Black Hills

Chapter 15 George Armstrong Custer

Of all people on this good Earth, my darling, you know that my reputation as America’s “Greatest Living Indian Fighter” is exaggerated. Under my orders and following my lead, thousands upon thousands of Rebels were killed, but it’s not been my honor to kill many Indians.

Unlike the Rebs, the Indians are a sly and elusive enemy. The warriors fight at a time and place of their choosing, almost never in a stand-up battle but with feints and usually from a distance (except for their rushing in to count coup or to scalp fallen whites), and then they flee, often running to hide behind the skirts of their women and the rattles of their babies in villages. So the only time the cavalry usually can surprise and bring the warriors to fight is when we attack one of their villages, especially early, just after dawn. So it was at my Battle at the Washita River.

Those warriors, mostly Cheyenne, that bloody year of 1868 had been coming up out of the Indian Territory and out of Texican country farther south to raid in Kansas. That November, General Sheridan had showed me the butcher’s bill just since August—110 white people killed, 13 women raped, more than a thousand head of cattle stolen, and countless settlers’ cabins burned and looted. The Kansans were taking this rape, theft, and slaughter personally.

The Indians’ violence flowed, as you know I believe, directly from the peace treaties we signed with Red Cloud and the others that year at Fort Laramie: treaties in which Sherman gave the tribes everything they’d ever demanded and more, including the army’s agreement to abandon our entire string of forts along the Bozeman Trail and then, on top of that, acknowledging Sioux ownership of the Black Hills, despite the fact that the Sioux were recent invaders there themselves and also in spite of the additional fact that white men—miners—were already following my surveying trail into those hills and building their own cities there. But Indians, like any worthwhile enemy, see concession as weakness, so it was little surprise that mere weeks after their chiefs signed these agreements, their braves were slaughtering settlers all over Kansas, then retreating to safe havens such as the Fort Cobb Agency on the Washita River in northern Texas country, where they took our beef, wintered over, and waited for good weather before riding off to slaughter more settlers.

You remember Phil Sheridan, of course, my dear. (And I remember you dancing with him at Fort Leavenworth when the general came out to take over Hancock’s command.) General Sheridan was as helpful to my career as he was a bad dancer with you. He plucked me out of Monroe, where I was dying from boredom (except for the wonderful days and nights with you, my love), and on November 12, Sheridan and I were leading a mixed force of infantry and cavalry deep into Indian country.

The hostiles, with our help at such agencies disguised as forts as Fort Cobb, had short supply lines, but the cavalry always suffered from unacceptably long lines of supply, often all the way back to Leavenworth. Thus we built the Camp Supply depot on the North Canadian River near the Oklahoma panhandle. The hostiles were so used to their sanctuary there south of the Arkansas River that they’d grown smug and careless; this time, with Camp Supply as our logistics base, we were going to take them by surprise in the winter. (The old mountain man Jim Bridger argued that such a winter campaign couldn’t be done—that cavalry would founder in drifts in a day and be dead in three days—but Sheridan and I knew better than that.)

I’ve told you, Libbie, about Phil Sheridan’s unusual, almost nonsoldierly habit of using swear words (which I forswore forever on that same day in 1862 when I gave up drinking forever after you had seen me drunk in Monroe, just after I began courting you)—well, anyway, Phil’s delusion that he was the first cavalry commander in the West to consider attacking the Indians in the dead of winter (many before him had done so) mixed with his swearing made for a fascinating briefing before my officers and men and I set out in a serious snowstorm to the tune of “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”

The snow helped our Osage scouts (who were eager to settle old scores with their enemy the Cheyenne), and on November 26 we crossed the trail of a band of Indians returning to their village in the Oklahoma country from what obviously had been a raid into Kansas. We immediately left the wagon train behind and followed that trail south for a day and a night.

I pushed the men hard, as you know I tend to do when on the real warpath, stopping only once for coffee and hardtack in the short, freezing day and longer, freezing night. It was the only stop my men saw from 4 a.m. to late into the next day. My 720 men followed me through the night, the only sound the crack of ice atop the snow as their horses’ hooves broke through the crust. Finally one of the Osage guides called me forward to the crest of a hill, and I was surprised to see a river valley stretching away below us. I could see vague shapes moving about a half mile away, but I assumed they were buffalo.

“No,” grunted the Osage. “Heap Indians. Ponies.”

I whispered the query to the old Osage—why did he think they were Indian ponies? In the dim starlight, they could have been anything.

“Me hear dog bark,” grunted the old guide.

I strained to hear but could make out no barking dog. For a second I thought I heard a bell… Indians sometimes bell the lead mare in their pony herds… but it was not clear enough. Finally I heard the thin, frail cry of a baby rise out of the dark valley. There could be no doubt now.

I ordered the attack to begin at first light.

I divided my forces, just as I did yesterday (was it yesterday?) at the Little Big Horn. I broke the column into four detachments—one to swing around to the far end of the village in the valley, two to sweep in from the sides, my own detachment to attack south from our current location.

I had no idea how many Indians were down there that night, of course, Libbie; it might have been a hundred; it might have been ten thousand. But I had seven hundred cavalry at my command, and no force of irregulars on earth could stand up to seven hundred US Cavalry fighting with surprise on their side.

Some of the members of the regimental band said after that battle that it was so cold their lips stuck to their brass instruments when they began playing our regiment’s beloved “Garry Owen” at the beginning of the attack as I’d ordered, but they exaggerate. In truth, it was only their spittle that froze, soon sending the brass notes faltering and then stopping, but that was unimportant, since I’d already led the detachment down off our hill and into the valley and village at full speed, me at the lead (of course), sword out and extended in one hand, pistol in the other.

The Indians—it turned out to be a Cheyenne village, which pleased our bloodthirsty Osage scouts no end—were caught totally by surprise, but warriors came erupting from their tents and teepees within seconds, hurling lances, notching arrows, and firing repeating rifles. We cut them down where they stood. I have to admit to you the truth of war, Libbie—when an old man or old woman or, I saw early in the fight, a ten-year-old boy picked up a fallen brave’s rifle or lance and directed it at my men, the cavalrymen cut them down as well. Many of these troopers had been chasing hostile Indians for two years or more, never catching them in a fair fight, only seeing the scalped whites, raped women, and burnt settlements in the hostiles’ wake. The pent-up frustration on the part of my men was very great, the fighting—though brief, less than an hour with only the first half hour being a true fight—horribly intense.

The braves retreated from the village and tried to wade the Washita River, but we shot many of them down as they stood waist-deep in the rushing icy water. Those that reached the thick trees on the other side continued firing from vantage points there, but groups from all four of my converging detachments were sent in—the trees were not so tight that we had to dismount—and, one by one, the warriors were killed. Almost none allowed themselves to be captured.

Our own casualties were light—one of my officers killed and two officers and eleven enlisted men wounded. My second-in-command (you remember Major Elliott) and nineteen of his men had been seen chasing hostiles away from the river, and although we expected that detachment to return soon, it never did. We later learned that the Indians downriver had ambushed and killed Elliott and all his men.

Still, the victory was all but complete. I had fifty-three prisoners—mostly women and children who had remained hidden in their lodges during the fighting—and more than nine hundred Indian ponies. The women and children we would take back with us, but I ordered almost 850 of the ponies, mostly pintos, destroyed. I know how much you love horses, my darling, and knew when I told you upon my return that you were upset with the idea, but I believe you’ve come to understand that I had little choice. I let the women, children, and a couple of ancient men choose ponies for riding, but there was no way my troopers could herd the other 850-some Indian pintos all the way back to Camp Supply. Leaving them for the enemy to reclaim was unthinkable.

There are many memories for me from that battle along the Washita, but the screams of the ponies, the smell of the gunpowder mixing with the scent of the ponies’ blood in the cold morning air, the sounds of their heavy falling in the snow and along the icy banks of that river… well, they are indelible.

By ten a.m., I’d learned who it was we’d fought. The band belonged to the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle—the so-called peace chief—the very same Black Kettle who’d somehow managed to survive Colonel Chivington’s slaughter of his band at Sand Creek in Colorado. Black Kettle’s sister told me, through my interpreter, that the old chief had camped here away from and farther north of the other Indian villages now strung out along the Washita down this long valley—encampments of Apache, Arapahoe, Kiowa, and even Comanche—precisely because he, Black Kettle, had been afraid of an attack by cavalry (a fear that none of the other Indians appeared to have shared, although none of the other chiefs had been at Sand Creek). Black Kettle himself had been killed, we discovered, in the first minutes of the shooting as the old man attempted to flee, not even staying to protect his family or grandchildren.

The intelligence of the thousands of Indians camping so near did not alarm me—this many cavalry troopers could have handled any number of warriors they sent upstream at us—but it decided me on shooting the ponies and withdrawing for the time being.

I know that you remember, Libbie, the outrageous newspaper articles that soon sprang up comparing this fair-fight victory to Chivington’s massacre at Sand Creek. As we discussed at the time, this was not only untrue, it was libelous. Black Kettle’s band along the Washita had been harboring many of the braves who’d been terrorizing Arkansas. We found white men’s and women’s scalps. We found photographs, weapons, clothing, utensils, and other loot from the burned cabins. More than that, Black Kettle’s braves had two white women as hostages (one very young), and they cut the women’s throats at the first sound of our attack. These were not innocent, peace-loving Indians, however much Black Kettle had liked to call himself the “peace chief.”

Black Kettle’s sister kept talking and talking and talking, blaming everything on the few “hot-blooded young braves” who had joined the tribe, babbling away, but I soon realized that she was just playing for time. By noon, the first hundreds of warriors from the many villages downstream were beginning to appear on the bluffs across the river. By late afternoon, there would be thousands there, and I’m sure that’s exactly what Black Kettle’s sister wanted—for us to still be in that indefensible position as thousands of Arapahoe, Kiowa, returning Cheyenne, Apache, and Comanche fell upon us.

During the last part of this harangue, just as the last of the ponies were killed and just before I cut her off so that we could mount up and ride, I could not help notice the beautiful girl—young woman of seventeen, actually—who for some strange reason had been holding my hand while Black Kettle’s wizened sister droned on.

“What is this old woman doing?” I irritably asked my interpreter.

The interpreter laughed. “Why, sir, she’s been marrying you to that squaw, named Mo-nah-se-tah. I think you’re duly and properly married by now.”

I immediately dropped the girl’s hand and gestured Black Kettle’s sister to silence.

I well remember that retreat out of the valley and upstream along the river, looking back in the early-afternoon winter light—the many hundreds of Indians along the bluffs there now looking like so many black vertical pegs in the reflected sunlight, looking, from the distance, like heathen Druid monuments to some forgotten sun god—and the valley itself alive with flame and smoke (we had burned all the teepees) and the snow there not only trampled, but red, for several hundred yards, from the blood of the murdered ponies.

I was later criticized both from within the Army and from without for retreating when I had so many Indians virtually at our mercy (our wagon train was coming up, and there was enough buffalo and other meat in the captured village to feed my seven hundred troopers for months)—not to mention criticized even more harshly for not tarrying and searching for Major Elliott and his men—but you know the reason for my so-called retreat, Libbie, my darling. Of all the people on Earth, you are the only one to know the full reason.

But sometimes I wonder what those writers-of-editorials who called me coward or “squaw killer” would think if they knew the truth.

Let us recall more pleasant (or at least amusing) things, my darling.

Mo-nah-se-tah.

How you used to tease me about her. She stayed with the Seventh after the Battle of Washita River and was either a guest in a tent near my tent, or was in my tent. It was a long, hard, cold winter. (You know that on the march—even those first November days in ’68 when we were striking south toward the Antelope Mountains and the Washita River before the attack on Black Kettle’s band—I often would not have my command tent erected when we paused, but would sleep the few, cold hours of the long, cold night outside, on a buffalo robe, with our two large dogs on either side of me. Later, when that endless winter campaign was over… no, wait, even during it, through our many letters, I remember now… you teased me unceasingly about my “Indian bride.”)

I remember one early missive I sent you from the snowy wastes, one in which I described first the comic “wedding ceremony” along the Washita and then describedMo-nah-se-tah herself to you in terms that no “ordinary” young wife would have found bearable, much less amusing:

She is an extremely comely squaw, possessing a bright, cheery face, a countenance beaming with intelligence, and a disposition more inclined to be merry than one usually finds among the Indians…. Added to bright, laughing eyes, a set of pearly teeth, and a rich complexion, her well-shaped head was crowned with a luxuriant growth of the most beautiful silken tresses, rivalling in color the blackness of the raven and extending, when allowed to fall loosely over her shoulders, to below her waist.

That was in my letter for public consumption—and, perhaps, as I knew you would know, for later publication in the book of memoirs you and I had long planned to write together—but I knew how you would respond to it privately, and you did not disappoint me, my darling. I knew that you would tease me about the girl in a way that only a wife perfectly secure in her husband’s love and adoration could tease her lover.

No more than a week later, somewhere on our freezing march through the panhandle of Texas and around back into Oklahoma, your responding letter caught up to me:

My Darling Autie,

Your second bride sounds ravishing, my dearest. As the victor in your lightning siege and burning of that Indian Troy, you certainly deserve this ravishing Helen whom you describe in such delightful (one might almost say “breathless”) prose. Few white women have ever received a love letter of their own with such rapturous phrasings and felicitous paeons, so I have no idea how your Cheyenne Helen (whose name apparently sounds a little like “Minnesota,” which is appropriate, since you took her, one might say, in the snow) feels about this praise. Can she read? Oh, that makes no matter, I’m sure, since while you must send me letters, I am certain that you need not even raise your voice to talk to her on these long, long winter nights. She does share your tent, of course? It would hardly be gallant of you if she did not.

So, my darling Autie, my dearest Beloved, what does our—your—Mo-nah-se-tah (and I see while actually writing the name, that she has much more “moan” than wintry state in her sweet name) look like beneath those soft and beaded doeskin dresses which I’m sure she wears only when outside your shared sleeping quarters?

Are Mo-nah-se-tah’s ravenlike “luxuriant growth of the most beautiful silken tresses” matched by the richness of her escutcheon, my dearest connoisseur of all such luxuriance?

I interrupt only to say that I remember when you first used “escutcheon” to describe what you are discussing here, my darling Libbie. It was in Monroe, when we were lying naked on our bed that summer evening after we’d bathed together and I was playing with the rich tangle of what I then called your maiden-hair and you asked me if your “escutcheon” was, as you whispered that warm afternoon, “too prolific?” I assured you then that it was not, that I loved the luxuriant growth of it, and then I ended any verbal argument by other means.

Your winter ’69 letter continued, and I think I remember each word correctly:

Are your new friend Mo-nah-se-tah’s attributes higher and firmer than mine?

I wrote you back that I had seen the lady bathing and that although she seemed to have almost no escutcheon, her seventeen-year-old’s breasts were high and firm, but immediately assured you that they did not compare in attractiveness to your full, white bosoms. (I could have told you the truth, that Indian women’s busts were almost always sagging, wrinkled old dugs before they were out of their twenties, caused, I presume, by suckling far too many Indian children and perhaps by never being supported by any proper undergarment, but I thought perhaps you knew this already. You were always put off by the appearance of old, wrinkled, sagging Indian women.)

You wrote more:

Is her skin a golden, dusky tawny all over (except for the parts that are pink on me)?

I assured you in the next mail that Mo-nah-se-tah’s skin was indeed a golden, tawny color, unblemished except for an odd tattoo carved into her left shoulder. Her nipples, I explained, were a light brown and thus not nearly as attractive or exciting as your pink tips, my darling Libbie. You then abandoned all subtlety:

Do Indian maidens named Mo-nah-se-tah moan in your presence, my dearest Autie?

I laughed then and wrote you that the day before, the 14th of January, 1869, Mo-nah-se-tah had moaned softly for hours. It was the day her baby was born, and during most of the time I had glimpsed her briefly naked in my tent, the small girl was grossly pregnant with some brave’s child. I often wondered if we had killed the father of her child that morning of November 27 (odds are good we had), but I never asked Mo-nah-se-tah, and she never mentioned the warrior or his fate.

The girl was always cheerful and never a drag on the regiment. Indeed, it was due to her excellent guiding that on March 15 of 1869 we found Little Robe’s and Medicine Arrow’s village in north Texas, thus ending a chase that had preoccupied us all that long winter. Since they had some white captives with them (the memory of those two dead white women in the burned village along the Washita, their throats so cruelly cut, had stayed with me), I chose to parley rather than immediately attack the village, but when Medicine Arrow proved especially recalcitrant, I seized four of their men as hostages and promised the chiefs I would hang these men at sunrise the next morning if they did not immediately hand over their white captives. Still, the recalcitrant Cheyenne resisted, so we sent the captives—after grabbing a few more—away to Fort Hays with a second ultimatum that these hostages would be freed only after Medicine Arrow and Little Robe brought their bands to the reservation and released the white captives. Luckily for us, the guards at Fort Hays killed two of these Cheyenne hostages, and Medicine Arrow released the captives and led his people to a reservation.

Then I returned to Fort Hays and you, and we had two of the most pleasant years of our marriage there, with you teasing me about Mo-nah-se-tah at some of the most intimate moments of those two happy years. Why such conversation excited you, my dearest, I do not know, but your excitement always incited mine—and perhaps, to be totally truthful, the fantasy discussions of Mo-nah-se-tah did as well—so of all our little bedroom games, the Mo-nah-se-tah game may have been one of the most stimulating for both of us.

Libbie, my darling, even while thinking these thoughts to you, I am overcome by a strange and deep foreboding.

I am sure that I am merely dreaming, almost certainly in the arms of morphia, after being wounded at the Little Big Horn yesterday (or recently), but sometimes here in the darkness I feel insubstantial, no longer connected to my injured body or the world, in a word—untethered—except to you.

Even while I was reminiscing about the Washita victory and our ongoing Mo-nah-se-tah game, another memory chilled me.

Do you remember last winter in New York, when, weary of seeing Julius Caesar for free (more than two score times, until we could—and did—recite all the dialogue from memory), we were allowed by our friend the actor Lawrence Barrett (the very same friend who’d left all those complimentary tickets for us to Julius Caesar) to sit in on the dress rehearsals for Henry IV Part I and Henry IV Part II?

Neither of us knew the plays that well, but you were highly amused at the character of Henry Percy, the so-called Hotspur. When I failed to see the source of your amusement, you whispered, “Oh, Autie… Hotspur is you!”

I frowned at the martinet of a war leader strutting and fretting on the stage—the theater, I remember, being filled only with other actors and immediate family, was not heated, and we were shivering—and I whispered back, “I fail to see any resemblance.”

“Oh, Autie,” you whispered again, still giggling as softly as you could at the scene unfolding on the stage, “he loves his wife madly. Don’t you see? But the two of them are always teasing and threatening and playacting toward each other.”

At that very moment, the dialogue on stage was such:

HOTSPUR

LADY PERCY

HOTSPUR

LADY PERCY

HOTSPUR

LADY PERCY

I remember it in such detail because I later read it in our newly acquired Compleat Shakespeare volumes at least half a hundred times. It did indeed sound like a cavalry officer speaking to his beloved but too-inquisitive wife. How many times had you and I had similar conversations, Libbie? Always with me promising that wherever I was to be sent, I would summon you and we would be together.

You also laughed that day, I remember, at this Hotspur’s seeming similarity to me in the way he asked his officers for advice but then interrupted them, never listening. And Hotspur’s temper and reckless boldness, you said, reminded you so much of me that you were considering calling me “My darling Hotspur” rather than “Autie” in your love letters.

But then Henry Percy, Hotspur, was cut down on the battlefield. (In single combat with that wastrel fop Prince Hal, which I did not believe for a moment.)

And then that fat, drunken bag of cowardly guts Falstaff gave his idiotic soliloquy about honor being “only a word, that is, nothing” and went so far as to slice Hotspur’s corpse with his own sword and claim the victory over this fine warrior, lugging the body off stage. This dishonorable act, evidently much approved of both by Shakespeare and the crowd at the dress rehearsal that evening, so upset you and so angered me that we left early.

But the next evening, during the rehearsal for Henry IV Part II, it was Lady Percy’s eulogy for her dead husband—the other kings and royals and knights seem almost to have forgotten him—that caused you to start weeping. We stayed for the end of that interminable play, but I’m sorry we did. I don’t think you ever forgot Lady Percy’s widow’s lament, and once, in the middle of the night, weeping hard even as I held you, you admitted that if anything ever happened to me, you would have to give the same speech, telling other members of the Seventh Cavalry and the ignorant public that your dead husband had been the miracle of men…

I told you then, Libbie (I almost said “Kate” there), each time you sobbed in the night that I would do everything in my not-inconsiderable powers to keep you from becoming the widow who would have to read Lady Percy’s lines like that.

But tonight (or today, there is only darkness here in this semiconscious state), I worry and wonder if I can keep that promise. I know that you would be a fierce and loyal widow, Libbie, always keeping my memory alive and defending my honor from those honorless rogues (Major Benteen?) who have always wanted and tried to sully my reputation.

But I do not want you to be a widow, Libbie. I do not want to die.

Oh, my darling, my dearest—I hold fast to the memories of you and of us, and I lie here and wait for the light. I know that you will be there when I awake. I know it as surely as I know our love.