Goes-Ahead carries about a tall, attenuated, and weakened frame. He is standing on the verge of yonder land. He is stricken with a fatal disease. In manner he is as quiet and [pg 146] unobtrusive as a brooding bird. When reminiscent his wonted smile disappears, his eye lights up with a strange mysterious fire. He talks straight on like a man who has something to tell and is eager to tell it. We may gain better glimpses of his life if we let him tell his own tale: “When I was quite a lad I went to war. I was the first in the battle and the others all said: ‘There he goes ahead of us.’ I have been first in battle ever since and thus I got my name, Goes-Ahead. The greatest pleasure I had when I was a boy, I remember, was in killing wolves. After we had shot the wolf we would run up and put our coup stick on him and play that he was our enemy. Another sport we had was playing buffalo. We divided up and part of the boys would be buffalo and part would be hunters. The boys who were playing buffalo would paw up the dust and we would run after them and shoot arrows at them, and then the buffalo bull would chase us back until he caught one of the boys, then we went on until we conquered the buffalo. When I was a young man we had buffalo skulls with the meat and skin all taken off and we would tie ropes to them and put them on the ice. The girls would sit on the buffalo head and we would draw them along the ice. That was one of our greatest pleasures. I was about fifteen years old when I first went on the war trail. It was in the winter time and I was on foot. I [pg 147] used a bow and arrows and my arrows were not very good. The young fellows who went with me had old Springfields, using powder and bullets. We used to make a shack by the edge of the woods, the others would kill the buffalo and then we would roast the meat by the fire. I used to cut the buffalo meat in strips, and dried it, and then put it in sacks and carried it along for the war party. When we made a little log shelter at night they made me stay by the door where it was cold and I had to do all the cooking for the party. We had no bucket with which to carry water, so when we killed a buffalo we took the tripe and used that for a pail in which to carry water. The scouts of the war party of course were away ahead of us and when we made our shack in the woods they would return at night. If they returned singing we knew that they had buffalo and we would run to get their packs. These scouts got up before daybreak and left the camp on another scouting expedition—they were looking for the enemy to see which way they were moving or what they had been killing. We found the trail by the marks of their old camps. The scouts trailed the enemy until they found the camp, then they returned howling like a wolf as they came near us, and then we knew they had found the enemy. When they approached the camp we made piles of different material and then they shook their guns at the piles and we knew that they were [pg 148] telling the truth, that they had seen the enemy. Then they run over the piles. Then we got ready for the night and stretched our ropes; we took our medicine and tied it on our heads. Then we all stood up in a row and they selected the bravest to take the lead to the camp of the enemy. Then these braves started on a run, first on a dog trot and then faster and faster until they got their speed, and then we endeavoured to keep up until we reached the enemy's camp. When we got within sight of the camp we would all sit in a row and take off our moccasins and put on new ones. Then we selected two men to go around to the camp and get all the horses they could capture and bring them back to our party. When these horses were caught and brought back to us we roped and mounted them bareback and rode away as fast as we could, driving the remainder of the horses they had captured. We kept on for days and nights without anything to eat or any rest. After we had reached our camp and had spent the night we painted ourselves and the best horses, mounted them, and started shooting guns in the air; then everybody knew that the war party was back. We rode through the camp on our horses. We did not expect the enemy to pursue us, because we had gone so far and so long that we knew we were out of their reach.” “My first battle was on the Yellowstone River. I rode a [pg 149] roan horse. I was scouting under General Miles. We found the trail of the Nez Perce Indians. We fought a battle twenty miles north of where Billings is now located. The Nez Perce chased the scouts back. Just at this time our interpreter, Bethune, had quit riding, for his horse had played out and he went on foot. Then many of the Nez Perce dismounted and began to surround Bethune and open fire on him. I thought then his life would be lost and I rode back as fast as I could ride into the midst of the fire, pulled him on the back of my horse and rode away, saving his life.” In his own words Goes-Ahead tells us how he became a scout in the United States Army: “I was a single man and I loved to go on the warpath. The chiefs announced to all the camp asking young men to go to the army officers and enlist as scouts. As I wanted to scout I obeyed the command of my chiefs. The army officers took the names of these young men. The young men whose names were not taken were turned back, but they always took my name, and that is how I came to be a scout.” Goes-Ahead tells for us a most graphic story of his share in the Custer fight and his impressions of General Custer in the chapter on “The Indians' Story of the Custer Fight.”
THE INDIANS' STORY OF THE CUSTER FIGHT [pg 150] We are thinking now of the reddest chapter in the Indian wars of the Western plains. Out amid the dirge of landscape, framed within the valley of the Little Big Horn, where that historic river winds its tortuous way through the sagebrush and cactus of Montana, a weather-beaten cross stands on a lonely hillside, surrounded by a cluster of white marble slabs, and all marking the final resting-place of the heroes of the Seventh United States Cavalry, who perished to a man, “in battle formation,” with their intrepid leader, Gen. George A. Custer. “Custer's Last Battle,” as chroniclers of Indian wars have designated that grim tragedy, has been written about, speculated upon, and discussed more than any other single engagement between white troops and Indians. Volumes have already been written and spoken on all sides—the controversy still goes on. The brave dead sleep on; they are bivouacked on Fame's eternal camping ground. Civilization has irrigated the valley and swept on to Western frontiers, but as though to forever write laurels for the brow of Custer—called the Murat of the American army—the white stones and the decaying crucifix of wood are surrounded [pg 151] by barren bluffs and a landscape so forbidding that it is a midnight of desolation. It seems to be preserved by the God of Battles as an inditement on the landscape never to be erased by any human court—lonely, solemn, desolate, bereaved of any summer flower, written all over with the purple shadows of an endless Miserere. Thirty-six years have run through the hourglass since these dreary hills and the flowing river listened to the furious speech of rifles and the warwhoop of desperate redmen. The snows have piled high the parchment of winter—a shroud for the deathless dead—whiter than the white slabs. Summer has succeeded summer, and all the June days since that day of terrific annihilation have poured their white suns upon these white milestones of the nation's destiny—the only requiem, the winds of winter, and in summer the liquid notes of the meadow lark. In all the argument and controversy that has shifted the various factors of the fight over the checkerboard of contention, the voice of the Indian has hitherto been hopelessly silent. It is historically significant, therefore, that the Indian now speaks, and the story of Custer's Last Battle, now told for the first time by all four of his scouts, and leaders of the Sioux and Cheyennes, should mark an epoch in the history of this grim battle. The Indians who tell this story were all of them members of the last Great Indian Council, [pg 152] and they visited the Custer Field a little over two miles from the camp of the chiefs, traversed every step of the ensanguined ground and verified their positions, recalling the tragic scenes of June 26, 1876. It matters much in reading their story to remember that all of Ouster's command were killed—every lip was sealed in death and the silence is forever unbroken. The Indian survivors are all old men: Goes-Ahead and Hairy Moccasin are each on the verge of the grave, fatally stricken by disease; Chief Two Moons, leader of the hostile Cheyennes, is a blind old man; Runs-the-Enemy, a Sioux chief, totters with age. In a near tomorrow they too will sink into silence. These four scouts, faithful to the memory of Custer, together with the Sioux and Cheyenne chiefs, trudged with the writer to stand on the spot where Custer fell, and with bowed heads pay their silent tribute to the dead. The camera has recorded the scene, a last vision of the red man standing above the grave of his conquerors, a pathetic page in the last chapter of Indian warfare. |
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