The Indians started sprinting ahead, jumping up, dodging down, jumping up again, then dropping down again as they continuously approached the soldiers. The white men all went mad at once. They aimed their weapons at themselves rather than at us. They were all dead almost before we could reach them.
They took their own lives. This is the testimony of Wooden Leg, a Northern Cheyenne warrior who fought against George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. His account, collected decades after the fight, offers a rare and troubling view of the most famous engagement of the American Indian Wars. Wooden Leg was not his birth name.
Born in the Black Hills around 1858, he was first known as Eats from the Hand. The name came from a favorite uncle, an elderly Crow who had been captured and adopted by the Cheyenne. Legend held that the elder Wooden Leg could walk farther than anyone else without showing fatigue, outpacing even the youngest children who tried to compete with him. The younger man took the name in his teens, pleased by the honor of being compared to such a man.
His father promised to bestow it at the proper moment, and when the ceremony came, the young warrior was around seventeen. Wooden Leg belonged to one of the last generations of Northern Cheyenne to reach adulthood living in the traditional way. As a child, he still saw vast herds of buffalo. His people fought their long-standing enemies, primarily the Crow and the Shoshone, and their territory stretched from Montana’s Bighorn River westward to the Black Hills.
The Cheyenne had originally come from the Great Lakes region, moving southwest to present-day Minnesota in the 1600s, then into North Dakota a century later. They likely obtained horses around 1730, which allowed them to venture onto the Great Plains and follow the buffalo. By the time Wooden Leg was born, conflict with the United States government was becoming unavoidable. Settlers were pouring westward, and the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 had ended Red Cloud’s War.
Under that agreement, the Oglala and their Cheyenne allies received a large reservation that included the sacred Black Hills, while a vast stretch of unclaimed land in Wyoming and Montana was designated as hunting grounds for the Northern Cheyenne and Lakota. That territory included the Powder River country where Wooden Leg grew up. When gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1875, the government attempted to buy the land, but most of the tribes refused to negotiate. On January 31, 1876, all free-roaming Lakota and Cheyenne were ordered to report to their agencies.
When they refused, General Sheridan authorized military operations to drive them back onto the reservations. The deadline and the refusal to meet it sparked the Great Sioux War of 1876. Wooden Leg later explained that his people did not fully comprehend the danger. His father argued that the Cheyenne should remain on their hunting grounds, which the 1868 treaty allowed.
Even Custer himself, in his book My Life on the Plains, expressed sympathy for the free-roaming life, writing that if he were an Indian, he would rather cast his lot among those who adhered to the free open plains than submit to the confined limits of a reservation. Still, the warnings came. Relatives from the reservation would visit and repeat the same message: the soldiers are coming, the soldiers are coming. Most of the Cheyenne disbelieved it.
As long as they did not attack the whites, Wooden Leg claimed, they believed they could continue to live and hunt wherever they wanted. The soldiers eventually came. One morning, an elderly man climbed a neighboring hill to observe and pray, as was customary. Almost immediately he began shouting: the soldiers are right here.
The camp and the horse herd were already in the path of the invading whites. Children cried for their mothers, women screamed as bullets sang among the lodges, and elderly men and women limped and stooped to escape. Braves grabbed whatever weapons they had and tried to meet the attack. Wooden Leg captured a pony, launched a few arrows at the long knives, and helped move two small children to safety.
He tried to rejoin the battle, but it did not help. The Cheyenne watched from a distance as the soldiers triumphed and burned their lodges and belongings. This was the Battle of Powder River, fought on March 17, 1876, about thirty-five miles southwest of present-day Broadus, Montana. Colonel Joseph J.
Reynolds led the troops and would later face court-martial for his conduct. Only one warrior died, but the destruction was devastating. The Cheyenne launched a counter-raid that evening and recovered most of their horses, roughly five hundred in all, but they lost their shelters in harsh cold weather, and more people died from exposure. A few days later, they found refuge in an Oglala camp under the legendary Crazy Horse, who provided them with temporary housing, robes, and food.
From there, Wooden Leg and his people moved on, joining the great gathering along the Little Bighorn River. The camp was enormous, one of the largest assemblies of Plains tribes in known history. Wooden Leg estimated that the Hunkpapa people of Sitting Bull had twice as many lodges as the Cheyenne, and the Sans Arc more than the Miniconjou and Oglala combined. Modern estimates suggest roughly a thousand lodges, holding anywhere from three to seven thousand people and perhaps two thousand warriors.
No one knows the exact number to this day. Wooden Leg had other things on his mind. Seven days earlier, the Indians had pushed the Army back along the upper Rosebud, and he did not expect the soldiers to bother them again. 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 all night. They did not return to their own lodge until after dawn and slept late on the morning of June 25. Wooden Leg was not awakened until the soldiers arrived. He heard rifle fire in the distance as women screamed and searched for their babies.
Older men yelled that the soldiers had arrived and ordered the young men to get out and fight. Wooden Leg hurried to prepare for combat. He put on a new shirt and elegantly beaded moccasins and smeared on war paint. He would have preferred time to oil and braid his hair, but there was none.
His father rushed him as he caught his favorite pony. These preparations were not mere show. Death was the reason behind them. Every Cheyenne warrior wanted to look his best when he went before the Great Spirit, whether in battle, illness, or injury.
Only warriors who had received specific instructions from medicine men were exempt. They entered battle half naked, believing themselves bulletproof and not in danger of dying, so they saw no need to prepare to meet their creator. Wooden Leg mounted up and joined a large contingent of armed fighters. Riding around the camp circle, he saw the blue coats for the first time.
He accompanied a group of Sioux warriors until they had passed behind the soldiers, though by then the troops had mounted their horses and hidden in the woods. The soldiers were accompanied by some Indian scouts, who looked like Shoshone or Crows and had mostly retreated up the valley. Custer divided his command, though the exact details of what followed remain uncertain. His attempt to cross the river and attack the village failed, and his troops retreated north along Battle Ridge toward Calhoun Hill.
There were just over two hundred men under his direct command, split into several companies. They had no chance. Calhoun Hill seems to have become the site of the deaths of Companies C, I, and L. Custer may have ridden north and even crossed the river, but he quickly came back as Companies E and F were forced back to Last Stand Hill.
The forty or fifty soldiers who remained on the hill could not hold out for long. The fight took place about three miles north of where Major Reno and Captain Benteen had made their stand. Wooden Leg first joined the fighters assaulting Reno’s position, but he and the others soon left to respond to Custer’s charge across the camp. He stopped in the village to exchange horses and offer his father the tobacco he had taken from a dead trooper.
Then he crossed the river again, heading east toward the battleground. Almost all the Indians dismounted and scuttled along the gullies on foot as they approached the soldiers. Hundreds of riders circled about, some simply dodging, others daringly racing in front of the military. For about an hour and a half, Wooden Leg engaged in what he called slow, long-distance fighting, sniping at soldiers who stood on a high ridge east of the Cheyenne camp.
He noted the advantage of Indian bows: the troops had to expose themselves to aim, while the warriors could stay hidden and loft arrows at them. Then approximately forty troops charged from the eastern part of the ridge toward the river, directly into the center of concealed Sioux and Cheyenne fighters on a low rise. The soldiers halted and dismounted, and soon the warriors surrounded them. Then came the scene Wooden Leg described so vividly.
The Indians rushed forward, jumping up and dodging down as they closed on the soldiers. The white men, he said, all went mad at once. Rather than fight, they turned their weapons on themselves. They were all dead almost before the warriors reached them.
Wooden Leg was not the only participant to make such claims, and the issue remains a matter of debate, but from his perspective, the soldiers took their own lives. The warriors quickly gathered up the guns of the fallen soldiers and turned them on those who remained on the high ridge. Wooden Leg, who had been fighting on foot, returned to his horse and rode around the eastern end of the ridge. By the time he arrived, the soldiers there were all dead.
According to the Indians who witnessed it, only a handful had been killed by Indian weapons. The rest had shot themselves. A Cheyenne told him that four soldiers had tried to flee, turning their horses and retracing their route. The warriors swiftly killed three of them.
The fourth crossed a gulch and a ridge to the east before the pursuing Sioux closed in. His horse was exhausted, and his right arm moved as if he were beating the animal to go faster. Then his right hand rose suddenly to his head. He fell dead from his horse, having shot 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 but then limited his fire, wary of unintentionally striking one of his own men among the many warriors leaping up and down in the grass. The Battle of the Little Bighorn ended with Custer’s entire command destroyed. Wooden Leg survived the fight, but the war would not end with it.
The Army’s retaliation was swift and brutal, and within a few years the Cheyenne and Lakota way of life Wooden Leg had known as a young man would be broken. His account, told half a century later to a doctor who recorded his words, remains one of the most direct and unsettling testimonies from that day, preserved in the book Wooden Leg: A Warrior Who Fought Custer.