sitting Bull said of the cavalry, “but they were too tired. When they rode up, their horses were tired and they were tired.” Reno retreated farther, back across the Little Bighorn. The retreat turned into a rout, and his column was isolated.

In the center of the Sioux camp Crazy Horse held his warriors back, waiting for Custer to make his move on the opposite bank of
the river. Custer continued riding northward and sent an order to Benteen to rejoin him. Crazy Horse gathered his warriors and rode through the camp
away
from Custer in order to outflank him. Gall, meanwhile, gathered his men in the south and crossed the river behind Custer. Other Sioux and Cheyenne splashed across the river opposite Custer's column.

Custer probably realized by then that he was cut off, if not already surrounded, and ordered his cavalry to the small hill at the northern end of the river bluff. His two hundred men with carbine rifles would establish and hold a defensive perimeter until Benteen, Reno, or other cavalry reached him. As his stretched-out column approached the brow of the rocky hill, fighting a rear guard against Gall's warriors, Crazy Horse suddenly appeared above them. He had reached the top first, from the other side.

There was a moment's pause as Crazy Horse appreciated the situation. Then he led his charging warriors down the slope and fell onto Custer and his 208 men.

Chief Kill Eagle said the Sioux were “like bees swarming out of a hive.” Watching from across the river, young Black Elk saw a big dust swirl on the hillside from which horses galloped out with empty saddles.
This
was the battle of Sitting Bull's vision. No quarter was given.

Although not at Custer Hill, Sitting Bull gave this account of Custer's death only a year later, derived from Crazy Horse and others. “Up there where the last fight took place, where the last stand was made, the Long Hair stood like a sheaf of corn with all the ears fallen around him…. He killed a man when he fell. He laughed…. He had fired his last shot.” Dead alongside Custer was his brother, Tom, twice awarded the Medal of Honor in the Civil War.

Benteen, meanwhile, had ridden back to the river as ordered to find Reno holding a static position. They joined forces in a successful defense. In total, fifty of Reno's men were killed and forty-four wounded; thirteen Medals of Honor were awarded. The following afternoon, Sitting Bull moved south to the Bighorn Mountains and the Sioux bands dispersed. There would be little hunting that year.

On July 5, 1876, the river steamer
Far West
berthed at Bismarck
Landing in South Dakota. A telegram was sent to Washington, beginning:
GENERAL CUSTER ATTACKED THE INDIANS JUNE
25,
AND HE, WITH EVERY OFFICER AND MAN IN FIVE COMPANIES, WERE KILLED
. It was the centenary of U.S. independence.

 

That August, Congress enacted a law providing that “until the Sioux relinquished all claim to the Powder River country and the Black Hills, no subsistence would be furnished them.” Which is ironic, for it was the government that broke the treaty, the government that sent in the army to attack the Sioux, while the Sioux never wanted subsistence, only their traditional hunting lands.

Two thousand five hundred more cavalry were sent to the Plains, so that Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and other chiefs were harried and hunted throughout their lands. Many chiefs surrendered, and by November, the first Sioux had fled to Canada. In January 1877 the two great warriors met for the last time at Tongue River village. Sitting Bull announced his intention to escape across the border to the land of “the Great Mother,” the Canada of Queen Victoria. Crazy Horse spoke of surrender, to which Sitting Bull replied, “I do not want to die yet.”

Sitting Bull gathered about three thousand of his people and, in May 1877, led them across the border to Wood Mountain. He advised the Royal Canadian Mounted Police of his arrival and requested a meeting. In the interview with the “redcoats” he produced a gold medal. “My grandfather received this medal in recognition of his battle for King George III during the [American] revolution,” he said. “Now, in this odd time, I direct my people here to reclaim a sanctuary of my grandfather. I have come to remain with the White Mother's children.” The RCMP explained that Canada must not to be used as a base for raids into the United States, that he must obey the laws of Her Majesty, and that he and his tribe were welcome in Canada as a free people but, like free people, must fend for themselves.

Also in May, Crazy Horse with some two hundred Oglala lodges surrendered to the U.S. Army. In September he was murdered by guards at Fort Robinson in Nebraska.

Chief Sitting Bull and his people lived in Canada for four years, but the buffalo there were few, mere remnants of the millions wiped out by the skin traders and settlers in the United States. His people began to starve. In July 1881, responding to repeated U.S. government offers of food, reservation life, and a “pardon,” the tired chief returned to the United States. He left his famous head-dress in Canada.

Sitting Bull allowed his young son to hand over his rifle to the commanding officer at Fort Buford in Montana, to teach the boy “that he has become a friend of the Americans.” Sitting Bull was the last chief of the free Sioux to surrender his weapons.

Despite the offered “pardon,” for two years he was held prisoner at Fort Randall, south on the Missouri River. In 1883 he was allowed finally to rejoin his Lakota at Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. There he became a revered member of the Silent Eaters, a select group concerned with the welfare of the surviving Sioux nation. There also began a strange interlude in Sitting Bull's life. Despite his publicly and outspoken antipathy to the U.S. government, it arranged a Sitting Bull speaking tour of fifteen cities. He was a sensation. Buffalo Bill Cody visited him and invited him to join his Wild West Show.

The Wild West Show was unique. Touring the United States and Canada, it eulogized the myths and modern legends of the American West even as they were being created. Among those who appeared with Buffalo Bill were Geronimo, Annie Oakley, Rain-in-the-Face (who perhaps killed General Custer), Wild Bill Hickock, and, most famous, Chief Sitting Bull. One of the most popular events recreated was the battle of the Little Bighorn. Sitting Bull gave most of his wages to poor white urchins, who flocked to him wherever he went.

In 1885 Sitting Bull had another mystical vision. He saw a meadow lark alight on a hillock beside where he was sitting, and the bird said to him, “Your own people—Lakotas—will kill you.”

Buffalo Bill asked Sitting Bull to tour with the show to Great Britain,
where in 1887 it played before Queen Victoria in London. Sitting Bull declined, for the government was beginning moves to take yet more land from the Sioux. He returned to Standing Rock Reservation. It was Black Elk, by then a holy man like Sitting Bull, who sailed with Buffalo Bill to Britain. There, a British soldier joined the show. He was Private William Jones, one of the defenders of Rorke's Drift in the Anglo-Zulu wars and recipient of the Victoria Cross.

Despite Sitting Bull's political resistance, more land was taken from his people. By 1890 the Sioux had only islands of reservations surrounded by white settlers, less than sixteen thousand square miles. No Sioux lived freely in their own lands. Then, in early 1889, began the phenomenon of the Ghost Dance.

A new religion swept the Plains nations. Its prophet, Wovoka, predicted the coming of a “messiah” who would end the white man's domination, return to the Plains the slaughtered buffalo and antelope, and resurrect the men, women, and children slain by the bluecoats. Native Americans who danced the Ghost Dance, for five days every six weeks, would enjoy this new future. The dance was adopted throughout the Great Plains, especially by the Sioux, for Chief Sitting Bull refused to condemn the movement.

At Standing Rock, Sitting Bull still lived the Sioux way, although he sent his children to a Christian school so that they could read and write English. The Ghost Dance contained no incitement to violence, and no government official or journalist ever interviewed Wovoka about it, yet it was portrayed as a demonic war dance inciting armed rebellion. About three thousand warriors did gather in the Badlands that winter, but all they did was dance in the snow.

In December the government asked Buffalo Bill Cody to visit Sitting Bull to persuade him to travel to Chicago for a conference. The Standing Rock Reservation agent, James McLaughlin, had always disliked and belittled Sitting Bull, and refused to let Cody and Sitting Bull meet. Cody's authority was rescinded and he left.

Just before daylight on December 15, forty-three Indian police surrounded Sitting Bull's log cabin. They were supported by a squadron
of cavalry. McLaughlin had given orders: “You must not let him escape under any circumstances.”

Two policemen entered the cabin and woke Sitting Bull. “You are my prisoner,” one of them told him. “You must go to the agency.” The fifty-nine-year-old Sitting Bull dressed and quietly went outside to find himself surrounded by forty armed Indian police.