Classic Poem

Far away,
One foggy morning in the midst of May,
Fort Lincoln had beheld the marshalling
Of Terry's forces; heard the bugle sing,
The blaring of the band, the brave hurrah
Of Custer's men recalling Washita
And confident of yet another soon.
How gallantly in column of platoon
(So many doomed and given to the ghost)
Before the weeping women of the post
They sat their dancing horses on parade!
What made the silence suddenly afraid
When, with a brazen crash, the band went whist
And, dimmer in the clinging river mist,
The line swung westward? Did the Ree squaws know,
Through some wise terror of the ancient foe,
To what unearthly land their warriors led
The squadrons? Better suited to the dead
Than to the quick, their chanting of farewell
Grew eerie in the shadow, rose and fell —
The long-drawn yammer of a lonely dog.
But when at length the sun broke through the fog,
What reassurance in the wide blue air,
The solid hills, and Custer riding there.
With all the famous Seventh at his heel!
And back of those the glint of flowing steel
Above the dusty infantry; the sun's
Young glimmer on the trundled Gatling guns;
And then the mounted Rees; and after that
The loaded pack mules straggling up the flat
And wagons crowding wagons for a mile!

What premonition of the afterwhile
Could darken eyes that saw such glory pass
When, lilting in a muffled blare of brass
Off yonder near the sundering prairie rim,
The Girl I Left Behind Me floated dim
As from the unrecoverable years?
And was it nothing but a freak of tears,
The vision that the grieving women saw?
For suddenly a shimmering veil of awe
Caught up the van. One could have counted ten
While Custer and the half of Custer's men
Were riding up a shining steep of sky
As though to join the dead that do not die
But haunt some storied heaven of the bold.
And then it seemed a smoke of battle rolled
Across the picture, leaving empty air
Above the line that slowly shortened there
And dropped below the prairie and was gone.

Now day by day the column straggled on
While moody May was dribbling out in rain
To make a wagon-wallow of the plain
Between the Muddy and the upper Heart.
Where lifeless hills, as by demonic art,
Were hewn to forms of wonderment and fear,
Excited echoes flocked about to hear,
And any sound brought riotous applause,
So long among the scarps and tangled draws
Had clung that silence and the spell of it.
Some fiend-deserted city of the Pit
The region seemed, with crumbling domes and spires;
For still it smoked with reminiscent fires,
And in the midst, as 'twere the stream of woe,
A dark flood ran.


June blustered in with snow,
And all the seasons happened in a week.
Beyond the Beaver and O'Fallon creek
They toiled. Amid the wilderness of breaks
The drainage of the lower Powder makes,
They found a way and brought the wagons through;
Nor had they sight or sign of any Sioux
In all that land. Here Reno headed south
With packs and half the troopers for the mouth
Of Mispah, thence to scout the country west
About the Tongue; while Terry and the rest
Pushed onward to the Yellowstone to bide
With Gibbon's men the news of Reno's ride.

Mid June drew on. Slow days of waiting bred
Unhappy rumors. Everybody said
What no one, closely questioned, seemed to know.
Enormous numerations of the foe,
By tentative narration made exact
And tagged with all the circumstance of fact,
Discredited the neat official tale.
'Twas well when dawn came burning down the vale
And river fogs were lifting like a smoke
And bugles, singing reveille, awoke
A thousand-throated clamor in the herd.
But when the hush was like a warning word
And taps had yielded darkness to the owl,
A horse's whinny or a kiote's howl
Made true the wildest rumors of the noon.

So passed the fateful seventeenth of June
When none might guess how much the gossip lacked
To match the unimaginative fact
Of what the upper Rosebud saw that day:
How Crook, with Reno forty miles away,
Had met the hordes of Crazy Horse and Gall,
And all the draws belched cavalries, and all
The ridges bellowed and the river fen
Went dizzy with the press of mounted men —
A slant cyclonic tangle: how the dark
Came not a whit too early, and the lark
Beheld the Gray Fox slinking back amazed
To Goose Creek; what a dust the victors raised
When through the Chetish Hills by many a pass
They crowded down upon the Greasy Grass
To swell the hostile thousands waiting there.

Alas, how wide they made for Yellow Hair
That highway leading to the shining Past!

Now came the end of waiting, for at last
The scouting squadrons, jogging from the south,
Had joined their comrades at the Rosebud's mouth
With doubtful news. That evening by the fires,
According to their dreads or their desires,
The men discussed the story that was told
About a trail, not over three weeks old,
That led across the country from the Tongue,
Struck up the Rosebud forty miles and swung
Again to westward over the divide.
Some said, " We'll find blue sky the other side,
Then back to Lincoln soon! " But more agreed
'Twould not be so with Custer in the lead.
" He'll eat his horses when the hardtack's gone
Till every man's afoot! " And thereupon
Scarred veterans remembered other days
With Custer — thirsty marches in the blaze
Of Texas suns, with stringy mule to chew;
And times when splinters of the North Pole blew
Across the lofty Colorado plains;
And muddy going in the sullen rains
Of Kansas springs, when verily you felt
Your backbone rub the buckle of your belt
Because there weren't any mules to spare.
Aye, there were tales to make the rookies stare
Of Custer's daring and of Custer's luck.
And some recalled that night before they struck
Black Kettle's village. Whew! And what a night!
A foot of snow, and not a pipe alight,
And not a fire! You didn't dare to doze,
But kept your fingers on your horse's nose
For fear he'd nicker and the chance be lost.
And all night long there, starry in the frost,
You'd see the steaming Colonel striding by.
And when the first light broke along the sky,
Yet not enough to make a saber shine,
You should have seen him gallop down the line
With hair astream! It warmed your blood to see
The way he clapped his hat beneath his knee
And yelled " Come on! " " Go ask him if we came!"

And so they conjured with a magic name;
But, wakeful in the darkness after taps,
How many saddened, conscious of the lapse
Of man-denying time!


The last owl ceased.
A pewee sensed the changing of the east
And fluted shyly, doubtful of the news.
A wolf, returning from an all-night cruise
Among the rabbits, topped a staring rim
And vanished. Now the cooks were stirring dim,
Waist-deep in woodsmoke crawling through the damp
The shadow lifted from the snoring camp.
The bugle sang. The horses cried ha! ha!
The mule herd raised a woeful fanfara
To swell the music, singing out of tune.
Up came the sun.


The Seventh marched at noon,
Six hundred strong. By fours and troop by troop,
With packs between, they passed the Colonel's group
By Terry's tent; the Rickarees and Crows
Astride their shaggy paints and calicoes;
The regimental banner and the grays;
And after them the sorrels and the bays,
The whites, the browns, the piebalds and the blacks.
One flesh they seemed with those upon their backs,
Whose weathered faces, like and fit for bronze,
Some gleam of unforgotten battle-dawns
Made bright and hard. The music of their going,
How good to hear! — though mournful beyond knowing;
The low-toned chanting of the Crows and Rees,
The guidons whipping in a stiff south breeze
Prophetical of thunder-brewing weather,
The chiming spurs and bits and crooning leather,
The shoe calks clinking on the scattered stone,
And, fusing all, the rolling undertone
Of hoofs by hundreds rhythmically blent —
The diapason of an instrument
Strung taut for battle music.


So they passed.
And Custer, waking from a dream at last
With still some glory of it in his eyes,
Shook hands around and said his last goodbyes
And swung a leg across his dancing bay
That champed the snaffle, keen to be away
Where all the others were. Then Gibbon spoke,
Jocosely, but with something in the joke
Of its own pleasantry incredulous:
" Now don't be greedy, Custer! Wait for us! "
And Custer laughed and gave the bay his head.
" I won't! " he cried. Perplexed at what he said,
They watched the glad bay smoking up the draw
And heard the lusty welcoming hurrah
That swept along the column. When it died,
The melancholy pack mules prophesied
And wailing hills agreed.