The shout was from Custer, and no-one needed a second bidding. Craig watched some of the soldiers unholster their Colt .45s, shoot their own horse straight through the forehead, and then use the body as a rampart. They were the smart ones.
There was no defensive cover on that hill. Not a rock or boulder behind which to hide. As the men jumped to the ground a few were detached from each company to take a dozen mounts by the bridle and run them back to the crest of the ridge. Sergeant Lewis turned both his and Craig’s horse and cantered them back to the ridge. There they joined the milling mob of cavalry mounts being held by a score of troopers. Before long the horses began to scent the Indians. They skittered and reared, pulling their handlers with them. From the saddle Lewis and Craig watched. After the first rush, the battle went quiet. But the Indians were not finished; they were simply moving to surround.
It was said later that the Sioux destroyed Custer that day. Not so. The Cheyenne did most of the frontal assault. Their cousins the Oglala Sioux deferred to them the honour of defending their own village, which would have been the first in Custer’s attack, and acted in an assisting capacity, moving round the flanks to cut off any retreat. From his vantage point Craig could see the Oglala slipping through the long grass far to the left and right. Within twenty minutes there was no hope of retreat. The zipping bullets and hissing arrows began to fall closer. One of the horse-handlers took a falling arrow in the base of the throat and fell, choking and screaming.
The Indians had some rifles and even a few old flintlocks, but not many. By the end of the afternoon they would be substantially rearmed with new Springfields and Colts. Mainly, they used arrows, which for them had two advantages. The bow is a silent weapon; it does not give away the position of the firer. Many bluecoats died that afternoon with an arrow in the chest and never saw a target. The other advantage was that clouds of arrows could be fired high in the sky, to fall almost vertically on the cavalrymen. The effect was particularly damning on the horses. Within sixty minutes a dozen mounts had been hit by falling arrows. They broke away from the handlers, tearing the reins from the men’s grasp, and galloped away down the trail. The others, uninjured, followed their example. Long before the men were dead, the horses were gone and all hope of escape gone with them. Panic began to run like wildfire through the crouching troopers. The few veteran officers and NCOs simply lost control.
The Cheyenne village belonged to Little Wolf, but by chance he was missing. When he returned an hour too late for the fight, he was roundly abused for not being there. In fact, he was the one leading the scout party that had been tracking Custer up the Rosebud and across the divide to the Little Bighorn.
In his absence leadership went to the next senior warrior, a visitor from the Southern Cheyenne called Lame White Man. He was in his mid-thirties, neither lame nor white. When a group of thirty troopers under an officer tried to make a break towards the river, he charged them alone, crushing their morale and dying a hero in the process. None of those thirty struggled back to the rings on the slope. Watching them die, their companions lost hope of survival.
From above, Lewis and Craig could hear the sounds of men praying and crying as they faced their death. One trooper, little more than a boy and blubbering like a baby, broke circle and came up the hill seeking one of the last two horses. Within seconds four arrows thudded into his back and he went down twitching.
The two men on horses were now within range, and several arrows whistled past. Perhaps fifty to a hundred men were still left alive on the slope below, but half of them must have taken an arrow or a bullet. Sometimes a warrior, seeking personal honour, would mount up and charge straight past the crouching soldiers, defying a hail of shot and, the marksmanship being what it was, riding away unharmed but covered in glory. And always the high-pitched screams.
Every soldier there thought they were war cries. Craig knew better. The charging Indian’s cry was not for battle but for death, his own. He was simply confiding his soul to the care of the Everywhere Spirit.
But what really destroyed the Seventh Cavalry that day was their fear of being taken alive and tortured. Each soldier had been completely brainwashed with stories of the hideous ways in which captives of the Indians died. In the main they were wrong.
Plains Indians had no culture of the prisoner of war. They had no facilities for them. But an opposing force could surrender with honour if they had lost half their men. After seventy minutes Custer had certainly done this. But in Indian lore, if opponents just kept on fighting, they would normally be killed to the last man.
If a prisoner was taken alive, he would normally only be tortured in one of two cases: if he was recognized as one who had formally sworn never to fight the Indians of that tribe again, and had broken his word, or if he had fought with cowardice. In either case he was without honour.
In Sioux/Cheyenne culture the withstanding of pain with fortitude and stoicism could recover that honour. A liar or a coward should be given that chance, through pain. Custer was one who had once sworn to the Cheyenne that he would never fight them again. Two squaws of that tribe, recognizing him among the fallen, pushed steel awls through the dead eardrums so that he could hear better next time.
As the circle of Cheyenne and Sioux closed in, the panic ran like a brushfire through the surviving men. Battles in those days were never fought in good visibility; there was no smokeless ammunition. After an hour the hill was wreathed in a fog of powder smoke, and through the fog came the painted savages. Imagination ran riot. Years later an English poet would write:
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up your remains,
Why, you rolls to your rifle and blows out your brains,
And you goes to your Gawd like a soldier.
None of the last survivors on that hillside would ever live to hear of Kipling, but what he described was what they did. Craig heard the first pistol shots as wounded men saved themselves the misery of torture. He turned to Sergeant Lewis.
The big man was white-faced beside him, both their horses running out of control. There was no escape back down the track; it seethed with Oglala Sioux.
‘Sergeant, you’ll not let me die like a tied pig,’ the scout called to him. Lewis paused, thought, and his dedication to duty ended. He slipped from his horse, drew his knife and cut the thongs that tied Craig’s ankles to his girth-strap.
At that moment three things happened in less than a second. Two arrows from a range of no more than a hundred feet thudded into the sergeant’s chest. Knife in hand, he gazed at them with some surprise, then his knees buckled and he fell onto his face.
From even closer range a Sioux warrior rose from the long grass, pointed an ancient flintlock musket at Craig and fired. He had clearly used too much black powder in an effort to achieve increased range. Worse, he had forgotten to remove the ramrod. The breech exploded with a roar and a sheet of flame, shattering the man’s right hand to pulp. If he had been firing from the shoulder he would have lost most of his head, but he was firing from the hip.
The ramrod came out of the barrel like a quive
ring harpoon. Craig had been facing the man. The ramrod took his horse full in the chest, penetrating to the heart. As the animal went down Craig, hands still cord-tied, tried to throw himself clear. He landed on his back, his head slammed into a small rock and he was knocked cold.
Within ten minutes the last white soldier on Custer’s hill was dead. Though the scout was unconscious and never saw it, the end when it came was blisteringly fast. Sioux warriors would later relate that one minute the few dozen last survivors were still fighting and the next the Everywhere Spirit had simply swept them away. In fact most just ‘rolled to their rifles’ or used their Colt pistols. Some did the favour to wounded comrades, others to themselves.
When Ben Craig came to, his head sang and reeled from the blow by the rock. He opened one eye. He was on his side, hands tied behind, one cheek pressed to the earth. Grass blades were close to his face. As his head cleared he became aware of soft-shod feet moving all about him, of excited voices and occasional cries of triumph. His vision cleared also.
There were bare legs and feet in moccasins running across the hillside as Sioux warriors hunted for loot and trophies. One of them must have seen his eyes move. There was a yelp of triumph and strong hands jerked his torso upright.
There were four warriors round him, faces painted and contorted, still deranged by the killing frenzy. He saw a stone war club raised to smash out his brains. For one second as he sat and waited for death he wondered idly what lay on the other side of life. The blow did not fall. Instead a voice said, ‘Stop.’
He looked up. The man who had spoken was astride a pony ten feet away. The dropping sun was to the right of the rider’s shoulder and the glare reduced the image of the man to a silhouette.