r’s on me.’
WHISPERING WIND
Legend has always had it that no white man survived the massacre of the men under General Custer at the Little Bighorn, 25 June 1876. Not quite true; there was one single survivor. He was a frontier scout, aged twenty-four, name of Ben Craig.
This is his story.
It was the keen nose of the frontier scout that caught it first: the faint aroma of woodsmoke on the prairie wind.
He was riding point, twenty yards ahead of the ten cavalrymen of the patrol scouting forward of the main column down the western bank of Rosebud Creek.
Without turning round the scout raised his right hand and reined in. Behind him the sergeant and the nine troopers did the same. The scout slipped from his horse, leaving it to crop the grass in peace, and trotted towards a low bank between the riders and the creek. There he dropped to the ground and crawled to the crest, peering over the top while remaining hidden in the long grass.
They were camped between the ridge and the bank of the stream. It was a small camp, no more than five lodges, a single extended family. The teepees indicated Northern Cheyenne. The scout knew them well. Sioux teepees were tall and narrow; Cheyenne built theirs wider at the base, more squat. Pictographs showing hunting triumphs adorned the sides and these too were in the Cheyenne manner.
The scout estimated the camp would contain between twenty and twenty-five persons, but the half-score of men were away hunting. He could tell by the ponies. There were only seven grazing near the lodges. To move such a camp, with the men mounted and the women and children, folded teepees and other baggage on travois there should have been almost twenty.
He heard the sergeant crawling up the bank towards him and gestured behind him for the man to stay down. Then the blue uniform sleeve with the three chevrons appeared beside him.
‘What do you see?’ said a hoarse whisper.
It was nine in the morning and already burning hot. They had been riding for three hours. General Custer liked to break camp early. But already the scout could smell the whiskey on the breath of the man beside him. It was bad frontier whiskey and the smell was rank, stronger than the perfume of the wild plum, cherry and the torrents of rambling dog roses that grew in such profusion along the banks to give Rosebud Creek its name.
‘Five lodges. Cheyenne. Only the women and children in camp. The braves are away hunting across the creek.’
Sergeant Braddock did not ask how the scout knew this. He just accepted that he did. He hawked, ejected a squirt of liquid tobacco and gave a yellow-toothed grin. The scout slid down the bank and stood up.
‘Let us leave them alone. They are not what we are looking for.’
But Braddock had spent three years on the plains with the Seventh Cavalry and had had depressingly little sport. A long and boring winter in Fort Lincoln had yielded a bastard son by a laundress and part-time whore, but he had really come to the plains to kill Indians and did not intend to be denied.
The slaughter took only five minutes. The ten riders came over the ridge at a canter and broke at once into a full gallop. The scout, mounted up, watched in disgust from the top of the ridge.
One trooper, a raw recruit, was so bad a horseman that he fell off. The rest did the butchery. All cavalry swords had been left behind at Fort Lincoln so they used their Colt revolvers or new-issue Springfield ’73s.
When they heard the drumming of hooves the squaws attending the campfire and their cooking pots tried to find and gather their children before running for the river. They were too late. The riders were through them before they could reach the water, then turned and charged back through the lodges, shooting down anything that moved. When it was over and all the old people, women and children were dead, they dismounted and raided the teepees, looking for interesting loot to send home. There were several more shots from inside the lodges when still-living children were found.
The scout trotted the 400 yards from the ridge to the camp to examine the slaughter. There seemed nothing and no-one left alive as the troopers torched the teepees. One of the troopers, little more than a boy and new to this, was bringing up his breakfast of hard tack and beans, leaning out of the saddle to avoid his own puke. Sergeant Braddock was triumphant. He had his victory. He had found a feathered war bonnet and affixed it to his saddle near the canteen that ought to have contained only spring water.
The scout counted fourteen corpses, tossed like broken dolls where they fell. He shook his head as one of the men offered him a trophy, and trotted past the tents to the bank of the creek to give his horse a brief drink.
She was lying half hidden in the reeds, fresh blood running down one bare leg where the rifle bullet had taken her in the thigh as she ran. If he had been a mite quicker he would have turned his head away and ridden back to the burning teepees. But Braddock, watching him, had caught the direction of his glance and ridden up.
‘What have you found, boy? Well, another vermin, and still alive.’
He unholstered his Colt and took aim. The girl in the reeds turned her face and stared up at them, eyes blank with shock. The scout reached out, gripped the Irishman’s wrist and forced the pistol-hand upwards. Braddock’s coarse, whiskey-red face darkened with anger.
‘Leave her alive, she may know something,’ said the scout. It was the only way. Braddock paused, thought and then nodded.
‘Good thinking, boy. We’ll take her back to the general as a present.’
He reholstered his pistol and went back to check on his men. The scout slipped off his horse and went into the reeds to tend to the girl. Luckily for her the wound was clean. At short range the bullet had gone through the flesh of the thigh as she ran. There was an entry wound and an exit hole, both small and round. The scout used his neckerchief to bathe the wound with clear creek water and bind it tight to stop the flow of blood.
When he had finished he looked at her. She stared back at him. A torrent of hair, black as a raven’s wing, flowed about her shoulders; wide dark eyes, clouded with pain and fear. Not all Indian squaws were pretty in a white man’s eyes, but of all the tribes, the handsomest were the Cheyenne. The girl in the reeds, aged about sixteen, had a stunning, ethereal beauty. The scout was twenty-four, Bible-raised, and had never known a woman in the Old Testament sense. He felt his heart pound and had to break the gaze. He swung her onto his shoulder and walked back to the ruined camp.
‘Put her on a pony,’ shouted the sergeant. He swigged again from his pannikin. The scout shook his head.
‘Travois,’ he said, ‘or she’ll die.’