CHAPTER XXXI.
CLOSING CHRONICLES.
In 1876 the peaceful Sioux took an outing, having refused to go to their reservation in accordance with the treaty made with the Great Father at Washington, D. C., and regular troops were sent against them.
General Custer, with the 7th Regiment, led the advance, and General Terry aimed for the rear of the children of the forest up the Big Horn.
Here, on the 25th of June, without assistance, and with characteristic courage, General Custer attacked the enemy, sending Colonel Reno to fall on the rear of the village.
Scarcely enough of Custer's own command with him at the time lived long enough to tell the story of the battle. General Custer, his two brothers, and his nephew were among the dead. Reno held his ground until reinforced, but Custer's troops were exterminated.
It is said that the Sioux rose from the ground like bunch-grass and swarmed up the little hill like a pest of grasshoppers, mowing down the soldiers with the very newest and best weapons of warfare, and leaving nothing at last but the robbed and mutilated bodies lying naked in the desolate land of the Dakotah.
The Fenimore Cooper Indian is no doubt a brave and highly intellectual person, educated abroad, refined and cultivated by foreign travel, graceful in the grub dance or scalp walk-around, yet tender-hearted as a girl, walking by night fifty-seven miles in a single evening to warn his white friends of danger. The Indian introduced into literature was a bronze Apollo who bathed almost constantly and only killed white people who were unpleasant and coarse. He dressed in new and fresh buckskins, with trimming of same, and his sable hair hung glossy and beautiful down the coppery billows of muscles on his back.
The real Indian has the dead and unkempt hair of a busted buggy-cushion filled with hen feathers. He lies, he steals, he assassinates, he mutilates, he tortures. He needs Persian powder long before he needs the theology which abler men cannot agree upon. We can, in fact, only retain him as we do the buffalo, so long as he complies with the statutes. But the red brother is on his way to join the cave-bear, the three-toed horse, and the ichthyosaurus in the great fossil realm of the historic past. Move on, maroon brother, move on!