Read Online The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Big Horn by Nathaniel Philbrick - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Nathaniel Philbrick
Tags: United States, Social Science, History, Biography & Autobiography, Military, Native American Studies, CO, State & Local, UT, CA, West (AK, Native Americans, Native American, HI, NV, Ethnic Studies, MT, ID, WY)
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times (the Lakota’s sacred number), she walked over the hill and was gone.
Sitting Bull’s nephew White Bull remembered how important the pipe was to his uncle, how he filled the pipe with tobacco, lit it, and, holding the bowl with his right hand, pointed the stem into the sky as he pleaded with Wakan Tanka to assist his people. After pointing the pipe in the four sacred directions, he peered into the future and spoke. “He could foretell anything,” White Bull remembered.
O n that spring day in 1876, when Sitting Bull climbed the butte near the Rosebud River, he knew that there were soldiers on the north bank of the Yellowstone River. His scouts had also reported that soldiers to the south were preparing to march in their direction. But from where would they attack first? Once perched on a mossy rock, Sitting Bull began to pray until he fell asleep and dreamed.
In his dream he saw a huge puffy white cloud drifting so sedately overhead that it seemed almost motionless. The cloud, he noticed, was shaped like a Lakota village nestled under snow-topped mountains. On the horizon to the east, he saw the faint brown smudge of an approaching dust storm. Faster and faster the storm approached until he realized that at the center of the swirling cloud of dust was a regiment of horse-mounted soldiers.
The dust-shrouded troopers continued to pick up speed until they collided with the big white cloud in a crash of lightning and a burst of rain. In an instant, the dust—and the soldiers—had been washed away, and all was quiet and peaceful as the huge cloud continued to drift toward the horizon and finally disappeared.
He now knew from where the attack was going to come—not from the north or from the south, but from the east.
CHAPTER 3
Hard Ass
S itting Bull had dreamed of an army washed away by a burst of rain. By the end of the first week of the Seventh Cavalry’s slow slog west from Fort Lincoln, the prediction was about to come true.
Soon after leaving their first campsite on the Heart River, the column was hit by a furious thunderstorm. At noon on the next day, hail the size of hickory nuts clattered out of the sky, beating on the heads and shoulders of the men and nearly stampeding the mules. The next morning they awoke to a bitterly cold rain that continued all day. And so it went.
Rivers that were barely discernible trickles for most of the year were transformed into brown, rain-pelted torrents. The engineers built crude bridges of boards and brush, and gradually the slender-wheeled wagons made it across, but the going was agonizingly slow. And then there was the mud—glutinous, clinging, and slippery, so slippery that even when pushed by hand the sunken wagon wheels spun uselessly and the men and horses, exhausted and cold, wallowed and slithered in the dark gray alkaline slime of a wet spring in North Dakota. “Everybody is more or less disgusted except me . . . ,” Custer wrote Libbie. “The elements seem against us.”
There were occasional days of sun, when blue and green replaced the gray, when, blinking and with a squint, they gazed upon a world of transcendent beauty. On May 24, flowers suddenly appeared all around them. “During this march we encountered . . . a species of primrose,” wrote Lieutenant Edward Maguire, head of the column’s engineer corps. “The flowers were very beautiful, and as they were crushed under the horses’ feet they gave forth a protest of the most delicate and welcome odor.”
Most welcome, indeed.
The smells associated with this column of approximately twelve hundred men and sixteen hundred horses and mules were pungent and inescapable—an eye-watering combination of horsehair and sweaty human reek. The stench was particularly bad at night, when all of them were contained within a half-mile-wide parallelogram of carefully arranged tents, picketed horses, and freshly dug latrines. If it was too wet to light a fire, the men lived on hardtack and cold sowbelly
Sitting Bull’s nephew White Bull remembered how important the pipe was to his uncle, how he filled the pipe with tobacco, lit it, and, holding the bowl with his right hand, pointed the stem into the sky as he pleaded with Wakan Tanka to assist his people. After pointing the pipe in the four sacred directions, he peered into the future and spoke. “He could foretell anything,” White Bull remembered.
O n that spring day in 1876, when Sitting Bull climbed the butte near the Rosebud River, he knew that there were soldiers on the north bank of the Yellowstone River. His scouts had also reported that soldiers to the south were preparing to march in their direction. But from where would they attack first? Once perched on a mossy rock, Sitting Bull began to pray until he fell asleep and dreamed.
In his dream he saw a huge puffy white cloud drifting so sedately overhead that it seemed almost motionless. The cloud, he noticed, was shaped like a Lakota village nestled under snow-topped mountains. On the horizon to the east, he saw the faint brown smudge of an approaching dust storm. Faster and faster the storm approached until he realized that at the center of the swirling cloud of dust was a regiment of horse-mounted soldiers.
The dust-shrouded troopers continued to pick up speed until they collided with the big white cloud in a crash of lightning and a burst of rain. In an instant, the dust—and the soldiers—had been washed away, and all was quiet and peaceful as the huge cloud continued to drift toward the horizon and finally disappeared.
He now knew from where the attack was going to come—not from the north or from the south, but from the east.
CHAPTER 3
Hard Ass
S itting Bull had dreamed of an army washed away by a burst of rain. By the end of the first week of the Seventh Cavalry’s slow slog west from Fort Lincoln, the prediction was about to come true.
Soon after leaving their first campsite on the Heart River, the column was hit by a furious thunderstorm. At noon on the next day, hail the size of hickory nuts clattered out of the sky, beating on the heads and shoulders of the men and nearly stampeding the mules. The next morning they awoke to a bitterly cold rain that continued all day. And so it went.
Rivers that were barely discernible trickles for most of the year were transformed into brown, rain-pelted torrents. The engineers built crude bridges of boards and brush, and gradually the slender-wheeled wagons made it across, but the going was agonizingly slow. And then there was the mud—glutinous, clinging, and slippery, so slippery that even when pushed by hand the sunken wagon wheels spun uselessly and the men and horses, exhausted and cold, wallowed and slithered in the dark gray alkaline slime of a wet spring in North Dakota. “Everybody is more or less disgusted except me . . . ,” Custer wrote Libbie. “The elements seem against us.”
There were occasional days of sun, when blue and green replaced the gray, when, blinking and with a squint, they gazed upon a world of transcendent beauty. On May 24, flowers suddenly appeared all around them. “During this march we encountered . . . a species of primrose,” wrote Lieutenant Edward Maguire, head of the column’s engineer corps. “The flowers were very beautiful, and as they were crushed under the horses’ feet they gave forth a protest of the most delicate and welcome odor.”
Most welcome, indeed.
The smells associated with this column of approximately twelve hundred men and sixteen hundred horses and mules were pungent and inescapable—an eye-watering combination of horsehair and sweaty human reek. The stench was particularly bad at night, when all of them were contained within a half-mile-wide parallelogram of carefully arranged tents, picketed horses, and freshly dug latrines. If it was too wet to light a fire, the men lived on hardtack and cold sowbelly
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