Meanwhile, down at the ford, five hundred more braves had swarmed across the Greasy Grass, and more was coming like bees out of a shaken hive.

CHAPTER 28 The Last Stand

IT WAS BOUYER who reacted first. Riding a fleet Crow pony, he overtook the General and detained him, seizing Vic’s bridle. The Indians was firing at them, and Bouyer was wounded, I think: a dark stain showed on his buckskin shirt, but he never paid it no mind.

Cooke meantime got the troop remounted, after they delivered some answering fire as skirmishers, for it was obvious we would have to get out of that narrow place to where the cavalry could maneuver.

Now Custer suddenly recovered, the charge was sounded properly, and down Medicine Tail we dashed, almost to the water, and the Indians, most of them dismounted, fell back, though not so far we could have negotiated the ford against them, the Greasy Grass being clogged with warriors, hundreds on ponies and more wading chest-deep.

Another ravine opened at a forty-five-degree angle to the right, and we plunged into and up it, coming to a hogback ridge which we gained, galloping along the grass-covered bench under heavy Indian fire, though I don’t believe we had yet lost many men, maybe a few near the ford, but the command was still in good organization, riding in column of fours. A mile or so north the ridge reached its summit, and I reckoned Custer was a-heading there as the best place to make his stand.

But when you run from an Indian, be it orderly withdrawal or not, he gets amazingly encouraged, figuring he has the momentum on you. We had started to attack the village and been stopped by four Cheyenne, then drove off: that’s how them hostiles saw it, and events was proceeding to prove them right. I don’t know why

Custer had halted at that first puny demonstration, four savages against our two hundred. Maybe in his crazy view he thought that was the entire enemy force and was caught by the idea that Indians was so brave. I don’t think he could endure the thought of another person than he having the capability of courage in the grand degree.

Only they wasn’t just four and had not showed foolhardy gallantry, but was rather demonstrating to gain time while others crossed the river behind them and still more lay concealed in the ground towards which we would be deflected. They was using strategy.

A peculiar reverse of roles took place that day upon the Little Bighorn. Reno had been sent to charge the village and instead was himself charged. Custer, going to envelop the enemy, had got it done to his own self. In their last great battle the Indians fought like white men was supposed to, and we, well, we was soon to arrive at the condition in which we had planned to get them, for this wasn’t the terrain for cavalry and our order commenced to dissolve somewhere along that flight.

And now come a new host of Indians from the south. Led by the great war chief Gall, though we didn’t know it then, who had just repulsed Reno and besieged him upon that bluff where Custer had took his first look at the village. They was at least a thousand strong, and riding in dread certainty.

Meanwhile, on the slope towards the river, the Gray Horse Troop was getting all cut up by Indians hidden in the draws along there, and finally they was run into a deep ravine and piled up on one another and slaughtered by Sioux shooting down from above, with only a couple of riderless horses left to plunge wildly up the vertical cutbanks.

Custer was still acting well. He throwed Calhoun’s company against Gall as dismounted skirmishers, but them Sioux forthwith left their own ponies and advanced crawling through the sage, shooting arrows from concealment, hundreds at a time, which having reached the limit of their lofty arcs, descended in fearful volleys, piercing men who could not see an enemy to fire at.

Some Indians encircled the troopers detailed as horse-holders, every fourth man in the company, and leaping forth stampeded the mounts with screams and flapping blankets. So Calhoun was henceforth pinned in place. They then begun to diminish his line from both ends towards the center, knocking off the skirmishers one by one, and at last come out of the grass in a great naked brown wave, yelling Hoka Hey!, the Sioux war cry, from a multitude of guttural throats, and washed over him.

That’s what struck me, the sight of savage flesh, for the Indians was stripped to the breechclout and most was not painted nor wearing their bonnets and other gewgaws usual to their battle costume, and taking no coups except upon the dead. Most fought afoot, with no frenzied displays of courage, and taking every advantage of cover. My God, there was a lot of the latter on that awful field: it was like a big sponge, with its gulches and draws, and now and again as if a mighty hand was a-squeezing it, it seemed to heave and savages would well out of every nook, drowning another portion of the command, then be absorbed once more into concealment.

But they took quite as much toll upon us when in hiding, with them arrow-volleys swishing through the sky, and had their rifle sharpshooters too, though there wasn’t near as many guns on the Indian side as some people think; they simply used well the few they had, most of them not repeaters, either.

I had a seven-shot Winchester carbine, but would have give anything to trade it for the old Sharps single with which I had hunted buffalo, for we in Custer’s party was now upon the summit of the ridge, farthest distant from the enemy as befits a general in defensive action. Below us and on a lower rise was Tom Custer’s sorrel-mounted troop, and to the left, Keogh riding to fill the gap caused by Calhoun’s collapse; then that deep draw into which the Gray Horse Troop had been run and slaughtered, and farther to the right, one platoon of Captain Yates’s F Company, at this moment being rolled up by a great press of savages who shortly spilled through and engaged Tom and the remaining platoon of F.

So there was much to watch of the meanest kind of sight, and nought to do at that range. I mean for me: for Custer there was plenty, and he was so far doing it fine, though at the disadvantage of being by personality and training a cavalryman to the core, which is to say, having the offensive character. He had never been backed up this way before and denied the possibility of his beloved charge. Our horses was worthless here, and some of the men in headquarters detail had started to shoot theirs and make a breastwork of their carcasses, for any fool could see the ridge would soon be engaged. And to show you how normal the General was at this time, he had Lieutenant Cooke take down the names of the troopers who did this and swore to court-martial them on the return to Fort Lincoln.

This was the next second after sending a courier to move Keogh against the Sioux what had run over Calhoun, who was after all Custer’s brother-in-law and now evidently deceased, though as the time passed we could see less and less through the gigantic pall of gunsmoke and milling dust that was turning the middle afternoon into late twilight.

So when Keogh in turn got his, we knowed it mainly from the volume of hostile yells, and then come Tom Custer’s men, dismounted and their horses lost, backing foot by foot up the rise towards our position.

Right about then, the first shot sounded from behind us, where there was a sharp slope to the northwest which fell into an encircling ravine. No one had paid that ground much mind, what with thousands of hostiles on the other three sides, so it had filled up unopposed with Indians who had traveled the long way around, another thousand if there was one, and now advancing up against us, they commenced to sound their cries: Hoka Hey, Hoka Hey, and some yelled the name of their great people, Lakota! Lakota! The Men! The Men!-but predominant even over these was the simple, throaty Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey that started like a funeral drum and then increased in tempo to where it was a madman’s raving, though without disorder, a directed passion if you can imagine that, the wild and merciless fixed upon a single aim and undistracted. They was Cheyenne, and they was at the center of the world.