The Dangerous Book of Heroes Page 17

  On Sunday the twenty-fifth, Custer and one Seventh Cavalry column crossed the ridge separating the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn valleys and advanced on the Sioux. Not seen by the Sioux scouts was a second column led by Major Reno, riding to attack the southern end of the camp, or a third column under Captain Benteen, circling farther south to block any escape.

  Chief Red Horse recalled the urgency at midday: “We came out of the council lodge and talked in all directions. The Sioux mount horses, take guns, and go fight the soldiers. Women and children mount horses and go, meaning to get out of the way.” Not all of them could.

  Major Reno’s surprise attack across the river caught women and children in the open. Almost all the family of Sitting Bull’s adopted brother, Gall, was killed. “After that, I killed all my enemies with the hatchet,” Gall reported. In the south of the camp where Reno’s cavalry attacked were the Hunkpapa with Sitting Bull; in the center were the Oglala with Crazy Horse.

  “Sitting Bull was big medicine,” said Gall. “The women and children were hastily moved downstream…. [T]he women and children caught the horses for the bucks to mount them; the bucks mounted and charged back to Reno and checked him, and drove him into the timber.”

  For whatever reason, Reno had stopped and dismounted when he might have charged further. Gall’s counterattack turned his flank and forced the bluecoats into the trees, where horses could not operate freely. “They were brave men,” Sitting Bull said of the cavalry, “but they were too tired. When they rode up, their horses were tired and they were tired.” Reno retreated farther, back across the Little Bighorn. The retreat turned into a rout, and his column was isolated.

  In the center of the Sioux camp Crazy Horse held his warriors back, waiting for Custer to make his move on the opposite bank of the river. Custer continued riding northward and sent an order to Benteen to rejoin him. Crazy Horse gathered his warriors and rode through the camp away from Custer in order to outflank him. Gall, meanwhile, gathered his men in the south and crossed the river behind Custer. Other Sioux and Cheyenne splashed across the river opposite Custer’s column.

  Custer probably realized by then that he was cut off, if not already surrounded, and ordered his cavalry to the small hill at the northern end of the river bluff. His two hundred men with carbine rifles would establish and hold a defensive perimeter until Benteen, Reno, or other cavalry reached him. As his stretched-out column approached the brow of the rocky hill, fighting a rear guard against Gall’s warriors, Crazy Horse suddenly appeared above them. He had reached the top first, from the other side.

  There was a moment’s pause as Crazy Horse appreciated the situation. Then he led his charging warriors down the slope and fell onto Custer and his 208 men.

  Chief Kill Eagle said the Sioux were “like bees swarming out of a hive.” Watching from across the river, young Black Elk saw a big dust swirl on the hillside from which horses galloped out with empty saddles. This was the battle of Sitting Bull’s vision. No quarter was given.

  Although not at Custer Hill, Sitting Bull gave this account of Custer’s death only a year later, derived from Crazy Horse and others. “Up there where the last fight took place, where the last stand was made, the Long Hair stood like a sheaf of corn with all the ears fallen around him…. He killed a man when he fell. He laughed…. He had fired his last shot.” Dead alongside Custer was his brother, Tom, twice awarded the Medal of Honor in the Civil War.

  Benteen, meanwhile, had ridden back to the river as ordered to find Reno holding a static position. They joined forces in a successful defense. In total, fifty of Reno’s men were killed and forty-four wounded; thirteen Medals of Honor were awarded. The following afternoon, Sitting Bull moved south to the Bighorn Mountains and the Sioux bands dispersed. There would be little hunting that year.

  On July 5, 1876, the river steamer Far West berthed at Bismarck Landing in South Dakota. A telegram was sent to Washington, beginning: GENERAL CUSTER ATTACKED THE INDIANS JUNE 25, AND HE, WITH EVERY OFFICER AND MAN IN FIVE COMPANIES, WERE KILLED. It was the centenary of U.S. independence.

  That August, Congress enacted a law providing that “until the Sioux relinquished all claim to the Powder River country and the Black Hills, no subsistence would be furnished them.” Which is ironic, for it was the government that broke the treaty, the government that sent in the army to attack the Sioux, while the Sioux never wanted subsistence, only their traditional hunting lands.

  Two thousand five hundred more cavalry were sent to the Plains, so that Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and other chiefs were harried and hunted throughout their lands. Many chiefs surrendered, and by November, the first Sioux had fled to Canada. In January 1877 the two great warriors met for the last time at Tongue River village. Sitting Bull announced his intention to escape across the border to the land of “the Great Mother,” the Canada of Queen Victoria. Crazy Horse spoke of surrender, to which Sitting Bull replied, “I do not want to die yet.”

  Sitting Bull gathered about three thousand of his people and, in May 1877, led them across the border to Wood Mountain. He advised the Royal Canadian Mounted Police of his arrival and requested a meeting. In the interview with the “redcoats” he produced a gold medal. “My grandfather received this medal in recognition of his battle for King George III during the [American] revolution,” he said. “Now, in this odd time, I direct my people here to reclaim a sanctuary of my grandfather. I have come to remain with the White Mother’s children.” The RCMP explained that Canada must not to be used as a base for raids into the United States, that he must obey the laws of Her Majesty, and that he and his tribe were welcome in Canada as a free people but, like free people, must fend for themselves.

  Also in May, Crazy Horse with some two hundred Oglala lodges surrendered to the U.S. Army. In September he was murdered by guards at Fort Robinson in Nebraska.

  Chief Sitting Bull and his people lived in Canada for four years, but the buffalo there were few, mere remnants of the millions wiped out by the skin traders and settlers in the United States. His people began to starve. In July 1881, responding to repeated U.S. government offers of food, reservation life, and a “pardon,” the tired chief returned to the United States. He left his famous head-dress in Canada.

  Sitting Bull allowed his young son to hand over his rifle to the commanding officer at Fort Buford in Montana, to teach the boy “that he has become a friend of the Americans.” Sitting Bull was the last chief of the free Sioux to surrender his weapons.

  Despite the offered “pardon,” for two years he was held prisoner at Fort Randall, south on the Missouri River. In 1883 he was allowed finally to rejoin his Lakota at Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. There he became a revered member of the Silent Eaters, a select group concerned with the welfare of the surviving Sioux nation. There also began a strange interlude in Sitting Bull’s life. Despite his publicly and outspoken antipathy to the U.S. government, it arranged a Sitting Bull speaking tour of fifteen cities. He was a sensation. Buffalo Bill Cody visited him and invited him to join his Wild West Show.

  The Wild West Show was unique. Touring the United States and Canada, it eulogized the myths and modern legends of the American West even as they were being created. Among those who appeared with Buffalo Bill were Geronimo, Annie Oakley, Rain-in-the-Face (who perhaps killed General Custer), Wild Bill Hickock, and, most famous, Chief Sitting Bull. One of the most popular events recreated was the battle of the Little Bighorn. Sitting Bull gave most of his wages to poor white urchins, who flocked to him wherever he went.

  In 1885 Sitting Bull had another mystical vision. He saw a meadow lark alight on a hillock beside where he was sitting, and the bird said to him, “Your own people—Lakotas—will kill you.”

  Buffalo Bill asked Sitting Bull to tour with the show to Great Britain, where in 1887 it played before Queen Victoria in London. Sitting Bull declined, for the government was beginning moves to take yet more land from the Sioux. He returned to Standing Rock Reservation. It was Black El
k, by then a holy man like Sitting Bull, who sailed with Buffalo Bill to Britain. There, a British soldier joined the show. He was Private William Jones, one of the defenders of Rorke’s Drift in the Anglo-Zulu wars and recipient of the Victoria Cross.

  Despite Sitting Bull’s political resistance, more land was taken from his people. By 1890 the Sioux had only islands of reservations surrounded by white settlers, less than sixteen thousand square miles. No Sioux lived freely in their own lands. Then, in early 1889, began the phenomenon of the Ghost Dance.

  A new religion swept the Plains nations. Its prophet, Wovoka, predicted the coming of a “messiah” who would end the white man’s domination, return to the Plains the slaughtered buffalo and antelope, and resurrect the men, women, and children slain by the bluecoats. Native Americans who danced the Ghost Dance, for five days every six weeks, would enjoy this new future. The dance was adopted throughout the Great Plains, especially by the Sioux, for Chief Sitting Bull refused to condemn the movement.

  At Standing Rock, Sitting Bull still lived the Sioux way, although he sent his children to a Christian school so that they could read and write English. The Ghost Dance contained no incitement to violence, and no government official or journalist ever interviewed Wovoka about it, yet it was portrayed as a demonic war dance inciting armed rebellion. About three thousand warriors did gather in the Badlands that winter, but all they did was dance in the snow.

  In December the government asked Buffalo Bill Cody to visit Sitting Bull to persuade him to travel to Chicago for a conference. The Standing Rock Reservation agent, James McLaughlin, had always disliked and belittled Sitting Bull, and refused to let Cody and Sitting Bull meet. Cody’s authority was rescinded and he left.

  Just before daylight on December 15, forty-three Indian police surrounded Sitting Bull’s log cabin. They were supported by a squadron of cavalry. McLaughlin had given orders: “You must not let him escape under any circumstances.”

  Two policemen entered the cabin and woke Sitting Bull. “You are my prisoner,” one of them told him. “You must go to the agency.” The fifty-nine-year-old Sitting Bull dressed and quietly went outside to find himself surrounded by forty armed Indian police.

  Copyright © 2009 by Matt Haley

  Sioux from nearby cabins came out and surrounded the police. There was argument, shouting. A fracas developed; someone fired a gun; and Sitting Bull was shot in the back and in the head by the Indian police. The shot in the back may have been accidental; the bullet in the head, which murdered him, was intentional. It was fired by Red Tomahawk, a Lakota Sioux. Sitting Bull died immediately, his last vision come true.

  With the death of the spiritual leader of the Sioux nation, Big Foot became the prominent chief. His arrest was ordered as well, but he was already moving his band—120 men, 230 women and children—to the Pine Ridge Reservation. With him was Black Elk. On December 28 a unit of the Seventh Cavalry intercepted Big Foot’s band in heavy snow. He immediately flew a white flag and surrendered to the smaller force.

  They were escorted to Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, Big Foot riding in an army ambulance wagon because he was suffering from pneumonia. When the Sioux awoke the next day, they found their teepees surrounded by 470 cavalry soldiers, with four Hotchkiss revolving cannons on slopes aimed into the camp.

  After breakfast, Colonel Forsyth ordered the Sioux to surrender all their weapons. A few guns were handed over but Forsyth was not satisfied. He sent bluecoats into the teepees; they hauled possessions out into the snow and removed hatchets and knives. Two more rifles were uncovered, one in the possession of Black Coyote, a deaf warrior. Accidentally or on purpose, whether by Black Coyote or someone else, while the warrior was being manhandled by two soldiers, a rifle was fired.

  The surrounding Seventh Cavalry immediately fired their carbines into the camp. Big Foot was one of the first killed. Then the four cannons opened fire, sending in two-pound explosive shrapnel shells. When the shooting stopped, between two and three hundred Sioux were lying dead in the snow, with fifty-one wounded. The cavalry lost twenty-five dead and thirty-nine wounded, most from their own shrapnel and bullets.

  Black Elk, witness to both the battle of Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee, recalled years later: “I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young…. A people’s dream died there.”

  Chief Sitting Bull’s body was moved from Standing Rock Reservation in 1953 to Mobridge, South Dakota, the land of his birth. A granite shaft now marks his grave. Described in his own words, the creed of his life is a suitable epitaph for the last great Native American chief: oyate ptayela—“taking care of the nation.”

  Recommended

  Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the Amerian West by Dee Brown

  The Plains Indians by Colin Taylor

  American Indians in American History, edited by Sterling Evans

  For Valour: Victoria Cross and Medal of Honor Battles by Bryan Perrett

  The Royal Ontario Museum, Ontario, Canada

  Edith Cavell

  To be a nurse is not easy, but it is worth the sacrifice.

  —Edith Cavell

  One of the reasons for writing this book is to breathe new life into the extraordinary stories of heroes and heroines who were once known to all. Time and changes in education have meant that sometimes stories are forgotten where they should be remembered.

  The life of Edith Cavell is one such tale. In 1915 her death rocked the world and helped bring America into the First World War. Queen Alexandra attended her funeral, the same lady who visited Robert Scott on his ship before he set off to the South Pole. Such was the outcry at her death that the German kaiser insisted no other woman would be executed unless he had reviewed the case and given his personal order. Edith Cavell’s statue stands at Saint Martin’s Place near Trafalgar Square in London. Very few of the thousands who pass it each day know how courageous she was, or of the lives she saved at the expense of her own.

  Her father was a vicar in the village of Swardeston in Norfolk. He was sometimes known as “the One-Sermon Vicar,” as he repeated the same one every Sunday for nearly forty-six years. Edith Louisa Cavell was born on December 4, 1865. It was a devout and stern upbringing. As there was no village school, the vicar taught Edith himself with her two sisters and a brother.

  Cavell discovered a talent for languages at a young age. She was engaged as a children’s governess for some years, then traveled to Brussels in 1890, where she taught for five years before returning home to nurse her father through a long illness. That experience would give her life direction as she began formal training as a nurse in 1896, at the London Hospital on Whitechapel Road. In 1903 she was promoted to assistant matron at Shoreditch Infirmary. Her efficiency and powers of organization were said to be outstanding, and she was asked by an eminent surgeon, Antoine Depage, to start the first school for training nurses in Belgium. She opened the school in 1907.

  Cavell was a serious woman who rarely smiled but had the respect of all those with whom she dealt. She trained the nurses with stern discipline, coupled with a deep well of personal kindness. When she discovered that one of her patients had become a drug addict, she kept the fact from the authorities until she had helped the girl break the habit. She also refused to expel one probationer nurse who had become a stripper, worrying what would become of the girl if she was turned away. In fact, the nurse gave up her second career and eventually became the supervisor of another European hospital.

  As the “directrice” of the clinic, Cavell taught anatomy, cleanliness, and the importance of hard work to the trainee nurses, sometimes using Florence Nightingale as an example. On one summer day she refused to let them kill a wasp that had gotten in, saying: “Turn it free. A nurse gives life; she does not take it.”

  When war broke out in 1914, Cavell was at home on holiday in Norfolk. In June of that year, Archduke Franz Ferdinand wa
s assassinated in Serbia, and one by one, the great nations were dragged into the conflict. Despite the entreaties of her mother, sisters, and brother, Cavell knew her duty was with the nurses and patients in Brussels and returned immediately. On August 20, German soldiers marched into the city.

  As a noncombatant, Cavell was offered safe passage to Holland, but she refused. Battle casualties were coming into the clinic every day, and she stayed to tend them. Even then, she could have lived out the war in perfect safety if she had not felt so strongly that she must also do something for the Allies. When two British soldiers on the run asked for shelter at her clinic, she hid them in the cellar. As far as possible, Cavell took on this secret part of her work herself, keeping her nurses away from the hunted men so they could not be implicated. Despite the danger, she had them smuggled out to Holland, and the clinic quickly became known as part of the Belgian Underground and a safe place to hide.

  Cavell was aware of the danger in her activities. She kept her diary hidden, sewn into a cushion in case the clinic was ever searched. There was little money and not much to eat, but Edith and her nurses shared what they had with those who came to them, while always expecting the knock on the door that would mean they had been discovered.

  She was eventually betrayed by a German spy named George Quien. He had discovered some details of the underground work going on at the clinic. He appeared one day, pretending to be a Paris doctor with a minor complaint that required him to remain in the clinic for some weeks. There he took note of the clandestine activities and asked innocent-sounding questions of the nurses. When he disappeared without warning in early 1915, one of Cavell’s contacts was arrested shortly afterward. She said to another nurse: “I suppose it won’t be long before they come for us.” Even then, under terrible strain, she continued helping Allied soldiers find their way home, passing two hundred of them back to safety. Her work was too important to give up, no matter what storm clouds were on the horizon.