In the summer of 1876, a young Northern Cheyenne warrior named Wooden Leg watched as the soldiers he had been fighting suddenly turned their weapons on themselves. “Instead of fighting us, they turned their guns upon themselves,” he recalled decades later. “Almost before we could get to them, every one of them was dead. ” Whether or not Wooden Leg’s account of the final moments of the Battle of the Little Bighorn was entirely accurate, his testimony became one of the most important Native American perspectives on the most famous engagement of the Indian Wars.
Wooden Leg was born in the Black Hills in 1858, originally named Eats From The Hand. As a teenager, he took the name of a favorite uncle, a Crow captive adopted into the Cheyenne who was renowned for his endurance as a walker. The younger Wooden Leg earned the name through his own stamina, and he proudly accepted the honor. He belonged to the last generation of Cheyenne to grow up in the traditional way, following the buffalo across the northern plains and making war against their old enemies, the Crow and Shoshone.
The Cheyenne had migrated from the Great Lakes region over the previous two centuries, and by Wooden Leg’s youth they ranged from the Black Hills to the Bighorn River in Montana. Their world was changing rapidly. Settlers were pouring west, and conflicts with the United States government were becoming unavoidable. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 had granted the Lakota a large reservation in what is now western South Dakota, including the sacred Black Hills, and had set aside a vast expanse of unceded territory in Wyoming and Montana as hunting grounds for both the Lakota and the Northern Cheyenne.
It was in this Powder River country that Wooden Leg spent much of his youth. In 1875, gold was discovered in the Black Hills. The government wanted to buy the land, but the tribes refused to sell. A deadline of January 31, 1876 was set for all free-roaming Lakota and Cheyenne to report to the agencies.
When most bands refused, General Sheridan authorized military action against the so-called hostiles. That ultimatum ignited the Great Sioux War of 1876. Wooden Leg’s father was firmly against going to the reservation, believing that Indians were not made to live that way and that it was better to remain on their hunting grounds, which the 1868 treaty had guaranteed them. George Armstrong Custer had expressed a similar sentiment in his own writings, saying that if he were an Indian, he would prefer the free open plains to the confinement of a reservation.
Nonetheless, Custer had a job to do. Reservation visitors repeatedly warned the free bands that the soldiers were coming, but most refused to believe it. On the morning of March 17, 1876, the warnings proved true. Soldiers under Colonel Joseph J.
Reynolds attacked the Cheyenne camp at the Powder River. An old man atop a nearby knoll shouted the alarm as the troopers moved between the camp and the horse herd. Women screamed and children cried as bullets tore through the lodges. Wooden Leg caught a pony, fired a few arrows, and helped carry two young children to safety.
The village was destroyed, and most of the Cheyenne possessions were lost. Only one warrior was killed, and the Cheyenne recovered most of their five hundred horses in a raid that night, but the loss of shelter in freezing conditions proved deadly, and several more Cheyenne perished. The survivors located the Oglala camp under Crazy Horse, who received them with full hospitality. A council was held, and it was decided that the Oglala and Cheyenne should join the Hunkpapa Sioux of Sitting Bull to the northeast.
The Hunkpapas outnumbered the Cheyenne and Oglala combined, and safety in numbers was a powerful consideration. They were soon joined by the Miniconjou under Lame Deer. As the camp grew, food and grass for the horses grew scarce, so they moved as one in search of game. More groups joined along the way: Sans Arcs, Blackfeet Sioux, Assiniboines, and a band Wooden Leg referred to as the “waist and skirt” people, who were very poor and used dogs to haul their belongings.
Later, Southern Cheyenne under Chief Lame White Man arrived. The camp traveled west, allowing their horses to graze and regain strength, with a large council held each evening to plan the next move. There was no ultimate destination, only the search for good grazing and ample game. They still believed they were rightfully within their ordained hunting grounds.
Around the middle of May, they found an abundance of buffalo on Rosebud Creek in present-day Montana. They camped there for about a week, hunting and drying meat. At what Wooden Leg called the fourth Rosebud camp, more Cheyenne arrived from the reservation with warnings of approaching soldiers. Wooden Leg and ten others departed for the Tongue River to hunt and scout.
They killed buffalo and also located a soldier camp. After considering a raid on the horses, they judged it too risky and returned to report what they had found. That night, Wooden Leg rode out with a combined force of some eight hundred Lakota and Cheyenne under Crazy Horse. On the morning of June 17, 1876, they attacked General George Crook and his troops at the Battle of the Rosebud.
The fight lasted several hours, and both sides suffered similar losses. Crook claimed victory because he held the ground after the warriors departed, but Wooden Leg and his comrades believed they had won. They had gone toe-to-toe with the army for hours, something they rarely did. One officer present, Captain Anson Mills, later wrote that they were the best cavalry soldiers on earth, charging while hanging from their horses’ necks, exposing almost no part of themselves to aim at.
Following the battle, Crook’s Crow and Shoshone scouts left him, and he moved his troops over forty miles south, where they remained immobile for weeks waiting for reinforcements. Crook and his men would take no part in the fighting soon to come. That left two columns in the field. Colonel John Gibbon was on the Yellowstone with plans to march south, joining General Terry, the commander of the Department of Dakota.
The other column was Custer’s 7th Cavalry, twelve companies of some 566 troopers, 31 officers, and 35 Crow and Arikara scouts. Neither Gibbon, Terry, nor Custer knew what had happened on the Rosebud. On June 22, Custer began marching his troops toward the Rosebud in search of hostiles. Wooden Leg and the others broke camp the next morning and headed toward the Bighorn River, their numbers further reinforced by additional Cheyenne and a handful of Arapaho.
Wooden Leg later described the structure of this gathering, noting that each tribe operated its own internal government, and the chiefs met together as equals. The only one above all the others was Sitting Bull, recognized as the old man chief of all the combined camps. In reality, Sitting Bull was only in his early forties, but to an eighteen-year-old like Wooden Leg, that seemed ancient. On June 24, the large camp began raising lodges along the banks of the Little Bighorn.
Wooden Leg estimated there were around three hundred Cheyenne lodges, with the other Sioux bands each having more, and the Hunkpapas twice as many as the Cheyenne. Modern estimates suggest around one thousand lodges housing between three and seven thousand people, with anywhere from one to two thousand warriors. It is considered one of the largest gatherings of plains tribes in known history. Wooden Leg had other things on his mind.
“I had no thought then of any fighting to be done in the near future,” he later said. “We had driven away the soldiers on the Upper Rosebud seven days ago. My mind was occupied mostly by such thoughts as regularly are the uppermost in the minds of young men. I was eighteen years old and I liked girls.
” He and his brother spent the entire night of June 24 dancing with young women in the Sans Arc camp and did not return to their own lodge until after daybreak, sleeping in late on the 25th. It was the sound of rifle fire that woke him. Women were screaming, and older men were calling out that the soldiers were here. Wooden Leg rushed to prepare himself for battle, donning a new shirt and beaded moccasins and applying his war paint.
He would have liked to oil his hair as well, but there was no time. Every Cheyenne warrior dressed carefully before battle, because each wanted to look his best when meeting the Great Spirit. The only exceptions were warriors with special instructions from medicine men, who believed themselves impervious to bullets and went into battle half naked. Wooden Leg mounted his horse and followed a large group of warriors beyond the circle of Hunkpapa lodges, where he saw the bluecoats for the first time.
The soldiers had mounted their horses and were hiding in the timber, accompanied by Indian scouts, likely Crows or Shoshones. Wooden Leg did not know it, but these were Major Reno and his men. Custer had ordered Reno to attack the village, but Reno quickly found himself overwhelmed and ordered a retreat into the timber. When the hidden soldiers came tearing out on horseback, Wooden Leg and his companions initially fled, but soon realized the soldiers were running away from them, not toward them.
The warriors turned and pursued. Wooden Leg fired four shots from his old cap-and-ball six-shooter with little effect. He and another Cheyenne named Little Bird rode alongside a soldier, striking at him with their pony whips. The trooper shot Little Bird in the thigh, and Wooden Leg grabbed the rifle strapped to the soldier’s back and yanked it away.
He did not harm the man further, swept on by the crowd of warriors. As the soldiers crashed into the river, Wooden Leg used his new rifle as a club, knocking two more men from their saddles. He then saw an enemy Indian firing from behind a knoll. Wooden Leg dismounted and crept forward.
The man was struck by a bullet but was only wounded, and as he raised his rifle, Wooden Leg and the others rushed in. Wooden Leg crashed his rifle down on the man’s head as others beat and stabbed him to death. He later believed the man was an Arikara scout. Wooden Leg joined the others in pillaging the dead.
Reno had left forty men behind in his retreat, and all of them were dead. Wooden Leg took tobacco from one fallen trooper, a cartridge belt from another, and finally forty rounds of ammunition for his new rifle, a Springfield Model 1873 carbine. After loading the weapon, he set out again to join the fight. Meanwhile, Reno and what remained of his command had linked up with Captain Benteen and were making a stand on a bluff overlooking the river, later known as Reno Hill.
Custer, with five companies, remained on the east side of the river pushing north. At some point, he split his command. An attempt to cross the river and attack the village was repulsed, and the troopers fell back to Calhoun Hill and north along what became known as Battle Ridge. With just over two hundred men split up, they had no chance.
Company C, I, and L perished on or around Calhoun Hill. Companies E and F were driven to Last Stand Hill. Those left on the hill, around forty or fifty men, did not last much longer. Wooden Leg initially joined the warriors attacking Reno Hill but soon departed with others to answer Custer’s charge on the other side of the camp.
He paused to swap mounts and gave his father the tobacco he had taken from the dead trooper. He crossed the river and joined the fight, sniping at the soldiers from a distance. He noted that the Indian bows had a distinct advantage, as warriors could remain concealed and lob arrows down on the soldiers, while the troopers had to expose themselves to take aim. After about an hour and a half of long-distance fighting, around forty soldiers came galloping from the east part of the ridge toward the river, right into a group of hidden Sioux and Cheyenne.
The troopers stopped and dismounted on a low ridge and were surrounded. This was the moment Wooden Leg described as the soldiers going crazy and killing themselves. As the warriors rushed forward, the white men turned their guns upon themselves. “Almost before we could get to them, every one of them was dead,” he said.
Wooden Leg later reported that seven troopers tried to escape down a coulee toward the river, but they too were surrounded, and some, according to what he heard, also took their own lives. Wooden Leg described one soldier who raised himself on his left elbow after the battle, his expression wild as if his mind was tangled. A Sioux warrior jumped forward, wrenched the six-shooter from his grasp, and shot him through the head. Wooden Leg thought he must have been the last man killed in the battle, where not one of the enemy got away.
He examined some of the dead. One man, stripped naked, had tattoos, and there is speculation this may have been Tom Custer, the general’s younger brother. Wooden Leg stated that none of the warriors knew who any of the soldiers were. He did not learn about Custer until quite some time afterwards and never heard anyone in the village discussing the man following the battle.
This is backed by other participants. Shaved Elk, an Oglala, later claimed they did not suspect they were fighting Custer and did not recognize him alive or dead. Wooden Leg did recall one warrior saying that the big chief of the soldiers had been named Long Hair, and a Hunkpapa chief later claimed to have killed him, recognizing him by his long and wavy yellow hair. But there were problems with these claims, as it is now known Custer had cut his hair short before the battle.
Wooden Leg took a scalp from a dead soldier with a long yellow beard, which he tied to an arrow shaft. This may have been Custer’s adjutant, William W. Cooke, who was known for his long mutton chops. He also took a jacket, pants, and a few bottles of whiskey.
He gave the beard scalp to his grandmother and passed the whiskey out to his friends. There was little celebration, as too many families were mourning their dead. The next day, Wooden Leg joined warriors watching for soldiers from Reno Hill who might try to fetch water from the river. He shot at one man who pitched forward into the water.
Two Sioux warriors got to him first and killed him. The Sioux agreed Wooden Leg’s bullet had been the first blow, so he was allowed to choose from the man’s belongings, finding a folding knife, a plug of chewing tobacco, and a few silver dollars. However, military records indicate all the water carriers were accounted for, and none failed to rejoin their comrades on the hill. Whether Wooden Leg’s memory was faulty after fifty years or he was telling a story, the claim remains unverified.
Wooden Leg also came upon the body of a dead black man, not scalped or cut up like the white men. This may have been Isaiah Dorman, a freedman from Pennsylvania who married into the Santee Sioux, was friendly with Sitting Bull, and served with the 7th as an interpreter. When Dorman’s body was later discovered by soldiers, it had indeed been mutilated. Over 260 soldiers were dead and more than fifty wounded.
Wooden Leg claimed the native casualties numbered just thirty, six Cheyenne and twenty-four Lakota, with the number rising in the days to come as the mortally wounded passed. The battle was over, and the free roaming life of the Cheyenne was drawing to an end. Wooden Leg would go on to live another sixty years, eventually working for the US Army, and would find himself at Wounded Knee in South Dakota.
But the Battle of the Little Bighorn, told from his perspective, remains one of the most enduring accounts of the most famous fight of the Indian Wars.