GREASY GRASS - Chapter Five

 

I believe that some time around 4:30 pm, Saterday, 25 June, 1876, after pausing briefly at the bottom of the Medicine Trail Coulee, head of scouts Mitch Bouyer, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and German born "C" company bugler Henry Dose, all began crossing the Minniconjou Ford (above) together.  About midstream, Private Dose was shot and killed by a musket fired by the Cheyenne warrior Bobtail Horse.

Next to him the Sioux warrior White Bull aimed at the second soldier, who was “...riding a fine looking horse, a sorrel with...four white stockings."  According to White Bull he pulled the trigger, and that soldier fell into the river. “They all reined up their horses and gathered around where he had fallen....By this time the air was getting thick with gun smoke and it was hard to see...When it cleared a little I saw...Some of them got off their horses...and seemed to be dragging something out of the water, while others soldiers still on horseback kept shooting at us.”

Before the black powder smoke obscured the scene another witness saw soldiers fall while crossing the river. He was the young Crow scout Curley (above), who was watching from the bluffs above. Telling his story years before and miles apart from White Bull, Curley said one of the men who was shot crossing the river was ridding a sorrel horse with white stockings. 

And that day the only officer, scout or trooper who was riding a sorrel horse with four white leggings (above)  was George Armstrong Custer.

According to several witnesses who helped recover his body two days after the battle, Custer had received a gunshot wound in his left chest "near the heart".  Assuming the bullet missed that vital organ, it would have caused a massive spontaneous pneumothorax (above) - damaging his rib cage before puncturing the upper lobe of his left lung and leaving behind a sucking chest wound.  

Air and blood filled the chest space outside his now deflated lung causing intense pain, rapid and continuing blood loss and the inability to draw a deep breath. Custer was probably conscious, but would be unable to communicate coherently.

Lieutenant William Winer Cooke (above) was probably the first officer to reach Custer's side, and with the help of enlisted men they would have lifted Custer and thrown him across the back of his horse.

They lead the animal away from the river and up the first escape route which presented itself - not the Medicine Trail Coulee, which angled south , back the way the regiment had come, but to the right, northward (above, left), away from the rest of the regiment, up what is now called the Long Coulee.

Captain Myles Walter Keogh (above), leading the 3 companies directly behind Custer, threw "C" and "I" companies into skirmish line to hold off the warriors with their carbines, while  "L" company followed Custer's body up the Long Coulee.  But this skirmish line, like Reno's earlier, did not hold for long.

"Suddenly we heard war cries behind us", continued White Bull.  "I looked back and saw hundreds of Lakotas and (Cheyenne)  warriors charging toward us....The soldiers must have seen them too, for they fell back to the far bank of the river, and those still on horseback got off to fight on foot. As warriors rode up to join us...a big cry went up.  Hoka hey!" the Lakotas were shouting. "They are going!" I saw this was true. The soldiers were running back up the coulee and swarming out over the higher ground to the north."

As the skirmish line fell apart, Lieutenant James Calhoun (above), along with his second in command, 

...20 year old 2nd Lieutenant John Jordan Crittenden (above), lead the 34 men of "L" company back up Medicine Trail Coulee, chased closely by warriors all the way.  At the top of drainage, and finding that his men were isolated,  Crittenden tried  to form a defense, dismounting on a height later named Calhoun Ridge. Crittenden was naturally hindered by his glass eye, the result of a shot gun injury years earlier. Warriors were able to stamped the troop's horses, leaving the men on foot in the center of the now sprawling battlefield.

Among the warriors who swarmed up Medicine Trail Coulee in pursuit was the 28 year old Cheyenne warrior Two Moon (above). He recalled, “The shooting was quick, quick. Pop—pop—pop very fast. Some of the soldiers were down on their knees, some standing. Officers all in front. The smoke was like a great cloud, and everywhere the Sioux went the dust rose like smoke....”

A 22 year old Southern Cheyenne girl, Antelope Woman, later named Kate Big Head, was singing war songs in the Cheyenne camp, in support of her brother, White Bull. Then she learned that her nephew, Noisy Walking,  had been wounded in the fight across the river. Grabbing a horse she galloped up the right drainage, Medicine Trail Coulee.  At the top she found “The soldiers had lined themselves out on a long ridge.” 

She later told an interviewer, while the Indians, “...hid themselves crawling forward...gradually creeping closer...by following the gullies or dodging from knoll to knoll...within a few minutes there were many hundreds of warriors wriggling along the gullies all around the soldiers...their saddled horses standing near them showing all of the warriors where the white men were.”

Moving around, searching for her nephew, Antelope Woman saw, "The soldier horses got scared and all of them broke loose and ran toward the river." Abandoned of their means of escape she saw the soldiers begin to use their last pistol shots to end their lives. "Right away," she said, "all of them began shooting themselves or shooting each other....For a short time the Indians just stayed where they were and watched. Then they rushed forward. But not many of them got to strike coup blows on living enemies."

Not seeing her nephew, Antelope Woman turned north, crossing what was later called Keogh Ridge. But the fight there was already over,  all the soldiers dead. So she pushed on until she reached "Last Stand Hill". There she observed, "The Indians were crowded on the (northern) side of the ridge along it's two sides.  I followed, but keeping myself back so I would not be hit by a bullet. I stopped and looked over a little hill and watched a band of soldiers on the ground at the norther slope of the ridge"

The same destruction which had been brought to Lieutenant  Crittenden and Captain Keogh's commands now befell the last group of soldiers who had followed Custer to the river ford. The loss of their leader had dissolved the unit cohesion. Isolated, and bewildered, the last of the men under Custer were surrounded, picked off and killed. They had stripped his chest, looking to tend his chest wound, but it had done no good. He might have been already dead when someone, probably Lieutenant Cooke, whose body was found beside Custer, put a bullet in Yellow Hair's brain, to save him the agony if the Sioux or Cheyenne had reached him first.    

"At the time there must have been hundreds of warriors for every white man," remembered Antelope .Woman.  "The shots kept coming from the place where the soldiers were lying behind their dead horses. All the Indians jumped up and ran forward...But there were seven of the White men who sprang to their feet and went running toward the river (Deep Ravine),...There was such a rush and mix up that it seemed the whole world had gone wild."

Two Moon saw the last of them. "One man all alone ran far down toward the river...I thought he was going to escape, but a Sioux fired and hit him in the head. He was the last man. He wore a braid on his arms."  It meant that he was an noncommissioned officer.

As did many other warriors, White Bull went among the dead soldiers, looking for ammunition. On the top of the ridge he found a naked white man's body. He turned the corpse over and recognized him as the soldier on the sorrel horse he had shot at the river.  "I remembered how close some of his bullets had come, so I thought I would take the medicine of his trigger finger to make me an even better shot. Taking out my knife. I began to cut off that finger." But a woman's voice stopped him. She said, "He is our relative."

It was the attractive young Cheyenne woman  Mona Setah (above) , whom White Bull had been courting.  She had brought her 7 year old son to this butcher ground. His name was Yellow Hair, for the blond highlights in his rich black mane. Seven years earlier Mona Setah had been taken captive at the battle of the Washita, and during the slow march north she had been raped by George Armstrong Custer.  That fall she had given birth to her boy.  It was Custer's body which lay naked before them at that moment.  While White Bull watched Mona Setah's  mother shoved a sewing awl deep into each of Custer's ears, "So Long Hair will hear better in the spirit land."  And, said White Bull, "That was the first I knew that Long Hair was the soldier chief...I shot at the ford."

It was now approaching 5:30pm.  In less than an hour of fighting 210 soldiers under the direct command of George Armstrong Custer had been killed.  At most one, or perhaps two white men escaped.  As heartbreaking as the loss of so many soldiers' lives was, no white families would starve during the coming winter.  According to the Cheyenne count, seven of their sons had been killed driving the white soldiers from their village. The Sioux had lost 19 men and boys who would no longer  feed their families. Between 10 and 20 native women and children were also killed. Remembered Two Moon,  "We had no dance that night. We were sorrowful." 

Antelope Woman eventually found her nephew in a deep gulch. "He had been shot through the body and had been stabbed several times. I stayed with him while a young man friend went to the camps to tell his mother." She brought a travois to carry her son back to the family lodge, where the young man died that night."

The day had changed the lives of every Sioux and Cheyenne who had camped along the Little Big Horn River on 25 June, 1876. The Hunkpapa warrior Gall, who had seen his family members murdered by white soldier's bullets, and who in a rage had used his war club to bludgeon many white men to death that day, would never fight again against anyone, white man or Indian. 

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