An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill Part 31

When Terry and Crook's commands joined on the Yellowstone both commands went into camp together and guards were placed to prevent surprise. The scene was typical of the Old West, but it would astonish anyone whose whole idea of warfare has been gained by a visit to a modern military post or training camp, or the vast camps where the reserve forces are drilled and equipped for the great European war.

Generals Crook, Merritt, and Carr were in rough hunting rigs, utterly without any mark of their rank. Deerskin, buckskin, corduroy, canvas, and rags indiscriminately covered the rest of the command, so that unless you knew the men it was totally impossible to distinguish between officers and enlisted men. However, every one in the commands knew every one else, and there was no confusion.

A great part of that night was spent in swapping stories of recent experiences. All of them were thrilling, even to veteran campaigners fresh from the trail. There was no need of drawing the long bow in those days. The truth was plenty exciting enough to suit the most exacting, and we sat about like schoolboys, drinking in each other's tales, and telling our own in exchange.

A story of a personal adventure and a hairbreadth escape in which Lieutenant De Rudio figured was so typical of the fighting days of the West that I want my readers to know it. I shall tell it, as nearly as I can, just as it came to me around the flickering fire in that picturesque border camp.

De Rudio had just returned from his adventure, and he told it to us between puffs of his pipe so realistically that I caught several of my old friends of the Plains peering about into the darkness as if to make sure that no lurking redskins were creeping up on them.

In the fight of a few days before De Rudio was guarding a pony crossing with eight men when one of them sang out:

"Lieutenant, get your horse, quick. Reno (the commander of the outfit) is retreating!" No trumpet had sounded, however, and no orders had been given, so the lieutenant hesitated to retire. His men left in a hurry, but he remained, quietly waiting for the call.

Presently, looking behind him, he saw thirty or forty Indians coming full gallop. He wheeled and started to get into safer quarters. As lie did so they cut loose with a volley. He leaned low on his horse as they shot, and the bullets sang harmlessly over his head.

Before him was a fringe of thick underbrush along the river, and into this he forced his unwilling horse. The bullets followed and clipped the twigs about him like scissors. At last he gained the creek, forded, and mounted the bank on the other side. Here, instead of safety, he found hundreds of Indians, all busily shooting at the soldiers, who were retreating discreetly in the face of a greatly superior force. He was entirely cut off from retreat, unless he chose to make a bold dash for his life right through the middle of the Indians. This he was about to do, when a young Indian, who had observed him, sent a shot after him, and his horse fell dead under him, rolling over and over, while he managed to scramble to his feet.

The shot had attracted the attention of all the Indians in that immediate neighborhood, and there were plenty of them there for all offensive purposes. De Rudio jumped down the creek bank and hid in an excavation while a hail of bullets spattered the water ahead of him and raised a dozen little clouds of dust at his feet.

So heavy had this volley been that the Indians decided that the bullets had done their work, and a wild yell broke from them.

Suddenly the yell changed to another sort of outcry, and the firing abruptly ceased. Peering out, De Rudio saw Captain Benteen's column coming up over the hill. He began to hope that his rescue was at hand.

But in a few minutes the soldiers disappeared and the Indians all started off after them.

Just beyond the hill was the noise of a lively battle, and he made up his mind that Reno's command had rallied, and that if he could join them he might be saved.

Working his way softly through the brush he was nearing the summit of the slope when he heard his name whispered and saw three of his own company in the brush. Two of them were mounted. The horse of the third had been killed.

The three men remained in the bushes, lying as low as they could and making no sound. Looking out now and then, they could see an old Indian woman going about, taking scalps and mutilating the bodies of the soldiers who had been slain. Most of the warriors were occupied with the battle, but now and then a warrior, suspicious that soldiers were still lurking in the brush, would ride over in their direction and fire a few shots that whistled uncomfortably close to their heads.

Presently the firing on the hill ceased, and hundreds of Indians came slowly back. But they were hard pressed by the soldiers, and the battle was soon resumed, to break out intermittently through the entire night.

In a quiet interval the two soldiers got their horses, and with their companion and De Rudio holding to the animals' tails forded the river and made a detour round the Indians. Several times they pa.s.sed close to Indians. Once or twice they were fired on and answered the fire, but their luck was with them and they escaped bringing a general attack down upon them.

As they were making their way toward the edge of the clearing they saw directly before them a party of men dressed in the ragged uniforms of American cavalrymen, and all drew deep breaths of relief. Help seemed now at hand. But just as they sprang forward to join their supposed comrades a fiendish yell broke from the hors.e.m.e.n. In another instant the four unfortunates were rushing to cover, with a dozen Indians, all dressed in the clothing taken from dead soldiers, in hot pursuit.

The Indians had been planning a characteristic piece of Sioux strategy.

As fast as it could be accomplished they had been stripping the clothing from dead and wounded soldiers and garbing themselves in it with the purpose of deceiving the outposts of Reno's command and surprising the Americans as soon as day broke. Had it not been for the accidental discovery of the ruse by De Rudio's party it might have succeeded only too well.

The lieutenant and his companions managed to get away safely and to find shelter in the woods. But the Indians immediately fired the underbrush and drove them further and further on. Then, just as they had begun to despair of their lives, their pursuers, who had been circling around the tangle of scrub growth, began singing a slow chant and withdrew to the summit of the hill.

There they remained in council a little time and then cantered away single file.

Fearing another trap, the white men remained for weary hours in their hiding-place, but at last were compelled by thirst and hunger to come out.

No Indians were visible, nor did any appear as, worn out and dispirited, they dragged themselves to the camp of the soldiers. In the forty-eight hours since he had been cut off from his command De Rudio had undergone all the horrors of Indian warfare and a hundred times had given himself up for dead.

Bullets had pa.s.sed many times within a few inches of him. Half a dozen times only a lucky chance had intervened between him and the horrible death that Indians know so well how to inflict. Yet, save for the bruises from his fall off his horse, and the abrasions of the brush through which he had traveled, he had never received a scratch.

CHAPTER XI

Of all the Indians I encountered in my years on the Plains the most resourceful and intelligent, as well as the most dangerous, were the Sioux. They had the courage of dare-devils combined with real strategy.

They mastered the white man's tactics as soon as they had an opportunity to observe them. Incidentally they supplied all thinking and observing white commanders with a great deal that was well worth learning in the art of warfare. The Sioux fought to win, and in a desperate encounter were absolutely reckless of life.

But they also fought wisely, and up to the minute of closing in they conserved their own lives with a vast amount of cleverness. The maxim put into words by the old Confederate fox, Forrest: "Get there fastest with the mostest," was always a fighting principle with the Sioux.

They were a strong race of men, the braves tall, with finely shaped heads and handsome features. They had poise and dignity and a great deal of pride, and they seldom forgot either a friend or an enemy.

The greatest of all the Sioux in my time, or in any time for that matter, was that wonderful old fighting man, Sitting Bull, whose life will some day be written by a historian who can really give him his due.

Sitting Bull it was who stirred the Indians to the uprising whose climax was the ma.s.sacre of the Little Big Horn and the destruction of Custer's command.

For months before this uprising he had been going to and fro among the Sioux and their allies urging a revolt against the encroaching white man. It was easy at that time for the Indians to secure rifles. The Canadian-French traders to the north were only too glad to trade them these weapons for the splendid supplies of furs which the Indians had gathered. Many of these rifles were of excellent construction, and on a number of occasions we discovered to our cost that they outranged the army carbines with which we were equipped.

After the Custer ma.s.sacre the frontier became decidedly unsafe for Sitting Bull and the chiefs who were a.s.sociated with him, and he quietly withdrew to Canada, where he was for the time being safe from pursuit.

There he stayed till his followers began leaving him and returning to their reservations in the United States. Soon he had only a remnant of his followers and his immediate family to keep him company. Warily he began negotiating for immunity, and when he was fully a.s.sured that if he would use his influence to quiet his people and keep them from the warpath his life would be spared, he consented to return.

He had been lonely and unhappy in Canada. An accomplished orator and a man with a gift of leadership, he had pined for audiences to sway and for men to do his bidding. He felt sure that these would be restored to him once he came back among his people. As to his pledges, I have no doubt that he fully intended to live up to them. He carried in his head all the treaties that had been made between his people and the white men, and could recite their minutest details, together with the dates of their making and the names of the men who had signed for both sides.

But he was a stickler for the rights of his race, and he devoted far more thought to the trend of events than did most of his red brothers.

Here was his case, as he often presented it to me:

"The White Man has taken most of our land. He has paid us nothing for it. He has destroyed or driven away the game that was our meat. In 1868 he arranged to build through the Indians' land a road on which ran iron horses that ate wood and breathed fire and smoke. We agreed. This road was only as wide as a man could stretch his arms. But the White Man had taken from the Indians the land for twenty miles on both sides of it.

This land he had sold for money to people in the East. It was taken from the Indians. But the Indians got nothing for it.

"The iron horse brought from the East men and women and children, who took the land from the Indians and drove out the game. They built fires, and the fires spread and burned the prairie gra.s.s on which the buffalo fed. Also it destroyed the pasturage for the ponies of the Indians. Soon the friends of the first White Men came and took more land. Then cities arose and always the White Man's lands were extended and the Indians pushed farther and farther away from the country that the Great Father had given them and that had always been theirs.

"When treaties were broken and the Indians trespa.s.sed on the rights of the White Man, my chiefs and I were always here to adjust the White Man's wrongs.

"When treaties were broken and the Indians' rights were infringed, no one could find the white chiefs. They were somewhere back toward the rising sun. There was no one to give us justice. New chiefs of the White Men came to supplant the old chiefs. They knew nothing of our wrongs and laughed at us.

"When the Sioux left Minnesota and went beyond the Big Muddy the white chiefs promised them they would never again be disturbed. Then they followed us across the river, and when we asked for lands they gave us each a prairie chicken's flight four ways (a hundred and sixty acres); this they gave us, who once had all the land there was, and whose habit is to roam as far as a horse can carry us and then continue our journey till we have had our fill of wandering.

"We are not as many as the White Man. But we know that this land is our land. And while we live and can fight, we will fight for it. If the White Man does not want us to fight, why does he take our land? If we come and build our lodges on the White Man's land, the White Man drives us away or kills us. Have we not the same right as the White Man?"

The forfeiture of the Black Hills and unwise reduction of rations kept alive the Indian discontent. When, in 1889, Congress pa.s.sed a law dividing the Sioux reservation into many smaller ones so as to isolate the different tribes of the Dakota nation a treaty was offered them.

This provided payment for the ponies captured or destroyed in the war of 1876 and certain other concessions, in return for which the Indians were to cede about half their land, or eleven million acres, which was to be opened up for settlement.

The treaty was submitted to the Indians for a vote. They came in from the woods and the plains to vote on it, and it was carried by a very narrow majority, many of the Indians insisting that they had been coerced by their necessities into casting favorable ballots.

Congress delayed and postponed the fulfillment of the promised conditions, and the Indian unrest increased as the months went by. Even after the land had been taken over and settled up, Congress did not pa.s.s the appropriation that was necessary before the Indians could get their money.

Sitting Bull was appealed to for aid, and once more began employing his powerful gift of oratory in the interest of armed resistance against the white man.