XII
High Noon on the Little Horn
Now it came to pass,
That late June morning on the Greasy Grass,
Two men went fishing, warriors of the Sioux;
And, lonesome in the silence of the two,
A youngster pictured battles on the sand.
Once more beneath the valor of his hand
The execrated troopers, blotted out,
Became a dust. Then, troubled with a doubt,
He ventured: “Uncle, will they find us here—
The soldiers?” ’Twas a buzzing in the ear
Of Red Hawk where he brooded on his cast.
“The wind is coming up,” he said at last;
“The sky grows dusty.” “Then the fish won’t bits,”
Said Running Wolf. “There may be rain tonight”
Said Red Hawk, falling silent. Bravely then
The youngster wrought himself a world of men
Where nothing waited on a wind of whim,
But everything, obedient to him,
Fell justly. All the white men in the world
Were huddled there, and round about them swirled
More warriors than a grownup might surmise.
The pony-thunder and the battle-cries,
The whine of arrows eager for their marks
Drowned out the music of the meadowlarks,
The rising gale that teased the cottonwoods
To set them grumbling in their whitened hoods,
The chatter of a little waterfall.
These pebbles—see!—were Crazy Horse and Gall;
Here Crow King raged, and Black Moon battled there!
This yellow pebble—look!—was Yellow Hair;
This drab one with a little splotch of red,
The Gray Fox, Crook! Ho ho! And both were dead;
And white men fell about them every place—
The leafage of the autumn of a race—
Till all were down. And when their doom was sealed,
The little victor danced across the field
Amid the soundless singing of a throng.
The brief joy died, for there was something wrong
About this battle. Mournfully came back
That other picture of a dawn attack—
The giant horses rearing in the fogs
Of their own breath; the yelping of the dogs;
The screaming rabble swarming up the rise;
The tangled terror in his mother’s eyes;
The flaming lodges and the bloody snow.
Provokingly oblivious of woe,
The two still eyed the waters and were dumb.
“But will they find us, Uncle? Will they come?”
Now Red Hawk grunted, heaving at his line,
And, wrought of flying spray and morning-shine,
A spiral rainbow flashed along the brook.
“Hey hey!” said Red Hawk, staring at his hook,
“He got my bait! Run yonder to the bluff
And catch some hoppers, Hohay. Get enough
And you shall see how fish are caught today!”
Half-heartedly the youngster stole away
Across a brawling riffle, climbed the steep
And gazed across the panoramic sweep
Of rolling prairie, tawny in the drouth,
To where the Big Horns loomed along the south,
No more than ghosts of mountains in the dust.
Up here the hot wind, booming gust on gust,
Made any nook a pleasant place to dream.
You could not see the fishers by the stream;
And you were grown so tall that, looking down
Across the trees, you saw most all the town
Strung far along the valley. First you saw
The Cheyennes yonder opposite the draw
That yawned upon the ford—a goodly sight!
So many and so mighty in a fight
And always faithful brothers to the Sioux!
Trees hid the Brulé village, but you knew
’Twas half a bow-shot long from end to end.
Then Ogalalas filled a river bend,
And next the Minneconjoux did the same.
A little farther south the Sans Arc came,
And they were neighbors to the Hunkpapas.—
The blackened smoke-vents, flapping in the flaws,
Were like a startled crow flock taking wing.—
Some Ogalalas played at toss-the-ring
And many idlers crowded round to see.—
The grazing ponies wandered lazily
Along the flat and up the rolling west.
Now, guiltily remembering his quest,
He trotted farther up the naked hill,
Dropped down a gully where the wind was still—
And came upon a hopping army there!
They swarmed, they raged—but Hohay didn’t care;
For suddenly it seemed the recent climb
Had been a scramble up the height of time
And Hohay’s name was terror in the ears
Of evil peoples. Seizing weeds for spears,
He charged the soldiers with a dreadful shout.
The snapping of their rifles all about
Might daunt a lesser hero. Never mind;
His medicine made all their bullets blind,
And ’twas a merry slaughter. Then at last
The shining glory of the vision passed,
And hoppers were but hoppers as before,
And he, a very little boy once more,
Stood dwarfed and lonely on a windy rise.
The sun was nearly up the dusty skies.
’Twas white with heat and had a funny stare—
All face! The wind had blown away its hair.
It looked afraid; as though the sun should fear!
Now, squinting downward through the flying blear,
He scanned the town. And suddenly the old
Remembered dawn of terror struck him cold.
Like startled ants that leave a stricken mound
In silence that is felt as panic sound
By one who sees, the squaws and children poured
Along the valley northward past the ford;
And men were chasing ponies every place,
While many others ran, as in a race,
To southward.
Hohay, taking to his heels,
Made homeward like a cottontail that feels
A kiote pant and whimper at his tail.
He reached the bluff rim, scrambled to the vale
And crossed the stream. The fishermen were gone.
A hubbub in the village led him on
Pell-mell among the snatching underwood,
Till, checked as by a wall of sound, he stood
Apant and dripping in the howling town.
A bent old man there hobbled up and down
Upon a staff and sang a cackling song
Of how his heart was young again and strong;
But no one heeded. Women ran with guns
And bows and war clubs, screaming for their sons
And husbands. Men were mounting in a whirl
Of manes and tales to vanish in a swirl
Of scattered sand; and ever louder blew
The singing wind of warriors riding through
To battle. Hohay watched them, mouth agape,
Until he felt a hand upon his nape
That shoved him north, and someone shouted “Run!”
He scampered.
Meanwhile, nearer to the sun,
A rifle shot beyond the village end,
Came Reno’s troopers pouring round a bend,
Their carbines ready at their saddle bows.
A bugle yammered and a big dust rose
And horses nickered as the fours swung wide
In battle order; and the captains cried,
And with a running thunder of hurrahs
The long line stormed upon the Hunkpapas
Strung thin across the open flat. They fled
Like feeble ghosts of men already dead
Beneath the iron feet that followed there;
For now they deemed the far-famed Yellow Hair,
The Wolf of Washita, with all his pack
Potential in the dust cloud at his back,
Bore down upon them.
Flame along a slough
Before a howling wind, the terror grew
As momently increased the flying mass,
For all the others running up were grass
Before that flame; till men became aware
Of how another voice was booming there,
Outsoaring Panic’s, smashing through the brawl
Of hoofs and wind and rifles.
It was Gall.
A night wind blowing when the stars are dim,
His big black gelding panted under him;
And scarce he seemed a man of mortal race,
His naked body and his massive face
Serene as hewn from time-forgotten rock,
Despite the horse’s rearing to the shock
Of surging men. Boy-hearted warriors took
New courage from the father in his look
And listened in a sudden lull of sound.
“The foe is there!” he shouted. “Turn around!
Die here today!” And everywhere he rode
A suck of men grew after him and flowed
To foeward.
Now it seemed the routed fear
Had joined the halted troops. They ceased to cheer.
Dismounting with their right upon the trees
Along the river, and the Rickarees
Upon their left, they flung a blazing dam
Across the valley. Like a river jam
The eager rabble deepened on the front,
For other hundreds, howling to the hunt,
Were dashing up with ponies. Then they say
A sound was heard as when a jam gives way
Before a heaped up freshet of the Spring,
And ponies in a torrent smote the wing
Where, mounted yet, the little Ree band stood.
Now those, remembering where life was good,
Regretting that they ever chose to roam
So far from kindly faces, started home
Without farewells; and round the crumpled flank
The Sioux came thronging, bending back the rank
Upon the pivot of the farther troop,
Till, crowded in a brushy river loup,
The soldiers fought bewildered and forlorn.
Behind them from across the Little Horn
The long range rifles on the bluff rim spat
A hornet swarm among them; and the flat
Before them swam with ponies on the run—
A vertigo of shadows; for the sun
Went moony in the dust and disappeared.
Inverted faces of a nightmare leered
Beneath the necks of ponies hurtling past;
And every surge of horsemen seemed the last,
So well their daring fed upon their rage.
It might have been a moment or an age
The troopers gripped that slipping edge of life,
When some along the left saw Bloody Knife,
By Reno, straighten from his fighting squat,
And heard him scream, and saw the wound he got
Spew brains between the fingers clutching there.
Then like a drowning man with hands in air
He sank. And some who fought nearby have said
The Major’s face, all spattered with the red
Of that snuffed life, went chalky, and his shout
Scarce reached the nearer troopers round about:
“Back to the bluffs!” But when a few arose
To do his will, they say he raged at those:
“Get down! Get down!” Then once again he cried:
“Get to the bluffs!”—And was the first to ride.
Now some along the right, who had not heard,
But saw the mounting, passed a shouted word
That groped, a whisper, through the roaring smoke:
“We’re going to charge!” And where it fell, it broke
The ragged line. Men scrambled to the rear
Where now the plunging horses shrieked with fear
And fought their holding “fours”—nor all in vain,
For whole quadrigae, fastened bit to rein,
Ramped down that stormy twilight of the Sioux.
The nearest empty saddle seat would do
For any lucky finder. Rout or charge—
What matter? All along the river marge
The man storm raged, and all the darkened vale
Was tumult. To retreat was to assail,
Assault was flight. The craven and the bold
Seemed one that moment where the loud dust rolled,
Death-strewing, up along the Little Horn.
About the loup a mockery of morn
Broke in upon the gloaming of the noon,
And horseless troopers, starting from the swoon
Of battle, saw, and knew themselves alone
And heard the wounded wailing and the moan
Of dying men around them. Even these,
Forlorn among the bullet-bitten trees,
Were scarce less lucky than the fleeing ranks
With crowding furies snapping at their flanks,
Death in the rear and frantic hope ahead.
’Twas like a bison hunt, the Sioux have said,
When few bulls battle and the fat cows run
Less fleet than slaughter. Hidden from the sun,
How many a boy, struck motherless, belied
The whiskered cheek; what heroism died,
Fronting the wild white glory!
Funk or fight,
Lost in the noon’s anomaly of night,
The troopers struggled, groping for a ford.
But more and more the pressure of the horde
Bore leftward, till the steep-banked river spread
Before them, and the bluffs that loomed ahead
Were like the domes of heaven to the damned.
A shrinking moment, and the flood was jammed
With men and horses thrashing belly deep;
And down upon them, jostled to the leap,
The rear cascaded. Many-noted pain
Sang medley in the roaring rifle rain
That swept the jetting water, gust on gust.
And many a Sioux, gone wild with slaughter lust,
Plunged after. Madmen grappled in the flood,
And tumbling in the current, streaked with blood,
Drank deep together and were satisfied.
Now scrambling out upon the further side,
The hunted troopers blundered at a steep
More suited to the flight of mountain sheep
Than horses; for a narrow pony trail,
That clambered up a gully from the vale,
Immediately clogged with brutes and men.
Spent horses skittered back to strive again,
Red-flanked and broken-hearted. Many bore
Their riders where no horse had gone before,
Nor ever shall go. Bullets raked the slope,
And from the valley to the heights of hope
The air was dirty with the arrow-snow.
The heights of hope? Alas, that stair of woe,
Strewn with the bleeding offal of the rout,
Led only to an eminence of doubt,
A more appalling vision of their plight;
For in the rear and on the left and right
The nearer bluffs were filling with the Sioux,
And still along the flat beneath them blew
The dust of thousands yelping for the kill.
They say that good men broke upon the hill
And wept as children weep. And there were some
Who stared about them empty eyed and dumb,
As though it didn’t matter. Others hurled
Profane irrelevancies at the world
Or raved about the jamming of their guns.
And yet there lacked not level-headed ones,
Unruffled shepherds of the flock, who strove
For order in the milling of the drove
With words to soothe or cheer, or sting with scorn.
Now up the valley of the Little Horn
Wild news came crying from the lower town
Of other soldiers yonder riding down
Upon the guardless village from the east;
And every tongue that sped the news increased
The meaning of it. Victory forsook
Big hearts that withered. Lo, the Gray Fox, Crook,
Returning for revenge—and not alone!
How many camps along the Yellowstone
Were emptied on the valley there below?
The whipped were but a sprinkle of the foe,
And now the torrent was about to burst!
With everything to know, they knew the worst,
And saw the clearer in that no one saw.
Then broke a flying area of awe
Across the rabble like a patch of sun
Upon the troubled corn when gray clouds run
And in the midst a glowing rift is blown.
Pressed back before the plunging white-faced roan
Of Crazy Horse, men brightened. How they knew
That lean, swift fighting-spirit of the Sioux,
The wizard eyes, the haggard face and thin,
Transfigured by a burning from within
Despite the sweat-streaked paint and battle grime!
Old men would ponder in the wane of time
That lifting vision and alluring cry:
“There never was a better day to die!
Come on, Dakotas! Cowards to the rear!”
Some hundreds yonder held the net of fear
Round Reno’s hill; but in the cloud that spread
Along the valley where the fleet roan led
Were thousands.
Now the feeble and the young,
The mothers and the maidens, terror-flung
Beyond the lower village to the west,
Had seen the soldiers loom along a crest
Beyond the town, and, heading down a swale
By fours, with guidons streaming in the gale,
Approach the ford. ’Twas Custer with the grays,
A sorrel troop and thrice as many bays—
Two hundred and a handful at the most;
But ’twas the bannered onset of a host
To those who saw and fled. Nor could they know
The numbers and the valiance of the foe
Down river where the bulls of war were loud;
For even then that thunder and the cloud
Came northward. Were they beaten? Had they won?
What devastation, darkening the sun,
Was tearing down the valley? On it roared
And darkled; deepened at the lower ford
And veered cyclonic up the yawning draw
To eastward. Now the breathless people saw
The dusty ponies darting from the van
And swarming up the left. The guns began,
A running splutter. Yonder to the south
The big dust boiling at a coulee’s mouth
Was pouring ponies up around the right.
Grown dimmer in the falling battle-night,
The stormy guidons of the troopers tossed,
Retreating upward, lessened and were lost
Amid a whirling cloud that topped the hill.
And steadily the valley spouted still
The double stream of warriors.
Then a shout
Enringed the battle, and the scene went out
In rumbling dust—as though a mine were lit
Beneath the summit and the belch of it
Gloomed bellowing. A windy gloaming spread
Across the ridges flicked with errant lead
And wayward arrows groping for a mark.
And horses, hurtled from the central dark,
With empty saddles charged upon the day.
Meanwhile on Reno’s hill four miles away
Men heartened to a rousing cheer had seen
The bays and blacks and sorrels of Benteen,
Hoof-heavy with their unavailing quest
Among the valleys to the south and west,
Toil upward. Unmolested by the foe,
The pack mules, trumpeting “We told you so,”
Trudged in a little later. By the cheers
It might have been reunion after years;
And was in truth; for there were graying locks,
That night, to mock the pedantry of clocks,
Untroubled by the ages life can pack
Between the ticks.
The fire had fallen slack
Upon the watching summits round about
And in a maze of wonderment and doubt
Men scanned the north that darkled as with war.
“What was it that the Major waited for?
He’d best be doing something pretty quick
Or there’d be Custer with a pointed stick
To look for him!” So growled a bolder few.
But many thought of little else to do
Than just to dodge the leaden wasp that kills
Sent over by the snipers on the hills
In fitful swarms.
Now like a bellowed word
The miles made inarticulate, they heard
A sound of volley-firing. There! and there!
Hoarse with a yet incredible despair
That incoherent cry of kin to kin
Grew big above the distant battle din—
The sequent breakers of a moaning sea.
And twice the murmuring veil of mystery
Was rent and mended. Then the tearing drawl
Was heard no more where Fury, striding tall,
Made one in dust the heavens and the earth.
“He’s pitching into them for all he’s worth,”
Some ventured;—“was there nothing else to do
But hug that hill?”
Then suddenly there grew
A voice of wrath, and many lying near,
Who heard it, looked—and it was Captain Wier
By Reno yonder; and the place went still:
“Then, Major, if you won’t, by God I will,
And there’ll be more to say if we get back!”
They saw him fling a leg across his black
And take the northward steep with face set grim;
And all the black horse troop rode after him
Across the gulch to vanish on a rise.
Two miles away from where the smudgy skies
Of afternoon anticipated night,
They halted on a space-commanding height
And, squinting through the dusty air ahead,
Were puzzled. For the silence of the dead
Had fallen yonder—only now and then
A few shots crackled. Groups of mounted men—
Not troopers—by the rifting dust revealed,
Were scattered motionless about the field,
As wearily contented with a work
Well done at last.
Then suddenly the murk
Began to boil and murmur, like a storm
Before the wind comes. Ponies in a swarm
Were spreading out across the ridgy land
Against the blacks.
By now the whole command
Was coming up, and not a whit too soon;
For once again the sun became a moon
Amid the dust of thousands bearing down.
Now farther back upon a bleak bluff crown
The troop of Godfrey waited for the fight,
Not doubting that their comrades held the right,
When orders, riding with an urgent heel,
Arrived with more of prudence to reveal
Than pluck: Withdraw at once! A startled stare
Made plain how all the flanking hills were bare
And not a sign of Reno in the rear!
Just then the fleeing troops of French and Wier
Came roaring down across a ridge in front
And, close upon their heels, the howling hunt
Made dimmer yet the summit of the slope.
And Godfrey, seeing very little hope
If all should flee those thousands, overjoyed
With some great coup, dismounted and deployed
To fight on foot, and sent the horses back.
And so he dared the brunt of the attack,
Retreating slowly like a wounded bear
With yelping dogs before him everywhere
Regardful of the eager might at bay.
And so the whole command got back that day
Of big despairs; and men remember still.
Then all the ridges circling Reno’s hill
Were crowded. In among the flattened men,
Now desperately fighting one to ten,
Hell hornets snarled and feathered furies crooned
A death song; and the sun was like a wound
Wherewith the day bled dizzy. Yet from all
The muddled nightmare of it, men recall
Deeds brighter for the years: how Captain French,
Like any stodgy tailor on his bench,
Sat cross-legged at the giddy edge of life
Serenely picking with a pocket knife
The shell-jammed guns and loading them anew;
How, seemingly enamoured of the view,
Deliberate, Johnsonian of mien,
His briar drawing freely, strolled Benteen
Along his fighting line; how Wallace, Wier
And Godfrey yonder, fearing only fear,
Walked round among the troopers, cheering them.
And some remember Happy Jack of M,
The way his gusty laughter served to melt
The frost of terror, though the joy he felt
Seemed less to mark a hero than a fool.
And once, they say, an ammunition mule
Broke loose and bolted, braying, as he went,
Defiance and a traitorous intent
To quit the Whites forever. Then they tell
How Sergeant Hanley with an Irish yell
Took horse and followed, jealous for the pack;
And all the line roared after him, “Come back!
Come back, you fool!” But Hanley went ahead.
At times you hardly saw him for the lead
That whipped the dust up. Blindly resolute,
The traitor with the Irish in pursuit
Struck up along a hostile ridge that burned
And smoked and bellowed. Presently he turned
And panted home, an image of remorse;
And Hanley, leaping from his winded horse,
Lay down and went to work among the rest.
The wounded day bled ashen in the west;
The firing dwindled in the dusk and ceased;
The frightened stars came peeking from the east
To see what anguish moaned. The wind went down—
A lull of death. But yonder in the town
All night the war drums flouted that despair
Upon the hill, and dancers in the glare
Of fires that towered filled the painted dark
With demon exultation, till the lark
Of doom should warble. Heavy-lidded eyes
Saw often in the sage along a rise
The loom of troops. If any shouted “Look!”
And pointed, all the others cheered for Crook
Or Terry coming; and the bugles cried
To mocking echoes. When the sick hope died,
They fell to sullen labor, scraping up
The arid earth with plate and drinking cup
Against the dreaded breaking of the day.
And here and there among the toilers lay
The winners of an endless right to shirk;
While many panted at a harder work,
The wage whereof is nothing left to buy.
It seemed that all were men about to die,
Forlornly busy there among the dead—
Each man his sexton. Petulant with dread,
They talked of Custer, grumbling at a name
Already shaping on the lips of Fame
To be a deathless bugle-singing soon.
For no one guessed what now the tardy moon
Was poring over with a face of fright
Out yonder: naked bodies gleaming white
The whole way to the summit of the steep
Where Silence, brooding on a tumbled heap
Of men and horses, listened for a sound. …
A wounded troop horse sniffed the bloody ground
And ghosts of horses nickered when he neighed.
Now scarcely had the prairie owls, afraid
Of morning, ceased, or waiting hushes heard
A timid, unauthoritative bird
Complain how late the meadowlarks awoke,
When suddenly the dreaded fury broke
About the sleepless troopers, digging still.
It raked the shallow trenches on the hill;
It beat upon the little hollow where
The mules and horses, tethered in a square
About the wounded, roared and plunged amain,
Tight-tailed against no pasture-loving rain;
And many fell and floundered. What of night
From such a morning? For the hostile light
Increased the fury, and the battle grew.
That day it seemed the very sun was Sioux.
The heat, the frenzy and the powder gas
Wreaked torture. Men were chewing roots of grass
For comfort ere the day had well begun.
Bare to the grim mid-malice of the sun,
The wounded raved for water. Far below,
Cool with the melting of the mountain snow,
The river gleamed; and, queasy with the smell
Of bodies bloating in a stew of hell,
Men croaked about it. Better to be killed
Half way to yonder joy than perish grilled
Between that grid of earth and burning air!
So nineteen troopers volunteered to dare
A grisly race. The twentieth who ran,
Invisible and fleeter than a man,
With hoofs of peril flicked the dusty sod
Where pluckily the sprinting water squad
Made streamward. Giddy with a wound he got,
A trooper tumbled, and his cooking pot
Pursued the others with a bounding roll.
A second runner crumpled near the goal.
And when the sprawling winners drank, they say
The bullets whipped the water into spray
About their heads; for yonder in the brush
The Sioux kept watch, but dared not make a rush
Because of marksmen stationed on the bluff.
And when the greedy drinkers had enough,
With brimming kettles and the filled canteens
They toiled along the tortuous ravines
And panted up a height that wasn’t Fame’s.
Men still recall the water; but the names
Enrich that silence where the millions go.
The shadows had begun to overflow
Their stagnant puddles on the nightward side,
When presently the roar of battle died
On all the circling summits there. Perplexed
With what the wily foe might purpose next,
The troopers lay and waited. Still the swoon
Of silence held the stifling afternoon,
Save for a low monotony of pain,
The keening of the gnats about the slain
That festered. Nothing happened. Shadows crept
A little farther nightward. Many slept,
Dead to the sergeant’s monitory shake;
And some, for very weariness awake,
Got up and dared to stretch a leg at last,
When from the summits broke a rifle blast
That banished sleep and drove the strollers in.
Abruptly as it started, ceased the din
And all the hills seemed empty as before.
And, breath by breath, the weary waiting wore
The hours out. Every minute, loath to pass,
Forewarned the next of some assault in mass
Preparing in the hush. A careless head
Above a horse’s carcass drew the lead
Of lurking marksmen. What would be the end?
The prayed-for dark itself might prove no friend
For all its pity.
Now the early slant
Of evening made the thirsty horses pant
And raise a running whimper of despair,
When, seemingly ignited by the glare,
The very prairie smouldered. Spire by spire,
Until the whole fat valley was afire,
Smoke towered in the windless air and grew
Where late the league long village of the Sioux
Lay hidden from the watchers on the hill;
And like the shadow of a monster ill
Untimely gloaming fell across the height.
Yet nothing but the failing of the light
Upon the distant summits came to pass.
The muffled murmur of the burning grass
Was all the reeking valley had of sound;
And when the troopers dared to walk around,
No spluttering of rifles drove them back.
The shadows in the draws were getting black
When someone lifted up a joyous cry
That set the whole band staring where the sky,
To southward of the smoke, remembered day.
And there they saw, already miles away—
A pictographic scrawl upon the glow—
The tangled slant and clutter of travaux
By crowding hundreds; ponies that pursued,
A crawling, milling, tossing multitude,
A somber river brawling out of banks;
And glooms of horsemen flowing on the flanks—
The whole Sioux village fleeing with the light
To where the Big Horn Mountains glimmered white
And low along the south!
The horses neighed
To swell the happy noise their masters made.
The pack mules sang the only song they knew.
And summits, late familiar with the Sioux,
Proclaimed a new allegiance, cheer on cheer.
For who could doubt that news of Terry near
Had driven off the foe?