I
N LATE
1875, the government in Washington, aware of the huge potential of the gold fields in the Black Hills, decided to induce the Sioux to sell them. Custer’s preliminary enthusiasm had proved to be well-founded, and the rush of prospectors into the forbidden territory was proving difficult to stop. Once again, a commission was appointed in an attempt to gain concessions from the Sioux without telling them the true worth of the land they were being asked to surrender.
But the chiefs were no longer so gullible. They had been through a number of treaty negotiations, and they had seen how willing the white men were to lie and cheat and, when neither of those options worked, to take by force what the Sioux would not give up. Spotted Tail took a tour of the Black Hills, and while there, talked to several miners and the new agent for the territory. All the whites he spoke to told him the same thing—the Black Hills were worth at least thirty to fifty million dollars, possibly more. But they also told the Brule chief that such a figure was more than the government in Washington was likely to pay.
Red Cloud did some figuring of his own, and came up with seven million dollars, which he wanted put in an account to generate interest, which would be distributed annually without ever drawing on the principal. At the same time, he asked for a number of regular goods distributions, everything from food to the erection of houses, for seven full generations.
In its counterproposal, the commission, headed by William B. Allison, the senator from Iowa, and once again including Gen. Alfred Terry, made an offer of six million dollars for outright purchase or perpetual rental at an annual payment of four hundred thousand dollars.
But there was no consensus among the Sioux. The young warriors were outraged that their chiefs would even consider selling the sacred land of the Paha Sapa. The older chiefs, Spotted Tail and Red Cloud in particular, thought they were being more practical, trying to get something for their people in the belief that if the Hills were not sold, they would be taken by force.
But the anger of the young men, which threatened the commissioners, led to talks being broken off without a firm deal having been made. The talks crumbled, and the commission rode off, followed by angry warriors who outnumbered the commissioners and their cavalry escort by more than ten to one.
Once the negotiations terminated, the army, which had been trying to stem the tide of miners seeking to enter the gold fields, backed away. They no longer made any effort to prevent incursions into the lands which had been guaranteed to the
Sioux under the treaty of 1868. While the young warriors had been right to be angry, Red Cloud and Spotted Tail had proved to be prescient.
If there was to be any preservation of Sioux title to the Black Hills, it would have to be achieved on the warpath.
For a short time after the talks were terminated, the Sioux squabbled among themselves. Those from the agencies were trying to convince the wild Sioux of the Powder River country to accept reservation life. They told tales of the wonders of the agencies.
“Every five days,” Red Bear said to a council of hostiles and agency Sioux, “the white man turns loose hundreds of cattle. We take to our horses and hunt them like we hunt the buffalo. The women butcher them just like they did the buffalo. But it is better than the buffalo hunt, because there are always cattle. Before, when we lived free, sometimes we had to go weeks without finding a buffalo herd. That can’t happen with the cattle.”
Crazy Horse and Young man Afraid were anything but convinced. Young Man Afraid argued a bit, but Crazy Horse preferred to sit stony faced, letting the tame Indians talk of their lives, but not caring what they said. Spotted Tail and Red Cloud stayed silent, too, knowing that their words were suspect. They were too closely identified with the white man now, worse than Laramie Loafers in the eyes of some, and nothing they had to say would carry any weight with the hostiles from the Powder River.
But there was one Sioux present who could speak with authority, and who still had the respect
of the hostile leaders. Touch the Clouds asked to be heard, and when he was recognized, he looked slowly around the council circle, choosing his words carefully, framing them before speaking.
“I have lived in the Powder River country,” he began. “And I have tried living at the agency, too. Red Bear talks about hunting the white man’s cows. He says it is like the old days, like running down the buffalo. But it is not. When we rode to hunt the buffalo, we were free men, and the buffalo were free, too. It is true that sometimes we had to ride far, looking for the herds, farther and farther now that the white man is here. But it is not true that hunting the white man’s scrawny cows is like hunting the buffalo. The cows are kept in cages, and so are the agency Indians. White man cages. Both of them.”
Red Bear started to argue, but Touch the Clouds held him off. “I am not finished,” he said. “The food they give us at the agency is not fit to eat. The flour is bad, the corn is full of worms, even the cattle, which Red Bear likes to hunt, are diseased. The agents are thieves and cheats. They sell things intended for the Indians and put the money in their own pockets. They don’t care what happens to the Indians under them, as long as they can get rich at Indian expense. That is not how free men are supposed to live. That is not how Sioux warriors are supposed to live. That is not how I want to live. And I will not live that way. I will not go back to the reservation unless the white man holds a gun to my head. And even then I might not go. Red Bear can do what he wants to do. He is a free man, whether he knows it or not. But so am I.”
Touch the Clouds didn’t bother to resume his seat. Instead, he stepped through the council circle and went on out of the lodge. Inside, no one said a word. Even when the pounding of Touch the Cloud’s pony’s hooves faded away to nothing, the council lodge was silent.
Then, without a word, Crazy Horse got to his feet and walked out of the lodge. Behind him came Sitting Bull, then Young Man Afraid. For all practical purposes, the council was over. There was nothing more to be said, and no one of influence among the hostiles there to say it in any case.
But Gen. Philip Sheridan, the commander of the Department of the Missouri, was determined to force compliance. While the Sioux argued among themselves over the winter and into the spring of 1876, Sheridan was assembling a formidable army. He sent three columns into the field, each under an experienced commander.
Gen. George Crook led over a thousand soldiers and nearly three hundred Shoshoni and Crow scouts north from Fort Fetterman, heading toward the Little Bighorn River valley. Gen. Alfred Terry, with Custer in his command, led two thousand, seven hundred more troops. Terry was following the Yellowstone from the east. The third, and smallest, contingent was heading along the Yellowstone from the west, its four hundred and fifty men having left Fort Ellis in Montana Territory under the command of Gen. John Gibbon.
As the troops slowly converged on the Sioux, the Indian numbers had begun to swell. Near starvation at the agencies, many of Red Cloud’s and Spotted Tail’s people headed northwest, where
they could still find buffalo and where they would feel safe. The troop movements near the reservations had frightened some and made others angry. Neither emotion was sufficient to uproot lodges by the dozen and send their owners streaming into the hostiles’ country.
By the end of May, with the troops rapidly closing, there were as many as two thousand lodges in the great camp on the Rosebud Creek. The number of warriors might have been as high as four thousand, and possibly even higher. Not even Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull knew. But what all the Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne, Arapaho and Assiniboine alike, agreed upon was that this was their last, best chance to send the white men packing. Some had already resigned themselves to defeat, and were determined to have one last summer of freedom to live the old way. Others, and Crazy Horse was chief among them, were determined that victory was the only permissible outcome.
Sitting Bull led a sun dance at what all agreed was the largest gathering of plains Indians the continent had ever seen. The mood was decidedly celebratory, with feasting nonstop, endless dancing, gambling, and horse racing, but there was an elegiac undercurrent for the fatalists among the Sioux and their allies.
Terry and Gibbon joined up on the tenth of June at the mouth of the Rosebud. Their scouts were convinced that the hostile camp was somewhere to the south, between their joint command and Crook’s column coming up the Rosebud from the south. Neither Terry, Gibbon, Custer, nor Crook knew where the Indian village was located.
But Crook was not so lucky. The Sioux had found him. Camped in the valley of the Little Bighorn, their scouts had stumbled on Crook’s column and hastened back with word of the approach of the man they called “Three Stars.”
Crazy Horse hastily assembled a force numbering nearly fifteen hundred warriors. But it had taken more than a little argument on his part to deploy his forces in a way that made sense to him.
Some of the other chiefs wanted to send the entire force of warriors to the Rosebud to smash Crook’s column once and for all. Even Sitting Bull was in favor of the idea.
“And who will protect the women and the children?” Crazy Horse argued.
“If we kill all the bluecoats, they will not need protection,” Lone Eagle countered. “You have heard of Sitting Bull’s dream. You know that he saw bluecoat soldiers falling upside down into our village. You know that means a great victory will be ours.”
“Yes, I know of the dream. But I also know that there are many bluecoats, and if we are not careful, that dream might not come true. The bluecoats send soldiers from many different directions. Does Lone Eagle know for certain that there are no soldiers to the east? Or to the west? Or to the north?”
“It does not matter. As long as we are willing to fight, we will win.”
“It
does
matter. Someone must stay behind to defend the village. Ask those who were at Ash Hollow when Harney came. Ask those who were at Sand Creek. Ask those who were at Washita, when Long-Hair came. How many times have we come
home to find the lodges reduced to ashes, the women and children dead on the ground, our horses gone, our food destroyed? Once would have been too many, but it has been more than once, and Lone Eagle knows this.”
“Crazy Horse is right,” Sitting Bull said. He was weak from the Sundance, in which he had had fifty pieces of flesh sliced from each arm. The loss of blood had reduced him to near invalid status. But his word was still powerful, and with him and Crazy Horse in agreement, no one wanted to argue.
So Crazy Horse assembled his force of fifteen hundred warriors and led an all-night march on June sixteenth. The Sioux crossed the divide between the Little Bighorn camp and Rosebud Creek, moving in a military-style column, with scouts out ahead and the
akicita
warriors guarding the flanks and the rear. Crazy Horse was determined that this time tempers would be on a tight rein, and the younger men would be held in check. He sensed that this might be the last real opportunity to inflict significant damage on the bluecoats and would not let a lack of discipline spoil it.
At dawn the following morning, the warriors reached the banks of the Rosebud, where the horses were allowed to graze while the warriors donned their war paint. By eight thirty, the Sioux were ready to move again.
At the same time, Crook called a halt to his march, which had begun at 4:00
a.m
. His troopers unsaddled their mounts while Crook conferred with Washakie, the great Shoshoni chief who was leading the contingent of scouts.
“There are many Sioux ahead,” Washakie told him.
But Three Stars was confident. “We are many, too,” he said.
Washakie shook his head. “Too many Sioux. We should send scouts to see exactly where they are. And how many.”
Crazy Horse was on the west side of the Rosebud valley. Creeping to the top of a hill, he could see the creek below, and the huge column, its members scattered on both banks. He saw the horses unsaddled and grazing. The north end of the valley narrowed dramatically, the walls getting progressively steeper, and a heavy stand of timber filled the gap. If he could get the Sioux into the timber without being spotted, it would be an ideal place from which to launch an ambush.
But as he was about to back away from the crest, a small band of Crow scouts stumbled on the advance party and, when they saw the massed Sioux might, broke back for the column, shouting the alarm.
The Sioux poured over the ridge in pursuit of the scouts. There was no time for strategy. The troopers, broken into smaller units by the terrain, started to lay down heavy fire, but the hordes of Sioux and Cheyenne kept on coming. The pockets of resistance fought fiercely, but the Sioux and Cheyenne were every bit as fierce. They swarmed in masses over and through the clumps of troopers. The fighting was hand to hand much of the time, the warriors pressing their assault instead of staying at a distance where the repeating rifles of the bluecoats were more deadly.
The pockets of battle became swirls of limbs and lances as the warriors kept the troopers off balance. Pressing, charging, falling back and charging again, the Sioux never let up. Crook’s men were fighting for their lives, and they knew it. Much of the combat involved knives and clubs. At such close quarters, the soldiers were unable to make efficient use of their long guns.
Limbs were severed, eyes gouged out, throats slashed, and blood splattered on Sioux and soldier alike. It was like nothing the troopers had ever seen. And they weren’t prepared for it.
Crook tried to mount a counterattack, but Crazy Horse was everywhere, leading charge after charge. Wherever it looked as if the tide was about to turn, Crazy Horse took the lead. Good Weasel, Black Twin, and Kicking Bear,
de facto
lieutenants for Crazy Horse, followed his lead, taking command of large contingents and rallying the warriors to keep the pressure on.