Custer's Last Jump Steven Utley, Howard Waldrop id

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.Eight or twelve Indians had, in the gray dawn, climbed for altitude above the ships.Still several miles short of their intended drop zone, the balloon infantrymen piled out of the burning and exploding craft.Though each ship was armed with two Gatling rifles fore and aft, the airships were helpless against the airplanes' bullets and rockets.Approximately one hundred men, Custer included, cleared the ships.The Indian aviators made passes through them, no doubt killing several in the air.The Franklin and Hancock burned and fell to the earth across the river from the village.The Allen, dumping water ballast to gain altitude, turned for the Wolf Mountains.Though riddled by machine rifle fire, it did not explode and settled to earth about fifteen miles from where now raged a full-scale battle between increasingly demoralized soldiers and battle-maddened Sioux and Cheyenne.Major Reno had charged the opposite side of the village as soon as he heard the commotion.Wrote one of his officers later: "A solid wall of Indians came out of the haze which had hidden the village from our eyes.They must have outnumbered us ten to one, and they were ready for us.Fully a third of the column was down in three minutes." Reno, fearing he would be swallowed up, pulled his men back across the river and took up a position in a stand of timber on the riverward slope of the knoll.The Indians left a few hundred braves to make certain Reno did not escape and moved off to Reno's right to descend on Keogh's flank.The hundred-odd parachute infantrymen who made good their escape from their airship were scattered over three square miles.The ravines and gullies cutting up the hills around the village quickly filled with mounted Indians who rode through unimpeded by the random fire of disorganized balloon infantrymen.They swept them up, on the way to Keogh.Keogh, unaware of the number of Indians and the rout of Reno's command, got as far as the north bank of the river before he was ground to pieces between two masses of hostiles.Of Keogh's command, less than a dozen escaped the slaughter.The actual battle lasted about thirty minutes.The hostiles left the area that night, exhausted after their greatest victory over the soldiers.Most of the Indians went north to Canada; some escaped the mass extermination of their race which was to take place in the American West during the next six years.Terry found Reno entrenched on the ridge the morning of the twenty-seventh.The scouts sent to find Custer and Keogh could not believe their eyes when they found the bodies of the 7th Cavalry six miles away.Some of the men were not found for another two days, Terry and his men scoured the ravines and valleys.Custer himself was about four miles from the site of Keogh's annihilation; the Boy General appears to have been hit by a piece of exploding rocket shrapnel and may have been dead before he reached the ground.His body escaped the mutilation that befell most of Keogh's command, possibly because of its distance from the camp.Custer's miscalculation cost the Army 430 men, four dirigibles (plus the Studebaker scout from the Ethan Allen), and its prestige.An attempt was made to make a scapegoat of Major Reno, blaming his alleged cowardice for the failure of the 7th.Though Reno was acquitted, grumblings continued up until the turn of the century.It is hoped the matter will be settled for all time by the opening, for private research, of the papers of the late President Phil Sheridan.As Commander in Chief, he had access to a mountain of material which was kept from the public at the time of the court of inquiry in 1879.Extract from Huckleberry Among the Hostiles: A Journal BY MARK TWAIN, EDITED BY BERNARD VAN DYNEHutton and Company, New York, 1932.EDITOR'S NOTE: In November 1886 Clemens drafted a tentative outline for a sequel to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which had received mixed reviews on its publication in January 1885, but which had nonetheless enjoyed a second printing within five months of its release.The proposed sequel was intended to deal with Huckleberry's adventures as a young man on the frontier.To gather research material firsthand, Mark boarded the airship Peyton in Cincinnati, Ohio, in mid-December 1886, and set out across the Southwest, amassing copious notes and reams of interviews with soldiers, frontiersmen, law enforcement officers, ex-hostiles, at least two notorious outlaws, and a number of less readily categorized persons.Twain had intended to spend four months out West.Unfortunately, his wife, Livy, fell gravely ill in late February 1887; Twain returned to her as soon as he received word in Fort Hood, Texas.He lost interest in all writing for two years after her death in April 1887.The proposed novel about Huckleberry Finn as a man was never written: we are left with 110,000 words of interviews and observations, and an incomplete journal of the author's second trek across the American West.—BvDFeb.2: A more desolate place than the Indian Territory of Oklahoma would be impossible to imagine.It is flat the year 'round, stingingly cold in winter, hot and dry, I am told, during the summer (when the land turns brown save for scattered patches of greenery which serve only to make the landscape all the drearier; Arizona and New Mexico are devoid of greenery, which is to their credit—when those territories elected to become barren wastelands they did not lose heart halfway, but followed their chosen course to the end).It is easy to see why the United States Government swept the few Indians into God-forsaken Oklahoma, and ordered them to remain there under threat of extermination.The word "God-forsaken" is the vital clue.The white men who "gave" this land to the few remaining tribes for as long as the wind shall blow—which it certainly does in February—and the grass shall grow (which it does, in Missouri, perhaps) were Christians who knew better than to let heathen savages run loose in parts of the country still smiled upon by our heavenly malefactor.February 4: Whatever I may have observed about Oklahoma from the cabin of the Peyton has been reinforced by a view from the ground.The airship was running into stiff winds from the north, so we put in at Fort Sill yesterday evening and are awaiting calmer weather.I have gone on with my work.Fort Sill is located seventeen miles from the Cheyenne Indian reservation.It has taken me all of a day to learn (mainly from one Sergeant Howard, a gap-toothed, unwashed Texan who is apparently my unofficial guardian angel for whatever length of time I am to be marooned here) that the Cheyenne do not care much for Oklahoma, which is still another reason why the government keeps them there [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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