The Real Custer (42 page)

“We played one strain through,” band member Henry Meder recalled, “then our instruments all froze up.”
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“With cheers that strongly reminded me of scenes during the war,” Custer wrote to Sheridan, “every trooper, led by his officer, rushed toward the village.”
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George led from the front as the four columns converged on the lodges. He was the first in the village, and fought through to the south side where he directed the battle from atop a low hill. Captain Hamilton, charging by his side, was shot from his mount and killed.

“The sleeping and unsuspecting savages were completely surprised by the onset,” Sheridan wrote.
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Some warriors were killed as they emerged from their teepees. Others managed to fight back, with rifles or hand-to-hand. Women and children ran about the village in fear, or hid in the lodges, and many fell victim to the hail of gunfire. “In the excitement of the fight, as well as in self defense,” Custer noted, “it so happened that some of the squaws and a few children were killed and wounded.” One count had around ninety-two women, children, and old men killed, along with ten warriors, but Cheyenne chiefs later told Custer thirteen men, sixteen women, and nine children were killed.
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Black Kettle rushed from his lodge and jumped on a horse, pulling up his wife Medicine Woman Later behind him. They tried to cross the river but were felled in a fusillade of bullets, killing them and the horse. Little Rock, the second senior chief after Black Kettle, tried to mount a defense until he was shot down by Major Elliott.
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Seeing a small group of Indians fleeing downstream, Elliot rode off in pursuit with nineteen troopers shouting, “Here goes for a brevet or a coffin!”
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The battle subsided as the morning wore on. “Light skirmishing is going on all around,” Frederick Benteen wrote. “Savages on flying steeds, with shields and feathers gay, are circling everywhere, riding like devils incarnate. The troops are on all sides of the village, looking on and seizing every opportunity of picking off some of those daring riders with their carbines.”
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A few charges scattered whatever organized resistance remained. The troopers took time to eat and rest as the Indian scouts collected scalps.

Custer took stock. He had successfully attacked what he believed to be a hostile band, and demonstrated that offensive operations in the winter were possible. His losses had been slight—only a few killed that he knew of, and some wounded, including his brother Tom and Captain Barnitz. Fifty-three women and children were taken captive. Custer's men sorted through the camp and discovered evidence suggesting that
some in the group had been raiding. They saved various artifacts; Custer later sent the Detroit Audubon Club a buffalo hide shield, a bow and arrows, a beaded buckskin dress, and a ten-inch knotted scalp, said to be that of Little Rock.
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After picking over the camp, they prepared the rest for burning. “The plunder having been culled over, is hastily piled,” Benteen wrote, “the wigwams are pulled down and thrown on it, and soon the whole is one blazing mass. Occasionally a startling report is heard and a steamlike volume of smoke ascends as the fire reaches a powder bag, and thus the glorious deeds of valor done in the morning are celebrated by the flaming bonfire of the afternoon.”
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“All that was left of the village were a few heaps of blackened ashes,” Custer wrote. The eight hundred ponies and mules in the herd were killed to deny them to other Indian bands, Custer himself picking off a few that were straggling through the village.

Sounds of the battle had echoed down the valley and alerted Indians in nearby camps. Presently warriors appeared along the ridgeline, watching the soldiers and taking some pot shots. “The firing was kept up by the Indians out, on the bluff, on our left front, all day,” Henry Meder recalled.
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Custer established a defensive ring around the village and distributed ammunition. He did not know how many Indians were in the vicinity, but he assumed they outnumbered his force. His supplies and ammunition were limited, and his pack train was miles away. He could not stay at the village; there was no relief column coming or even a prospect of other forces being sent to secure the position. The day was wearing, and Custer concluded he had to leave or be surrounded and put under siege.

Custer assembled his men and prisoners and began to march loudly downstream toward the next village, of Arapahos. This had the intended effect; the warriors who had been observing his force withdrew quickly and rushed ahead to spread the alarm. But after the Indians disappeared,
Custer abruptly turned his column back toward his pack train and made for Camp Supply, the band playing “Ain't I Glad to Get Out of the Wilderness.” The Indians did not give chase, and Custer returned to the post on December 2.

“The head of Custer's column made its appearance on the distant hills,” Sheridan recalled, “the friendly Osage scouts and the Indian prisoners in advance.” Sheridan noted their “wild and picturesque performance in celebration of the victory, yelling, firing their guns, throwing themselves on the necks and sides of their horses to exhibit their skill in riding, and going through all sorts of barbaric evolutions and gyrations,” and that night “the rejoicings were ended with the hideous scalp dance.”

The rest of Custer's column arrived after the scouts, but Major Elliott was missing. He and his small band had vanished down the Washita. Days later, Custer, Sheridan, and one hundred soldiers returned to the site to learn their fate. The bodies were found in a small circle two miles from the village, “stripped as naked as when born, and frozen stiff,” Frederick Benteen recalled. “Their heads had been battered in, and some of them had been entirely chopped off; some of them had had the Adam's apple cut out of their throats; some had their hands and feet cut off, and nearly all had been horribly mangled in a way delicacy forbids me to mention.”
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“The little piles of empty cartridge shells near each body showed plainly that every man had made a brave fight,” Sheridan wrote. “None were scalped, but most of them were otherwise horribly mutilated, which fiendish work is usually done by the squaws.” The bodies were identified and buried.

Clara Blinn and her son turned up at an abandoned Kiowa village ten miles away. She had been shot twice in the forehead, and the back of her skull was smashed. “The body presented the appearance of a woman of more than ordinary beauty,” one report noted, “small in figure, and not more than twenty-two years of age.”
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Sheridan, who was present at
the discovery, noted that the powder from the weapon used to kill her had “horribly disfigured her face.” One of her hands gripped a piece of corn cake, indicating she may have been eating or feeding her son when she was killed. Willie, who showed signs of starvation, had been grabbed by the feet and his head smashed against a tree. The bodies were wrapped in blankets and taken from the site, eventually being interred at Fort Arbuckle. A piece of Clara's calico dress and a lock of Willie's hair were sent to her husband.

“The Kiowas have been engaged in the war all the time, and have been playing fast and loose,” Sheridan threatened after he returned. “I will take the starch out of them before I leave them.”
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Satanta, the Kiowa leader who had captured Clara, surrendered to Custer on December 17 along with Chief Lone Wolf, hoping to avoid the fate that befell Black Kettle. Instead, Custer had Satanta placed under arrest and sought permission to hang him for murder. Satanta was held until February when Chief Tene-angopte negotiated his release, promising that the Kiowa would return to the reservation.

Custer called Washita a “complete and gratifying success” and “a regular Indian ‘Sailor's Creek.'” Once again he had redeemed himself through battle. The
New York Times
also praised the outcome of Washita. “Gen. Custer, in defeating and killing Black Kettle, has put an end to one of the most troublesome and dangerous characters on the plains,” the paper said. “A permanent peace can now be obtained through energetic and successful war. . . . ‘stout hearts' will do much; and one or two repetitions of Custer's victory will give us peace on the Plains.”
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Sheridan said the battle sent a message to the Indians that there would be no traditional winter truce. He justified the attack on Black Kettle, saying his group was “one of the most villainous of the hostile bands,” and if the sixty-eight-year-old chief did not personally participate
in the depredations of the braves, he “freely encouraged them by ‘making medicine,' and by other devilish incantations,” and it was age alone that kept him back from joining them.
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Hazen said that Black Kettle had admitted to him less than a week before the battle that “many of his men were then on the war path, and that his people did not want peace with the people above the Arkansas.”
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But Hazen also criticized the campaign in a pamphlet entitled
Some Corrections of “My Life on the Plains
,
”
a direct response to Custer's published account.

Critics condemned the non-combatant casualties, the women, children, and elderly who were caught in the crossfire. In January 1869 the Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw Indian delegates in Washington called for an investigation. Custer denied having specifically targeted women and children, but the bloody reputation he gained at Washita stuck in some quarters. Agent Ned Wynkoop maintained that Black Kettle thought he was on the reservation when his band was attacked and could have been reasoned with instead of attacked, with no loss of life. Wynkoop resigned his position two days after the battle—he had not yet heard what happened, but he anticipated the outcome. The Cheyenne had initially blamed him for the 1864 incident at Sand Creek, and he would not be left in that position again. He said he refused to be “the instrument of the murder of innocent women and children.”
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Custer was also criticized for leaving the battlefield without determining what happened to Major Elliott or mounting a rescue operation. This built on the charges raised at his court-martial that during the forced march to Fort Harken he had in effect abandoned some of his straggling troops to the Indians. Frederick Benteen wrote a pathos-laden letter to his friend William J. De Gresse, imagining the death struggle of Elliott and his men and painting Custer as negligent. De Gresse gave the letter to the St. Louis Democrat, which published it anonymously, and it was later reprinted in the
New York Times
. Benteen's letter made this
aspect of the battle very public, and Custer told his officers he would horsewhip the author if he found him. Benteen then admitted he had written it. Custer eyed him for a moment, then dismissed him saying, “Mr. Benteen, I will see you later.”

Sheridan's campaign continued after Washita, with other officers gaining similar results. On Christmas Day 1868, six companies of the 3rd Cavalry and one of the 37th Infantry led by brevet Lieutenant Colonel A. W. Evans descended on a Comanche village south of the junction of Salt Fork and Elm Creek. They captured and burned sixty lodges as most of the Indians fled. “The Indians kept up fighting during the day and the next morning,” one report read, “but there was not much fight in them.”
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On the last day of 1868, a delegation of twenty-one Arapahoe and Cheyenne chiefs arrived at Fort Cobb begging for peace. They asked for no terms, “but for a paper to protect them from the operations of our troops while
en route.
They report the tribes in mourning for their losses, their people starving, their dogs all eaten up, and no buffalo.” Sheridan said his campaign was “the final blow to the backbone of the Indian rebellion.”
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An old chief complained that the winter campaign allowed the Indians no time “to get their seats warm.”
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In January 1869, when Comanche Chief Toch-a-way or Turtle Dove finally came to Fort Cobb, he struck himself on the chest and told Sheridan, “Me Toch-a-way, me good Indian.” Sheridan replied, so the story goes, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.”
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