Page 73 of The Veteran

‘Keep her safe, boy. We’ll be back.’

Craig walked over to the nearest chuck wagon, took a plate of salt pork, tack and beans, found a box of ammunition, sat down and ate. He thought of his mother, fifteen years earlier, reading to him from the Bible by the dim light of a tallow candle. He thought of his father, patiently panning hour after hour to find the elusive yellow metal in the streams running down from the Pryors. And he thought of old Donaldson, who had only once taken off his belt to him, and then when he had been cruel to a captured animal.

Shortly before eight, with darkness now settled on the camp, he rose, returned his billycan and spoon to the wagon, and walked back to the travois. He said nothing to the girl. He just unhitched the two poles across the pinto pony’s back and lowered the rig to the ground.

He picked up the girl from the floor and swung her effortlessly onto the pinto’s back, handing her the tether rein. Then he pointed to the open prairie.

‘Ride,’ he said. She stared at him for two seconds. He slapped the pony on the rump. Seconds later it was gone, a sturdy, hardy, unshod animal that could find its own way across many miles of open prairie until it scented the odour of its own kin. Several Ree scouts watched curiously from fifty feet away.

They came for him at nine and they were angry. Two troopers held him while Sergeant Braddock hit him about the body. When he sagged they dragged him through the camp to where General Custer, by the light of several oil lamps and surrounded by a group of officers, sat at a table in front of his tent.

George Armstrong Custer has always been an enigma. But it is clear there were two sides to the man: a good and a bad, a light and a dark.

On his light side he could be joyous and full of laughter, addicted to boyish practical jokes, and pleasant company. He possessed an endless energy and enormous personal stamina, forever engaged in some new project, whether collecting wildlife from the plains to send back to zoos in the east, or learning taxidermy. Despite years of absence, he was unswervingly loyal to his wife, Elizabeth, on whom he doted.

After a drunken experience in his youth, he was teetotal, refusing even a glass of wine with dinner. He never swore and forbade profane language in his presence.

During the Civil War fourteen years earlier he had shown such blinding courage, such total absence of personal fear, that he had quickly risen from lieutenant to major-general, only agreeing to revert to lieutenant-colonel to stay in the smaller postwar army. He had ridden at the head of his men into withering curtains of fire, yet never been touched by a bullet. He was a hero to myriad civilians, yet was distrusted and disliked by his own men, excepting his own personal court.

This was because he could also be vindictive and cruel to those who offended him. Although himself unscathed, he lost more of his own men, dead and wounded, than any other cavalry commander in the war. This was put down to an almost crazy rashness. Soldiers tend not to warm to a commander who is going to get them killed.

He ordered the use of the lash frequently during the War of the Plains and sustained more desertions than any other commander in the West. The Seventh was endlessly being depleted by the nocturnal departure of deserters, or snowbirds as they were called. The unit had to be constantly replenished with fresh recruits, but he had little interest in training them to become efficient and drilled cavalrymen. Despite a long autumn and winter at Fort Lincoln, the Seventh was in a deplorable state in June 1876.

Custer possessed a personal vanity and ambition of awesome proportions, going out of his way to encourage personal glorification through newspapers whenever he could get it. Many of his mannerisms, the tanned buckskin suit, the flowing auburn curls, were to this end, as was the journalist Mark Kellogg, who now accompanied the Seventh Cavalry to war.

But as a commanding general he had two flaws that would kill him and most of his men in the next hours. One was that he constantly underestimated his enemy. He had the reputation of a great Indian-fighter and he believed it. In truth, eight years earlier he had wiped out a sleeping Cheyenne village, that of Chief Black Kettle on the Washita River in Kansas, surrounding the sleeping Indians in the night and butchering most of them, men, women and children, at sunrise. The Cheyenne had just signed a new treaty of peace with the white men, so they thought they were safe.

In the intervening years he had been involved in four small skirmishes with war parties. The aggregate losses for all four were not a dozen. Considering the hideous casualty lists of the Civil War, these brushes with local Indians were hardly worth a mention. Yet the readers back east were hero-hungry and the

painted savage of the frontier was a demonic villain. Sensational newspaper reports and his own book, My Life on the Plains, had led to this reputation and the iconic status.

The second fault was that he would listen to no-one. He had some extremely experienced scouts with him on the march down the Rosebud, but he ignored warning after warning. This was the man before whom Ben Craig was dragged on the evening of 24 June.

Sergeant Braddock explained what had happened, and that there were witnesses. Custer, surrounded by six of his officers, studied the man in front of him. He saw a young man twelve years his junior, just under six feet tall, clad in buckskin, with curling chestnut hair and electric blue eyes. He was clearly Caucasian, not even a half-blood as some scouts were, yet his feet were clad in soft leather boots rather than stiff cavalry issue, and a single white-tipped eagle feather hung from a braided strand of hair at the back of his head.

‘This is a very serious offence,’ said Custer when the sergeant had finished. ‘Is it true?’

‘Yes, General.’

‘And why did you do it?’

Craig explained the earlier interrogation of the girl and the plans for later that evening. Custer’s face tightened in disapproval.

‘I’ll have none of that sort of thing in my command, not even with squaws. Is it true, Sergeant?’

At this point Captain Acton, sitting behind Custer, intervened. He was smooth, persuasive. He had personally conducted the interrogation. It had been entirely verbal, via the interpreter. There had been no infliction of pain on the girl. His last instructions were that she should be guarded through the night, but not touched, so that the general could make a decision in the morning.

‘I think my troop sergeant will confirm what I say,’ he concluded.

‘Yessir, that’s just the way it was,’ said Braddock.

‘Case proved,’ said Custer. ‘Close arrest until court martial. Send for the provost-sergeant. Craig, in letting this prisoner go, you have sent her to join and warn the main body of the hostiles. That is treason and a hanging offence.’

‘She did not ride to the west,’ said Craig. ‘She rode to the east to find her own family, what’s left of them.’

‘She can still now warn the hostiles where we are,’ snapped Custer.

‘They know where you are, General.’

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