US History/US History (Bureau Development Inc.)(1991).ISO/dp/0028/00287.txt

Text File | 1990-12-23 | 47KB | 773 lines

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$Title{Custer Battlefield
Chapter 2  Road to the Little Bighorn}
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$Author{Utley, Robert M.}
$Affiliation{National Park Service}
$Subject{indians
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custer
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indian
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$Volume{Handbook 132}
$Date{1988}
$Log{Lt. Col. Custer*0028701.scf
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Book:        Custer Battlefield
Author:      Utley, Robert M.
Affiliation: National Park Service
Volume:      Handbook 132
Date:        1988

Chapter 2  Road to the Little Bighorn

     The Indians who wiped out Custer were Teton Sioux and Northern Cheyennes.
Seven separate tribes made up the Teton Sioux-Hunkpapa, Blackfoot, Oglala,
Brule, Two Kettle, Sans Arc, and Miniconjou.  Once they had lived around the
headwaters of the Mississippi River, but, pressed by Chippewas armed with
muskets obtained from white traders, they retreated in the late 18th century
westward to the Missouri River and beyond.  In turn they pushed aside weaker
tribes and finally overspread the plains cut by the valleys of the Yellowstone
River and its major tributaries, the Powder, Tongue, and Bighorn.

     The Cheyennes followed a similar course but migrated to the southwest and
made their homes along the upper Platte River.  Here they gradually split into
two divisions.  The Southern Cheyennes generally lived on the High Plains
between the Platte and Arkansas Rivers.  The Northern Cheyennes drifted
northward to the country the Sioux now claimed.

     This land, so bounteous in buffalo and other resources that supported the
Plains Indians' way of life, belonged to the Crow tribe.  The Sioux swept
aside the Crows, thus touching off generations of conflict between the two
peoples.  In this warfare the Northern Cheyennes allied themselves with the
Sioux.

     Then another tide rolled westward, this one of white people.  Like the
Crows before them, the Tetons were confronted with a powerful threat to their
territory and freedom.  They felt the first tremors in the early 1860's, when
gold discoveries in the mountains of Idaho and western Montana set off a rush
to the new bonanzas.  Gold seekers went up the Missouri River on steamboats or
set out in wagon trains overland to the mountains.

     The Indians resisted.  Soldiers marched against them.  Brig. Gen. Alfred
Sully led an army of 2,000 to the Yellowstone in 1864, and Maj. Gen. Patrick
E. Connor threw three strong columns into the Powder River country in 1865.
Sully won a victory at Kill-deer Mountain, but Connor's army almost
disintegrated when his supply system broke down.

[See Lt. Col. Custer: Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, photographed in New
York in early 1976]

Recipe for Disaster

     The end of the Civil War in 1865 gave new momentum to the westward
movement of white Americans.  Workmen pushed the rails of the Union Pacific up
the Platte River Valley to meet and join in 1869 with the Central Pacific
beyond the Rocky Mountains.  The Northern Pacific built from St. Paul,
Minnesota, aiming for Dakota Territory and ultimately the Pacific Northwest.
Steamers continued to ply the Missouri, carrying passengers and freight to
Fort Benton, the head of navigation, for the land journey to the gold mines.
Along the railroad and steamboat routes the little postwar regular Army built
forts and stationed troops to guard travelers and settlers.

     For the Tetons and their Northern Cheyenne allies, the most serious
menace loomed in the south.  Beginning in 1866, emigrants increasingly looked
to the Bozeman Trail as the best route to the Montana mines.  Angling
northwestward from the North Platte River, this route crossed the Powder,
Tongue, and Bighorn Rivers, struck the Yellowstone on its upper reaches, and
continued to Virginia City and other mining camps.

     Piercing the Sioux buffalo ranges as it did, the trail infuriated the
Indians, especially when soldiers came to protect it.  Three guardian forts,
Reno, Phil Kearny, and C.F Smith, planted the Army in the midst of Sioux
country.  The tribes fought back, cutting off travel on the trail and bottling
up the troops in their rude forts.

     The Sioux had many fine leaders that year of 1866, but increasingly they
gave allegiance to one who was not even a chief Red Cloud.  Skilled in war and
politics, Red Cloud mobilized the Teton tribes against the hated forts.  A
mystical young warrior named Crazy Horse also rose to prominence. He played a
critical role in the conflict by leading a decoy party that enticed 81
soldiers and civilians out of Fort Phil Kearny squarely into an ambush.  All
perished.

     The annihilation of Capt. William J. Fetterman and his command on
December 21, 1866, stunned the nation and prompted demands for vengeance. Even
so, Red Cloud won the war.  Despite setbacks at the Wagon Box and Hayfield
fights in August 1867, the Indians effectively disrupted travel on the Bozeman
Trail.  The Government decided that the forts would have to be abandoned.  For
the Army it was a humiliating retreat.  But for the gold seekers it made
little difference: the rapid construction of the Union Pacific Railroad made
the Montana mines more accessible by other routes.

     The Government formalized its surrender in the Fort Laramie Treaty of
1868.  Maddeningly, Red Cloud refused to sign until the soldiers had actually
pulled out of the forts, after which his warriors promptly rode in and laid
them waste.  Even then, the Oglala leader tarried to hunt buffalo before
finally journeying down to Fort Laramie, almost six months after he had been
expected, to make his mark on the treaty.

     The Treaty of 1868 laid the groundwork for endless trouble between the
Indians and the United States Government.  The Government's aim was to get the
Sioux together where they could be watched and controlled.  That meant setting
aside a reservation and feeding them.  The treaty therefore established all of
present South Dakota west of the Missouri River as the Great Sioux
Reservation.  In this sweep of plains the Sioux would live while drawing
rations and other provisions at agencies along the Missouri River.

     But the Sioux had won the war, and not all wished to become agency
Indians.  Besides giving up the Bozeman Trail, therefore, the Government
agreed to an "unceded territory," free of whites, stretching from the western
boundary of the reservation to the summit of the Big Horn Mountains.  Here in
the Powder River Basin, long the heart of the Sioux domain, the Indians could
continue to follow the buffalo.

     Most of the Tetons, some 15,000, succumbed to the lure of free rations
and went to the reservation.  Even Red Cloud, after exasperating Government
officials with shifting demands, finally gave in.  But neither he nor his
equally powerful rival, Spotted Tail, chief of the Brules, wanted an agency on
the Missouri.  The Indian Bureau at last agreed to locations far up the White
River, across the reservation boundary in Nebraska, and established Red Cloud
and Spotted Tail agencies.  Other agencies, chief among them Cheyenne River
and Grand River (renamed Standing Rock in 1875), rose from the banks of the
Missouri River to the east.

     Not all the Indians settled on the Great Sioux Reservation.  A hard core
of holdouts, about 3,000 Sioux and 400 Cheyennes, stubbornly resisted all
overtures from the Government.  They wanted nothing to do with white people or
agencies or rations.  They preferred the old life of the chase, and so long as
the buffalo ran in the unceded territory they remained free to do as they
pleased.

     The Indians in the unceded territory followed their own tribal chiefs and
noted warriors.  The Hunkpapas, for example, boasted Black Moon, Four Horns,
Gall, Crow King, and Rain-in-the-Face; the Miniconjous, Lame Deer and Hump;
the Sans Arc, Black Eagle and Spotted Eagle; the Blackfoot Sioux, Jumping Bear
(later known as John Grass); and the Oglalas, the incomparable Crazy Horse.
Since his success in luring Captain Fetterman into the fatal trap set by his
people in 1866, Crazy Horse, still the silent enigma of his early years, had
emerged as the most powerful of the non-treaty Oglalas. The Northern
Cheyennes, too, closely allied to the Sioux, counted dynamic leaders among
their own roving bands: Dull Knife, Little Wolf, Two Moons, Dirty Moccasins,
and Lame White Man.

     Above all the tribal leaders, however, towered a single chief of
commanding influence - Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapas.  In earlier battles,
especially the fighting against General Sully in 1864-65, he had made an
outstanding record.  Since then, he had broadened his influence into spiritual
and political realms.  Rocklike dedication to traditional Indian values and
unwavering opposition to all relations with the white people ran deep in his
makeup and fortified his dominance.  On his tribesmen at the agencies he
heaped scorn: ' - You are fools to make yourselves slaves to a piece of fat
bacon, some hard-tack, and a little sugar and coffee."  All the Teton and
Cheyenne roamers, while honoring immediate tribal allegiances, looked beyond
them to the forceful personality, superior intellect, and personal magnetism
of Sitting Bull.  In the eyes of Indians and whites alike, the Powder River
bands came more and more to be identified as Sitting Bull's people.

     These roving bands were a source of vast annoyance to the U.S.
Government, for they offered haven to discontented agency Indians.  In fact,
many Sioux and Cheyennes shuttled back and forth between the Powder River
country and the reservation, enjoying the best of both worlds - the old free
life of the chase in the summer and the security and rations of the agency in
the winter.  On the reservation these people created endless turmoil, for they
were unmanageable, a menace to agency officials, and a disruptive influence on
their brethren who remained there year around.  Off the reservation to the
west, they did not always stay within the unceded territory.  Sometimes war
parties raided along the Platte and among the Montana settlements.

     Government authorities looked forward to the time when the unceded
territory could be done away with.  None believed more ardently in the
necessity of this move than the Army's two senior officers, Gen. William
Tecumseh Sherman and Lt. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan.  Sherman commanded the U.S.
Army and, with seamed face, grizzled red beard, and caustic manner, radiated
absolute authority.  Sheridan, headquartered in Chicago, presided over the
vast Military Division of the Missouri, which embraced the Great Plains from
Mexico to Canada.  A short, stocky, combative Irishman, he, too, ruled with
iron hand.  With Ulysses S. Grant, Sherman and Sheridan made up the trio of
generals whom the nation credited with victory over the Confederacy in the
Civil War.  Now Grant was President of the United States, and his two
lieutenants ran the Army.

     Sherman, who had helped to negotiate the Treaty of 1868, never thought of
the unceded territory as sacrosanct.  "I suppose we must concede the Sioux the
right to hunt from the Black Hills . . . to the Big Horn Mountains," he wrote
to Sheridan in 1870, but the ultimate title is regarded as surrendered."  In
fact, Sherman and other treaty commissioners had expected the problem to solve
itself.  As the buffalo disappeared, the Indians would be left with no choice
except to go to the reservation.  But this did not happen at once, and white
pressure on the Sioux hunting grounds intensified faster than the buffalo
diminished.

     The first direct pressure came from the Northern Pacific Railway, which
reached the Missouri River in 1873 and pointed its line toward the Yellowstone
Valley.  As he had with the Union Pacific, Sherman looked to this railroad as
the Army's strongest ally.  "That Northern Pacific Road is going to give you a
great deal of trouble," he warned Sheridan in 1872.  But the Army ought to
give every possible assistance, he urged, "as it will help to bring the Indian
problem to a final solution."  Military escorts accompanied railroad surveying
parties into the Yellow-stone country during the summers of 1871, 1872, and
1873.  Although the Treaty of 1868 permitted railroads, Sitting Bull's
warriors, in several armed clashes with the bluecoats, made clear their
attitude toward this intrusion into their country.

     Leading the cavalry component of the Northern Pacific Expedition of 1873
was a bold young officer already a national celebrity - Lt. Col. George
Armstrong Custer.  In life as later in death, this dashing cavalier provoked
controversy.  From associates he commanded either love or hate, rarely
indifference.  Some saw him as reckless, brutal, egotistical, selfish,
unprincipled, and immature.  Others looked upon him as upright, sincere,
compassionate, honorable, tender, and above all fearless in battle and
brilliant in leading men to victory.

     A mediocre student at West Point, Custer had been commissioned a second
lieutenant early in the Civil War.  Within two years, at the age of 23, he
donned the star of a brigadier general.  From Gettysburg to Appomattox, the
gold-bedecked "boy general" with long yellow hair and scarlet cravat led first
the Michigan Cavalry Brigade and then the Third Cavalry Division from one
triumph to another.  War's end found him, at age 25, a major general and a
national hero.

     In 1865, after the great volunteer armies of the Union went home, the
little postwar regular Army could no longer support all the generals who had
conquered the Confederacy.  Custer emerged from the war both as a major
general of volunteers and a major general by brevet (an honorary distinction)
in the regulars, but his line grade had advanced only to captain.  With the
reorganization of the regular Army in 1866, however, he won appointment as
lieutenant colonel of the newly formed 7th Cavalry Regiment.  Ever since,
while the regiment's colonel remained on detached service, Custer had led the
7th in campaigns against the Plains Indians.

     Custer's most celebrated victory came during the war with the Southern
Cheyennes of Kansas and the Indian Territory.  On November 27, 1868, he
launched a dawn attack on the sleeping camp of Chief Black Kettle on the
Washita River.  The troops inflicted a crushing defeat on this group but had
to withdraw hastily when warriors from other villages appeared on the scene.
The Battle of the Washita set off a lasting controversy. Humanitarians accused
Custer of slaughtering peaceable Indians. (Actually, the chief was peaceable,
but his young warriors had just returned from a raid on Kansas settlements.)
Within the Army, and within his own regiment, Custer was both criticized and
defended for pulling out and leaving behind a small part of his force later
found to have been wiped out.

     Custer and the 7th Cavalry came to the northern Plains in time to
participate in the Yellowstone expedition of 1873.  That autumn the regiment
took station at Fort Abraham Lincoln, a fine new post on the west bank of the
Missouri River across and downstream from the railhead town of Bismarck.  Many
wives joined their husbands, including Elizabeth Custer, a vivacious,
beautiful woman, utterly devoted to her mate.  She set the tone for a garrison
life that was gay and briskly social.

     Custer had got his first taste of the northern Indians in skirmishes with
Sitting Bull's warriors on the Yellowstone.  Now he would figure conspicuously
in the next chapter of the gathering conflict with the Sioux.

Campaign of 1876

     It was not the Yellowstone but the Black Hills that ignited the volatile
mixture of Indian and white.  The Black Hills were not part of the unceded
territory but of the Great Sioux Reservation itself.  With rumors of gold
floating about the settlements of Dakota, the Territory's promoters, anxious
to learn what the hazy blue mountains to the west might hide, agitated for an
official exploration of the Black Hills.  General Sheridan also wanted to know
more about this area, for he had decided that he needed a fort somewhere near
there to keep watch over the Sioux.  Early in 1874, he won authority to send a
military expedition to look for a suitable location.  To command it, he turned
to his young protege at Fort Lincoln.

     For the troopers of Custer's 7th Cavalry, the Black Hills Expedition of
1874 turned out to be a summer's lark among forested, game-rich slopes drained
by rushing creeks full of trout.  On the northeastern edge of the Hills,
Custer found an ideal site for Sheridan's military post (Fort Meade would be
established there in 1878).  But of vastly greater consequence, in the streams
of the Hills themselves he found confirmation of the rumors of gold.  A
courier bearing official dispatches took the word out.  "Gold in the Black
Hills," shouted the newspaper headlines.

     Even before year's end, gold seekers had rushed to the Black Hills, and
the spring of 1875 saw the stampede under way in earnest.  Custer City,
Deadwood, and other mining camps sprang up in the most promising valleys.
Vainly the Army tried to turn back the prospectors.  Vainly, too, the
Government tried to buy the Black Hills from the Sioux.  Although some of the
agency chiefs gave signs of weakening, the turbulent young warriors who spent
part of the year with Sitting Bull would have none of it.  Any chief who
signed risked his life at the hands of these men.

     The Indians' attitude irritated Government officials.  Rationalizing that
the Sioux had broken the treaty by raiding around the edges of the unceded
territory, they laid plans to end the troublesome roaming of the non-treaty
bands and to press the agency chiefs to sell the Black Hills. President Grant
himself quietly approved a new policy.  Soldiers would no longer bar settlers
from the unceded territory west of the reservation boundary, 'and if some go
over the Boundary into the Black Hills," General Sherman understood, "the
President and Interior Dept will wink at it for the present."  These so-called
"settlers," of course, were interested in the Black Hills, not the land to the
west; the new policy meant simply that prospectors could now enter the Black
Hills without military interference.

     Shortly afterward, in December 1875, the Government moved against the
"non-treaties." Native runners bore an ultimatum from the Commissioner of
Indian Affairs to the Sioux and Cheyennes in the unceded territory: report at
the agencies by January 31, 1876, or be branded hostile and driven in by the
Army.

[See Indian Chiefs: Sitting Bull, Crow King, Jumping Bear]

[See More Chieftains: Rain-in-the-Face, Red Horse, Spotted Eagle, Low Dog, Two
Moon]

     In their snowbound tipis the hunting bands received the ultimatum with
disdain.  The deadline was impossibly close at hand, and moving camp in
midwinter, especially such long distances, was exhausting and perilous. Such
considerations, however, mattered little to the roamers because they had no
intention of giving up their country or way of life for the reservation.
Besides, they did not seriously believe that the Army would make war on them.
They ignored the summons.

     The deadline came without response.  On February 1, 1876, the Secretary
of the Interior, whose department included the Indian Bureau, certified all
Indians in the unceded territory as hostile and asked the Secretary of War to
take such measures as he thought appropriate.

     General Sheridan welcomed this development.  He had urged a winter
campaign that would catch the Indians off guard and had fretted over the delay
caused by the Indian Bureau's insistence on first giving them a chance to come
in.  At once Sheridan ordered his subordinate commanders to organize strong
expeditions for an invasion of the Indian stronghold.

     These officers were Brig. Gen. George Crook, commanding the Department of
the Platte from Omaha, and Brig. Gen. Alfred H. Terry, commanding the
Department of Dakota from St. Paul.  Crook, a reticent, unpretentious man who
rarely shared his thoughts or plans with even his closest aides, had come to
his present command the year before after defeating the Apaches of Arizona.
With a thick blond beard, forked and sometimes braided, a canvas suit, and
durable mule, he projected an image of homespun simplicity. Terry, tall,
bearded, and a man of marked kindliness and humility, had practiced law before
the Civil War but had done so well as a wartime general of volunteers that he
had been rewarded with a brigadier's commission in the regular service.

     Sheridan drew up a plan that called for a strategy of convergence. Three
columns, one from Crook's department and two from Terry's, would converge from
three directions on the locale thought to be occupied by the Indians.  No
particular concert of action would be attempted, for each column would be
strong enough to defeat any expected combination of Indians.

     The Indian Bureau assured the Army that no more than 500 to 800 fighting
men ranged the entire unceded territory, and they of course were scattered in
their winter camps.  This estimate, in fact, was close to accurate.  Between
400 and 500 lodges sheltering a population of some 3,000 people made up
Sitting Bull's following.

     For the generals, the uncertainty lay not in the present but in the
future strength of their opponents - in how many agency Indians would head
west this year, and how soon.  Thus Sheridan's anxiety to take the field
before spring, when the yearly influx from the agencies would begin to
reinforce the roamers.

     But estimates of Indian strength figured critically in military
calculations only in hindsight, after disaster demanded an explanation.  No
matter how many Indians gathered, the planners assumed, they could not remain
together in large numbers for more than a few days.  Their ponies quickly
stripped the surrounding grass and fouled the water sources, their hunters
decimated and frightened away nearby game, and their campfires consumed
available fuel.  As General Sheridan told a congressional committee in 1874,
even though the Sioux might field 3,000 or 4,000 fighting men, "we cannot have
any war with Indians because they cannot maintain five hundred men together
for three days; they cannot feed them."

     The fact is that no officer of the three columns doubted the ability of
the troops to whip any number of Indians they could find.  The great worry,
rather, was that the troops would not be able to find them, or bring them to
decisive battle if they did.  Such was the lesson, with rare exceptions, of
the Army's experience in Indian warfare.

     Only one of Sheridan's three striking arms got under way before winter
ended.  General Crook, the "Gray Fox," organized a force of 800 infantry and
cavalry at Fort Fetterman, Wyoming, on the North Platte River.  Early in March
he pushed northward on the old Bozeman Trail through deep snow and subzero
cold.  Scouts spotted an Indian camp on Powder River, and Crook sent Col.
Joseph I. Reynolds and six companies of cavalry to attack it.  On the bitterly
cold morning of March 17, the troopers stormed into the village. The surprised
Indians scattered but rallied and counterattacked.  Timidly, Reynolds
abandoned his prize and fell back to the main column.  Angry and discouraged,
Crook turned about and headed for Fort Fetterman to outfit for another try.
He did not march again until May 29, two months later.

     Meantime, General Terry's preparations had been slowed by winter storms.
Early in April, however, his "Montana Column" shoved off from Fort Ellis, in
western Montana, and marched eastward down the Yellowstone River. Commanded by
Col. John Gibbon, it consisted of about 450 men of the 2d Cavalry and 7th
Infantry, with 25 Crow Indians, the bitter enemies of the Sioux, serving as
scouts.  On May 17 Terry's other force, the "Dakota Column," finally marched
out of Fort Lincoln and pointed west toward the Yellowstone.  Sheridan's
winter campaign had become a summer campaign.

     Terry himself commanded the Dakota Column.  He had meant Custer to
command.  But during the spring Custer had been summoned to Washington as a
witness in congressional hearings on frontier fraud.  His testimony so angered
President Grant that he ordered Terry to launch the expedition without Custer.
Sheridan and Terry both asked the President to relent, and he finally allowed
Custer to go along - but only at the head of his own regiment, and only under
Terry's command.

     The Dakota Column included all 12 companies of the 7th Cavalry. Numbering
about 600 officers and troopers, the regiment stood at little more than half
its authorized strength.  In addition, there were two companies of the 17th
Infantry and one of the 6th to guard a train of 150 supply wagons, a
detachment of the 20th Infantry serving three rapid-fire Gatling guns, and
about 35 Arikara Indian scouts.  Altogether, the Dakota Column numbered about
925 officers and enlisted men.  It was the 7th Cavalry, however, that Terry
expected would run down the Indians and bring them to battle.  Despite the
President's displeasure, Terry believed the tireless and tenacious Custer just
the officer to do it.

     As customary, the Indians Crook and Terry sought had passed the winter
widely dispersed in small camps among the valleys of the Powder River country
and even as far east as the Black Hills.  By March 1876, they had drifted to
the Powder itself and its eastern tributaries.  The village on Powder River
that Colonel Reynolds attacked on March 17 consisted of about a hundred lodges
of Oglalas, Miniconjous, and Cheyennes.  After the soldiers withdrew, the
warriors reclaimed their village and moved downstream, then over to the East
Fork of the Little Powder to unite with Crazy Horse.

     The fight on Powder River served unmistakable notice that the soldiers
meant war.  The combined bands now set forth to find Sitting Bull, who was
camped about 60 miles farther north, on another branch of Powder River. Little
by little, as word of the war sped from one camp to another, the Indians came
together for self-defense.  As the spring grass - greened, they moved slowly
westward from the Powder to the Tongue and on to the Rosebud, their numbers
swelling as one group after another joined.  By early June they had reached a
strength of about 400 lodges - about 3,000 people, including some 800
warriors.

     While camped on the lower Tongue River early in May, the Indians
discovered soldiers on the north bank of the Yellowstone opposite the mouth of
the Bighorn and sent in a raiding party of about 50 men which ran off the
horses of the Crow scouts.  Later in the month, after the troops had moved
farther down the Yellowstone, warriors harassed scouting and hunting parties
from the military camp.

     After a buffalo hunt, the Indians moved up Rosebud Creek.  Early in June
they paused for a sun dance, the annual ceremony of tribal renewal and
spiritual rededication.  It was a deeply moving experience, made the more
intense by the external menace and the common commitment to stand together in
meeting it.  In a prophetic vision, Sitting Bull saw many dead soldiers,
"falling right into our camp." It was an immensely thrilling and promising
image.

     The spring grass not only fattened the ponies of these Indians but also
set in motion the annual spring movement of their kinsmen from the agencies.
From Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Red Cloud, and Spotted Tail agencies,
parties headed for the Powder River country.  Besides the usual lure of a
summer's hunt, this year they went in anger over the white people's attempt to
seize the Black Hills and the Government's ultimatum to abandon the unceded
territory.  And this year, because of these resentments, they went in larger
numbers than ever.  They moved slowly, waiting for the grass to ripen and
their ponies to gain strength.

     As Crook and Terry prepared to march, Colonel Gibbon tarried on the
Yellowstone, his mission to prevent Indians from crossing the river and
escaping to the north.  Through late April and early May, he bivouacked on the
north bank of the river opposite the mouth of the Bighorn, then moved
downstream to new camps near the mouth of the Rosebud.  Rain and mud limited
his movements, but his Crow scouts, under the efficient Lt. James H. Bradley,
kept watch on the valleys to the south.

     Abundant signs gave notice of Sioux nearby, and the humiliating theft of
the Crow scouts ponies on May 3 erased any lingering doubt.  On May 16 Bradley
and a reconnoitering party spotted the main Sioux and Cheyenne camp in the
Tongue River Valley, and Gibbon tried without success to get his command
across the bank-full river to march against it.  Again on May 27 the scouts
located the quarry, this time in Rosebud Valley only 18 miles from Gibbon's
position.

     To the east, meantime, Terry and Custer for these same Indians.
Curiously, in dispatches to Terry, Gibbon failed to inform his superior that
he knew exactly the location of the big village that all three columns sought.
Acting on reports that Sitting Bull himself waited on the Little Missouri to
give battle, Terry sent Custer to scout this stream for signs of Sioux.  Not
until June 8, when he reached the Yellowstone at the mouth of the Powder and
met officers from the Montana Column, did Terry learn where the Indians were.

     Wrongly assuming the village would still be on the lower Rosebud, where
Bradley had seen it two weeks earlier, Terry laid plans to trap it between
Custer and Gibbon.  First, however, he wanted to assure himself that the
Indians had not doubled back to the east.  He therefore sent six companies of
the 7th Cavalry under Maj. Marcus A. Reno on a southward swing to examine the
Powder and Tongue valleys and rejoin the main command at the mouth of the
Tongue.  He then prepared to push on to meet the Montana Column.

     At the mouth of the Powder, Terry established a supply depot manned by
his own infantry and dismounted cavalry and another three infantry companies
that had come upriver from Fort Buford.  Here, too, he met Capt. Grant Marsh
with the river steamer Far West, chartered by the Government to transport
supplies and speed communication.  Leaving all his wagons at the depot and
organizing a mule packtrain to carry provisions, Terry had Custer march the
balance of his regiment up the Yellowstone to the mouth of the Tongue.  Terry
himself steamed up on the Far West.

     Major Reno violated his instructions.  Finding no fresh indications of
Indians in either the Powder or Tongue valleys, he decided to cross to the
Rosebud.  Here he promptly discovered recent campsites.  Since Bradley's
sighting of May 27, Sitting Bull and his people had not, as Terry supposed,
remained in place but had moved on up the Rosebud to the southwest.  Reno
followed far enough to ensure that they had indeed left the area, then turned
back to the Yellowstone to report to Terry.

     Unknown to Reno as he counter marched on June 17, momentous events were
taking place only 40 miles up this very valley.  On May 29 General Crook had
again marched forth on the old Bozeman Trail, leading more than a thousand men
drawn from the 2d and 3rd Cavalry and the 4th and 9th Infantry.  Near the head
of the Tongue River he paused for a week awaiting the arrival of Crow and
Shoshoni allies he had invited to help him fight the Sioux.  When they finally
appeared, 262 strong, the expedition moved.

     On the morning of June 17, Crook's column halted for coffee on upper
Rosebud Creek.  Suddenly hundreds of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors burst upon
them.  Crook's Indian allies rushed to the attack and held back the assailants
until the troops could organize for battle.  For six hours the two sides
fought valiantly among the rolling hills shouldering the Rosebud. In
midafternoon the Indians broke off the battle and withdrew, leaving Crook
bloodied but in possession of the field.

     Burdened by wounded, the "Gray Fox" decided that he had no choice but to
fall back to the base camp he had left only the day before.  Also, the
experience had left him badly shaken and determined not to risk another
advance without a stronger command.  From his Goose Creek bivouac, near
modern-day Sheridan, Wyoming, he called for reinforcements.  Crook thus
counted himself out of the events shaping up only a short distance to the
north.

     The intelligence that Major Reno brought back from the Rosebud forced
Terry to revise his plan of action.  Actually he changed the plan itself very
little, merely shifting its place of execution farther west.  On the morning
of June 21, Terry penned a dispatch to General Sheridan telling of his new
plan.  Gibbon, he said, would march back up the Yellowstone, cross the river
on the Far West, and then work his way up the Bighorn to the mouth of the
Little Bighorn.  At the same time, Custer would lead the 7th Cavalry up the
Rosebud, cross to the upper Little Bighorn, and descend that stream toward
Gibbon.  "I only hope that one of the two columns will find the Indians," he
concluded.  "I go personally with Gibbon."

     Terry's plan reflected both what he knew and what he did not know about
his opponents.  As for their strength, the campsites that Reno examined in the
Rosebud Valley revealed about 400 lodges, the same as Bradley's estimate a
month earlier.  At two men per lodge, this made about 800 fighters.  The
whereabouts of the agency Indians, and whether any had joined the main camp
since it had left the lower Rosebud, he did not know; nor does he seem to have
worried much about it.

     The Indians' location was also a mystery.  Terry knew that about two
weeks earlier they were ascending the Rosebud.  They could have continued up
that river or swung eastward toward the Black Hills, or they could have
crossed to the Little Bighorn or turned north down Tullock's Creek toward the
Yellowstone.  The general impression was that they would be found on the upper
Little Bighorn; lower down, they would be approaching the Bighorn, beyond
which lay Crow country and the risk of a collision with their longtime
enemies.

     Because of the Indians' uncertain location, Terry's plan above all had to
be flexible.  Although not explicitly stated, everyone expected Custer, with
his aggressive drive and more mobile column, to make the kill. Gibbon's role
was mainly to block the northward flight of any Indians who got away from
Custer's cavalry.  Custer's mission, therefore, was to march up the Rosebud on
the Indian trail.  If it turned to the Little Bighorn, he was still to
continue up the Rosebud before swinging west to the upper reaches of the
Little Bighorn - this to make certain the Indians did not get away to the
south or east and to give Gibbon's infantry time to get into blocking position
at the mouth of the Little Bighorn.  Terry expected him there by June 26, but
this date had no other significance.  The 7th Cavalry carried rations for 15
days, and Custer left no doubt that he would use them all, if necessary, to
find the Indians.  The notion that Terry meant for him to attack on June 26
arose only after the offensive ended in disaster.

     That afternoon, June 21, Terry summoned his principal subordinates to a
conference in the cabin of the Far West, moored to the bank of the Yellowstone
at the mouth of the Rosebud.  Bent over a map spread out on a table, Terry,
Gibbon, Custer, and Maj. James Brisbin, Gibbon's cavalry chief, worked out the
details and timing of Terry's strategy.  In their talk they assumed, as usual,
that the Indians would scatter and run if given the chance. (General Crook
could have told them differently, but word of the Battle of the Rosebud had
not yet reached the Yellowstone.)  Thus everyone worried not about how to
defeat the Indians but how to catch them before they discovered the soldiers
and fled in all directions.  As Gibbon said, the object of the plan was "to
prevent the escape of the Indians, which was the idea pervading the minds of
all of us."

[See Sioux Warrior: The Sioux Warrior]

     The next morning, as the 7th Cavalry prepared to march, Terry handed
Custer written orders that his adjutant general had put to paper during the
night.  In the never-ending, never-conclusive attempt to fix the blame for
what happened afterward, every word and every nuance of those orders would be
fiercely debated.

     At noon on June 22, the 7th Cavalry passed in review before Terry,
Gibbon, and Custer, astride their mounts.  The regimental band, Custer's
pride, had been left at the Powder River base, but massed trumpets provided a
measure of panoply.  Company by company, they trooped in front of their
commanders, each raising its own cloud of dust, each marked by a swallow-tail
guidon in the pattern of an American flag.

[See Troop Equipment: The Cavalryman's equipment]

     As usual in the field, the lean, bronzed troopers displayed every variety
of costume.  Slouch hats, gray or blue shirts, and the regulation sky-blue
trousers stuffed into cavalry boots predominated.  To ease saddle wear, many
had lined their trouser seats with canvas.  Each man carried a Springfield
singleshot carbine and a Colt revolver, with 100 cartridges for the former and
24 for the latter.  Sabers had been left behind; they were cumbersome and
soldiers rarely got close enough to Indians to use them anyway.

[See The Cavalryman: The Cavalryman with his mount]

     Custer's command numbered 31 officers and 566 enlisted men, 35 Indian
scouts (the Arikaras, four Sioux, and six Crows borrowed from Gibbon), and
about a dozen packers, guides, and other civilian employees.  Bringing up the
rear, a train of pack-mules bore rations and forage for 15 days together with
reserve carbine ammunition of 50 rounds per man.  The train had already begun
to give trouble, some of the mules breaking formation and throwing their
packs.

     Despite his embarrassment over the train, Custer swelled with pride at
the spectacle.  He wore his customary field gear-fringed buckskin jacket and
trousers, knee-high troop boots, the scarlet cravat and broad-collared blue
shirt of Civil War memory, and a wide-brimmed white hat.  Two bolsters encased
a pair of snub-nosed English revolvers.  Close-cropped hair belied his Indian
name, "Long Hair," and with ragged beard and fierce sunburn he hardly
resembled the immaculate officer depicted by the artists of the eastern
journals.  A mounted orderly bore his personal pennant, displaying white
crossed sabers against a red and blue field.

     The regiment's formidable appearance concealed serious internal
conflicts.  Some of the officers accorded Custer blind loyalty and adulation.
Notable among them were Capt. Thomas B. Weir, Lt. William W. Cooke (the
Canadian-born regimental adjutant), and of course his own relatives: brother
Capt. Thomas W. Custer, brother-in-law Lt. James Calhoun, and two civilians,
brother Boston (hired as a forage master) and nephew Armstrong Reed (embarked
on a summers outing with his namesake uncle).

     Other officers looked on Custer with contempt or even loathing.  Among
these were his two senior subordinates, Maj. Marcus A. Reno and Capt.
Frederick W. Benteen.  Reno, dark and swarthy, had done well as a colonel in
the Civil War but no longer commanded much respect from his brother officers.
Benteen, captain of Company H, had been a wartime lieutenant colonel.  Lean,
muscular, clean-shaven and white-haired, fearless in combat, he was widely
admired as the ideal company commander.  He returned the compliment with
ill-tempered ridicule of all but a few brother officers. For Custer he
harbored a passionate hatred that soured his character for the rest of his
life.

     Amid clouds of choking dust, Custer's troopers pushed up the Rosebud.
They covered 12 miles that afternoon but racked up 30 each on the next two
days.  On the second day, June 23, they struck the Indian trail that Major
Reno had already examined, and by the morning of the 24th they had reached the
limit of Reno's reconnaissance.  Here they paused at the site where the Sioux
had staged their sun dance earlier in the month.  The Indian scouts saw enough
evidence of powerful medicine to make them restive.

     Shortly after leaving the sun dance campsite, the column confronted
another development.  The Indian trail, hitherto by all indications several
weeks old, suddenly turned fresh.  Signs estimated to be no more than two days
old suggested that the quarry could not be very far away, perhaps as near as
20 miles.  The scouts probably knew the explanation, but no one consulted them
and the officers speculated at length.  Custer sent the Crows forward to
gather more information.

     Across the Rosebud divide to the west, circumstances conspired to give
the Sioux and Cheyennes crucial advantages in the coming conflict.  Ignorant
as yet of Custer's approach, they had no plans to meet the danger he
presented.  Extraordinary good fortune, however, came to their support.

     As Sitting Bull's following made its way slowly up the Rosebud through
early June, a scattering of people arrived from the agencies.  At the same
time, however, others departed on hunting forays, to scout the enemy's
movements, and even to trade for arms and ammunition at distant points on the
Missouri River.  The size of the village, therefore, remained about 400 tipis.

     The scouting parties kept watch on General Crook as well as Colonel
Gibbon.  On June 9 one even tried to run off Crook's cavalry horses, but
failed.  On June 16 another group saw Crook break camp and head down the
Rosebud.  Hurrying back to warn of the danger, they found that the village had
crossed from the Rosebud to a tributary of the Little Bighorn later named Reno
Creek.  The next day most of the young men, perhaps 500 to 700, rode back to
the Rosebud and upstream to head off the soldiers, whose further advance would
soon imperil the village.  In fierce fighting they succeeded in their aim, for
next day Crook's men counter marched to their base at Goose Creek.

     The chiefs decided to move the village again.  On June 18 the people
struck camp, journeyed down Reno Creek to the Little Bighorn, then turned
south, up the valley, and pitched their tipis.  Here, a short distance above
the mouth of Reno Creek, they remained for six days.  Here they staged a
festive celebration of the victory over the soldiers on the Rosebud.  And here
they gained another cause for celebration, for at last their brethren from the
agencies began to arrive.  On the backtrail from the Rosebud down Reno Creek,
and down the Little Bighorn itself, they came suddenly and in great numbers.

     During these six days Sitting Bull's village more than doubled, from 400
to nearly 1,000 lodges, from 3,000 to nearly 7,000 people, from 800 to nearly
2,000 warriors.  In six separate tribal circles they crowded the narrow
valley.  Hunkpapas, Oglalas, Miniconjous, Sans Arcs, Blackfoot, Two Kettles,
Brules, and a scattering of Yanktonnais and Santees (Sioux, but not Tetons)
made up the five Sioux circles, while 120 Cheyenne lodges rounded out the
great array.  Even a handful of Arapahoes cast their lot with their friends.

     The tribal leaders had planned a movement farther up the Little Bighorn,
to the upper portion of the valley (exactly where General Terry expected to
find them).  Scouts, however, brought word of antelope herds to the north and
west, downstream.  On June 24, therefore, they moved the village northward,
back down the Little Bighorn in the direction from which they had come.

     The new location afforded an appealing setting.  The upper end of the
camp, anchored by the Hunkpapa circle, lay about two miles below the mouth of
Reno Creek.  The rest of the tipis sprawled along the west bank of the river
for nearly three miles downstream.  On the west the level valley, ranging from
one-half mile to a full mile in width, ended in low grassy hills and benches
where the huge pony herd grazed.  On the eastern edge of the valley the river,
cold and bank-full with the spring runoff from the Big Horn Mountains,
meandered among thickets of shady cottonwood trees.  A series of ragged bluffs
rose steeply from the east bank of the river to a height of some 300 feet.  On
the south the bluffs fell away to Reno Creek, on the north to a dry
watercourse later called Medicine Tail Coulee, which opened on the river
across from the Miniconjou and Sans Arc circles.  North of Medicine Tail the
breaks rose in tumbled furrows to a long narrow ridge paralleling the valley
opposite the lower end of the village, where the Oglalas and Northern
Cheyennes camped.  From here one could scan the entire village and beyond to
the snow-mantled Big Horn Mountains low on the southwestern horizon.

     Here on the banks of the pretty stream the Sioux called the Greasy Grass
stretched a village of unusual size.  Such numbers consumed immense quantities
of game, forage, and firewood and so could not remain long in one place, or
even together in one village.  It had come together in this strength only in
the few days preceding, and it could stay together for more than a few days or
a week only through luck, frequent moves, and constant labor.  White
apologists, seeking to explain the disaster this coalition of tribes wrought,
would later endow it with an immensity it never approached.  Still, it was big
by all standards of the time, and it was more than twice as big as any of the
Army officers looking for it anticipated.

     Furthermore, and of still greater portent, the village contained a people
basking proudly in the fullness of tribal power.  Contrary to the planning
assumptions and the mindset of Army officers, the Indians had little
inclination to avoid conflict.  Their grievances united them in a
determination to fight against those who would seize the Black Hills and send
soldiers to force them out of the unceded territory guaranteed by the Treaty
of 1868.  Sitting Bull's sun dance prophecy and their victory at the Rosebud
hardened their resolve.  And all these measures of strength aside, they would,
as always, fight tenaciously if the enemy threatened their women and children.

     Such was the objective that George Armstrong Custer sought as the sun
rose on that Sunday, June 25, 1876.