Trumpet on the Land: The Aftermath of Custer's Massacre, 1876

“Now the soldiers will stay away!” Dog Necklace growled every bit as tremulously as any grizzly boar as they gathered near one of the many leaping bonfires fed throughout that second night following the great battle against the soldiers, Snake, and Sparrowhawk People. “Surely they know we will never again wait for them to attack our camps of little ones and women.”

Red Horse echoed, “They now know we will hunt them down!”

“Yet—what of the great mystic’s vision?” asked Iron Thunder.

“Yes,” agreed Antelope Tail, worry cracking his voice. “What of Sitting Bull’s talk with Wakan Tanka?”

American Horse smiled. He had fought these white men many, many summers. Even winters too. In fact, thirty winters before his own father, Smoke, had met the famous white man Francis Parkman there beside the white man’s Holy Road that paralleled the Buffalo Dung River.^*

“The soldiers will return,” he told them confidently.

Dog Necklace disagreed, still sour as gall. “The soldiers would not dare try themselves against our strength! As powerful as the mystic’s dream was, I nonetheless still find it very hard to believe soldiers will come to fall into our camps now.”

“But his vision was so vivid, in such detail,” American Horse protested. “The Hunkpatila warrior called He Dog has told me Sitting Bull says we should expect another fight.”

“Let us savor this victory first, old one,” Red Horse chided the aging war chief.

“Yes,” agreed Dog Necklace as he chuckled with disdain. “Even as stupid as the white man is, none of our people can seriously believe the soldiers would still be marching on our villages. Chasing us after the beating we gave them.”

“It will be a long, long time before we have to worry about any soldiers marching on us now,” Red Horse said.

“Yes. I think they have learned their lesson well and are running away far to the south, never to fight us again this summer,” Dog Necklace boasted. “The Great Mystery has taught the soldiers a painful truth: never again come to attack a village of women and children. If they ever try, only death and destruction await them.”

“But that’s just what the shaman Sitting Bull saw in his vision,” American Horse scolded the young warriors for forgetting. “Soon he reminds us—the soldiers will return to fall headfirst like grasshoppers into our camp.”

“Never again will we retreat!” Iron Thunder roared.

Antelope Tail joined in. “On the Rosebud we learned a mighty lesson! Never again will we merely fight long enough to cover the retreat of our women and children, protecting those weaker than ourselves!”

Once again American Horse sensed the stirrings of his own warriorhood—as it always stirred when his people were threatened, rising as surely as did the guard hair on the neck of the wild wolf when a challenger presented himself. It had been as Crazy Horse promised them when he led the hundreds south to meet Three Stars. Indeed, it had been a new kind of fighting for the Lakota and their cousins, the Shahiyena of the North. In that one day-long battle with the confused, retreating, frightened soldiers, the Lakota bid farewell to their old way of waging war wherein each man fought on his own for coups and scalps and ponies; each man riding out ahead of the others to perform daring, risky, and often foolish deeds in the face of the white enemy.

There was much talk of how Crazy Horse had orchestrated their great victory over Three Stars and his soldiers. Much talk that from now on the Lakota would never retreat—would instead stand and fight any army come against their villages in this new way Crazy Horse had taught them: to ride knee to knee in massed bunches, swarming together over the white man as the bee flies in swarms that blackened the sky, flinging themselves against the soldier lines in numbers that could not help but roll over every one of the helpless blue-shirted enemy soiling their pants in abject fear.

While most of the warriors turned north with the wounded late in that day of fierce fighting, American Horse and other Lakota, as well as some of the Shahiyena, stayed behind to keep watch on the soldier camp through that first night following the battle. They were as hungry and tired as the rest, for it had been a good day, a great fight, and only one of American Horse’s Miniconjou had been wounded seriously enough that he might die.

What a great victory over Three Stars and his soldiers!