On the morning of June 25, 1876, a young Northern Cheyenne warrior named Wooden Leg woke to the sound of rifle fire. He had spent the previous evening dancing with young women in the Sans Arc camp and had not returned to his own lodge until after dawn. Now the women were screaming, searching for their babies, and the older men were shouting that the soldiers had arrived. Wooden Leg hurried to prepare for battle, putting on a new shirt and elegantly beaded moccasins, smearing war paint on his face.
He would have preferred to oil and braid his hair, but there was no time. His father was hurrying him along. These preparations were not mere show. Every Cheyenne warrior dressed carefully before a fight because death was always a possibility, and each man wanted to look his best when he went to see the Great Spirit.
Only warriors who had received specific instructions from the medicine men went into battle half naked, believing they were bulletproof and had no need to prepare for death. Wooden Leg was eighteen years old. He had been born in the Black Hills in 1858, one of the last of his people to grow up in the traditional Cheyenne way of life. His given name at birth was Eats From The Hand, but as a teenager he had taken the name of a favorite uncle, an adopted Crow who was famous for being able to walk farther than anyone else without tiring.
The younger Wooden Leg had developed into quite a walker himself, and the honor of being compared to the man who wore the name pleased him. He expressed to his father his desire to be called Wooden Leg, and his father promised to give him the new name at the appropriate moment. The naming ceremony happened when he was around seventeen years old. The Cheyenne had originally come from the Great Lakes area near Hudson Bay, moving southwest to what is now Minnesota in the 1600s.
They were discovered in North Dakota a century later, and it is probable they obtained horses around 1730, which allowed them to venture out onto the Great Plains and begin pursuing buffalo. By the time Wooden Leg was born, conflicts with the United States government were becoming more frequent as the massive westward migration of settlers had already begun. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, signed after Red Cloud’s War, gave the Oglala Sioux and their Cheyenne allies a sizable reservation that included the sacred Black Hills and the western portion of modern-day South Dakota. A large portion of unclaimed land in Wyoming and Montana was designated as hunting grounds for the Northern Cheyenne and Lakota, including the Powder River region where Wooden Leg grew up.
When gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1875, the government attempted to buy the Hills, but the tribes had no intention of selling. The majority of the bands steadfastly refused to come in for further negotiations. On January 31, 1876, all free-roaming Lakota and Cheyenne were ordered to report to the agency. When they refused, General Sheridan authorized military operations to expel the alleged hostiles from the reservations.
The Great Sioux War of 1876 had begun. Wooden Leg’s own father opposed the idea of moving to the reservation, arguing that it would be better for the Cheyenne to stay on their hunting grounds, which the 1868 treaty legally permitted. Even George Armstrong Custer had similar feelings. A few months before his death, his book My Life on the Plains was published, in which he wrote that if he were an Indian, he would much rather cast his lot among those who adhered to the free open plains than submit to the confined limits of a reservation.
Nevertheless, Custer had a task to do. Despite their decision to remain free, the Cheyenne frequently had guests from the reservation who pleaded with them to come back and repeated warnings that the soldiers were coming. Most of them disbelieved these warnings. As long as the Cheyenne did not attack the whites, which Wooden Leg claims they deliberately avoided doing, they believed they could continue to live and hunt anywhere they wanted in their allotted area.
Then, one day, the Army actually showed up. According to Wooden Leg, an elderly man got up early in the morning and, as was customary, climbed to the top of a neighboring hill to observe or pray. He had been there only a few seconds when he started yelling toward the camp that the soldiers were right here. The camp and the horse herd were already in the path of the invading whites.
Children called out for their mothers, women screamed as bullets sang among the lodges, and elderly individuals limped and stooped to escape. Braves grabbed whatever weapons they had and attempted to meet the attack. Wooden Leg captured a pony and launched a couple of arrows at the Long Knives before assisting in the removal of two small children. He tried to rejoin the battle after they were safe, but it did not really help.
The Cheyenne saw from a distance as the soldiers triumphed and most of their belongings, including their lodges, were destroyed. This minor altercation became known as the Battle of Powder River, about thirty-five miles southwest of what is now Broadus, Montana, on March 17, 1876. Colonel Joseph J. Reynolds led the troops and would later face court-martial for his actions during and immediately after the battle.
Only one warrior was killed by the Army, despite the success in demolishing the Cheyenne lodges and taking their horses. Reynolds’s situation was made worse by a Cheyenne counter-raid that evening, in which they recovered the majority of their ponies, roughly five hundred in all. However, the destruction of property was terrible, and more Cheyenne would die in the absence of shelter and harsh temperatures. Fortunately, they found an Oglala camp under the fabled Crazy Horse a few days later, where they were greeted with open arms.
The Hunkpapa people of Sitting Bull had twice as many lodges as the Cheyenne, and the Sans Arcs had more than the Miniconjou and Oglala combined. The exact number of natives camped there on the Little Big Horn is unknown to this day, but it is considered to be one of the largest gatherings of Plains tribes in all of known history. A modern estimate suggests roughly one thousand lodges with a population of three thousand to seven thousand individuals and two thousand warriors. Wooden Leg had other ideas.
He did not think there would ever be any warfare in the future. Seven days previously, they had pushed the Army off the upper Rosebud, and it seemed likely the soldiers would not bother them for a very long time. His thoughts were primarily those that young males typically have at the top of their minds. He enjoyed girls and he was eighteen years old.
On the evening of June 24, he and his brother visited the Sans Arc camp and danced with the young women for the whole evening. They slept somewhat late on the 25th, not returning to their own lodge until after dawn. In fact, Wooden Leg was never awakened until the soldiers arrived. In the distance he could hear rifle fire as women screamed and searched for their babies.
The older men started yelling that the soldiers had arrived and the young lads should get out and fight. Shortly after mounting his horse, Wooden Leg followed a sizable contingent of similarly armed combatants. A handsome man named Pawnee rode around and beyond the circle of the camp, which is where Wooden Leg first saw the blue coats. He accompanied a group of Sioux until they passed and were behind the white men.
The soldiers had already mounted their horses and were hidden in the woods, accompanied by a group of Indians who looked like Shoshone or Crows, though these Indians had mostly retreated back up the valley. Custer had divided his command. His effort to cross the river and attack the village was unsuccessful, and the troops retreated north along Battle Ridge to what is known as Calhoun Hill. There were just over two hundred men involved, divided and with absolutely no chance.
Calhoun Hill was the site of the deaths of Companies C, I, and L. It is possible that Custer rode north and even crossed the river, but he quickly made his way back when Companies E and F were forced to Last Stand Hill, also known as Custer Hill. The forty or fifty soldiers who remained on the hill would not be able to hold out for very long. Wooden Leg first joined the fighters assaulting Reno Hill, but he and the others soon left to respond to Custer’s charge across the camp.
He stopped as he went through the village to exchange horses and offer his father the tobacco he had taken from a deceased trooper. From there he crossed the river once more in an easterly direction, and each man made his own decision as they got closer to the battleground. Almost all of the Indians dismounted and scuttled along the gullies on foot after arriving close to the soldiers, even though they had all arrived on horseback. Hundreds of them were constantly riding about, most of them just winging it, but some were daringly displaying their bravery by racing along in front of the military.
Wooden Leg initially followed other Cheyenne who were sniping at the soldiers from a distance while moving cautiously forward. The soldiers were located east of the Cheyenne camp on a high elevation. He discussed the clear advantages of Indian bows, because the troops had to expose themselves in order to take aim while the warriors could stay hidden and just hurl arrows at the soldiers. After an hour and a half of what Wooden Leg called slow, long-distance fighting, approximately forty troops charged toward the river from the eastern portion of the ridge, directly into the center of some concealed Sioux and Cheyenne on a low ridge.
The troops halted and dismounted, and soon after, fighters surrounded them. The Indians started to rush ahead, jumping up, dodging down, jumping up again, and running down again as they constantly approached the soldiers. All of the white men immediately went mad at once. Rather than fight, they turned their guns on themselves.
Almost before the warriors could reach them, they all died. Wooden Leg was by no means the only participant who made such claims. The warriors swiftly gathered up the guns of these fallen soldiers and turned them on those who were left on the high ridge. Wooden Leg, who had been fighting on foot, returned to his horse and rode around the ridge past its east end.
The soldiers had all died by the time he arrived. Only a handful of those men had been killed by the Indians, according to the Indians themselves, who said that the men had shot one another. He was told by a Cheyenne that four troops from that area of the ridge had attempted to flee by turning their horses and returning over the same route, and three of them were swiftly killed. The fourth one crossed the gulch and a ridge to the east before the Sioux who were pursuing him approached.
His horse was exhausted, and his right arm was moving as if he were beating his horse to increase its speed. Then his right hand abruptly raised to his head, and he fell dead from his horse after shooting himself with his revolver. After that, Wooden Leg raced northward to a ridge he called Soldier Ridge, where his fellow fighters were encircling a group of blue coats on the north slope. He fired a few long-range rounds once again, but then limited his fire to the numerous fighters in the grass who were leaping up and down, for he did not want to accidentally destroy one of his own.
Every Cheyenne warrior would follow the same preparation for death, whether the impending peril was conflict, illness, or injury. But on this day, the soldiers made their own preparations with their own weapons, and the battle ended with the blue coats dead on the ridge, while Wooden Leg and his people survived to tell the story.