Little Big Man

I saw where we had rode down Medicine Tail Coulee less than a day before. The ground was tore up with hoofs, and there was the marks of iron-shoed cavalry horses going right down into the water, but we hadn’t got that far, so they must have been made by captured animals the Indians took across to their camp.

We walked a mile or more, up the diagonal ravine that Custer had took for his retreat, then onto the slope, proceeding ever higher towards that final ridge, and it was a good way before I seen the first body, though there might have been some that fell into the many gulches thereabout or been thrown there after being stripped and mutilated.

But soon they commenced to show up, at a distance pure white in the brilliant sun, like a field of boulders, one there, then two or three, others in groups of a dozen, lying where they fell and almost all by troops. Wasn’t no sign of disorganized panic; they had been whipped but not routed. And when you thought of the proportion of recruits, the exhaustion of two days without rest, and the overwhelming strength against them, they had done real well.

Now Old Lodge Skins says suddenly as we toiled up the rise: “This fight has given me a better opinion of white men. I did not understand before that they knew how to die properly.”

“Can you see them, Grandfather?”

“Almost,” he says. “Their bodies shine so.”

But as we come closer, the marble-white was not clear, but streaked and sometimes drowned in red which the heat turned brown, and the smell was starting up too, attended by millions of flies, and the birds rose in great circles at our approach and coyotes scampered off to a safe range. There was also maybe a hundred dead horses spread across that square mile.

I gritted my teeth and held my breath and trudged on, with the ground as it were sucking like quicksand at my moccasins though it was dry as ash. Yet I continued, for Old Lodge Skins had some high purpose in coming here. He was hardly a ghoul. And I guess I realized that it was only through him that I could ever come to accept the fact of that awful ridge and make it a part of normality.

“Yes,” he says, breathing deep through his ancient leathery nostrils, “they must be happy on the Other Side to have died as warriors rather than tenders-of-cattle or corn-growers or crazy diggers-of-yellow-dust or those-who-lay-down-iron-for-the-fire-wagon. I tell you, my son, I had thought for a long time that all white men were turning into women.”

He stopped for a minute so’s I could rest. True, that night’s sleep had done wonders for me, and also the dressing on my shoulder; but it was remarkable I could walk at all, let alone climb uphill. Old Lodge Skins himself showed no physical strain, though out there in the sunlight you could appreciate his advanced age: them ravines in his face was so deep that a fly would think twice about treading the bluffs above them. Indeed, his visage was a sort of miniature of the ground on which we stood. And his withered skin, wherever it could be seen for the paint, made the hide wrappings of his medicine bundle look almost new.

He turned now and seemed to take a view across the entire panorama, holding the bundle to his chest and pointing with the lancehead-end of the bow, from which two eagle feathers dangled.

“There came Gall with his many Hunkpapa,” he says, “and there Crow King. Down there, Lame White Man and the Human Beings, Minneconjou, and other Lakota peoples broke through the soldiers’ lines, while the great Crazy Horse and Two Moon went downriver, traveled through the encircling coulee, and swept up from the bluecoats’ rear.

“It was the greatest battle of all time, and there will never be another.” His thick voice broke slightly and two tears rolled down the troughs alongside his heavy, crimson, yellow-traced nose and vanished into the vertical traces of his upper lip, his mouth being like a river system with tributaries above and below.

And despite all I had been through, I felt sorry for him and says, “Surely there will be more,” though I did not consider what good they would do him since he was already too old to have been in this one.

“No,” said he. “This is the end.”

After a bit I gathered my strength and we climbed on, passing the remains of C Troop just below the knoll, and it ain’t my purpose to dwell upon the particulars of the carnage, for I think I have said enough about how the Indian women would come out after a battle and deal with the wounded. Well, they was served up with such a banquet following the Battle of the Little Bighorn as to surfeit the worst glutton. There was so many corpses to deface that they actually got tired of mutilating after a time; and so, many bodies stayed untouched, some not even stripped for the clothing.