On the afternoon of June 25, 1876, George Armstrong Custer led five companies of the Seventh Cavalry down

On the afternoon of June 25, 1876, George Armstrong Custer led five companies of the Seventh Cavalry down

toward the Lakota and Cheyenne village on the Little Bighorn—the Greasy Grass—and within the hour none of them were left to tell what had happened. The news reached the eastern cities in the first week of July, while the country was still in the middle of its centennial celebrations, and for the rest of the summer the question of how it had gone so wrong crowded nearly everything else off the front pages. There was no wire service feeding the public a steady drip of dispatches, no class of professional commentators standing ready to explain the plains to readers who had never seen them. An editor who wanted a credible opinion needed a man who had actually ridden that country. A man who had fought alongside Indian scouts and against hostile ones, and who knew cavalry from the saddle. Such men were scarce east of the Mississippi in July of 1876. Two of them happened to be in Philadelphia.

Donald McKay had come east as a living exhibit at the Centennial, but the credentials behind the billing were genuine. Of mixed white and Cayuse Native ancestry, he had led the Warm Springs scouts through the Modoc War of 1872–73, the brutal campaign fought in the lava beds of northern California and southern Oregon. That war had produced the most shocking blow the Army would suffered in the Western campaigns against NAtive American tribes: the killing of Brigadier General Edward Canby, shot down under a flag of truce at the peace table in April 1873, the only serving general the Indian wars ever claimed. Canby's murder had transfixed the country in 1873 much as Custer's death was transfixing it now, and it was McKay's Warm Springs scouts who ran the Modocs to ground in the campaign that followed.

Texas Jack Omohundro's qualifications pointed in several directions at once. As a young trooper in the Fifth Virginia Cavalry he had spent the war years riding against the Federal horsemen Custer commanded on the battlefields of Virginia. At Yellow Tavern it was Custer's own Michigan Brigade that broke the Confederate line, and shortly after receiving a battlefield dispatch from Lunsford Lomax carried by a young Texas Jack, Stuart was hit while firing at the retreating troopers of the 5th Michigan. Custer's regiment. Nearly eight years later, in January 1872, Texas Jack had helped guide the celebrated buffalo hunt staged for the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia—a party that included both Buffalo Bill Cody and Custer himself. And in the years he scouted for the Army out of Fort McPherson, on the Nebraska plains, he had come to know Sioux warfare at first hand in the very kind of fighting that had just destroyed the Seventh Cavalry. The Loup River story he tells below rewards a second reading: the article has Jack describe a lone warrior, wounded in half a dozen places, who still had the strength to fire a parting shot at Cody, the shot spoiled only because "a bullet which entered the body of the Indian at the moment he fired somewhat disarranged the aim." The bullet was Jack's. He is recounting how he saved Buffalo Bill's life without ever quite claiming the credit.

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More About Custer's Massacre.

WHAT THE WARM SPRING INDIANS AT THE CENTENNIAL SAY—TEXAS JACK

Texas Jack, and the Red Scout of twenty-three years' experience, Donald McKay, the Warm Spring Indian chief, were interviewed on the Custer massacre, by a reporter of Forney's Press, Philadelphia, Monday, at their quarters, near the Centennial grounds. Of McKay the reporter says: To a casual observer he looks the thorough type of an Indian warrior, standing six feet four inches in height, with skin brown and bronzed as of the veriest Indian, his black eyes and long, straight wiry hair tell of the blood that courses in his veins. It is only when he speaks that one can understand that he is not a full-blooded Indian chief.

In answer to the reporter he said: "I think Custer was surprised and that Sitting Bull had laid his plans so as to deceive any one but the most practiced Indian fighters. I am afraid that Gen. Custer trusted too much to his own dash and too little to his Indian scouts."

The Sioux, by reason of their numbers, are undoubtedly the bravest tribe of Indians on the plains. Sitting Bull is cruel, clever, and scheming. His present victory will draw around him all the young men from the agencies, and I have no doubt but that the war will be a long, costly, and bloody one.

I think a thousand frontiersmen who understand Indian fighting—when to advance and when to withdraw—would prove far more effectual than twice the number of regular troops. And I may say that if this war is not terminated before the cold weather sets in it will be prolonged much more than anybody thinks of.

Just before terminating the interview the reporter learned that Texas Jack had sent a telegram to General Sheridan, tendering his own and Donald McKay's services as scouts during the present campaign, and requesting an immediate reply as to the chance of an appointment. An answer is expected to day.

Texas Jack said the Sioux are, with perhaps the exception of the Comanches, the bravest Indians on the plains. He saw one fighting once on the Loup river, when there were eleven United States soldiers around him, and although wounded in half a dozen places, he still had strength to fire a parting shot at Cody (Buffalo Bill)—a shot which would have finished Cody's career, but that a bullet which entered the body of the Indian at the moment he fired somewhat disarranged the aim.

"I think Custer was badly surprised," he continued, "and I can imagine just how it was. Custer having parted with Reno, found the village apparently unsuspicious of his presence. But I believe that all along his march the Indians were perfectly well aware of every event that took place—that they knew his strength to a man—and laid their plans accordingly. Letting him get to a certain point, the Indians, before he could think of it, rose from all sides and poured in such a fire as to slaughter half his command. Then, instead of trying to cut his way through with the remainder if such a course had been practicable he tried to retreat. Then rose the Indians on every side—in front and rear—and there was nothing left to tell the tale but the bodies of those slain."

In conclusion Texas Jack stated that if General Sheridan accepted his services and those of Donald McKay they would start for the frontier at once. He believed that the present victory for the Sioux will cause all the discontented and bad Indians, including the Cheyennes and Arrapahoes, to rally to the standard of Sitting Bull, and that the combined force, which will include the best and bravest warriors on the plains, will prove a foe which it will require a long and arduous campaign to subdue.