Little Big Man полностью

“Is that so?” Sergeant Botts give a horselaugh. “Well, he’d get two votes for sure: his own and Miz Custer’s. Oh, and of course his brother Tom’s—there’s another bastard. You seen that specimen? Wild Bill Hickok put a head on him once down in Kansas and Tom pulled in his horns. And old Rain in the Face, when he was arrested a couple year ago for murdering three white men, he blamed Tom Custer for it and swore he would one day cut out Tom’s heart and eat it. Tom’s been pissing his pants ever since that Indian escaped.”

You can see what a high opinion members of the Seventh Cavalry still had of one another. The only officers for which Botts had any use was Captain Benteen, who I remembered from the Washita, and Captain Keogh, a mustachioed Irishman; and even in the case of the latter, Botts never cared for the Catholic religion, he let on, and in addition Keogh was also something of a drunk, although he was naturally brave rather than drinking to get his courage up as with Major Reno.

I don’t know where Botts got off condemning everyone else for boozing, for during my association with him he was himself invariably hitting a canteen which he had the sutler keep filled with rotgut. On the other hand, one of the main reasons he hated Custer was the General didn’t drink nor smoke. He detested the whole Custer tribe and says the real menace on this campaign was getting surrounded by Custers rather than Indians, for in addition to the General and Tom, and that younger brother Boston and the nephew Armstrong Reed, Lieutenant Calhoun was married to the Custer sister.

Next I reckon Botts would have started talking abusively of Mrs. Custer herself, but I could not stand for that, whether or not he had once saved my life. That lady was pretty as an angel.

Most soldiers shared Botts’s opinions, I found. Now they might have been right to feel such, but you take them Indians we was on our way to fight: if they had not venerated Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and Gall, these individuals would not have been their chiefs. It never made no sense to redskins to be led by men they hated or contemned. That seems to be an exclusive white trick, and what it amounted to here was that the Seventh Cavalry had two formidable enemies at the Little Bighorn: the entire Sioux nation and—the Seventh Cavalry.

A couple days after our arrival at the Tongue, scouts come in from Reno’s detachment which had reached the mouth of Rosebud Creek. He had found the Indians—or at least their tracks. A great trail half a mile wide, marked with the scratching of thousands of lodgepoles drug behind the ponies, led upstream in the Rosebud valley. So we all set out forthwith to join him where that creek emptied into the Yellowstone, the Seventh going by land and General Terry and his staff riding upon the Far West. Colonel Gibbon with his force was already in that area, on the Yellowstone’s north bank.

It will help if you remember that the Yellowstone in this region flows southwest to northeast, and them tributary streams enter it from the south and are roughly parallel to one another. Proceeding westward, first comes the Powder, where I joined the campaign; then the Tongue, where we found the dead Sioux and the soldier’s skeleton; next the Rosebud, where Reno was now waiting; and finally the Bighorn. Twenty-five or thirty mile above the mouth of the last-named is the forks, the eastward branch of which is the Little Bighorn.

Soon after everybody had collected at the mouth of the Rosebud, the leading officers, Terry, Custer, Gibbon, and their staffs, held a council on board the Far West, the results of which was circulated throughout the enlisted men on the bank before it was even over, for soldiers, like Indians, have their own mysterious means of getting news. I heard it from Botts.

“Here’s the plan,” he says. “The Seventh, under Custer, will go up the Rosebud to its headwaters and light into the Indians if they are there. If not, then we’ll cross over to the Little Bighorn valley and come down it. Meanwhile, Terry and Gibbon will be coming upriver. If the Indians are there, they’ll be caught between the two commands.

“But if I know Hard Ass, he won’t wait for the others. With that infantry, it’ll take them longer than us, and I’ll owe you a drink if we don’t have the Sioux whipped by time they show up.”

That reminded him of his beloved canteen, and he took a shot from it, I refusing his proffer. “Maybe,” he says, wiping his lips, “you was right, and Hard Ass will be President. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Sioux had run off into the mountains. I never knew an Indin who had the stomach for a real fight. Down on the Washita …”