blue ranks, pressing the frustrated soldier-chief to a stalemate.
After nearly an entire day of fighting, during which Crazy Horse and his young field generals continually stymied Crook and his officers, both armies abandoned the field, taking their wounded and dead with them.
Crook had decided against either continuing the chase or plunging ahead to meet up with the other two columns. He preferred instead to pull back to the south where he could lick his wounds. At the same time Sitting Bull and his advisers had decided to push over the rugged divide between the Rosebud and that sparkling river just on the other side of those Mountains of the Wolves.
They would march, The Bull told them. They would march over the mountains to the Pa-zees-la-wak-pa.
The Greasy Grass.
“
“No! Hear me!” The Bull cried above their praises. “We go because we have not yet struggled with the battle of my vision. We must march to the Greasy Grass. This fight on the Rosebud was not the battle in my vision, brothers!”
Still the warriors, young and old alike, persisted in their celebration. They had driven Red Beard’s troops clear out of the country!
“We have won, Sitting Bull! Long it has been since there has been such singing in our camps—we have won a great, great victory!”
“Hear me! It was not the great victory still to be given us on the Greasy Grass,” The Bull answered once they had fallen silent around him, intent on every word. “The dream showed me the soldiers would fall into our camp. Not on the field of battle. The soldiers would fall into our
So it came to pass that on the next day the people tore their lodges down and began their trek west. Over the Mountains of the Wolves they would come to the Greasy Grass, where they could hunt more buffalo, slowly working their way north to the land of the Yellowstone, where they could hunt antelope for meat and hides.
From that first warm day of spring, through the long weeks of wandering, that growing camp hummed with a constant activity, a drone of comings and goings. Not only were there the constant arrivals of cousins from the reservations and agencies, but there were the incessant departures of the young men on scouts and hunts. Not to mention those bands of warriors who led away pack animals burdened under dressed hides and thick robes, returning weeks later with their ponies swaybacked beneath loads of meat and blankets, provisions and guns, from the agency traders.
From the first day of late winter, when The Bull’s warriors had been able to travel east across a trackless, frozen landscape, they had bartered for more guns and ammunition.
Too, with each trip to the reservations for provisions, the warriors returned with more men. More and more the young ones, tough like resilient sinew, came to pitch their wickiups beside the waters of the Rosebud and later the Greasy Grass. Came to enjoy that time of endless celebration: each lazy summer day filled with hunting and scouting—each long, warm night of courting and storytelling and coup counting, and planning for The Bull’s glorious fight when the soldiers would fall headfirst into their camp on the Greasy Grass.
The valley of the Pa-zees-la-wak-pa lay blanketed with buffalo. A massive herd slowly inched south and west toward the hazy bulk of the Bighorn Mountains. By now little over a decade had passed since the white man began his wholesale slaughter of the black, shaggy beasts. But here this summer these herds were another blessing of the all-powerful Wakan Tanka.
Here in this valley the people would stay … far to the west from the white man. Here they could follow the buffalo as they had for time beyond remembering.
Eating the flesh of Pte to make themselves strong as a people once more.
“At last we are out of the white man’s land,” they all agreed, and smoked together each night on the Greasy Grass. “Let the
With some three hundred lodges and better than three thousand people themselves, the Northern Cheyenne led the Sioux bands down the west slope of the Wolf Mountains to what the Cheyenne had always called Goat River. And in that valley of the Little Bighorn, they created a sight never before seen by Sioux and Shahiyena alike: eight huge, graceful camp circles rising along the Greasy Grass, the horns of each circle open to the east in prayerful greeting to the rising sun.
At the extreme north end of this greatest of all congregations, the direction the tribes were marching, stood those Cheyenne lodges. Next to them were raised the lodges of the Sans Arcs, the Miniconjou, then a small camp circle of the Brule Sioux. Beyond them spread the huge camp circle of Crazy Horse’s Oglallas, the Blackfeet Sioux, another small circle of Santee Sioux, who without fail always pitched their camp next to the last tribe, Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapas.
That name long ago given to The Bull’s tribe had significance as “the edge” or “the border,” for it identified the group that traditionally camped at the village entrance. In the parlance of the old days, the Hunkpapas were “The Ones Who Camp by Themselves.”
Like Sitting Bull’s huge black-and-red lodge, the Sioux tepees were tall and narrow with a big smoke-flap opening at the top, whereas the lodges of the Northern Cheyenne were larger in circumference, yet sat a bit squatter and were topped with smaller ventilating smoke flaps. Sioux lodge or Cheyenne—there were better than two thousand lodges scattered along that silver ribbon of river. And nestled back in the thick willow and alder and creepers were huddled those wickiups that served as small brush-and-blanket shelters for the young warriors fresh off the reservations without families of their own.
To the west beyond the eight lodge circles, the huge pony herds had been put out to pasture on the rich green belly-high grasses. More than thirty thousand animals in all. No man had an accurate means of counting just how many ponies roamed those fertile bench-land pastures.
A man would have to say they were as thick as the ticks on an old buffalo bull’s back.
Off the divide at last a beautiful panorama opened up before the command.
The regiment had crossed a series of ridges some fifteen to eighteen miles wide, which separated the drainages of the Rosebud from the Little Bighorn. Far below their feet now spread a green, grassy plain extending a little more than fifty miles to the Bighorn Mountains, resting stoic and silent in a snowcapped majesty, pale and hazy beneath a summer sun that relentlessly worked at the high overcast to make for a hot day. By now the clouds above the column were burning off. The air about the men droned lazily with that buzz of summer’s retribution upon the high plains.
Down the slopes of gray rock sprouting with stunted sage and sparse bunchgrass, they wound their way, weaving round the dark green of jack-brush and pine and cedar clustered in clumps like old squaws gossiping over the army columns coming their way.
Lieutenant W. W. Cooke felt the first drops of sweat rolling down his long, flowing Dundrearies that spilled off his jaws. All the rage back east at the time, the long sideburns had proven quite a hit with the young ladies come visiting Fort Abraham Lincoln. For a man handsome to begin with, the Dundrearies only accented his dark good looks. He swiped a hand across his handlebar mustache as Custer called a halt on the open tableland where the column could enjoy the beckoning green of the lush grass calling seductively from the valley below.
“Not far now, General,” Cooke commented, reining in beside his commander.
“Billy, I want to see the officers. Promptly.”
“Right away,” replied the Canadian-born adventurer, who had come south to America when the Civil War offered excitement. He quickly gathered Custer’s officers at the head of the march.
“We’re close now, fellas,” Custer began. “I’m going to form the columns for the attack should we be presented any surprises. Therefore, the first troop commander to report back to me that his pack detail is complete and that each of his troopers does indeed carry a hundred rounds of carbine ammo and twenty-four rounds for his pistol will ride the advance of the column. It seems the honor of this position should go to the command who have done their best to obey my order against grumbling and is best prepared. I’ll wait here for a company commander to report—”
“I take the lead, General!”
Custer jerked sideways in his saddle to stare at Benteen.
