“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 welclass="underline" 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.
I happened to glance at him as my pony reached the summit. Now Reed was a right handsome young fellow, like all the Custer clan, and his habitual expression was one which blended civilized breeding with eager interest. You saw that on a lot of Eastern lads who come West for adventure in them days, like the frontier was some type of exhibit put on for their education and entertainment, rather than the often mortal matter it was for us who lived there permanent.
Reed’s officer-uncles had fitted him out in a buckskin suit like their own and hung some weapons on him, and a comely sight he was, a-sitting his fine animal on that elevation. But something awesome was murking his clear eyes and setting his beardless chin to tremble, and if you think I shall deride him for it, you are wrong, for then I looked myself into the valley, across that ribbon of river and beyond the fringe of timber dark in the sun, and saw the biggest encampment of savages ever assembled upon this continent.
Almighty God, it stretched farther than the eye could limit, five mile anyway of clustered tepees and on the benchland to the west grazed their herd of twenty thousand ponies. I give that figure, allowing it might have been bigger, for I couldn’t see it all. But in my days along the Canadian River down south, I had observed them great masses of buffalo, and this was the closest thing to that vista.