Crazy Horse by Larry McMurtry

village, he might have been massacred as thoroughly as Custer.
    Exactly when Crazy Horse entered the battle is a matter of debate. Some say he rode out and skirmished a little with Reno’s men; others believe he was still in his lodge when Reno arrived and that he was only interested in the larger fight with Custer. Most students of the battle think that when it dawned on Custer that he was in a fight for survival, not glory, he turned north, toward the high ground, hoping to establish a defensive redoubt on the hill, or rise, that is now named for him. But Crazy Horse, perhaps at the head of as many as a thousand warriors himself, flanked him and seized that high ground, sealing Custer’s doom while, incidentally, making an excellent movie role for Errol Flynn and a number of other leading men.
    So Crazy Horse may have done, but it was Gall and his thousand or so warriors who turned back Reno and then harried Custer so hard that the 7th Cavalry—the soldiers who fell into camp, as in Sitting Bull’s vision—could never really establish any position. If Crazy Horse did flank Custer, it was of course good quarterbacking, but it hardly seems possible now to insist that any one movewas decisive. Gall and his men might have finished Custer without much help from anyone—Gall had lost his wife and daughter early in the battle and was fighting out his anger and his grief.
    From this distance of years the historians can argue until their teeth rot that one man or another was decisive in this battle, but all these arguments are unprovable now. What’s certain is that George Armstrong Custer was very foolish, a glory hound who ignored orders, skipped or disregarded his reconnaissance, and charged, all but blindly, into a situation in which, whatever the quality of Indian generalship, he was quickly overwhelmed by numbers.
    What I think of when I walk that battleground is dust. Once or twice in my life I rode out with as many as thirty cowboys—I remember the dust that small, unhurried group made. The dust of two thousand milling, charging horses would have been something else altogether; the battleground would soon have been a hell of dust, smoke, shooting, hacking; once the two groups of fighting men closed with one another, visibility could not have been good. Custer received a wound in the breast and one in the temple, either of which would have been fatal. His corpse was neither scalped nor mutilated. Bad Soup, a Hunkpapa, is said to have pointed out Custer’s corpse to White Bull. “There he lies,” he said. “He thought he was going to be the greatest man in the world. But there he is.”
    Most of the poetic remarks that come to us from this battle are the work of writers who interviewed Indians, or those who knew Indians, who thought they remembered Bad Soup saying something, or Half Yellow Face making (probably in sign) the remark about the road we do not know, or Bloody Knife staring long at the sun that morning, knowing that he would not be alive to see it go down behind the hills that evening. All we can conclude now is that Bloody Knife and Bad Soup and Half Yellow Face were right, even if they didn’t say the words that have been attributed to them.
    Hundreds of commentators, from survivors who fought in the battle to historians who would not be born until long years after the dust had settled in the valley of the Little Bighorn, have developed opinions about scores of issues which remain, in the end, completely opaque. Possibly Crazy Horse fought as brilliantly as some think—we will never really know. But he and Sitting Bull and Two Moon survived the battle and Custer didn’t. General Grant, no sentimentalist, put the blame for the defeat squarely on Custer, and said so bluntly. The Indians made no serious attempt to root out and destroy Reno, though they could have. Victory over Long Hair was enough; Black Kettle was well revenged.
    The next day, to Major