Abe's Story by Anthony Renwick McGill

Author:Anthony Renwick McGill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Original Writing

9. CONFLICT IN THE DAKOTAS

As much as we wanted to see otherwise, events that signalled a country at war with itself came quickly that dull summer. I was a young man with restricted mobility and my ability to record detail was limited. I read what I could lay my hands on during that time to supplement what I learned from people of integrity known to me personally. Their accounts, and my own experiences with Pa, may be at variance with government-approved hagiography, but what follows is 1876 as it unfolded before my eyes.

On 18th June, the telegraph began to chatter furiously with news of an engagement the previous day between General Crook and a combination of Oglala Sioux, under Crazy Horse, and Cheyenne, in the vicinity of the Rosebud River. Significant losses among U.S. troops had been reported, but scant reference was made to casualties on the Indian side. The official word was that the General had withdrawn to await reinforcements, and that the Sioux and their allies had melted away in the direction of the Black Hills. Over the next few days there were rumours of military bewilderment, of a perceived change in customary hit-andrun tactics employed by the ‘hostiles’, but the presumption was that very soon a vastly superior United States military would succeed in corralling and neutering the Indian ‘threat’. If General Crook was to be the anvil upon which the Indians could be wrought, Custer was being given the role of the hammer and 25th June was to prove critical.

After inflicting the humiliating defeat at Rosebud River, the Indians demonstrated strategic naiveté by retiring to the valley of the Little Big Horn to camp and hunt instead of pressing home their advantage by further hobbling their enemy. They could have retreated northwards to ‘the Land of the Grandmother’ (Canada), as an alternative, before the U.S. Military could cut them off.

Instead, they occupied the valley of the Little Big Horn River. Their camps were arranged according to the seniority of the tribes. Furthest up the valley were the Cheyenne, while next came the non-agency tribes of Sioux in sequence – Brule, Oglala, Minneconjous and Sans Arcs. Finally, at the entrance to the valley, a full three miles from the Cheyenne encampment, were placed the Hunkpapas of Sitting Bull. Though each tribe and sub-tribe had its Chief, there was, singularly in this case, an unquestioned leader of the entire assemblage. This was the ever-charismatic Sitting Bull, who seemed imbued with the essence of the Santee religion and possessed of the majestic bearing of a Buddha.

Having elected to linger at Paha Sapa, the Sioux were to find their hand being forced by Custer. He was a man who had long dismissed the Indian as a lesser species, to be eradicated in the advance of the White Man’s ‘Manifest Destiny’. He had devoted ten years of his professional life to the destruction of Indian culture and the appropriation of their land. Recently groomed in a fashion that no longer merited

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