The Veteran (30 page)

“You have your orders,” snapped Custer and turned away.

Benteen shrugged and did as he was bid. Of Custer’s total force of about 600 soldiers, 150 rode away into the endless hills and valleys of the badlands on a wild goose chase.

Although Craig and Sergeant Lewis would never know it, Benteen and his exhausted men and horses would return to the river valley several hours later, too late to help but also too late to be wiped out. After giving his order, Custer broke camp again and the Seventh marched on down the creek towards the river.

At the hour of dawn a number of Crow and Ree scouts who had been out forward of the column came back. They had found a knoll near the confluence of Dense Ashwood Creek and the river. Being familiar with the whole area, they knew it well. There were pine trees on it, and by climbing one an observer could finally see the whole valley ahead.

Two Rees had been up the trees and seen what they had seen. When they learned that Custer intended to continue, they sat down and began their death songs.

The sun rose. The heat began to come upon the day. Ahead of Craig, General Custer, who was wearing his cream buckskin suit, took off the jacket, rolled it and fastened it behind his saddle. He rode on in a blue cotton shirt, with his wide-brimmed cream hat shielding his eyes. The column came to the knoll.

Custer went halfway up and tried to spot with a telescope what lay ahead. They were on the bank of the creek, still three miles short of the confluence with the river. When he came down from the hill and conferred with his remaining officers, rumour buzzed through the column. He had seen part of a Sioux village with smoke rising from the cooking fires. It was now midmorning.

Across the creek and east of the river there was a low range of hills which blocked the view of anyone at ground level. Still, Custer had found his Sioux. He did not know precisely how many there were and declined to listen to the warnings of his scouts. He determined to attack, the only manoeuvre in his personal lexicon.

The battle plan he chose was a pincer movement. Instead of securing the Indians’ southern flank and waiting for Terry and Gibbon to close off the north, he decided to form both halves of the nutcracker with what was left of the Seventh Cavalry.

Tethered to his horse and awaiting court martial after the battle, Ben Craig heard him order his second-in-command, Major Marcus Reno, to take a further three companies. A, M and B, and continue west. They were to reach the river, ford it, turn right and charge the lower end of the village from the south.

He would leave one company to guard the mule train and the supplies. With his remaining five companies Custer would gallop due north, behind the range of hills, until he emerged at the northern end. Then he would ride down to the river, cross it and attack the Sioux from the north. Between Reno’s three companies and his own five, the Indians would be trapped and destroyed.

Craig could not know what lay out of vision on the other side of the low hills, but he could study the behaviour of the Crow and Ree scouts. They knew, and they were preparing to die. What they had seen was the biggest concentration of Sioux and Cheyenne in one place that there had ever been or ever would be. Six great tribes had come together to hunt in partnership, and were now camped along the western bank of the Little Bighorn river. They contained between ten and fifteen thousand Indians drawn from all the tribes of the plains.

Craig knew that in Plains Indian society a male was deemed to be a warrior between the ages of fifteen and mid to late thirties. One-sixth of any plains tribe were therefore warriors. Thus there were two thousand of them down by the river, and they were not in a mood to be tamely driven back to any reservation when they had just heard that the plains to the north-west were teeming with deer and antelope.

Worse, and no-one knew this, they had met and defeated General Crook a week earlier and were not afraid of the bluecoated soldiers. Nor were they out hunting, like the menfolk of Tall Elk the previous day. In fact, on the evening of the 24th they had had a huge celebration of the victory over Crook.

The reason for the week’s delay was simple: one week was the mourning period for their own dead from the fight with Crook on the 17th, and so the celebration could only take place after seven days. On the morning of the 25th the warriors were recovering from the dancing of the previous evening. They had not gone hunting and they were still in full body paint.

Even so, Craig realized this was no sleeping village like that of Black Kettle by the Washita. It was past noon when Custer split his forces for the last and lethal time.

The scout watched Major Reno depart, heading down the creek towards the river crossing. At the head of B Company Captain Acton gave a glance at the scout he had virtually condemned to die, permitted himself a thin smile and rode on. Behind him Sergeant Braddock sneered at Craig as he went by. Within two hours both would be dead and the remnants of Reno’s three companies marooned on a hilltop trying to hold out until Custer could come back and relieve them. But Custer never came back and it was General Terry who would rescue them two days later.

Craig watched another 150 of the shrinking force head off down the creek. Though he was not a soldier, he had little faith in them. A full thirty per cent of Custer’s men were raw recruits with minimal training. Some could just about manage their horses when they were calm, but would lose control in combat. Others could hardly manage their Springfield rifles.

Another forty per cent, though of longer careers, had never fired a shot in anger at an Indian, nor met them in skirmish, and many had never even seen one except docile and cowed on a reservation. He wondered how they would react when a howling, painted horde of warriors came sweeping out to defend their women and children. He had the direst premonition and it turned out to be right. But by then it would be far too late.

There was a final factor he knew Custer had refused to bear in mind. Contrary to legend. Plains Indians held life to be sacred, not cheap. Even on the warpath they refused to take heavy casualties and after losing two or three of their best and bravest warriors would usually disengage. But Custer was attacking their parents, wives and children. Honour alone would forbid the menfolk to cease to fight until the last wasichu was dead. There could be no mercy.

As the dust cloud of Reno’s three companies disappeared down the creek Custer ordered the baggage train to stay put, guarded by one company of his remaining six. With the others, E, C, L, I and F, he turned towards the north with the range of hills keeping him invisible to the Indians in the valley of the river, but they were also invisible to him. He called over to the provost-sergeant, “Bring the prisoner along. He can see what happens to his friends when the Seventh gets among them.”

Then he turned and trotted off to the north. The five companies fell in behind him, about 250 men in all. Craig realized Custer still did not perceive the danger, for he was bringing three civilians with him to watch the fun. One was the wispy, bespectacled journalist Mark Kellogg. More to the point, Custer had two young relatives along, for whom he must have felt responsible. One was his youngest brother, Boston Custer, aged nineteen, and the other was a sixteen-year-old nephew, Autie Reed.

The men were trotting two abreast, in a line nearly half a mile long. Behind Custer rode his adjutant. Captain Cooke, and behind him the general’s orderly of the day. Trooper John Martin, who was also the regimental bugler. His real name was Giuseppe Martino; he was an Italian immigrant who had once been a butler for Garibaldi, and he still had only a limited command of English. Sergeant Lewis and the tethered Ben Craig were thirty feet behind Custer.

As they rode up into the hills, still keeping below the crest, they could turn in their saddles and see Major Reno and his men crossing the Little Bighorn before attacking from the south. At this point Custer, noticing the glum faces of his Crow and Ree scouts, invited them to turn and ride back. This they did without waiting for a second invitation. They survived.

The troops rode like this for three miles until they finally cleared the crest to their left and could at last look down into the valley. Craig heard a sharp intake of breath from the big sergeant who held his horse’s bridle and the murmured words: “Sweet Jesus.” The far bank of the river was a great ocean of teepees.

Even at that distance Craig could make out the shapes of the lodges and the colours in which they were decorated, identifying the tribes. There were six separate villages.

When the Plains Indians travelled, they did so in column, tribe by tribe. When they stopped to camp, they settled in separate villages. Thus the whole encampment was long and narrow, six circles flowing down the riverbank on the other side of the water.

They had been travelling north when they had stopped several days earlier. The honour of breaking trail had been given to the Northern Cheyenne, so their village was the northernmost. Next to them came their closest allies, the Oglala Sioux. Close by the Oglala were the Sans Arc Sioux and then the Blackfeet. Second from the south were camped the Minneconjou and at the far south, even then being attacked by Major Reno, was the tail of the column, the village of the Hunkpapa, whose chief and supreme medicine man of the Sioux was the veteran Sitting Bull.

There were others present, lodged with their nearest relatives, elements of the Santee, Brule and Assiniboin Sioux.

What the Seventh could not see, now blotted out by the hills, was that Major Reno’s attack on the southern end of Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa tribe was a catastrophe. The Hunkpapa had come swarming out of their lodges, many mounted and all fully armed, and counterattacked.

It was almost two in the afternoon. Reno’s men had been easily and skilfully outflanked to their left by pony-mounted warriors riding round them on the prairie and, with their flank turned, were being forced back into a stand of cottonwoods by the riverbank they had just crossed.

Many had dismounted from their horses in the trees, others had lost control and been thrown off. Some had lost their rifles, which the Hunkpapa gleefully took. Within minutes the remainder would have to stream back across the same river and take refuge on a hilltop, there to endure a thirty-six-hour siege.

General Custer surveyed what he could see, and from a few yards away Craig studied the great Indian-fighter. There were squaws and children to be seen about the camps but no warriors. Custer thought this a nice surprise. Craig heard him call to the company commanders, who had grouped round him. “We will go down and make a crossing and capture the village.” Then he summoned Captain Cooke and dictated a message.

It was to, of all people. Captain Benteen, whom he had long sent off into the wilderness. The message Cooke scribbled said: “Come on. Big village. Be quick. Bring packs.” He meant extra ammunition. This he gave to the bugler, Martino, who would live to tell the tale.

The Italian by a miracle did find Benteen, because that canny officer had given up his wild goose chase in the badlands, returned to the creek, and eventually joined Reno on the besieged hill. But by then there was no question of breaking through to the doomed Custer.

As Martino cantered back down the trail, Craig turned in his saddle to watch him. He saw twenty-four of Captain Yates’s F Company also turn round and simply ride off without orders.

No-one tried to stop them. Craig glanced back at Custer, up ahead. Did nothing penetrate that peacock head?

The general stood in his stirrups, raised his cream hat above his head and called to his troops, “Hurrah, boys, we’ve got them.” These were the last words the departing Italian heard, and he later reported them to the inquiry. Craig noticed that, like so many with fine auburn hair, Custer at thirty-six was developing a bald patch. Although nicknamed ‘Long Hair’ by the Indians, he had had it cropped short for the summer campaign.

Perhaps for this reason the Oglala squaws later could not recognize him where he fell, and the warriors did not think him worth scalping.

After his salutation Custer spurred his horse forward and the remaining 210 men followed. The ground ahead, leading down to the riverbank, was shallower and easier for a downhill charge. Half a mile later the column wheeled left, company by company, to descend the slope, ford the river and attack. At this point the Cheyenne village exploded.

The warriors came out like a cloud of hornets, painted in their battle colours, most naked from the waist up, screaming their high-pitched ‘yip yip yip’ cries as they rode to the river, splashed across and came up the eastern bank towards the five companies. The bluecoats stopped in their tracks.

Beside Craig, Sergeant Lewis reined in, and Craig heard again the muttered “Sweet Jesus”. Hardly were they across the river than the Cheyenne threw themselves from their ponies and came forward and upward on foot, sinking into the long grass to become invisible, rising, running a few paces and dropping again. The first arrows began to fall among the cavalry. One buried itself in the flank of a horse, which whinnied in pain, rearing high and throwing its rider.

“Dismount. Horses to the rear.”

The shout was from Custer, and no-one needed a second bidding. Craig watched some of the soldiers unholster their Colt .45s, shoot their own horse straight through the forehead, and then use the body as a rampart. They were the smart ones. There was no defensive cover on that hill. Not a rock or boulder behind which to hide. As the men jumped to the ground a few were detached from each company to take a dozen mounts by the bridle and run them back to the crest of the ridge. Sergeant Lewis turned both his and Craig’s horse and cantered them back to the ridge. There they joined the milling mob of cavalry mounts being held by a score of troopers.

Before long the horses began to scent the Indians. They skittered and reared, pulling their handlers with them. From the saddle Lewis and Craig watched. After the first rush, the battle went quiet. But the Indians were not finished; they were simply moving to surround.