The Veteran (29 page)

Round the campfires in the evening, before turning in, it was customary for them to talk among themselves. They discussed the officers, starting with General Custer, and the company commanders. Craig had been surprised how unpopular the general was with his men. His younger brother Tom Custer, commanding C Company, was much better liked, but the most loathed of them all was Captain Acton. Craig shared this antipathy. Acton was a career soldier who had joined just after the Civil War ten years earlier and risen in the Seventh in the shadow of Custer, the scion of a wealthy family back east. He was thin, with a chiselled face and a cruel mouth.

“So, Sergeant,” said Acton, “this is your prisoner. Let’s find out what she knows.”

“You talk the savage’s lingo?” he asked Craig.

The scout nodded.

“I want to know who she is, what group she was with and where the main body of the Sioux is to be found. Right now.

Craig bent over the girl on the buffalo hide. He broke into Cheyenne, using both words and numerous hand gestures, for the dialects of the Plains Indians had limited vocabulary and needed hand signals to make the meaning plain.

“Tell me your name, girl. No harm will come to you.”

“I am called Wind That Talks Softly,” she said.

The cavalrymen stood around and listened. They could understand not a word, but could comprehend the shakes of the girl’s head. Finally Craig straightened up.

“Captain, she says her name is Whispering Wind. She is of the northern Cheyenne. Her family is that of Tall Elk. Those were his lodges that the sergeant wiped out this morning. There were ten men in the village, including her father, and they were all away hunting deer and antelope east of the Rosebud.”

“And the main concentration of the Sioux?”

“She says she has not seen the Sioux. Her family came up from the south, from the Tongue river. There were some more Cheyenne with them, but they parted company a week ago. Tall Elk preferred to hunt alone.”

Captain Acton stared down at the bandaged thigh, leaned forward and squeezed hard. The girl sucked in her breath but gave no cry.

“A little encouragement perhaps,” said Acton.

The sergeant grinned. Craig reached out, took the captain’s wrist and removed it.

“That will not work. Captain,” he said. “She has told me what she knows. If the Sioux cannot be to the north, the way we have come, and they are not to the south and east, they must be to the west. You could tell the general that.”

Captain Acton plucked the restraining hand from his wrist as if it were infected. He straightened up, produced a half-hunter silver watch and glanced at it.

“Chow time in the general’s tent,” he said. “I must go.”

He had plainly lost interest in the prisoner.

“Sergeant, when it is full dark take her into the prairie and finish her off.”

“Anything say we can’t have a little fun with her first, Captain?” asked Sergeant Braddock.

There was a gust of approving laughter from the other men. Captain Acton mounted his horse.

“Frankly, Sergeant, I don’t give a damn what you do.”

He spurred his mount in the direction of General Custer’s tent at the head of the camp. The others mounted likewise. Sergeant Braddock leaned down to Craig with a leer.

“Keep her safe, boy. We’ll be back.”

Craig walked over to the nearest chuck wagon, took a plate of salt pork, tack and beans, found a box of ammunition, sat down and ate. He thought of his mother, fifteen years earlier, reading to him from the Bible by the dim light of a tallow candle. He thought of his father, patiently panning hour after hour to find the elusive yellow metal in the streams running down from the Pryors. And he thought of old Donaldson, who had only once taken off his belt to him, and then when he had been cruel to a captured animal.

Shortly before eight, with darkness now settled on the camp, he rose, returned his billycan and spoon to the wagon, and walked back to the travois. He said nothing to the girl. He just unhitched the two poles across the pinto pony’s back and lowered the rig to the ground.

He picked up the girl from the floor and swung her effortlessly onto the pinto’s back, handing her the tether rein. Then he pointed to the open prairie.

“Ride,” he said.

She stared at him for two seconds. He slapped the pony on the rump. Seconds later it was gone, a sturdy, hardy, unshod animal that could find its own way across many miles of open prairie until it scented the odour of its own kin. Several Ree scouts watched curiously from fifty feet away.

They came for him at nine and they were angry. Two troopers held him while Sergeant Braddock hit him about the body. When he sagged they dragged him through the camp to where General Custer, by the light of several oil lamps and surrounded by a group of officers, sat at a table in front of his tent.

George Armstrong Custer has always been an enigma. But it is clear there were two sides to the man: a good and a bad, a light and a dark.

On his light side he could be joyous and full of laughter, addicted to boyish practical jokes, and pleasant company. He possessed an endless energy and enormous personal stamina, forever engaged in some new project, whether collecting wildlife from the plains to send back to zoos in the east, or learning taxidermy. Despite years of absence, he was unswervingly loyal to his wife, Elizabeth, on whom he doted.

After a drunken experience in his youth, he was teetotal, refusing even a glass of wine with dinner. He never swore and forbade profane language in his presence.

During the Civil War fourteen years earlier he had shown such blinding courage, such total absence of personal fear, that he had quickly risen from lieutenant to major-general, only agreeing to revert to lieutenant-colonel to stay in the smaller postwar army. He had ridden at the head of his men into withering curtains of fire, yet never been touched by a bullet.

He was a hero to myriad civilians, yet was distrusted and disliked by his own men, excepting his own personal court.

This was because he could also be vindictive and cruel to those who offended him. Although himself unscathed, he lost more of his own men, dead and wounded, than any other cavalry commander in the war. This was put down to an almost crazy rashness. Soldiers tend not to warm to a commander who is going to get them killed.

He ordered the use of the lash frequently during the War of the Plains and sustained more desertions than any other commander in the West. The Seventh was endlessly being depleted by the nocturnal departure of deserters, or snowbirds as they were called. The unit had to be constantly replenished with fresh recruits, but he had little interest in training them to become efficient and drilled cavalrymen. Despite a long autumn and winter at Fort Lincoln, the Seventh was in a deplorable state in June 1876.

Custer possessed a personal vanity and ambition of awesome proportions, going out of his way to encourage personal glorification through newspapers whenever he could get it.

Many of his mannerisms, the tanned buckskin suit, the flowing auburn curls, were to this end, as was the journalist Mark Kellogg, who now accompanied the Seventh Cavalry to war.

But as a commanding general he had two flaws that would kill him and most of his men in the next hours. One was that he constantly underestimated his enemy. He had the reputation of a great Indian-fighter and he believed it. In truth, eight years earlier he had wiped out a sleeping Cheyenne village, that of Chief Black Kettle on the Washita River in Kansas, surrounding the sleeping Indians in the night and butchering most of them, men, women and children, at sunrise. The Cheyenne had just signed a new treaty of peace with the white men, so they thought they were safe.

In the intervening years he had been involved in four small skirmishes with war parties. The aggregate losses for all four were not a dozen. Considering the hideous casualty lists of the Civil War, these brushes with local Indians were hardly worth a mention. Yet the readers back east were hero-hungry and the painted savage of the frontier was a demonic villain. Sensational newspaper reports and his own book. My Life on the Plains, had led to this reputation and the iconic status.

The second fault was that he would listen to no-one. He had some extremely experienced scouts with him on the march down the Rosebud, but he ignored warning after warning. This was the man before whom Ben Craig was dragged on the evening of 24 June.

Sergeant Braddock explained what had happened, and that there were witnesses. Custer, surrounded by six of his officers, studied the man in front of him. He saw a young man twelve years his junior, just under six feet tall, clad in buckskin, with curling chestnut hair and electric blue eyes. He was clearly Caucasian, not even a half blood as some scouts were, yet his feet were clad in soft leather boots rather than stiff cavalry issue, and a single white-tipped eagle feather hung from a braided strand of hair at the back of his head.

“This is a very serious offence,” said Custer when the sergeant had finished. “Is it true?”

“Yes, General.”

“And why did you do it?”

Craig explained the earlier interrogation of the girl and the plans for later that evening. Custer’s face tightened in disapproval.

“I’ll have none of that sort of thing in my command, not even with squaws. Is it true, Sergeant?”

At this point Captain Acton, sitting behind Custer, intervened. He was smooth, persuasive. He had personally conducted the inter-rogation. It had been entirely verbal, via the interpreter. There had been no infliction of pain on the girl. His last instructions were that she should be guarded through the night, but not touched, so that the general could make a decision in the morning.

“I think my troop sergeant will confirm what I say,” he concluded.

“Yessir, that’s just the way it was,” said Braddock.

“Case proved,” said Custer. “Close arrest until court martial. Send for the provost-sergeant. Craig, in letting this prisoner go, you have sent her to join and warn the main body of the hostiles. That is treason and a hanging offence.”

“She did not ride to the west,” said Craig. “She rode to the east to find her own family, what’s left of them.”

“She can still now warn the hostiles where we are,” snapped Custer.

“They know where you are. General.”

“And how do you know that?”

“They’ve been shadowing you all day.”

There were ten seconds of stunned silence. The provost-sergeant appeared, a big, bluff veteran called Lewis.

“Take this man in charge, Sergeant. Close arrest. Tomorrow at sun-up there will be a quick court martial. Sentence will be carried out immediately. That is all.”

“Tomorrow is the Lord’s Day,” said Craig.

Custer thought.

“You are right. I will not hang a man on a Sunday. Monday it shall be.”

To one side, the regimental adjutant Captain William Cooke, a Canadian, had been scratching notes of the proceedings. These he would later stuff in his saddlebag.

At this moment one of the scouts. Bob Jackson, rode up to the tent. With him were four Rees and a Crow scout. They had been up ahead at sundown and were late in returning. Jackson was half white and half Piegan Blackfoot. His report brought Custer excitedly to his feet.

Just before sundown Jackson’s native scouts had found traces of a large camp, many circular marks in the prairie where the teepees had stood. The trail from the camp headed west, away from the valley of the Rosebud.

Custer was excited for two reasons. His orders from General Terry had been to go right on up to the headwaters of the Rosebud, but then to use his own judgement if fresh information was available. This was it. Custer was now a free man to create and formulate his own strategy and tactics, his own battle plan, without having to follow orders. The second reason was that he at last seemed to have found the main body of the elusive Sioux. Twenty miles to the west lay another river in another valley: the Little Bighorn, flowing north to join the Bighorn and thence to the Yellowstone.

Within two or three days Gibbon’s and Terry’s combined forces would reach that confluence and turn south down the Bighorn. The Sioux were in a nutcracker.

“Break camp,” shouted Custer and his officers scattered to their units. "We march through the night.”

He turned to the provost-sergeant.

“Keep that prisoner beside you. Sergeant Lewis. Tethered to his horse. And close behind me. Now he can see what happens to his friends.”

They marched through the night. Rough country, harsh terrain, out of the valley, always climbing towards the watershed. The men and horses began to tire. They arrived at the divide, the high point between the two valleys, in the small hours of the morning of Sunday the 25th. It was pitch dark but the stars were bright. Soon after the divide they found a rivulet which Mitch Bouyer identified as Dense Ashwood Creek. It flowed westwards, downhill to join the Little Bighorn in the valley. The column followed the creek.

Just before dawn Custer called a halt, but there was no pitching of camp. The tired men rested in bivouac and tried to catch a few moments’ sleep.

Craig and the provost-sergeant had been riding barely fifty yards behind Custer as part of the headquarters troop. Craig was still mounted on his horse, but his Sharps rifle and bowie knife were with Sergeant Lewis. His ankles were tied with rawhide thongs to his saddle girth and his wrists behind him.

At the pre-dawn pause Lewis, who was a bluff, by-the-book but not unkindly man, untied the ankles and let Craig slide to the ground. His wrists remained tied, but Lewis fed him several slugs of water from his canteen. The coming day would again be hot.

It was at this point that Custer made the first of the foolish decisions he would make that day. He summoned his third-in-command. Captain Frederick Benteen, and ordered him to take three companies, H, D and K, and ride off into the badlands to the south to see if there were any Indians there. From a few yards away Craig heard Benteen, whom he judged to be the most professional soldier in the unit, protest the order. If there was a big concentration of hostiles up ahead on the banks of the Little Bighorn, was it wise to split the force?