Custer’s Indian Allies

  

The Lakota Sioux were an aggressive and predatory warrior nation.  Since their adoption of the horse in the 1730s, the Sioux had become the Mongols of the American Great Plains…killing and burning…driving smaller and weaker tribes before them.

This was certainly true in the case of the Arikara and Crow tribes.  The Crow once inhabited the Black Hills in what is now South Dakota, but were displaced by the invading Sioux.  The Lakota regarded the former Crow territory as theirs “by right of conquest.” 

The Crow moved farther west to the vicinity of the Little Big Horn River in present day Montana, but the Lakota continued pressing westward into the lands of the Crow, so it is not surprising that the Crow were only too willing to support the U.S. Cavalry against a long time enemy.

In 1866, President Andrew Johnson signed an “Act to increase and fix the Military Peace Establishment of the United States.” This Act had an important impact on the Crow and Arikara tribes who now had a new way of resisting the aggressive Lakota Sioux…they could serve as scouts for the powerful U.S. Cavalry.

The half-Sioux, half-Arikara scout “Bloody Knife” became George Armstrong Custer’s favorite scout.  Custer met Bloody Knife in 1873, and Bloody knife accompanied the Custer expedition in the Yellowstone that year. 

Custer occasionally gave Bloody Knife gifts, including a silver medal inscribed with Bloody Knife's name.  Bloody Knife warned Custer not to attack the overwhelming Indian village the scouts had located during the campaign against the Sioux in 1876, but to no avail. 

On June 25, 1876, Bloody Knife participated in Reno’s charge on the Indian village along the Little Big Horn River.

Bloody Knife was shot through the head, his brains splattering all over Major Marcus Reno, which may have so unhinged Reno that he ordered a disorderly “Charge to the Rear.”

Meanwhile at the other end of the field, the Crow scouts, including White Man Runs Him, Goes Ahead, Curly, and Hairy Moccasin, advised Custer to wait for reinforcements.

Custer refused, believing he could whip the entire Sioux nation.  Since the scout's only duties were to find the Indian encampments, not necessarily to fight, Custer sent these Crow scouts away about an hour before engaging in the final battle.

After the battle, Curly found an army supply boat, the Far West, at the confluence of the Bighorn and Little Bighorn Rivers. He was the first to report the Custer’s annihilation, using a combination of sign language, drawings, and an interpreter. Curly did not claim to have fought in the battle, but only to have witnessed it from a distance.

When accounts of “Custer's Last Stand” began to circulate in the press, however, legends grew that Curly had actively participated in the battle, but had managed to escape.  According to one of these legends when Curley saw that the party with Custer was about to be overwhelmed, he begged Custer to let him show him a way to escape.  “…Custer looked at Curly, waved him away and rode back to the little group of men, to die with them.”  Or so goes the story.

Curly died of pneumonia on May 22, 1923 and is buried at the National Cemetery at the Little Bighorn Battlefield.