Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (25 page)

Across the misted valley, the Indians charged in a broad front, their ponies’ hooves drumming on the earth. When they were close enough to see the scouts hurrying to the brushy island, one of the Cheyenne warriors sounded a blast on a bugle. They
had intended to overrun the camp. Now they had to swerve into the dry stream bed. A burst of fire from the scouts’ Spencer repeating rifles raked the first ranks, and the charging warriors divided, some to the left and some to the right, thus sweeping around the island.

For most of the morning the Indians circled the island. The only targets were the scouts’ horses standing in the high grass, and as the warriors shot the animals down, the scouts used them for breastworks. A few warriors made individual charges upon the island, dismounting and trying to creep up on the scouts through the brush. But the quick rifle fire was too strong for them. A Cheyenne named Wolf Belly made two mounted charges right through the defense ring of scouts. He was wearing his magic panther skin, and it gave him such strong medicine that not a single bullet touched him.

Early in the afternoon Roman Nose arrived on the field and took a position on high ground overlooking the island. Most of the warriors stopped fighting and waited to see what Roman Nose would do. Tall Bull and White Horse went to talk with him, but did not ask him to lead them in battle. Then an old man, White Contrary, came by and said: “Here is Roman Nose, the man we depend upon, sitting behind this hill.”

Roman Nose laughed. He had already made up his mind what he was going to do that day, and he knew he was going to die, but he laughed at what the old man said.

“All those people fighting out there feel that they belong to you,” White Contrary went on, “and they will do all that you tell them, and here you are behind this hill.”
¹³

Roman Nose went off to one side and prepared himself for battle, painting his forehead yellow, his nose red, his chin black. Then he put on his single-horned war bonnet with the forty feathers in its tail. When he was ready, he mounted and rode down to the dry riverbed, where the warriors were waiting in formation for him to lead them in a victorious charge.

They started out in a slow trot, increased speed to a gallop, and then lashed their ponies without mercy so that nothing could stop them from riding over the island. But once again the fire power of Forsyth’s Scouts cut down the front ranks, reducing the force of the desperate charge. Roman Nose reached
the outer fringes of willows; then crossfire caught him above the hips, a bullet penetrating his spine. He fell into the brush, lying there until dusk, when he managed to crawl to the bank. Some young warriors were there searching for him. They carried him up to the high ground, where Cheyenne and Sioux women had come to take care of the wounded. During the night Roman Nose died.

For the young Cheyenne warriors, the death of Roman Nose was like a great light going out in the sky. He had believed and made them believe that if they would fight for their country as Red Cloud was doing, they would someday win.

Neither the Cheyennes nor the Sioux had any taste for more fighting, but they kept Forsyth’s Scouts besieged there in the brush and sand for eight days. The scouts had to eat their dead horses and dig in the sand for water. On the eighth day, when a relief column of soldiers came, the Indians were ready to leave the stench of the island.

The white men made much of this fight; they called it the Battle of Beecher’s Island, after young Lieutenant Frederick Beecher, who was killed there. The survivors boasted they had killed “hundreds of redskins,” and although the Indians could count no more than thirty, the loss of Roman Nose was incalculable. They would always remember it as the Fight When Roman Nose Was Killed.

After they had rested from the siege, a considerable number of Cheyennes started moving south. With soldiers hunting everywhere for them now, their only hope of survival lay with their relatives below the Arkansas. They looked upon Black Kettle as a beaten old man, but he was still alive, and he was chief of the Southern Cheyennes.

They had no way of knowing, of course, that the soldier chief who looked like an angry bear, Sheridan, was planning a winter campaign below the Arkansas. When the snows of the cold moons came, he would send Custer and his pony soldiers to destroy the villages of the “savage” Indians, most of whom had kept their treaty obligations. To Sheridan, any Indian who resisted when fired upon was a “savage.”

During that autumn Black Kettle established a village on the
Washita River forty miles east of the Antelope Hills, and as the young men drifted back from Kansas he scolded them for their errant ways, but like a forgiving father accepted them back into his band. In November, when he heard rumors of soldiers coming, he and Little Robe and two Arapaho leaders made a journey of almost a hundred miles down the valley of the Washita to Fort Cobb, headquarters for their new agency south of the Arkansas. General William B. Hazen was commander of the fort, and on their summer visits the Cheyennes and Arapahos had found him to be friendly and sympathetic.

On this urgent occasion, however, Hazen was not cordial. When Black Kettle asked for permission to move his 180 lodges near Fort Cobb for protection, Hazen refused to grant it. He also refused permission for the Cheyennes and Arapahos to join the Kiowa and Comanche villages. He assured Black Kettle that if his delegation would return to their villages and keep their young men there, they would not be attacked. After issuing his visitors some sugar, coffee, and tobacco, Hazen sent them away, knowing that he would probably never see any of them again. He was fully aware of Sheridan’s war plans.

Facing into a raw north wind that turned into a snowstorm, the disappointed chiefs made their way back to their villages, arriving on the night of November 26. Weary as he was from the long journey. Black Kettle immediately called a council of the tribe’s leaders. (George Bent was not present; he had taken his wife, Black Kettle’s niece, on a visit to William Bent’s ranch in Colorado.)

This time, Black Kettle told his people, they must not be caught by surprise as they had at Sand Creek. Instead of waiting for the soldiers to come to them, he would take a delegation to meet the soldiers and convince them that the Cheyenne village was peaceful. Snow was deep and still falling, but as soon as the clouds left the sky they would start to meet the soldiers.

Although Black Kettle went to bed late that night, he awoke just before dawn as he always did. He stepped outside his lodge, and was glad to see that the skies were clearing. A heavy fog blanketed the valley of the Washita, but he could see deep snow on the ridges across the river.

Suddenly he heard a woman crying, her voice becoming clearer
as she came closer. “Soldiers! soldiers!” she was shouting. Reacting automatically, Black Kettle rushed inside his lodge for his rifle. In the few seconds that passed before he was outside again he had made up his mind what he must do—arouse the camp and put everyone to flight. There must not be another Sand Creek. He would meet the soldiers alone at the Washita ford and parley with them. Pointing his rifle skyward, he pulled the trigger. The report brought the village wide awake. As he shouted commands to everyone to mount and ride away, his wife untied his pony and brought it to him.

He was preparing to hurry toward the ford when a bugle blared out of the fog, followed by shouted commands and wild yells of charging soldiers. Because of the snow there was no thunder of hoofbeats, but only a rattle of packs and a jingle of harness metal, a hoarse yelling, and bugles blowing everywhere. (Custer had brought his military band through the snow and had ordered them to play “Garry Owen” for the charge.)

Black Kettle expected the soldiers to come riding across the Washita ford, but instead they were dashing out of the fog from four directions. How could he meet four charging columns and talk to them of peace? It was Sand Creek all over again. He reached for his wife’s hand, lifted her up behind him, and lashed the pony into quick motion. She had survived Sand Creek with him; now, like tortured dreamers dreaming the same nightmare over again, they were fleeing again from screaming bullets.

They were almost to the ford when he saw the charging cavalrymen in their heavy blue coats and fur caps. Black Kettle slowed his pony and lifted his hand in the sign gesture of peace. A bullet burned into his stomach, and his pony swerved. Another bullet caught him in the back, and he slid into the snow at the river’s edge. Several bullets knocked his wife off beside him, and the pony ran way. The cavalrymen splashed on across the ford, riding right over Black Kettle and his wife, splattering mud upon their dead bodies.

Custer’s orders from Sheridan were explicit: “to proceed south in the direction of the Antelope Hills, thence toward the Washita River, the supposed winter seat of the hostile tribes; to destroy their villages and ponies, to kill or hang all warriors, and bring back all women and children.”
¹⁴

In a matter of minutes Custer’s troopers destroyed Black Kettle’s village; in another few minutes of gory slaughter they destroyed by gunfire several hundred corralled ponies. To kill or hang all the warriors meant separating them from the old men, women, and children. This work was too slow and dangerous for the cavalrymen; they found it much more efficient and safe to kill indiscriminately. They killed 103 Cheyennes, but only eleven of them were warriors. They captured 53 women and children.

By this time, gunfire echoing down the valley brought a swarm of Arapahos from their nearby village, and they joined the Cheyennes in a rearguard action. A party of Arapahos surrounded a pursuit platoon of nineteen soldiers under Major Joel Elliott and killed every man. About noontime, Kiowas and Comanches were arriving from farther downriver. When Custer saw the increasing number of warriors on the nearby hills, he rounded up his captives and without searching for the missing Major Elliott started back north in a forced march toward his temporary base at Camp Supply on the Canadian River.

At Camp Supply, General Sheridan was eagerly awaiting news of a Custer victory. When he was informed that the cavalry regiment was returning, he ordered the entire post out for a formal review. With the band blaring triumphantly, the victors marched in, waving the scalps of Black Kettle and the other dead “savages,” and Sheridan publicly congratulated Custer for “efficient and gallant services rendered.”

In his official report of victory over the “savage butchers” and “savage bands of cruel marauders,” General Sheridan rejoiced that he had “wiped out old Black Kettle … a worn-out and worthless old cypher.” He then stated that he had promised Black Kettle sanctuary if he would come into a fort before military operations began. “He refused,” Sheridan lied, “and was killed in the fight.”
¹⁵

Tall Chief Wynkoop, who had already resigned in a gesture of protest against Sheridan’s policies, was far away in Philadelphia when he heard the news of Black Kettle’s death. Wynkoop charged that his old friend had been betrayed, and “met his death at the hands of white men in whom he had too often fatally trusted and who triumphantly report the fact of his scalp in their possession.” Other white men who had known and liked
Black Kettle also attacked Sheridan’s war policy, but Sheridan brushed them aside as “good and pious ecclesiastics … aiders and abettors of savages who murdered, without mercy, men, women, and children.”
¹⁶

The Great Warrior Sherman gave Sheridan his support, however, and ordered him to continue killing hostile Indians and their ponies, but at the same time advised that he establish the friendly Indians in camps where they could be fed and exposed to the white man’s civilized culture.

In response to this, Sheridan and Custer moved on to Fort Cobb, and from there sent out runners to the four tribes in the area, warning them to come in and make peace or else they would be hunted down and killed. Custer himself went out in search of friendly Indians. For this field operation he requisitioned one of the more attractive young women from his Cheyenne prisoners to go with him. She was listed as an interpreter, although she knew no English.

Late in December the survivors of Black Kettle’s band began arriving at Fort Cobb. They had to come on foot, because Custer had killed all of their ponies. Little Robe was now the nominal leader of the tribe, and when he was taken to see Sheridan he told the bearlike soldier chief that his people were starving. Custer had burned their winter meat supply; they could find no buffalo along the Washita; they had eaten all their dogs.

Sheridan replied that the Cheyennes would be fed if they all came into Fort Cobb and surrendered unconditionally. “You cannot make peace now and commence killing whites again in the spring,” Sheridan added. “If you are not willing to make a complete peace, you can go back and we will fight this thing out.”

Little Robe knew there was but one answer he could give. “It is for you to say what we have to do,” he said.
¹⁷

Yellow Bear of the Arapahos also agreed to bring his people to Fort Cobb. A few days later, Tosawi brought in the first band of Comanches to surrender. When he was presented to Sheridan, Tosawi’s eyes brightened. He spoke his own name and added two words of broken English. “Tosawi, good Indian,” he said.

It was then that General Sheridan uttered the immortal words: “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.”
¹⁸
Lieutenant Charles Nordstrom, who was present, remembered the
words and passed them on, until in time they were honed into an American aphorism:
The only good Indian is a dead Indian.