Free Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors by Stephen Ambrose Page A

general guide the works of Colonel W. A. Graham, especially The Custer Myth (which reprints Godfrey’s and Benteen’s long accounts, along with those of many other eyewitnesses, red and white), and Edgar I. Stewart’s Custer’s Luck. The serious student who wants to immerse himself in the innumerable controversies about the battle should begin by carefully reading Graham and Stewart about four times through, then go on to the more specialized (and less careful) accounts. One warning—to study this battle is to enter quicksand. Let Graham and Stewart be your guides. Hold to their hands, and abandon them at your peril.
    † Benteen had decided there were no Indians to the south, so on his own he had decided to turn to his right. He joined Reno that afternoon.
    ‡ All estimates about what Custer did after Martini left him to take orders to Benteen are speculative. There are as many theories as there are accounts of the battle. What follows is my own best guess—but (except for Crazy Horse’s actions, which have been authenticated), only a guess.
    ∫ Or so the reported location of the soldiers’ bodies on the battlefield two days later led me to believe. This is not conclusive, of course, because the Indians may have moved the bodies after the battle.
    || Benteen did try, after joining Reno, to get through to Custer, but Gall’s forces blocked his way and he returned to Reno Hill.



CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
    The Death of Crazy Horse
“Stab the son-of-a-bitch! Stab the son-of-a-bitch!”
The Officer of the Day at Camp Robinson,
Nebraska, September 6, 1877
“Let me go, my friends. You have got me hurt enough.”
Crazy Horse, September 6, 1877
    June 25, 1876, had been a good day to die, a better one than Crazy Horse got for himself, and thereby hangs a tale.
    Following the battle, the Indians moved south, toward the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming. After traveling fifteen miles or so, the great camp broke up, Sitting Bull and the Hunkpapas going to the southwest, Crazy Horse with the Oglalas and Cheyennes heading southeast. * The hostiles burned the grass behind them, making cavalry pursuit impossible, and the country was filled with smoke. Soon the Cheyennes left Crazy Horse’s camp, and many of the agency Indians did too, as the Sioux continued to scatter. The agency warriors had got what they wanted, a big fight with lots of honors won and plunder captured, and they were ready to go back to the reservation. Many of the Indians were also confident about their future—they figured that such a crushing defeat would teach the Army a lesson it wouldn’t soon forget, so that they would be free to hunt the Powder River country once more in their small bands, unmolested. Perhaps there would be a little fighting again next summer, but for now the war was in the bag.
    The Army, meanwhile, was refitting before coming after CrazyHorse. Following the Custer disaster, it got everything it wanted. Congress promptly voted funds to build two forts along the Yellowstone, forts that Sheridan had been asking for since 1873. Some 2,500 new recruits were authorized and sent to the Sioux country to reinforce Generals Terry and Crook. Congress took control of the agencies out of the hands of the Indian Bureau and gave it to the Army. Despite all this effort, Crook stayed on the Powder River all through the rest of June and July, while Terry stayed in camp on the Yellowstone. Neither general would move until his command had been doubled in size by reinforcements, saying it would be unsafe to venture into Sioux territory without at least two thousand soldiers.
    The hostiles spent the month of July dancing, feasting, going into the Bighorns for lodge poles and deer, coming back to the prairie, and again dancing and feasting. Meanwhile, the same Army officers who for years had been hoping for orders to march against the Sioux and who bragged that they would give the hostiles a five- or even ten-to-one superiority and still whip them, sat where they