Indian Fights and Fighters: The Soldier and the SiouxBrady, Cyrus Townsend
History
Indian Fights and Fighters: The Soldier and the Sioux
Brady, Cyrus Townsend
Dakota Indians -- Wars; Indians of North America -- Wars -- 1866-1895
“I rejoined Sitting Bull and Gall. They were afraid to come and get
me there. I sent Little Hair a picture, on a piece of buffalo skin,
of a bloody heart. He knew I didn’t forget my vow. The next time I
saw Little Hair, ugh! I got his heart. I have said all.”
And, Indian-like, he stopped.
We all knew that the greater part of this was true, since it tallied
with the government account of the death of the sutler and Surgeon
Hontzinger. But we wanted to hear how he took Tom Custer’s heart.
McFadden, who is quite an artist as well as an actor of note, had made
an imaginary sketch of “Custer’s Last Charge.” He got it and handed it
to Rain, saying:
“Does that look anything like the fight?”
Rain studied it a long time, and then burst out laughing.
“No,” he said, “this picture is a lie. These long swords have
swords—they never fought us with swords, but with guns and revolvers.
These men are on ponies—they fought us on foot, and every fourth man
held the others’ horses. That’s always their way of fighting. We tie
ourselves onto our ponies and fight in a circle. These people are not
dressed as we dress in a fight. They look like agency Indians—we strip
naked and have ourselves and our ponies painted. This picture gives us
bows and arrows. We were better armed than the long swords. Their guns
wouldn’t shoot but once—the thing wouldn’t throw out the empty cartridge
shells. (In this he was historically correct, as dozens of guns were
picked up on the battle-field by General Gibbon’s command two days after
with the shells still sticking in them, showing that the ejector
wouldn’t work.) When we found they could not shoot we saved our bullets
by knocking the long swords over with our war clubs—it was just like
killing sheep. Some of them got on their knees and begged; we spared
none—ugh! This picture is like all the white man’s pictures of Indians,
a lie. I will show you how it looked.”
Then turning it over, he pulled out a stump of a lead pencil from his
pouch and drew a large shape of a letter S, turned sideways.[94] “Here,”
said he, “is the Little Big Horn river; we had our lodges along the
banks in the shape of a bent bow.”
“How many lodges did you have?” asked Harry.
“Oh, many, many times ten. We were like blades of grass. (It is
estimated that there were between four and six thousand Indians, hence
there must have been at least a thousand lodges.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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