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.