Page 74 of The Veteran

‘And how do you know that?’

‘They’ve been shadowing you all day.’

There were ten seconds of stunned silence. The provost-sergeant appeared, a big, bluff veteran called Lewis.

‘Take this man in charge, Sergeant. Close arrest. Tomorrow at sun-up there will be a quick court martial. Sentence will be carried out immediately. That is all.’

‘Tomorrow is the Lord’s Day,’ said Craig.

Custer thought. ‘You are right. I will not hang a man on a Sunday. Monday it shall be.’

To one side, the regimental adjutant Captain William Cooke, a Canadian, had been scratching notes of the proceedings. These he would later stuff in his saddlebag.

At this moment one of the scouts, Bob Jackson, rode up to the tent. With him were four Rees and a Crow scout. They had been up ahead at sundown and were late in returning. Jackson was half white and half Piegan Blackfoot. His report brought Custer excitedly to his feet.

Just before sundown Jackson’s native scouts had found traces of a large camp, many circular marks in the prairie where the teepees had stood. The trail from the camp headed west, away from the valley of the Rosebud.

Custer was excited for two reasons. His orders from General Terry had been to go right on up to the headwaters of the Rosebud, but then to use his own judgement if fresh information was available. This was it. Custer was now a free man to create and formulate his own strategy and tactics, his own battle plan, without having to follow orders. The second reason was that he at last seemed to have found the main body of the elusive Sioux. Twenty miles to the west lay another river in another valley: the Little Bighorn, flowing north to join the Bighorn and thence to the Yellowstone.

Within two or three days Gibbon’s and Terry’s combined forces would reach that confluence and turn south down the Bighorn. The Sioux were in a nutcracker.

‘Break camp,’ shouted Custer and his officers scattered to their units. ‘We march through the night.’ He turned to the provost-sergeant. ‘Keep that prisoner beside you, Sergeant Lewis. Tethered to his horse. And close behind me. Now he can see what happens to his friends.’

They marched through the night. Rough country, harsh terrain, out of the valley, always climbing towards the watershed. The men and horses began to tire. They arrived at the divide, the high point between the two valleys, in the small hours of the morning of Sunday the 25th. It was pitch dark but the stars were bright. Soon after the divide they found a rivulet which Mitch Bouyer identified as Dense Ashwood Creek. It flowed westwards, downhill to join the Little Bighorn in the valley. The column followed the creek.

Just before dawn Custer called a halt, but there was no pitching of camp. The tired men rested in bivouac and tried to catch a few moments’ sleep.

Craig and the provost-sergeant had been riding barely fifty yards behind Custer as part of the headquarters troop. Craig was still mounted on his horse, but his Sharps rifle and bowie knife were with Sergeant Lewis. His ankles were tied with rawhide thongs to his saddle girth and his wrists behind him.

At the pre-dawn pause Lewis, who was a bluff, by-the-book but not unkindly man, untied the ankles and let Craig slide to the ground. His wrists remained tied, but Lewis fed him several slugs of water from his canteen. The coming day would again be hot.

It was at this point that Custer made the first of the foolish decisions he would make that day. He summoned his third-in-command, Captain Frederick Benteen, and ordered him to take three companies, H, D and K, and ride off into the badlands to the south to see if there were any Indians there. From a few yards away Craig heard Benteen, whom he judged to be the most professional soldier in the unit, protest the order. If there was a big concentration of hostiles up ahead on the banks of the Little Bighorn, was it wise to split the force?

‘You have your orders,’ snapped Custer and turned away. Benteen shrugged and did as he was bid. Of Custer’s total force of about 600 soldiers, 150 rode away into the endless hills and valleys of the badlands on a wild goose chase.

Although Craig and Sergeant Lewis would never know it, Benteen and his exhausted men and horses would return to the river valley several hours later, too late to help but also too late to be wiped out. After giving his order, Custer broke camp again and the Seventh marched on down the creek towards the river.

At the hour of dawn a number of Crow and Ree scouts who had been out forward of the column came back. They had found a knoll near the confluence of Dense Ashwood Creek and the river. Being familiar with the whole area, they knew it well. There were pine trees on it, and by climbing one an observer could finally see the whole valley ahead.

Two Rees had been up the trees and seen what they had seen. When they learned that Custer intended to continue, they sat down and began their death songs.

The sun rose. The heat began to come upon the day. Ahead of Craig, General Custer, who was wearing his cream buckskin suit, took off the jacket, rolled it and fastened it behind his saddle. He rode on in a blue cotton shirt, with his wide-brimmed cream hat shielding his eyes. The column came to the knoll.

Custer went halfway up and tried to spot with a telescope what lay ahead. They were on the bank of the creek, still three miles short of the confluence with the river. When he came down from the hill and conferred with his remaining officers, rumour buzzed through the column. He had seen part of a Sioux village with smoke rising from the cooking fires. It was now mid-morning.

Across the creek and east of the river there was a low range of hills which blocked the view of anyone at ground level. Still, Custer had found his Sioux. He did not know precisely how many there were and declined to listen to the warnings of his scouts. He

determined to attack, the only manoeuvre in his personal lexicon.

The battle plan he chose was a pincer movement. Instead of securing the Indians’ southern flank and waiting for Terry and Gibbon to close off the north, he decided to form both halves of the nutcracker with what was left of the Seventh Cavalry.

Tethered to his horse and awaiting court martial after the battle, Ben Craig heard him order his second-in-command, Major Marcus Reno, to take a further three companies, A, M and B, and continue west. They were to reach the river, ford it, turn right and charge the lower end of the village from the south.

He would leave one company to guard the mule train and the supplies. With his remaining five companies Custer would gallop due north, behind the range of hills, until he emerged at the northern end. Then he would ride down to the river, cross it and attack the Sioux from the north. Between Reno’s three companies and his own five, the Indians would be trapped and destroyed.

Craig could not know what lay out of vision on the other side of the low hills, but he could study the behaviour of the Crow and Ree scouts. They knew, and they were preparing to die. What they had seen was the biggest concentration of Sioux and Cheyenne in one place that there had ever been or ever would be. Six great tribes had come together to hunt in partnership, and were now camped along the western bank of the Little Bighorn River. They contained between 10,000 and 15,000 Indians drawn from all the tribes of the plains.

Craig knew that in Plains Indian society a male was deemed to be a warrior between the ages of fifteen and mid to late thirties. One-sixth of any plains tribe were therefore warriors. Thus there were 2,000 of them down by the river, and they were not in a mood to be tamely driven back to any reservation when they had just heard that the plains to the north-west were teeming with deer and antelope.

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