Wooden Leg was a Northern Cheyenne warrior who fought in the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876. His account of that day, recorded in his later years, offers a rare Native American perspective on one of the most studied battles in American history.
Born with the name Canceo, he earned the name Wooden Leg after suffering a leg wound in a clash with the Crow Nation. The injury forced him to use a wooden prosthesis. He was a respected fighter among his people and took part in multiple conflicts against the U.S. Army.
On the morning of the battle, Wooden Leg was asleep when a sudden noise jolted him awake. Gunfire echoed in the distance. Chaos erupted throughout the camps as women screamed, warriors shouted, and elders bellowed warnings.
Wooden Leg sprinted to his lodge and prepared for battle. He tore off his everyday clothes and pulled on new britches and a fine cloth shirt. He painted his face with a blue-black circle, filling it with red and yellow. He combed his hair and tied it back with a buckskin strip.
His father, Many Wounds, had already secured his favorite horse. The older man draped a blanket over the animal and fashioned a bridle from rawhide. He urged his son to hurry.
Wooden Leg leapt onto his horse and galloped after the other warriors. His brother had already raced ahead. The mass of mounted warriors surged forward, pushing past the Oglala camp where hundreds of riders swarmed around soldiers who fired relentlessly.
The warriors answered with a storm of arrows. They rode alongside the Sioux, flanking the soldiers until they cut off their retreat. The soldiers took cover in the trees, but the warriors pressed closer, raining arrows into the timber.
Fallen soldiers littered the grass and sagebrush. Some Sioux crept forward with torches, ready to burn the woods. Then suddenly, the soldiers burst from cover on horseback.
They were not charging. They were running for their lives, bolting across the open valley toward the river.
The warriors hesitated only a heartbeat before giving chase. Wooden Leg found himself near the front. The soldiers' horses were exhausted, but the warriors' ponies flew like the wind.
Wooden Leg squeezed off four shots. He did not know if any struck home. Nearby, a Sioux warrior buried an arrow in a soldier's skull. Another soldier toppled from his saddle. More fell to arrows, spears, and stone war clubs.
Wooden Leg and a warrior named Little Bird zeroed in on one soldier wearing a trailing war bonnet. They flanked him, whipping his horse from behind. The soldier twisted in his saddle and fired into Little Bird's leg.
Enraged, Wooden Leg swung the elk antler handle of his whip hard against the soldier's skull. The blow staggered him. Wooden Leg grabbed the rifle strapped to the soldier's back and wrenched it free as the man slumped to the ground.
He left the soldier there, alive or dead, he never knew.
The surge of warriors carried him forward. He now clutched a soldier's rifle, useless without cartridges. He swung it like a club, knocking two soldiers from their saddles into the river.
Most warriors halted at the river, but some, including Wooden Leg, pushed across. On the far side, a Cheyenne warrior named Whirlwind collided with an enemy scout. Both fired point blank. Both dropped dead.
Nearby, a second scout hid behind a sagebrush mound, picking shots at the warriors. They returned fire and flanked him. A bullet dropped him. As they closed in, he weakly raised his rifle. Wooden Leg smashed the barrel into his skull, and others finished him with knives and clubs.
Wooden Leg claimed the dead man's gun. A Sioux warrior begged for one of his captured rifles, so Wooden Leg handed over the longer one and kept the shorter. The Sioux had already taken the dead man's ammo belt and gave him none.
Returning west across the river, Wooden Leg learned many soldiers had died there. The news weighed heavy, but he trudged uphill anyway.
Then a voice shouted, "Look, more soldiers." Wooden Leg spotted them on far-off hills downstream, still on their side of the river. Word spread fast. Warriors peeled away, some riding the ridgelines, others fording the river to flank through the valley.
Wooden Leg chose the valley route. His horse skidded down the slope, splashed across the river, and wove through the camps toward the Cheyenne circle at the village's end.
The camp stood half empty. Most women, children, and elders had fled west into the hills. Only his father remained at their lodge. Wooden Leg recounted the battle upstream and handed him the tobacco he had looted. When he showed off the rifle and cartridges, his father nodded.
"You fought bravely. Rest now," the older man said.
"No," Wooden Leg argued. "This gun makes me stronger. I'm going back."
His father frowned but roped Wooden Leg's second horse from the herd. He blessed it with protective medicine. Wooden Leg did the same for himself, strapping on his sheath knife.
Across the river, the new battle raged. Warriors streamed northeast, some fresh from camp, others arriving from the first fight. The soldiers had formed lines along a ridge, while the warriors fanned across lower slopes, flanking them.
His father gripped his arm. "Your brother's already there. Must both my sons risk themselves? You've no shield, no flute. Hang back. Shoot from afar."
Nearby, two younger warriors hesitated. Wooden Leg jangled his cartridges, boasting of the spoils they had taken. Guns, tobacco, even a dead man's clothes. Their hesitation vanished. They swung onto their horses and joined him.
As they neared the fighting, the mass dissolved into individual paths. Though every warrior had arrived on horseback, most now dismounted, creeping forward through gullies on foot. Wooden Leg angled left up a gulch, trailing Cheyenne fighters.
The soldiers had advanced along a high ridge two miles east of the camp before veering onto a lower spur where most would meet their end. Warriors from the valley and southern hills swelled in numbers, encircling the soldiers' ridge.
They took cover in gullies and behind sagebrush mounds. Bows outnumbered guns. Arrows arced high from concealment, raining down on men and horses alike. Gun users had to expose themselves, but arrows found their marks silently.
This slow dance of death lasted 90 minutes. The warriors could see the soldiers clustered on the ridge with their horses, but the soldiers could not spot them slithering through brush, popping up to fire, then vanishing like prairie ghosts.
Then a sudden shift. About 40 soldiers broke from the ridge's eastern end, galloping toward the river and the hidden mass of Cheyenne and Oglala warriors. The warriors retreated into a deep gully as the soldiers dismounted on the low ridge they had abandoned.
Then Lame White Man, the Southern Cheyenne chief, galloped up, rallying them. "Turn back. We can finish them all."
Then the soldiers broke. Instead of firing at the warriors, they turned their weapons on themselves. By the time the warriors reached them, every man lay dead by his own hand.
Wooden Leg retrieved his horse and circled east of the ridge. When he arrived, the remaining soldiers there were already corpses. Warriors told him most had killed each other or themselves.
Riding north of the ridge, Wooden Leg joined warriors surrounding another band of soldiers on the slope. He fired two long-range shots before stopping. Too many warriors were swarming through the sagebrush, risking friendly fire.
Then these soldiers too descended into madness, turning guns on comrades or themselves. None lived to fill the warriors' blades.
As Wooden Leg surveyed the field, a two-spirit warrior grabbed his arm. "There, the soldier chief, the one giving orders." But before they could point clearly, stampeding horses churned up dust, obscuring everything. The moment, and perhaps Custer himself, was lost in the chaos.
Wooden Leg noticed a Sioux warrior staggering away from the battle toward the gully. He swayed unsteadily, collapsing and rising repeatedly. As he passed near, Wooden Leg recoiled in horror. The man's entire lower jaw had been shot away. The gruesome sight turned his stomach, forcing him to vomit.
For most of the prolonged fighting, Wooden Leg followed his father's advice and remained mounted, keeping his distance while circling the battlefield. Only when soldiers charged toward the river did he dismount briefly to join the advancing warriors.
By now, only one group of soldiers remained, taking cover behind their dead horses at the ridge's western edge. Hundreds of warriors silently closed in from all sides. Wooden Leg crawled up the slope with his horse tethered by a long lariat. Though he could not see specific targets, he fired toward the dead horses marking the soldiers' position.
The soldiers' gunfire ceased. Warriors creeping closest shouted that all the white men were dead. A chaotic surge followed. Warriors, boys, and elders rushed forward in a cloud of dust and smoke.
In the aftermath, a bizarre moment occurred when one seemingly dead soldier propped himself up on his elbow, his dazed expression suggesting complete confusion. As startled warriors recoiled, a Sioux brave seized the man's pistol and shot him through the head. Wooden Leg believed he was the battle's final casualty.
The fighting had lasted from mid-morning till early afternoon. Among the dead, one fair-bearded soldier caught Wooden Leg's eye. His exceptionally long yellow facial hair inspired Wooden Leg to take an unusual scalp. Carefully skinning one side of the man's face to preserve the beard, he mounted it on an arrow shaft as a macabre trophy.
Moving through the carnage, word came that Noisy Walking lay severely wounded. Wooden Leg found his childhood friend in a gully. Though Noisy Walking claimed to feel good, his body betrayed three bullet wounds, one clean through his body, and multiple stab injuries.
Moving eastward, Wooden Leg spotted a nearly concealed body. Something about the figure seemed familiar. Summoning his brother Yellow Hair, they examined the corpse and made a grim discovery. It was their own war chief, Lame White Man.
The evidence suggested a tragic error. His finest clothing remained untouched. A Sioux warrior likely mistook him for an enemy in the chaos. A single bullet had pierced his chest, accompanied by multiple stab wounds. They discreetly covered his body with a blanket, avoiding confrontation with their Sioux allies.
Across the field, mourning women, mostly Sioux, retrieved their dead and wounded. The victory's joy faded as Wooden Leg heard their wails, reminded of their own losses.
That afternoon, the people conducted sacred burials. Lame White Man received honors fit for a chief. Wooden Leg helped inter his bones in a hillside crevice, wrapping the body in blankets and a buffalo robe, sealing the tomb with flat stones.
As custom dictated after death, all tribes began relocating. The Cheyenne moved approximately one mile downstream northwest. Sioux bands retreated toward the bench hills west of the Little Bighorn.
At dusk, Wooden Leg went to Noisy Walking. The wounded warrior lay beneath a willow dome, his body frail upon buffalo robes. His father, White Bull, kept watch while his mother sat silent at the entrance.
"How are you?" Wooden Leg asked.
"Good," Noisy Walking whispered. "Only I want water."
Wooden Leg knelt beside him. "You were very brave," he told him.
When Noisy Walking begged again for water, White Bull's voice cracked as he refused. A medicine man knows when even a sip can hasten the end.
Wooden Leg stayed until he could bear no more. There was nothing left to do but leave his friend to his fate.
That night, no songs of victory rang through the camps. Only the muffled cries of mourning women and the low chanting of prayers. Mothers and sisters gashed their limbs in ritual sorrow. Even the usual campfires were few, lit only for cooking or the solemn burning of the dead's belongings.
Five warriors, including Wooden Leg, took turns scouting through the night. Once they crept to the high bluffs overlooking the soldiers' refuge and saw them huddled below. Though they could have picked them off, they held their fire. Their duty was to observe, not provoke.
When relief came at last, Wooden Leg did not seek his family. He turned his horse loose and collapsed onto a patch of thick grass. Exhaustion was heavier than the dew.
Wooden Leg survived the battle and later escaped to Canada alongside fellow warriors. He eventually returned to settle on the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana, where he passed away in 1940.
His account, preserved in books and records, offers a crucial Native American viewpoint of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. It is a story not of triumph alone, but of sacrifice, vigilance, and the unbreakable spirit of his people.