Текст книги "LITTLE BIG MAN"

Автор книги: Томас Бергер (Бри(е)джер)

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 31 (всего у книги 35 страниц)

Reynolds had looked up while Bouyer was talking, but when I turned back to him, he stared at the turf again.

“There’s too many for him to take on alone,” I says. “And I wager that’s what he’ll do. He won’t wait for Gibbon and Terry.”

“Nope,” says Charley, in his soft voice.

“God damn it, man, you got to make him understand. I hear he’ll listen to you.”

“He won’t,” Charley says and knees his horse so as to move along, and I seen his right hand was wrapped in a bandanna, and asked if he was hurt.

“Whitlow,” says he.

“Can you shoot?”

“Barely,” Charley says and, by now exhausted with so much talking, he got away from me.

“Reynolds is just a yellowbelly,” Sergeant Botts told me in camp that evening. “He begged Terry to let him off this campaign, claiming to have a pre-monition he would go under.”

“Bottsy,” I says, “you got a pretty poor opinion of most. I was wondering what you thought of me.”

“Jack,” says Botts, “there ain’t a lot of you, but what there is, is all white.”

Some men will get a great liking for you if you listen to them abuse others. At that moment, him and me was sitting within some bullberry bushes, getting drunk upon the contents of our canteens. I reckon it was the first real 100 per cent, lowdown, stinking, dirty case of inebriation I had been a party to since them days long ago as I wandered about the southern plains searching for Olga and Gus.

The result was that the next morning found me in very poor condition at the start of the longest day of my life.

CHAPTER 27 Greasy Grass

SATURDAY, JUNE 24, was a mean hot day, and the south wind served only to choke the men behind with the dust of them in front. It got so bad after a time that the troops was obliged each to march along a separate trail, so as not to stifle them following, and also to diminish the great cloud that marked our progress. For we was getting close to the hostiles, and it was just after the noon halt that we crossed the place where another great Indian trail, coming from the south, joined the one we had been on so far.

That was not long after we found the enormous abandoned campsite where the lodgepoles for a sun-dance lodge was still standing. On the floor of the latter was some pictures traced in the sand: lines representing pony hoofmarks on one side and them of iron-shoed cavalry horses on the other; between, figures of white men falling headfirst towards the Indian ranks.

My head was thumping, and the smell of bacon at breakfast had made me go off and heave. I felt so miserable of body that, in compensation, my mind rested somewhat easier than it had been. The Ree and Crow, however, waxed even unhappier than before, while looking at them sand drawings, and chattered to Fred Girard and Mitch Bouyer, their respective interpreters, for being Indians they was much affected by symbols.

Up come Custer shortly, and Bouyer tells him that the pictures meant “many soldiers falling upside down into the Sioux camp,” which was to say, dead.

At that point I steps forward, saying: “General-”

But he interrrupts: “It’s the teamster, isn’t it? Well, teamster,” Custer says, looking down his sharp nose, “I understood your place was with the mules.” Yet he was not sore, but rather amused. “Or do I have it wrong?” he goes on. “I am only the regimental commander.”

“Sir,” I says, wincing from my hangover, “I don’t know how good a job these scouts is doing. I believe the way they put their reports sounds to you like sheer superstition and you ignore it.” Bouyer and Girard was giving me dirty looks.

“Whereas,” I says, “the whole point of being an Indian lies in the practical combination of fact and fancy. These here drawings and bones was left purposely for you to find and be scared by. If you arefrightened off, or go ahead and get whipped, then they will have constituted a prophecy. If you win, however, they will have been just another charm that never worked. But the important matter is that the hostiles know you are following them, and are herewith announcing they ain’t going to run.”

Custer had been showing a flickering smile. Now he throws back his head and makes a barking laugh. He once again seemed like his old self, rather than the sober figure he had become since leaving the Tongue.

“Teamster,” he says, “I have the reputation of being a severe man. But I am also surely the only commanding officer who could stand and listen to the recommendations of a mule skinner. I have a partiality for colorful characters-California Joe, Wild Bill Hickok, and so on-in whose company I should say you belong. Charley Reynolds is a splendid scout, but he is too quiet.”

He laughs again, taking off his gray hat and slapping his boots with it. “This campaign has been altogether too humorless! Very well,” he says, “you wanted to be a scout. You are one as of this moment. Your orders are to stay with me, to say whatever comes into your head, and not to bother these other fellows.”

So that’s how I was appointed official jester to the commander of the Seventh Cavalry, as a result of merely telling the truth. Now you might think I took offense at it, but you would be wrong. It meant that I might be even more ineffectual than when traveling with the mules, for everything said by a man who is an authorized idiot, so to speak, is naturally taken as idiotic. But I would be at the head rather than the tail of the column. Maybe I could even jolly Custer out of the worst mistakes. So I accepted the position, and that threw the General into another laugh, and Girard and Bouyer got the idea, too, and laughed, and so did the Crow and Ree without understanding, but Indians is always polite if possible.

Now my orders might have been to stay with Custer, but that was unlikely for any human being, even one without a hangover and riding a better mount than my half-lame pony, for the General’s reputation for energy had not been exaggerated. Back and forth he rode upon Vic and when he tired that animal out, the striker would bring up Dandy. Scouts was ever coming in with reports, but Custer would generally go out a mile or more to meet them. Then back he’d trot and maybe continue along the column to speak to one of the troop commanders. All the while, his adjutant, Lieutenant Cooke with the enormous mutton-chop whiskers, was writing out orders and sending them hither and yon by means of couriers, and replies come back and Custer’d read them in his quick, impatient way sort of like an eagle.

His brother Tom, a carbon-copy of the General with the characteristics less authentic-like he was more impudent than truly arrogant, with his hat on the side of his head, etc.-Tom was generally in evidence at the head of the column rather than back with his troop, and to get in on the importance he would also send messages to the pack train and so on; and the other brother Boston as well as the nephew Armstrong Reed, both young fellows, they was usually to be seen acting as if we was on a picnic outing.

So I was largely ignored and never had no more chance to amuse the General, had I wanted such, the rest of the day, nor indeed didn’t talk to nobody except once or twice I tried to strike up a conversation with Custer’s striker-not the man from the Washita, but a fellow named Burkman, but he was almost a moron, wearing his cap way down to his eyes, and a butt for everybody’s wit.

We marched thirty mile and went into camp at eight o’clock of the evening, but in come the Crow scouts shortly with a report that the Sioux trail had swung west and crossed the Wolf Mountains in the direction of the Little Bighorn, or Greasy Grass as the Indians called it, so at about midnight we started to move again. I don’t believe anyone had got a wink of sleep in the interim, for the news had soon went around that the hostile village was expected to lie in the river valley, in which case we’d attack it at dawn.

Of course during that halt, I encountered Botts, who had ate a quick meal and went wandering about sticking his nose in everywhere.

“What did I tell you,” he says. “Hard Ass will pitch into the Indians tomorrow, a whole day before the junction with Terry and Gibbon. And by the time they come up, he can deliver that village all skinned and gutted, compliments of the Seventh Cavalry. Curse his dirty heart,” he says, “but you gotta hand it to him.”

I warns Botts to keep his voice down, for we was right near the headquarters tent, but he says nobody would hear on account of Custer was holding a officer’s conference there and was deaf to anything but his own voice.

Then Bottsy says he had to get back to his troop and take care of the men. I don’t want you to have the idea he was not a good sergeant.

“Them recruits,” he says, “is already dragging their tails from these long marches and some ain’t fired a carbine more’n once or twice, nor seen a red excepting the coffee-coolers around the fort. If fired too fast, them Springfields heat up and the ejector sticks. I reckon the agents have fitted out the hostiles with repeaters, which can panic a man unless he realizes our pieces got twice the range of the Winchesters and Henrys.”

Them recruits made up about a third of our force. Some was Irish, and some was Germans who come over here to dodge the draft in the Old Country, couldn’t find no jobs, joined the U.S. Army, and was killed by savage Indians before they learned English: real peculiar experience.

As me and Bottsy was parting, we heard the officers in the tent sing some sad old songs: “Annie Laurie,” and the like, and then “Praise God from whom all blessings flow,” which took me back to my days at the Reverend Pendrake’s church. As singing, it wasn’t too good, I expect, but sounded very nice there in the wilderness and some of the enlisted men gathered around to listen.

Then, maybe to cheer people up after the plaintive and melancholic selections, they ended up with “He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

Bottsy says: “If they mean Hard Ass, then it’s sarcastic.”

So the column got into motion again and marched all night, going up a little creek off the Rosebud that led west towards the Wolf Mountains. It was right dark, without a moon, so them behind had to follow the leaders by the smell of dust and the sound of swinging equipment; whole troops kept getting lost, and there was shouts and curses and the banging of tin cups to locate them again, so when first light come about half-past two, we had done only some six miles and had not had no sleep since the night before.

However, we had reached the Wolf range by now, which really ain’t mountains but rather just bad country, steep hills and ravines and such between the Little Bighorn and Rosebud valleys, and went into camp in a coulee big enough to hide the whole regiment, where the idea was we could stay until the following morning, then cross the divide and at dawn strike the hostile camp which was expected to lie on the other side.

Now I had flopped upon the hard ground and tried to take a snooze, but never had no more success at it than most of the troopers. I wager to say that once again nobody slept during that halt: we was all too tired. The water thereby was so alkali the horses would not touch it; coffee made with such will take the skin off your tongue-which some of them recruits discovered there for the first time.

I don’t think Custer sat down, except upon his horse, at any time during that morning, nor took a bite of food. He wore buckskin pants with a long fringe down the leg, blue-gray shirt, gray hat, and boots that come to just below the knee. Around his waist was a canvas Army belt holding two holstered English Bulldog double-action pistols and a hunting knife in a beaded scabbard. The stubble on his cheeks was substantial now, for he had not shaved in ever so long; and being fair, it looked white. I mean because his face otherwise seemed so aged, them hitherto clear blue eyes being bloodshot from loss of sleep, with pouches beneath.

But he wasn’t slowing down none, and when word come in from the scouts that from a high point ahead they had spotted the Indian village fifteen mile upriver, he was washing the trail dust off his face from a bowl placed on a tripod. Quick he folded his collar back and leaped onto the bare back of Vic without even drying himself, for the air would do that as he rode: already in early morning you could feel it developing into a real scorcher. Off he went to alert the troop commanders, and within the hour we was on the trail again towards the pass across the divide.

The Crow and other scouts had stayed upon the butte from which they had made their observations, and when the column reached its vicinity, Lieutenant Varnum, the scout commander, come down and says: “General, our presence is known to the hostiles.”

“No,” says Custer. “No, it is not.” He spurs Vic into a trot up the slope.

Varnum goes after him, shouting: “Sir, we encountered six Sioux and gave chase, but they got away, riding towards the village.”

Soon the ground got so steep and rough we had to dismount and walk the rest of the way to the top of the butte, and Custer still outdistanced everybody else. Varnum looked utterly perplexed.

“He won’t believe there isa village,” he says.

On the summit was the Crow and Ree, Mitch Bouyer, most of the white scouts, and Lavender. The view to the northwest, down the Little Bighorn valley, must have been good were the air clear, but at this hour it was obscured by the midmorning summer haze you get in that country.

Nor had Custer brung his field glasses. The Crow, however, possessed an old battered brass telescope, and White Man Runs Him handed it to the General.

“Look for the smoke of their fires,” he says in Bouyer’s translation. “And the big horse herds on the benchland to the left of the river.”

Custer stares through the instrument for a minute. “I cannot see a thing,” he says.

Goes Ahead says: “Look for little worms. That is how ponies look at this distance, like maggots upon a buffalo hide that has not been fleshed.”

Custer gives the telescope back to White Man Runs Him. “No,” he says, “there is no village.”

Bouyer now speaks for himself, with an unhappy expression on his swart face: “General, there is more Sioux in that river bottom than I ever seen in thirty years out here. I swear it.”

“No,” says Custer, and walks briskly to where the orderly is holding his horse.

Back we went towards the column, and when still a half mile away, out rode Tom Custer and says to the General: “Armstrong, they have seen us!” A box of hardtack had fell off a mule, and when a detail of men went back the trail to fetch it, they found it being opened by a Sioux with his hatchet, had fired on him, but he escaped.

I don’t know if Custer then changed his mind about the village, but so long as his kin had reported it, I guess he at least believed there was hostiles in the neighborhood, so had the trumpeters call in the officers and told them to prepare to attack immediately since surprise was so longer possible and the Indians would have time to scatter if there was further delay.

The weary troopers mounted their tired horses again, and the Ree called Stab spit on some magic clay he carried and anointed the chests of his fellow tribesmen as a charm against misfortune, and shortly we moved out and across the divide.

That was about noon on that fateful Sunday, June 25, 1876, in the hundredth year of this country’s freedom, and though it be ever so long ago I recall it like it was happening this instant. I can get to sweating when I think of the heat of that day and how my flannel shirt clung to my back and how the dust got into my nose and coated my tongue, and I guess owing to my changed point of view that country did not look so attractive as my Indian memory of it, being chopped up and washed out with ravines and now and again tufts of reddish-brown grass or shabby gray sage.

Having crossed the divide, we reached the headwaters of a small creek that in spring must have been a tributary of the Greasy Grass, but now its bed was bone-dry pebbles. Right here it was that Custer made the division of his forces that a lot of people have criticized him for, but if you understand the situation as he saw it, what he done wasn’t necessarily foolish.

He did not believe there was a village where the scouts said, though he did think it was likely the Indians was someplace along the river, between where we would reach it following the dry creek, and Terry and Gibbon’s column coming up from the mouth.

It was however possible that the Sioux might be going upstream towards the Bighorn Mountains and would get around our left flank. Therefore Custer sent Captain Benteen and three troops to diverge from the main column on a left oblique and scout across the bluffs in that direction until he could see whether the upper river valley was clear.

My friend Botts was with Benteen’s battalion, so off he went with the contingent. I never seen him again my life long, though I don’t believe he perished.

Of the remaining eight troops, Custer kept five and gave three to Major Reno, and the two columns rode side by side descending through the timbered creek bottom which widened as it neared the river. I reckon we had come ten mile and two hours from the divide when we sighted that single tepee. There it stood, on the south bank of the creek, with some Indians clustered about it, and as often happened, we almost charged before recognizing they was our own scouts.

It was a Sioux lodge, and all about it was signs of a recently vacated camp with warm fire-ashes, and Lieutenant Hare tells Custer that when he and the Crow approached, they run off fifty-sixty hostiles.

Fred Girard rode up on a knoll from which he could look into the Little Bighorn valley, and he now waves his hat and shouts: “There go your Indians, running like devils.”

“Bouyer,” Custer orders, “tell your Crows to pursue them.”

So Bouyer passes that on to Half Yellow Face and the rest, and they chatter among themselves for a time, and Custer gets furious at the delay and when Bouyer says the scouts refused, I thought from the General’s expression he would have pistol-whipped them had there been time.

“They are afraid,” says Bouyer. “There are more Sioux along the Greasy Grass than there are bullets in the belts of your soldiers.”

“You are women!” shouted Custer, and them scouts knowed enough English for that and winced like they had been struck, yet still they sat upon their ponies while that blue dust cloud raised by the fleeing hostiles plumed above the valley.

I dismounted and went into the tepee. Inside was a body of a Sioux brave, dressed in fine clothing and resting upon a low scaffold, not dead long enough to smell, and there was Lavender, a-standing alongside.

I says: “Know him?”

He says he never, and turns away and ejects the shell from his Sharps, inspects and reinserts it, does the same for his revolver, and cleans his knife upon his shirt though it looked clean enough. Then some of the Ree set afire to the tepee, so we left it and mounted and Lavender bends over his saddle to give me his hand. His face was all powdered from the dust. He never said a word, nor did I, for there ain’t no rules on going into a fight about how to leave your friends. Me and Lavender was just matter-of-fact, I expect, having gone over everything long since.

So he tied the feathered hat tight beneath his chin and trotted his bay pony after Reno’s column, which had started to move briskly towards the river.

“Where they going?” I asked Custer’s orderly for the day, a trumpeter named John Martin who was an Italian just come over from Italy, his real name being Giovanni Martini, and he didn’t know English very good.

“Make-a de charge,” he says.

“At what?” I asks.

It seemed that Lieutenant Varnum had gone ahead to a ridge and seen a village several mile downstream, so Custer at last believed there was such, when a white man told him, and we was going to attack it.

When Reno’s rear troops had gone by, Custer’s command fell in behind and followed till we neared the river. In later arguments about the battle, some said Reno expected, on fording the river and advancing up the bottom, that the General would come behind in support. I don’t know about that; I never heard what orders Custer had give on that occasion, being inside the tepee with Lavender.

What I do think, though, is that he had an idea to use again the tactic with which he had had success at the Washita, where he also divided his force and struck the village from several points simultaneous, for we was still some distance from the ford which Reno was crossing when Custer turned right and led us off on a course roughly parallel to the river but behind some bluffs which cut off a view of it. It seemed to me that the plan was for us to get downstream a mile or two and ford over at that point and strike the lower end of the camp while Reno was attacking the upper.

I remember thinking then of how in a similar maneuver at the Washita, Major Elliot’s command had got cut off, and right while Custer was elsewhere winning, the Cheyenne slaughtered Elliot. That incident was supposed to have touched off Benteen’s hatred for Custer, and now Reno might be in similar jeopardy. Or maybe Benteen himself, for with only three troops he was away off to the left, and nobody really knowed how many hostiles there was nor exactly where they was situated.

For example, Custer didn’t seem to be in no hurry. He had slowed his pace after that turn to the right-which was O.K. by me on that pony of mine, but looked odd when you consider Reno’s fight was about to begin at any minute. Also I was uneasy at the sight of the terrain ahead. I did not claim any good memory of this stretch of the Little Bighorn from years ago, but what I did recall was that them northern rivers sometimes are bordered by real high bluffs that go on for miles without a break that will let you down to the water, and even when you arrive there you cannot rely on finding a ford.

Yet Custer was dawdling, and even stopped to water the horses at a little creek we come to. That was the place where I went up to him, and Tom was also there, and his brother-in-law Calhoun, and I thought again how he had sent off Benteen and Reno but was careful to keep his own family about him.

He looked quite drawn, I thought, and had his hat off to fan himself in the heat, and damn if I didn’t wish at that moment that he never had cut his hair.

But soon as he looked at me, he started to smile. “Yes, teamster,” he says, “do you wish to submit your plan of attack?”

“No sir,” says I, “I don’t mean to jest now. I know something of this country and it don’t look to me like we are going to find a ford for several mile.”

Tom pulls his blond mustache in annoyance and says: “Armstrong, why do you tolerate this idiot?”

“He amuses me,” the General says. “Don’t you, teamster? He is a frontier eccentric,” he goes on as if I wasn’t there. “You know I am partial to the type.”

Then I noticed that newspaper correspondent Mark Kellogg, dismounted and holding his bridle over an arm while scribbling in a notebook. Now he says: “Would you repeat that last phrase, General?” “ Partial to the type,” Custer says very distinct and slow enough for it to be copied. I seen then that he was holding an interview right there.

“Thank you, General,” Kellogg says. “Now would you care to characterize your mode of operation as we pause on the brink of battle?”

Custer brushed some trail dust off his shirt. “Very well,” he says. “I have been called impetuous. I resent that. Everything that I have ever done has been the result of the study that I have made of imaginary military situations that might arise. When I become engaged in a campaign and a great emergency arises, everything that I have ever heard or studied focuses in my mind as if the situation were under a magnifying glass. My mind works instantaneously but always as the result of everything I have ever studied being brought to bear on the situation.”

He was going to say more, I think, but at that moment his adjutant, Lieutenant Cooke, who had rode down to the river with Reno and stayed awhile on the near shore as observer, come dashing back, his whiskers flying like birds at his cheeks.

He reined in and shouted from his foaming mount: “Girard reports the Indians are coming out to meet Reno, and in force.”

As if to exemplify his self-estimate, Custer leaped into the saddle of his mare and asked: “Where are the hostiles?”

“About three miles downstream when I received word,” Cooke says. “By now Reno must have engaged them.” And indeed a few seconds after that we commenced to hear the snapping gunfire.

“How big is the village?” Custer asked, but Cooke didn’t know on account of the river bent like a corkscrew downstream and there was cottonwood timber in every bend which cut off the view.

The trumpeters sounded the order to mount, and there was some confusion getting the horses away from the water, but Custer didn’t wait, he galloped furiously up the northward slope to a ridge beyond and everybody followed as best they could for two mile of rough travel which was brutal to the horses, and I believe several dropped from exhaustion and their riders stayed behind with them, thus being unwittingly saved from the slaughter soon to come.

Then we halted again, though the animals was so excited by now that a lot was out of control, especially in the hands of them recruits, and you had rearing, bucking, and a certain panic back along the column. But I must say for my own pony, who had looked to drop dead earlier at a smart walk, in an emergency he got himself together somehow and did right well: I guess his tough Indian breeding showed up, and then it was more his type of terrain than for them big cavalry beasts.

Now we had been traveling more or less parallel to the course of the Greasy Grass, but behind the bluffs, and Custer ordered the halt so he could go out to a high point and look down at the situation in the valley-his first such of the day, remember, excepting that morning long-range view from the Wolf Mountain Crow’s Nest, from which he could not make out a thing. And up to this moment, he had still not seen one live, hostile Indian with his own eyes. It was real strange, as if some sort of charm was at work.

If so, the spell commenced to break now, for as we rode out onto the bluff above the river and looked into the western bottom, we saw enough Indians to satisfy any appetite. I’d say five-six hundred was massing against Reno’s command, which had dismounted and gone into a skirmish line that appeared a thin blue necklace at our distance and elevation. He had only a few more than a hundred men. And we also seen where the enemy was coming from. There could be no further doubt as to the existence of a village: it started a mile or so downstream and God only knowed how far it went, for on account of them loops of the Greasy Grass, we saw only the lower end-though I still wasn’t sure that Custer understood that. But figuring on the warriors charging Reno, and the visible tepees, the redskin population could not be far below two thousand souls.

Once that was realized, however, the situation was still not desperate in any wise. All together the Seventh Cavalry numbered some six hundred men, trained to fight in an organized way: for example, the efficient manner in which Reno went into the skirmish line. A very small party of dismounted men, controlling their fire, could handle many times their number in unorganized savage riders.

If we could get down to the next ford, Custer could strike across into the village and thus relieve the pressure on Reno, and Benteen would no doubt be along in time to reinforce either command. Also, back the trail the pack train was coming on with reserve ammunition and its cavalry guard.

Well, it didn’t seem as bad to me as it might have been-though it wasn’t no picnic, either-but I looked at Custer and seen he was hit real hard. He stared angrily into the valley, jerking his head a little and squinting in the sunlight. I figured he was mad at Reno, who had been ordered to charge the hostiles, and even though that was now manifestly impractical, it would have been like Custer to hold it against him.

But then the General suddenly takes off his gray hat, waves it into the air, and cheers. Since we others there with him-brother Tom, Lieutenant Cooke, the orderly Martin, and myself-never joined in, it sounded right odd. With that raspy voice of his, it might have reached the troops in the valley had all been silent there. As it was, it never had a chance, amid the firing of white and Indian guns, savage war cries, and the rest. Not to mention that you don’t usually hooray at a defensive action.

Then he wheels Vic around and dashes back to the troops. Tom Custer’s orderly was there, and the General barked at him: “Go tell the pack train to come directly across country to join us.” In other words, not to follow the twisting trail we had made so far, nor to make no attempt to reach Reno, though he would soon need ammunition at the rate them carbines was firing.

Well, that was another man saved: I mean the orderly, Sergeant Kanipe. The rest of us started off again at a wild gallop across that upland country, following Custer’s breakneck lead upon his mare, his personal guidon whipping along just after, the red-and-blue swallow-tailed pennant showing crossed white sabers, as borne by a trooper on a fine big sorrel. We detoured around the worst draws and steeper cutbanks, leaped some and negotiated others, but it was a horse-killing ride and again some animals dropped in their tracks, saving a few more lives as their riders stayed behind, though I heard some of them never did reach the rear but was ambushed on the way. For unbeknownst to us the Indians had started already to cross the Little Bighorn to our side and infiltrate the coulees.

I reckon we went more than a mile in that fashion and come just below a ridge that was the highest point in the region, when Custer called still another halt. Again he rode out and up for observation, and the same little party accompanied him as before, me included, and his nephew Armstrong Reed, too, who had come on the campaign for a summer outing. It was reflected on the latter’s young face that, so to speak, I first seen the magnitude of that gigantic Indian camp which lay across the river.