Indian side of Little Bighorn presented in new book

Richard Pyle

Friday, Oct. 1, 1999 | 8:48 a.m.

NEW YORK -- The faces staring out from the page are leathery, chiseled, emotionally opaque. The names -- Goes Ahead, White Man Runs Him, Yellow Robe, Iron Hawk -- resonate as war cries and gunfire once did across the treeless hills of eastern Montana.

These Indians were there when Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and some 200 U.S. cavalry troopers met death at Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876. They were the Crow and Arikara scouts who rode with Custer, and the Sioux and Cheyenne braves who destroyed him that hot Sunday afternoon.

Just as the outcome permanently tarnished Custer's reputation, it left the Indians a bitter legacy that, for some, has lasted 123 years, says Herman J. Viola, author of a new book that looks at the famous battle from the Indians' point of view.

"None of the four tribes involved find any comfort in the events of 1876," Viola, curator emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution, says.

"The Crow and Arikara not only feel betrayed by the government they sought to help, but today they are more often seen as traitors for helping the cavalry hunt down their traditional enemies," he says.

"The Cheyenne and Sioux, on the other hand, suffered terribly for their victory. In fact, elderly descendants of the Cheyenne and Sioux who were present at Little Bighorn still fear some sort of retribution awaits them if their family connection to Custer's demise is revealed."

Viola's book, "Little Bighorn Remembered, the Untold Indian Story of Custer's Last Stand," appears this month. It includes many obscure and previously unpublished details about the most famous event of the 19th-century Indian wars.

Among these are the Cheyenne oral legend that Custer's death was retribution by the Everywhere Spirit -- or God -- for breaking a promise never to attack the tribe and that some of Custer's troops may have drunk whiskey just before the battle.

The book also includes a new reconstruction of Custer's movements at Little Bighorn by National Park Service archaeologist Douglas Scott, and the first publication of all 41 drawings of the battle by Sioux chief Red Horse, which Viola calls a "Native American Bayeux Tapestry."

The overriding theme is the conflict among the Plains tribes that transcended war with the Army -- Crow and Arikara vs. their traditional enemies, the Sioux and Cheyenne.

"This is not the Indians against the cowboys -- this is Indians against Indians," Viola said in an interview.

"I am very excited about this book," says Joseph Medicine Crow, of Lodge Grass, Mont., a tribal historian who at 86 may be the last living person to have known anyone present at the battle of Little Bighorn.

Medicine Crow's great-uncle, or "grandfather in the Indian way," was White Man Runs Him, an imposing 6-foot-6 warrior who was one of the six Crow scouts with Custer that day and survived only because Custer released the scouts from duty.

As a boy, Medicine Crow listened as White Man Runs Him and four other former scouts told stories of their relationship with the flamboyant soldier they called Son of the Morning Star.

In the book, Medicine Crow says the Crows' friendly ties with the whites were based on a 100-year-old tribal prophecy that resistance meant eventual disaster and an 1825 treaty that was consummated by the ritual touching of a knife blade to tongues.

"This was a sacred oath that will be kept forever," Medicine Crow says.

He adds that in later years, when asked to help the army fight the Sioux and Cheyennes, the Crows saw themselves as using -- rather than being used by -- the whites.

"Crow survival was at stake. The Crows believed then -- and still believe -- that they honorably used the white man as allies in their continuing intertribal struggle with their worthy traditional enemies," Medicine Crow says.

While the Sioux, led by the famous Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have always overshadowed their Cheyenne allies, the Arikara are "the real forgotten people" on the other side, Viola says, although they lost three scouts and the Crows, none.

Even after 123 years, fear and suspicion persists, Viola says. "Old, old Indians still are afraid to talk about Little Bighorn. They still think the government is going to punish them. They say, 'You don't know the government.' "

This is especially true with Cheyennes, who according to rumors may still have "Custer memorabilia" -- paper money, weapons and battlefield artifacts -- hidden away, he said.

Among the more talkative Cheyennes was the Rev. Joseph Walks Along, a Mennonite preacher who recalled his grandfather, Yellow Robe, 12 at the time, saying the Indians didn't expect a fight until they saw the soldiers weren't carrying a flag of truce.

"Grandpa told us that prior to the battle, at a different place, Custer had told the Cheyennes that as long as the cavalry carried a white flag and the American flag, they would be coming in peace. On that day, Custer did not come in peace," Joseph Walks Along says.

In 1908 four surviving Custer scouts returned to Little Bighorn with Edward S. Curtis, a famed scholar-photographer on Indian culture. Curtis died in 1925 and his unpublished papers were rediscovered in 1988 by a son, then 95, who sent them to the Smithsonian.

Based on those writings, the Smithsonian's curator emeritus of military history, James Hutchins, contributes a chapter to Viola's book. He adds new details to the familiar story of how Custer divided his force into three parts and ordered his second-in-command, Major Marcus Reno, to attack the Indian encampment.

The Crow scouts criticized Custer for ignoring their warnings that the Sioux-Cheyenne enemy were too numerous and for failing to ride to Reno's aid. When the scouts donned tribal regalia, "to die as Indians," Custer let them go. As they joined Reno, according to White Man Runs Him, "we looked back and saw Custer still fighting" on a distant slope to the north. They did not know until later that the sun had set for Son of the Morning Star.

Three Arikara scouts with Reno were killed, but the Crows survived. Most continued to serve with the military. While Custer was acclaimed as a fallen hero, Reno was publicly vilified for his actions at Little Bighorn.

Hutchins says Curtis believed the Crows' account of Custer's action, but took the advice of his friend, President Theodore Roosevelt, not to publish a story that "makes Custer out both a traitor and a fool."

"Thirty years after the event it is necessary to be exceedingly cautious about relying on the memory of any man, Indian or white," Roosevelt wrote. "Such a space of time is a great breeder of myths."

In a foreword, Gerard Baker, a former Park Service superintendent of the Little Bighorn battlefield, says modern-day critics who deride the Crows and Arikaras for siding with the government forget that the Plains tribes were already at war with each other, and some needed help to survive.

"Indians today often look back at Little Bighorn and see only the harmful results of the Indian alliance with the U.S. Army," writes Baker, whose Indian descendants include Arikara. "Hindsight is always 20-20, but our ancestors did not have crystal balls."

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