The Only One Living to Tell by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780816599769
Publisher: University of Arizona Press

14

On the next march we reached Sage Creek, about halfway between the Black Hills and Fort Laramie. Here General Merritt received a message from headquarters at Fort Omaha, Nebraska, saying that it had been reported that the Sioux had left their reservation and were going north to join Sitting Bull in the Big Horn Mountains. Sitting Bull, a great medicine man and talker, was the head of all the war chiefs—among them Crazy Horse, Standing Bear, Lone Star, Rain in the Face, and Old Man Afraid of His Horses. The Sioux tribe numbered about sixty thousand souls, scattered across seven different agencies.

He sent an orderly around the camps to say that we would be moving early to a camp called Crazy Woman's Forks. The command went down to a dry creek and made camp, and the soldiers had to dig for water since the surface water was thick with a kind of whitish clay mud, and even the horses would not drink it. The next day the command moved down the valley to a nice green cottonwood bottomland, with clear running water.

At every camp men were sent out on the hills with signal flags, some with a white square in the center, others with a black square. One morning these pickets signaled that about thirty Indians were coming right into the camp from the east. Some fool was right out in the open, in sight of the Indians, because the Indians understood the signal and hurriedly retreated in the direction from which they had come, over by the Red Cloud Agency. Some soldiers and scouts under Buffalo Bill went after them, and they had a running fight, but I cannot tell who had the better of it that day. The scouts and soldiers returned that night with their horses all tired out, and they were tired, too, saying that they had never even seen any Indians to shoot.

The command stayed in camp the next day, while some scouts went north toward the Black Hills to see whether they could spot any Indian trails. They said that they could see no trails either coming or going, so the next day the command moved camp toward the Red Cloud Agency at a place called Cottonwood Flat. The camp posted pickets on the hills. Before long horsemen came toward the camp from a distance of about four miles. Buffalo Bill and his scouts, who were up above the canyon where the camp was, signaled when the horsemen got within two miles, but Buffalo Bill saw that the pickets would be right in the way of the approaching Indians and that he and his men were too far away to save them. Buffalo Bill took out his long-range .50 caliber rifle. Five mounted Indians were closing up, and three more were on foot. One of the mounted Indians had a great feather war bonnet, so he must have been a chief. Buffalo Bill took aim at him from a mile away and shot, and when the smoke cleared he saw that he had hit the Indian's horse.

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