Black Elk, a thirteen-year-old Lakota boy known among his people as Hehaka Sapa, had anointed himself on the day before the fighting began. He was a second cousin of the renowned warrior Crazy Horse, and he was about to witness the most famous battle of the Great Sioux War from the inside of the camp itself. The Seventh Cavalry Regiment under Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer had come to the valley of the Greasy Grass, and within hours, the battle would be over, in broad daylight, with no white men left alive on that field. The Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho had gathered in the valley in enormous numbers two days before the battle, moving to the south side of the Greasy Grass, what the soldiers called the Little Bighorn River.
The village stretched along the waterway in an immense arc. The Oglala, Miniconjou, Sans Arc, Blackfeet, Brulé, and Hunkpapa camps lay upstream to the south, while the Santee and Yankton bands were farthest to the north. The snowmelt from the Bighorn Mountains had swollen the river on the eastern side, and the banks were lined with timber. To the west and south, the mountains stood visible from the hilltops, and a series of gullies sliced through the cliffs and bluffs that rose above the river.
On the lower slopes to the west, the people grazed their countless ponies. Only a short time earlier, the warriors had already fought two engagements. On the Rosebud River, Crazy Horse had turned back General George Crook’s soldiers. And in the icy March of that winter, under the Snowblind Moon, the cavalry had come to the Powder River, invading the village, and had been routed as well.
The people had moved west to the Rosebud, repulsed the soldiers who attacked them there, and finally retreated to this ancestral valley, wanting only to be left alone. The day before the great fight, a medicine man named Hairy Chin summoned Black Elk to the teepee of a wounded warrior called Rattling Hawk, who had been shot in the hip during the Rosebud battle. Hairy Chin needed the boys to help in a healing ritual, because his power had come to him through a bear dream. He knotted Black Elk’s hair into the shape of bear ears, painted his face and torso yellow, added eagle feathers to his head, and drew black stripes on either side of his nose.
As the medicine man worked, Black Elk remembered his own vision from earlier in his life, and he felt as though he had been lifted off the ground. In that moment he understood more than he could put into words, and he became convinced that something terrible was about to happen to the people. The other boys wore real bearskins on their heads and were covered in red paint. Hairy Chin sang as two women entered the teepee, one carrying a cup of water and the other holding a plant.
The medicine man kept chanting, showing the sacred objects to the wounded warrior, and then gave Rattling Hawk a red cane. The warrior stood up immediately and followed the women out of the teepee, supported by the holy crimson staff. The boys capered around him, roaring and pretending to be small bears, and as they carried out the rite, feathers of various colors emerged from their mouths. Rattling Hawk’s gait improved quickly, and the next day he was well on his way to recovery.
That evening the villagers danced and told stories of bravery from the Rosebud fight. At dusk, Black Elk helped move the ponies closer to the village. When he finished, the dancing was still going on around the fires, and the boys hopped from one dance to another until they were too tired to stay awake. His father woke him at dawn and told him to go graze the horses.
The father warned him to tie a long rope to one horse so they could catch it quickly and bind the others, and he emphasized the need to be alert, to watch the camp closely, and to bring the horses back at the first sign of trouble. The boys tended the horses until the sun rose high and the heat became unbearable. They decided to take a break in the water, and a cousin kindly offered to stay with the horses. As Black Elk dabbed himself with oil, he felt a chilling sense of dread, as though something horrible was about to happen.
Still, he went down to the water’s edge with the others. Many people were digging turnips to the west of the village, and many were already swimming in the open water. Then the crier’s voice echoed across the Hunkpapa camp. The soldiers were coming.
The charge was on. The Oglala crier repeated the same words, his voice growing more urgent, and the alarm spread from camp to camp all the way to the Santee and Yankton bands. The boys were lucky to have their horses close by. Black Elk’s older brother sped off toward the Hunkpapa camp on a sorrel horse, and Black Elk’s father, seeing that the brother had gone without his weapon, told the boy to take the gun and the aunt’s six-shooter and give them to him.
Black Elk grabbed the guns, mounted his buckskin pony, and rode after his brother. A thick cloud of dust formed just outside the camp, and out of it came the soldiers, towering and powerful on their commanding horses, firing their weapons. The Hunkpapa, many of them still wet from the river, rushed around screaming in shock. Nearly all their women and children were already fleeing downstream.
Black Elk followed his brother toward a brushy timber thicket where some warriors were gathering, and all around them bullets cut through the trees, sending leaves falling to the ground. The women and children were running, the warriors were riding in, and the air was filled with thunder, screams, and dust. The warriors shouted words of courage, urging one another not to act like women. The great war chief Gall stood his ground and stopped the Hunkpapa from running away for a time.
From the north and west came the sound of eagle bone whistles and the high-pitched Lakota battle cries that sounded like a howling wind: Crazy Horse was coming. Dust and smoke darkened the valley, filling it with shadows and the clamor of gunfire, hoofbeats, and cries. Soldiers’ horses backed into the brush on the left, and when they emerged, Black Elk was caught in a whirlwind of activity as men and horses came and went, moving upstream and yelling to hurry. The troops were being forced back up the river.
Black Elk was too small to push through to where the soldiers were, so he did not kill anyone in that part of the fight. The soldiers and many warriors were crammed into the river, horses and women tangled together in the water. When the warriors came out, they began stripping the clothing off the dead soldiers and putting it on themselves. One soldier lay on the ground, and a warrior galloped up to Black Elk, ordering him to dismount and scalp the man.
The boy’s knife was dull, and the soldier had short hair. The soldier was gritting his teeth, so Black Elk shot him in the forehead and then removed his scalp. He rode toward the hill across the river, where a great cloud of dust rose above the Santee camp and the warriors darted in and out of it like swallows, firing their guns. Black Elk wanted to show his mother his first scalp.
On the way, he passed through the Oglala camp and saw Rattling Hawk sitting alone in his teepee, holding a gun and singing a melancholy song: Brothers, what are you capable of that I cannot? When his mother saw the scalp, she gave a special tremolo of joy and pride. She and Black Elk lingered on the hill, watching the dust swirl on the other side of the river. Horses with bare saddles came charging out of it.
They could not see clearly because of the heavy dust, but they knew the soldiers would be defeated. A number of boys Black Elk’s age and younger, who had come with their mothers and sisters, invited him to join the battle. They crossed the Greasy Grass and rode up a gulch to the bluff where the fighting had moved. The majority of the soldiers had already fallen.
Some were still alive, and the boys rode around aiming arrows at them. Black Elk saw a soldier writhing with arrows stuck in his body and tried to grab the man’s coat, but a warrior shoved him away and took it himself. Then the boy noticed something dazzling hanging from the soldier’s belt. It was a bright yellow object, round and beautiful, and he took it for a necklace.
At first it ticked. Then it stopped. He did not yet know what it was, but he wore it around his neck for a while. The women gathered and ascended the hill behind the men.
Gray horses lay dead, some piled on top of men. Many of the warriors had been killed or wounded, but the people did not see many of their own dead because they had already been gathered up. No one could tell who was who because of the dust. One man was groaning and extending his arms, and Black Elk aimed an arrow at his forehead.
He saw a few warriors trying to help another Lakota, and when he got closer he recognized him as Black Wasicu, a cousin. The man had been shot in the right shoulder, and the bullet had lodged in his left hip. This sight infuriated both Black Elk’s father and the wounded man’s father, who went out and killed a soldier, disfiguring his body in retaliation. Black Elk was asked to scalp a soldier for a younger boy, who then rushed to show the scalp to his mother.
Most of the fighters had driven the remaining soldiers back to the hill where their pack mules were. Black Elk grew tired of looking at the field. The stench of blood was overpowering, and he lost his fascination with it. He went back home with a few others, feeling no apology at all.
He was happy. This was their land, and the soldiers had come to hurt them and their families. He had sensed it would happen from the first shots, and he thought the soldiers were stupid for coming, because his people were connected to the Thunder Beings from his vision. In the village, everyone stayed up all night.
The men who had spent the entire night watching returned home, and the next morning another war party went back to the hill where the soldiers were. Black Elk followed, with his mother riding a mare with a small colt trotting beside her. At the foot of the hill, a huge boy named Round Fool was racing among some bullberry bushes on the west side of the river, calling out that there was a white man hiding there. The man had spent the whole night concealed in the brush.
The boys shot arrows at him as he crept from side to side, like hunting a rabbit. At one point he cried out, and eventually the warriors burned the grass around the bushes. The man came running out and was killed. The soldiers were still strongly protected on the hill, and the warriors could not reach them.
They could see the pack mules and horses, many of them already dead, but they could not see the soldiers lying in their defenses. A few troops opened fire as the warriors descended and crossed the river once more, and Black Elk and his mother rode quickly back to camp as dusk approached. The scouts reported that more soldiers were moving up the stream, so the people decided to disperse. They packed up and began climbing the Greasy Grass toward Woodlouse Creek in the Bighorn Mountains, traveling through the night.
Black Elk and his two younger brothers rode in a pony drag, and his mother threw some puppies into it. He did not get much sleep, because the puppies kept trying to climb out and he had to keep putting them back. By daybreak they reached a small dry creek, set up tents, and feasted. Before lunchtime they moved on to Woodlouse Creek at the foot of the mountains, where they made camp.
A man with severe injuries was convulsing there, repeatedly saying the same word over and over, and the people came to call the place the camp where that man died. That evening a cry went up that the soldiers were approaching, but it was only some of the men dressed in captured soldier clothing, having a good time. The scouts confirmed that Custer’s soldiers, and the army itself, had not pursued them. All night long, the deadly dances and big fires went on throughout the camp.
The Battle of the Little Bighorn was over. Custer’s entire force had been wiped out. The people had won the fight, but their victory was the last of its kind, and before long, the full weight of the United States army would come after them. For now, though, on the night of their triumph, the Lakota and Cheyenne danced in the glow of the fires.
Black Elk, the boy who had taken his first scalp at thirteen, was still wearing the strange ticking yellow object around his neck. It would be a long time before he knew that it was a soldier’s pocket watch.