Come on. Big Village. Be Quick.

by StockJockey

Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - 12:54 am

One hundred and thirty two years ago George Armstrong Custer fatefully rode into the Medicine Tail coulee in a what became known as his Last Stand. It was simply, a massacre.

Custer last written words were Come on. Big Village. Be Quick.

A new book sheds light on the fateful events leading to Custer’s death

A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Big Horn; the Last Great Battle of the American West, by James Donovan, is occasionally gory in its own right, although the books strengths are numerous . Custer is an icon in American History, and reminds me of many fearless, and reckless, traders I have known over the years. Perhaps George would have been a hedge fund manager if he were born 100 years later.

A brief look at what went down on June 25th, 1876 is in order. Sitting Bull warned the assembled Lakota and Cheyenne warriors not to mutilate the fallen Cavalry soldiers, due to a dream he had that foreshadowed the event.

But the women and children did not get the memo, and took out their ire on the dead and dying soldiers, including an African American interpreter who hard married an Lakota woman but rode with Major Reno on the fateful day:

Dorman, the black interpreter, was surrounded by Indians a short distance from the timber. He turned in his saddle and shot one through the heart, but his horse, riddled with bullets, went down. The big man dropped to one knee and began firing into the Indians with his sporting rifle. When his friend Rutten galloped by, Dorman yelled good-bye to him. Soon Dorman was surrounded by hostiles while the command passed him by. A bullet found him. Mortally wounded but still alive, he sat on the ground, his life flowing from him......

Women and young boys who had not retreated to the hills ran among the downed soldiers, finishing off those still alive, mutilating the dead as was their tradition, and plundering their bodies.

Just a hundred yards southeast of the timber, along the trail of dead, Sitting Bull rode up to where several Lakota’s were gathered around the wounded black man sitting in the dirt. He was known to them as Teat, married to a Hunkpapa woman named Visible. He was clearly close to death, a gunshot wound to his breast.

“My friends, “ teat said, “you have already killed me, don’t count coup on me.”

“Don’t kill that man, he is a friend of mine.” said Sitting Bull, remembering the day years before when the black man had given him some food. Sitting Bull dismounted and gave the dying man some water, then rode off toward the river.

A Hunkpapa women named Eagle Robe, mourning for her ten year-old brother just killed by the Cavalry, rode up and jumped to the ground.

“Do not kill me, because I will be dead in a short while anyway.” said Teat.

“If you did not want to be killed,” said the women, “why did you not stay home where you belong and not come to attack us?” Her brothers name was One Hawk. He had gone to the east with another man very early that morning looking for a horse that had strayed from the family herd. They had discovered the soldiers, then made for the camp as quickly as they could. They had just reached the Greasy Grass (Indian camp on the Little Big Horn river) when some Arikara scout’s ahead of the soldiers had killed him. The other man had escaped to warn the camp.

Eagle Robe raised a revolver a shot Teat in the head.

After killing him, Eagle Robe continued to the river, where she killed two more wounded soldiers. She shot one with her revolver and dispatched the other with her sheath knife. Behind her, other women began to mutilate Teat.

They drove a picket pin (tee-pee spike) through his testicles into the ground, slashed his body, and cut off his penis and stuffed it into his mouth. A Terrible Glory

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