The tall one pulled part of the damp sash from his belly, showing the half-breeds his terrible wound. He had been shot in the abdomen, and part of his intestine was already protruding from the gaping wound.
As the older one replaced the sash around his wound, the young warrior looked at the two scouts and asked, “You are the traders’ sons?”
“Yes,” Pourier replied. “What is your name?”
“I am Charging Bear.”
Unable to take his eyes off the older man for long, Big Bat turned back to the tall warrior, marveling at his immense courage. “Are the others coming?” he asked in Lakota.
“Only two,” Charging Bear responded.
Again Pourier looked into the older man’s eyes, the warrior’s face ashen with agony—with each flush of pain,grinding down on that small stick shoved between his teeth. “And you—your name—who are you?”
Slowly the handsome warrior dragged the stick from his mouth and drew himself up proudly. “I am American Horse. Chief of the Miniconjou.”
As Seamus watched, American Horse gave his rifle to the soldier chief with solemn dignity. Through the half-breed interpreters the Sioux leader told Crook he would surrender if the lives of the last two warriors in the ravine would be spared.
Amid angry shouts of “No quarter!” from the soldiers looking on, Crook gave his guarantee, and American Horse called to the holdouts. When the younger warrior attending the chief was turned over to Colonel Chambers’s guard detail, Surgeon Clements and his stewards took charge of the wounded American Horse.
Slowly the doctor pulled back the bloody sash from the sticky wound. More of the intestine escaped the hole. Gritting on the stick between his teeth, the chief immediately poked and shoved the best he could, pushing the bowel back into the ragged hole in his belly. But it was no use.
“I’m sorry, General,” Clements told Crook. “The wound is mortal.”
Crook turned to Grouard and said, “Tell the chief he will die before morning.”
American Horse made- no reply when told. His face registered nothing more than the pain already visited upon him. Clements led the chief away, hobbling slowly toward the small fire nearby, where the rest of the captives warmed their cold hands and feet. The chief settled among the women and children, his teeth still clamped on the stick. The surgeon left to return to his hospital tent, explaining that there was nothing else he could do for one so seriously wounded. It was but a matter of time.
Charging Bear stayed with Crook for a few minutes,talking to the soldier chief through the half-breed interpreters.
“Very soon Crazy Horse will come to free our village,” the warrior warned the general. He went on to express convincingly his belief that word of the attack had already reached the other villages in the surrounding countryside, and a great fighting force was then on its way, likely to arrive before nightfall.
Crook said, “You tell this man that’s just what I’ve hoped. I’ve prayed for nothing less than a good fight with Crazy Horse for a long, long time.” Then he had the infantry guards take Charging Bear away.
It did not take long before the last two warriors appeared from the tangle of brush farther up the ravine. One of them wore a corporal’s tunic, taken from Custer’s own L Company. He was eager to shake hands all around with the scouts and the officers—in fact, with any soldier who would shake hands as he grinned, relief washing over his face.
With the surrender of those last two warriors, Frank Grouard counted what the holdouts had left in ammunition. Six cartridges each. When the prisoners were escorted from the scene, Sergeant Von Moll of the Third Cavalry brought in a squad of his soldiers from Private Wenzel’s own A company to claim the body, the rifle still gripped in the dead man’s cold hands. Two empty cartridges lay near his right side, a live round still in his carbine, cocked and ready to fire.
As the angry troopers carried away their comrade, Donegan followed the half-breed scouts into the ravine. They found the walls of the coulee riddled, tracked, and scarred with the paths of thousands of bullets. Twisting, brushy yards from the entrance they discovered five bodies: three women, a warrior shot in the head, and an infant.
Bullets had repeatedly found one woman’s body; what was left of her clothing crusted over with muddy slime and coagulated blood. Her neck was nearly severed by one shot, three more had torn open her chest and shoulder. Two more grisly holes in each arm and leg. The bodies of the other two women had suffered nearly as many wounds— one with her head blown completely in half, clear down to the upper palate. From what Seamus could see, it appeared the warriors had used the bodies of their dead to hide behind during the onslaught of soldier lead.
Curious himself, Captain Anson Mills entered the ravine behind the three scouts, accompanied by the young girl who had been discovered in a lodge hiding beneath a pile of robes and who had attached herself to the officer. At the sight of one of the dead women, the girl rushed forward to fall upon the body, crying pitifully. She hugged the body, brushed the matted hair from the bloody face, her little tears falling upon the cold cheeks as she wailed.
“Her mother,” Pourier whispered to Mills and Donegan.
The captain wagged his head. “Why … why the women?”
Crook had his men drag the battered bodies from the coulee, where they lay for close to an hour while soldiers looked over the enemy dead. It struck Donegan as a pagan ritual, this satisfying the curiosity of the soldiers who had lost their own comrades in battle. While most only stared at the bodies before moving on, some chose to spit on the corpses.
Yet no soldier defiled the dead like Ute John, also known among the column as “Captain Jack.”
Chattering in his garbled pidgin English, the civilian member of Stanton’s Montana Volunteers made quite a show of it for a crowd of curious soldiers as he knelt over each of the squaws and scalped them with elaborate ceremony, demonstrating to the white men just how it was done.
“Injun style,” he explained, his mouth half-filled with rotted teeth.
Having joined the troops in May when a band of miners had affixed themselves to Crook’s column, John was in reality only half-Northern or Weber Ute, the other half Shoshone. Called Nicaagat by his own people on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming Territory, he had acquired a desperate thirst for the white man’s whiskey. That thirst took him to Salt Lake City for a six-month sojourn, during which time he claimed he’d been Christianized by Brigham Young’s Mormons.
“Ute John’s a Klischun,” he proudly reminded the onlookers, perhaps to convince them that what he was doing to the dead was not so barbaric an act as it might appear. “A Mo’mon Klischun.”
A loving Mormon family had given him shelter and taught him the rudiments of the English language. He had been “heap washed” of his sins, as many as three times in one year, and got a “heap b’iled shirt” of his very own to wear when he attended Sunday meetings to hear Prophet Brigham preach for hours on end.
While most of the soldiers turned away from the grisly spectacle, a few clamored to have a try at the scalping themselves. Donegan grumbled and started to turn aside, disgusted that none of the officers attempted to stop this savage depravity of tearing the hair from women’s skulls.
“What’s the matter with you, Irishman?” one of the old files asked Donegan. “You seen a lot worse before, I’d care to wager.”
“I have,” Seamus replied bitterly.
“So where the hell you get off being so goddamned righteous about it?” the veteran snarled. “Them prisoners the general took sure as hell getting treated good, ain’t they? Just think how things’d be for a bunch of us white men if we was took prisoner by a village of these sonsabitches. What fun they’d have killing us off real slow! So you just think about that, Irishman—before you go off being so goddamned high and mighty and looking down your nose at the likes of us gonna take a little revenge for what we seen done to our friends in the last ten years.”
Looking over that sullen group of angry soldiers who had turned to glare at him, Donegan finally said, “When I rode for the Army of the Potomac, and served Sheridan’s Army of the Shenandoah—I never once killed a woman or a child. And I’ll be damned if I’ve got to stand here and watch a coward take his revenge on women.”
“Just shut your mouth and go ’way,” Ute John grumbled, wagging his knife where he knelt on the ground to slice apart one of the women’s scalps so that each of the sympathetic soldiers could have a small lock.
“You best go, Irishman,” the old veteran suggested caustically. “Since you can’t seem to remember that these Injun bitches fight just as hard as the bucks.”
