A Thin Blanket of Soil (Part 10 of 11)

There was great celebration in the Indian village that night, at least that is what those of the Seventh Cavalry still on Reno Hill believed it to be.  The Sioux and Cheyenne may have been celebrating their great victory, or they may have been wailing over their dead.  Maybe they were doing both.  While they would grieve over those who had died, they would have taken great comfort knowing that their deaths had come from acts of bravery, so important to the culture.

No one knows how many Indians had died.  The Indians did not keep written records.  Asked about it years later, those who had participated in the battle had to rely on memory, naming those who they recalled had died.  There were seven great camp circles.  The Cheyenne may not have known the names of the Sioux dead.  The Ogalalas may not have known who of the Minneconjous or Hunkpapas had been killed.  No one likely knew or totaled the number of all who died.  It could have been as few as thirty or thirty-five.  That number seems low considering the number of cavalrymen killed, but we know that most who died in Reno’s command had perished in the wild rout across the Little Bighorn as all order disintegrated.  Few, if any, Indians had been killed or wounded because the soldiers were running, not fighting.  If the rout of Companies C, K, and I was truly like a buffalo hunt as the Indians described, and something similar occurred with Company E, it’s very plausible that Indian casualties during these episodes had been light.

Reno and Benteen remained besieged the following day.  Some may ask why the Indians didn’t annihilate them as well.  Joined by the pack train, they had a combined strength of about 300 able bodied men in a single position.  The Indians weren’t fools.  The soldiers were a beaten lot; they were no longer a threat.  There was no need to risk further Indian casualties.  Had that changed, the Indians would have dealt with them and would have dealt with them harshly.

By the second sunrise after the Custer fight the great camp circles would be empty, the Indians gone.  They doubtless had learned of another column of soldiers marching toward them from the north, Gibbon’s column.

What the relief column discovered was shocking.  The survivors on Reno Hill were relieved with its arrival, relieved that the Indians were gone.  They fully expected to learn that Custer and his battalion were similarly besieged on another hill.  That all were dead was unimaginable.  That they had not made a more concerted effort to go to Custer’s aid may have weighed heavily on their consciences, but only briefly.  They could well have been annihilated in the attempt.  Viewing the naked and mutilated corpses in the ravines and on the ridges of that lonely battlefield, more than one may have thought “There but for the grace of God am I.”

The total number of cavalry dead was somewhere between 250 and 270.  White man’s records weren’t always that accurate either.  Some were missing presumed dead.  Some were civilians.  Some were Indian scouts, many of whom scattered when the fighting began, officially relieved by Custer once they had fulfilled their mission to find the Indian encampment.

Of the dead, about 210 were those in or attached to Custer’s battalion.  There wasn’t a preponderance of shovels available, so the burials were not what most of us would recognize as burials.  There were no graves dug.  The bodies were simply given a thin blanket of soil dug from either side of the corpse.  Because there were so few shovels, men used whatever they had available with which to dig: knives, tin cups, tin plates.  It had to be a horrifying and sickening task, the hot sun beating down, the mutilated bodies bloated and stinking of death, many completely unrecognizable.  Dead horses swollen and stinking lay all around as well.  The horses would be left to rot on the open prairie, food for the scavengers.

Proper burials would have to wait.  That would come later, along with permanent markers designating where the men of Custer’s battalion fell, about fifty or sixty on Last Stand Hill, mostly those of F Company and headquarters staff, another 40 or so scattered in the ravine below, the men of E Company, stretched out over about a third of a mile.  The rest were scattered over about a half mile stretch of the ridge between Calhoun Hill and Last Stand Hill with more on another short ridge running west of Calhoun Hill and in the ravine below.  The few whose remains were found alone far from the rest gave testament to someone whose horse bolted out of sheer terror or someone who tried to escape the carnage.  None managed to escape.  The remains of Mark Kellog, the reporter who accompanied Custer hoping for a big scoop, were said to have been found near the river.  The scoop was even more sensational than he had imagined, he just didn’t live long enough to report it.  He had gone with Custer to the death.