Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn

ISBN-13: 9780865475106

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Farrar - Straus and Giroux

Publication Date: 10-30-1997

Pages: 480

Product Dimensions: 5.55(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)

Evan S. Connell (1924-2013) received numerous prizes and awards for his writing and was the author of many books of fiction, poetry, essays, and history, including Mr. Bridge, Mrs. Bridge, The Diary of a Rapist, The Alchymist's Journal, and The Collected Stories.

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Son of the Morning Star

Lt. James Bradley led a detachment of Crow Indian scouts up the Bighorn Valley during the summer of 1876. In his journal he records that early Monday morning, June 26, they saw the tracks of four ponies. Assuming the riders must be Sioux, they followed these tracks to the river and came upon one of the ponies, along with some equipment which evidently had been thrown away. An examination of the equipment disclosed, much to his surprise, that it belonged to some Crows from his own command who had been assigned to General Custer's regiment a few days earlier.

While puzzling over this circumstance, Bradley discovered three men on the opposite side of the river. They were about two miles away and appeared to be watching. He instructed his scouts to signal with blankets that he was friendly, which they did, but for a long time there was no response. Then the distant men built a fire, messages were exchanged by smoke signal, and they were persuaded to come closer.

They were indeed Crow scouts: Hairy Moccasin, Goes Ahead, White Man Runs Him. They would not cross the river, but they were willing to talk.

Bradley did not want to believe the story they told, yet he had a feeling it was true. In his journal he states that he could only hope they were exaggerating, "that in the terror of the three fugitives from the fatal field their account of the disaster was somewhat overdrawn."

The news deeply affected his own scouts. One by one they went aside and sat down, rocking to and fro, weeping and chanting. Apart from relatives and friends of the slain soldiers, he later wrote, "there were none in this wholehorrified nation of forty millions of people to whom the tidings brought greater grief."

Bradley at once rode back to his commandant, General Alfred Terry, and repeated what the Crows had said. Terry, accompanied by Colonel John Gibbon and surrounded by aides, did not join in the chorus of disbelief but sat on his horse with a thoughtful expression, "biting his lower lip and looking at me as though he by no means shared in the wholesale skepticism of the flippant members of his staff."

The column then resumed its march and shortly after noon crossed into the valley of the Little Bighorn.

A white scout named "Muggins" Taylor—described as a gambler and professional hunter—was directed to look around. When he came back he reported the smoke of a large fire up ahead. Col. Gibbon thought this was good news because it meant one of two things: Custer had taken the Indian village or the Indians themselves were burning it.

General Terry offered $200 to anybody who could reach Custer. Taylor and another scout named Bostwick decided to try. Both returned in a little while saying nobody could get through.

Horsemen materialized on a ridge and through field glasses it could be seen that several of them wore blue uniforms, meaning they must belong to Custer's regiment—possibly his Arikara scouts. Lt. Charles Roe led a troop of cavalry forward. Roe advanced cautiously, uncertain whether he was approaching Arikaras or Sioux. He dispatched a sergeant to find out. Advance, tie a handkerchief to your gun, wave it, and we will see what happens, said Roe. But just then a party of at least sixty United States cavalrymen—or what resembled cavalry, proceeding by twos, with a guidon flying—rode into view. A second cavalry unit then merged with the first and Lt. Roe understood that they were hostile Indians dressed in Army clothing. With this frightful masque to contemplate it seems odd that he did not rescind his order to wave a handkerchief at them, but he did not: "I immediately ordered the sergeant to move forward, saying that we would support him ... ."

The obedient sergeant commandeered two enlisted men and these guinea pigs galloped ahead while Roe and the others followed. Very soon a familiar noise could be heard: Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!

Neither the intrepid sergeant nor his companions were hit, but the plateau was by now carpeted with Indians and Lt. Roe thought it wise to retreat.

Until this withdrawal, most of the troops with Gibbon and Terry thought the disciplined blue-clad riders must belong to Custer. Only a few remained suspicious. Although the riders maintained cavalry formation, Lt. JohnMcBlain noted, "there was an indefinable something in their movements that did not appear altogether natural." Capt. Henry Freeman bet a cigar they were hostile, despite rumors that two of them had been seen shaking hands with Roe, and in his journal Freeman commented somewhat dryly that he had won a cigar.

While discussing the day's events around a campfire most infantrymen predicted more unpleasant news, whereas the cavalrymen—emotionally related to Custer's Seventh—argued that if indeed there had been a fight Custer must have been victorious. "So obstinate is human nature," Bradley wrote, "that there were actually men in the command who lay down to sleep that night in the firm conviction, notwithstanding all the disclosures of the day, that there was not an Indian in our front ... . They could explain ingeniously every circumstance that had a contrary look, and to argue with them was worse than useless."

Tuesday morning not an Indian could be seen.

Farther up the valley, on a hillside east of the river, lay a number of pale unidentifiable objects which were assumed to be dead buffalo. Several dark objects among these carcasses were thought to be buffalo skins left behind when the Indians fled. Bradley crossed the river to investigate.

Not long after his departure the column reached the site of an Indian encampment so recently deserted that the fire beds had not cooled. A few skulking dogs loped away when the army approached. Debris littered the ground: shotguns, axes, blankets, soup bowls, horn spoons, brass kettles, hammers, coffee mills, chunks of meat, antique pistols, a grindstone, tin cups, a small bellows, saddles and buffalo robes, along with such incongruous items as photographs, letters, and china dishes. Wounded horses from Custer's regiment and various pieces of army equipment also were discovered in the village, and from an upright pole dangled three human heads bound together with wires—all three so badly burned they could not be identified.

Gibbon's surgeon, Dr. Holmes Paulding, noticed Lt. James Porter's buckskin shirt. "Poor fellow," Dr. Paulding wrote in his diary, "there was a hole under the right shoulder & blood over the rest—Found 'Yates, 7th Cav' marked on a pair of gloves—under-clothing of Jack Sturgis, with his spurs, and traces of other old friends of that gallant regiment. There were immense fresh trails of lodge poles leading toward the ravines & bluffs and along all of them packs, travoises, lodge poles & utensils dropped or hastily cut loose ... ."

Several lodges had not been dismantled. Terry's soldiers at first thought this was because the hostiles had been in a hurry to escape; but inside each ofthese lodges lay one or more dead warriors, each handsomely dressed and—as was the burial custom—wearing moccasins with ceremonially beaded soles.

About this time Lt. Bradley returned from the other side of the river to say that the dark objects on the hillside thought to be buffalo skins were, in fact, dead horses. What had been mistaken for skinned buffalo carcasses were the naked bodies of Custer's men. Bradley had counted 197 dead soldiers. This news paralyzed the advancing army. A mule packer in Roe's company, Pvt. William H. White, said that for a quarter of an hour there was very little talking.

The column then proceeded through the valley in an attempt to learn what had happened.

As the troops marched south they noticed occasional clusters of arrows standing up like cactus. Before long they understood that each cluster would mean another dead cavalryman.

Moving figures could be discerned on a hilltop some distance ahead—rushing around in such excitement that they were assumed to be Indians—and with them a herd of ponies. A detachment of soldiers guided by Muggins Taylor went forward.

After a while Terry's army caught up with this unit and found the officer in charge talking with emissaries from the hill, who turned out to be Lts. Luther Hare and George Wallace of a Seventh Cavalry battalion commanded by Major Marcus Reno. It developed that Reno's battalion had been surrounded by Sioux and Cheyennes for two days, Sunday and Monday, until late Monday afternoon when the Indians dismantled their portable village and moved south toward the Bighorn mountains. What had appeared from the distance to be a pony herd was the Seventh Cavalry mule train.

Reno's messengers were thankful that Terry and Gibbon had arrived, but they were puzzled because they thought this column was led by General Custer. They said there had been no word from him since he divided the command and rode off with five companies early Sunday afternoon. They were stunned to hear that everybody who went with Custer was dead, and they had trouble realizing that their two-day ordeal was a peripheral fight.

Fifty-two of Reno's men were wounded, which gave Dr. Paulding plenty of work. In a letter to his mother some time afterward he sounds bemused by the resilience of the survivors. Although Custer's death shocked them, he wrote, they got over it quickly and became rather cheerful.

Captain Walter Clifford of the Seventh Infantry rode up into the hills for an elevated view of Reno's defensive position and there he happened to see an Indian pony with a shattered leg—the leg swinging hideously each time thelittle animal moved. Flies swarmed on the wound. The pony came hobbling over and rested its head against the flank of Clifford's horse. Clifford pulled away because nothing could be done, but when he looked around he saw the pony trying to follow. He rode back and again the pony approached, "this time laying his head on my horse's rump, looking straight at me, as if pleading for help." Clifford held his pistol against the pony's head and fired. "Lightning could not have finished him sooner."

On his way down Capt. Clifford studied the west bank of the Little Bighorn. Reno's men had fled to the hilltop after losing a skirmish at the upper end of the valley and had plunged from this embankment into the river. He estimated its height at about ten feet. They landed in water four or five feet deep and after crossing the stream they climbed hills that were too steep for a direct ascent. "The marvel is that with such a multitude of Indians around them so many escaped. The retreat was a mad race to a place of safety."

Preparations were begun to carry Reno's wounded troopers to the mouth of the Little Bighorn where the steamer Far West was waiting, moored to a cottonwood tree. Pvt. White was one of the men assigned to collect material for litters and he reports that at first they cut saplings, but then realized it would be easier to obtain poles by tearing apart Sioux burial lodges. Besides, this would give them a chance to hunt for souvenirs. White and others in this detail were fascinated by what they saw. Dr. Paulding wanted a pair of beaded moccasins laced on the feet of a dead warrior. He tugged at them, "but they were a tight fit, since his flesh was swollen, and the skin slipped when he took hold of a leg. Notwithstanding he was a doctor, the offensive odor and the repugnant situation in general caused him to quit his undertaking. Those bodies had been lying there through two days and nights of the warm weather of the 25th, 26th, and 27th of June."

The journal of Dr. Paulding fails to mention this incident.

White himself picked up half a dozen pairs of moccasins and a mirror studded with brass tacks. He also found a gunnysack full of letters which must have been taken from a stagecoach or a post office, and somebody's account book containing a list of about twenty names together with amounts charged against them. On several pages of this book were Indian drawings presumably made by whoever had stolen it, but these drawings did not interest him. He gave the letters and the account book to a Chicago journalist who was traveling with the army. The book has now disappeared. A number of journalists accompanied the army, but just two from Chicago: Charles Diehl of the Times and "Phocion" Howard of the Tribune. One of them must have carried it off.

Except for the tack-studded mirror—which, in photographs, suggests amedieval Viking artifact—White lost his Sioux memorabilia when some person or persons unknown ran away with a bag containing the moccasins. He told an interviewer many years afterward that he suspected a cavalryman from the Seventh.

The day after his excursion to the village White spent a while wandering through the valley where Reno's men started the fight. All of the bodies he saw had been horribly gashed. Entrails protruded. Heads, feet, arms, legs, and hands were chopped off. He noted just one exception—a trooper lying almost hidden beneath the belly of a horse. This man had not been found by the Indians and before dying of his wounds he must have gone mad with thirst because he had thrust his head between the animal's hind legs and opened a haunch with his knife. The knife lay on the ground beside his right hand. His left hand clutched a tin cup in which there were a few ounces of clotted blood.

In 1920 ex-Private William Slaper described what he saw in the valley to historian E. A. Brininstool: "Corporal Henry Scollen of M Troop was found badly mutilated, with his right leg severed from his body. Jim Turley's body was found with his hunting knife driven to the hilt in one eye ... ."

Scollen felt some deep apprehension. On June 24 his bunkmate, Pvt. Daniel Newell, went for a dip in Rosebud Creek and when he returned to camp he noticed Scollen writing in a diary. "If anything happens to me," Scollen said, "notify my sister Mary, who lives in Gardiner, Massachusetts. My name is Henry Cody ... ." This was the second time within a few days that he had told Newell his true name.

He was killed during the retreat from the valley. Newell saw him go down and heard him say "Good-bye, boys!"

His horse got away and later was caught by a soldier from another company. In a saddlebag was his prayerbook, The Key of Heaven, which Newell mailed to his sister. She wrote back wanting to know if her brother had been disfigured. Newell lied, assuring her that he was not. "I would have given most anything if I could have recovered his diary," Newell remarked in 1930, "but I suppose the squaws got that when they stripped his body. Poor boy."

An engineering officer of Gibbon's command, Lt. Edward McClernand, jotted down a few reflections while passing through the valley. He noted that this region had been scouted the previous April, at which time some Crow guides—well aware of Sioux nearby—had left an ideograph for their enemies to find: an empty breadbox decorated with charcoal drawings. These pictures informed the Sioux that they were going to be wiped out, and the Crows stuffed grass in the cracks of the box to indicate that this would happen in summer. Considering the great amount of territory scouted by Gibbon's patrols,McClernand wrote, it was strange that this breadbox should have been left just a short distance from the actual site of the battle.

Here on the valley floor, at the south end of the Sioux-Cheyenne encampment, the battle may have been resolved before Custer himself fired a shot. In 1883 an Unkpapa Sioux woman told of being here when Reno charged. She thought the man who led the attacking troops must have been drunk or insane : "He had the camp at his mercy, and could have killed us all or driven us away ... ."

Instead, Reno's men dismounted and formed a skirmish line. Then they began to retreat. They ran very fast, she said, dropping guns and cartridges. She was disgusted by the conduct of these whites, saying they must have been seized with panic worse than that which seized her own people.

Things looked different from the troopers' point of view. They saw hundreds of Sioux galloping from the Unkpapa village—stretched out flat on their ponies or clinging to the far side. Bullets began pattering into the earth. Pvt. William Morris said so many bullets hit the ground that he got dust in his eyes. Sgt. John Ryan remembered that when the order to dismount was given they were in a prairie dog town and the men employed these little cones of earth as breastworks. Ryan says nothing else about such a defensive posture, but he and every other soldier knew that a prairie dog mound would not deflect a bullet or anarrow.

Most of the warriors rode back and forth yelping and firing at the prone troopers, but some turned the west end of the line intending to surround them, and when this happened Reno's battalion withdrew toward a stand of cottonwoods beside the river.

Trees offered more protection than prairie dog hillocks and several military analysts believe Reno should have stayed there instead of doing what he did. They point out that his battalion so near the village would have engaged a great many warriors, thus allowing Custer's plan to unfold. Other strategists think he had no choice but to break away, recross the river, and establish a defensive position on the bluff. Sgt. Ryan, whose opinion was formed while Sioux bullets zipped past his head, clearly favored getting out. He observed to his company commander, Capt. Thomas French, that some Indians had managed to get completely behind them. "Oh, no," Capt. French said, "those are General Custer's men." At that moment, according to Ryan, a bullet struck Pvt. George Lorentz in the back of the neck. The bullet dropped out of Lorentz's mouth and he fell to the ground.

Just then Major Reno rode up and shouted, "Any of you men who wish to make your escape, follow me!"

Pvt. Morris thought Lorentz had been hit in the stomach. Whatever happened, Lorentz was dying. Morris dragged him to a tree and propped him up.

"Go on," Lorentz said, "you cannot do me any good."

Morris protested. Lorentz again told him to leave.

"All right, if you say so," Morris answered and tried to mount his horse but the animal was terrified and he could not get a foot in the stirrup. By now everybody else was gone. Morris danced around while the horse reared and struggled. Finally he lunged at it, grabbed the pommel, and hauled himself up. The horse went running through the brush: "I on my stomach across the saddle ... . The Indians were closing in. Two Indians got so close to me that I thought they were going to lasso me ... ."

Lt. Wallace said that when he rode out of the cottonwoods he saw hostiles everywhere. Reno's troops were in a column of fours and the Indians would give way to let them pass, then start firing, and if any man did not use his pistol the Indians would come very near.

Another trooper interviewed long afterward said they howled "like incarnate fiends." Although forty-five years had elapsed, he said, he never would forget a Sioux riding so close that he could have touched the Indian with a saber.

Pvt. James Wilber escaped from the valley unhurt, but on the second day of the battle he was wounded and left partly paralyzed. He remembered that during this retreat a big Sioux galloped alongside and tried to pull him from the saddle. The Sioux had been hit in the shoulder, "and with every jerk he made at me the blood gushed from the wound and stained my shirt and trousers. He was a determined devil and hung on to me until we almost reached the river."

Reno's skirmish line had been supported by Arikara scouts—usually called Rees. Among them was Red Bear, whose story appears in The Arikara Narrative which was compiled with the help of interpreters and published in 1920.

Red Bear decided to pull out when it became apparent that the bluecoats could not stop the Sioux, but he had not ridden very far when his horse stumbled and fell. It scrambled up and galloped toward the river while he chased it through the trees and wild rose bushes. Finally a dead limb snagged the bridle. The limb broke off and dragged behind, which stopped the horse, but just then a Dakota Sioux came riding up. The bottom of the Dakota's face was painted red and the top was yellow. Red Bear shot him. The Dakota fell to the ground. By this time, Red Bear said, all he could hear was gunfire and the shrill eagle-bone whistles of the Sioux. He ran to the Little Bighorn, sawhis horse swimming around, and jumped in. He caught the mane of his horse and together they reached the opposite side, but as he was climbing out he saw the Dakota horse—a dark bay with a white streak on the forehead. It wore a necklace of deer hooves and he heard the necklace clattering while the Dakota horse swam across the river. Then he saw Bobtailed Bull's big pinto which came plunging through the brush snorting with fright—"the tail and mane floating in the wind." The reins were flying, Red Bear said, and the rawhide saddle was bloody.

Weeks later this pinto showed up at the Arikara village near Fort Berthold, three hundred miles from the Little Bighorn. The Arikaras composed a song about it.

Red Bear saw Major Reno with a handkerchief tied around his head: " ... his mouth and beard white with foam, which dripped down, and his eyes were wild and rolling."

Quite a lot of testimony indicates that Reno did lose control and that a good many soldiers were scared witless. The Sioux ignored some of these terrified men, leaving them to be dragged off their horses and killed by boys. An eighteen-year-old Cheyenne named Wooden Leg said he and his friends jeered the bluecoats, telling them they should not even try to fight, they should get more Crows and Shoshones to help them. He and another Cheyenne rode beside one soldier who was so frightened that instead of killing him they lashed him with pony whips.

Reno was a West Point graduate with combat experience in the Civil War, so it is not likely that his eyes rolled desperately and he foamed at the mouth. But he was excited, of this there is not much doubt. One officer present at the time said Reno ordered the men to mount and dismount three times in quick succession. As for the handkerchief, it was either red or white and he had tied it around his head because he had lost his straw hat. Under the circumstances this insignificant detail might be considered remotely symbolic. Soldiers do not like to see their commandant lose his helmet.

That he should wear a straw hat while charging an enemy camp sounds eccentric, but Reno was not the only member of his battalion thus equipped. It was hot—two months later Gibbon's men would report 111 degrees in the shade, 116 degrees inside a tent—and a shrewd Yankee merchant on the Yellowstone turned a neat profit selling straw hats for twenty-five cents. There is no record of how many he sold, but it must have been a sight when Reno charged the village.

Although correspondent John F. Finerty was not at the Little Bighorn he had met the major and described him as a short, stout man "with a determinedvisage, his face showing intimate acquaintance with the sun and the wind." Arikara scouts, who knew him better than Finerty ever did, compressed his nature and his appearance into a single phrase: Man With the Dark Face.

Just when the Arikaras began to call him that is uncertain, possibly after he got into an argument with a scout named High Bear. Reno misunderstood a figure of speech, taking it as an insult, and threatened to shoot High Bear—who responded by drawing a knife. Another scout, invoking Custer's name, jumped between them and managed to prevent a bloody settlement. From then on, if not earlier, the Rees had no trouble identifying that dark face.

How well or how badly Major Reno directed his troops is still, after all this time, a subject of querulous dispute among Little Bighorn buffs. He himself felt so maligned and traduced by subsequent criticism that he demanded a Court of Inquiry, and by order of President Hayes this court convened at Chicago's Palmer House on January 13, 1879. The investigation lasted almost a month. Some thirteen hundred pages of testimony were recorded.

Among the officers who testified was Reno's chief of scouts, Lt. Hare, who said that if they had continued their advance the column would have been demolished in five minutes.

Sgt. Culbertson testified: "If the skirmish had not been retired, or had been held out for three minutes longer, I don't think any one would have gotten off the line."

Lt. DeRudio saw no indication of cowardice: "When he halted and dismounted I said, 'Good for you,' because I saw that if we had gone five hundred yards farther we would have been butchered."

Capt. Moylan said: "In my judgment if he had continued to charge down the valley he would have been there yet." Nobody insisted the retreat was a triumph, Moylan went on, and as for himself, he preferred life on the hilltop to death somewhere else. This observation moved the Court Recorder, Lt. Jesse Lee, to ask if the captain did not think it more honorable for a soldier to die fighting than to sit dishonored on a hill—a question Moylan resented.

Reno testified that although he knew nothing of the local topography it later developed that if they had charged another three hundred yards the entire command would have plunged into a ditch several feet deep and ten yards wide. Indians were concealed in this ditch and he thought most of his men would have been shot from the saddle even before they got to it. As for getting out—impossible.

Lt. Varnum said the ground appeared to be open prairie. He did not see any ditch.

Reno was asked about his relationship with Custer. He replied that he felt no animosity, he and the general got on well enough. But the implication ofthis was unmistakable, so he added that even if his own brothers had been riding with Custer he could not have done any more than he did.

His response did not satisfy Lt. Lee:

"The question is, did you go into that fight with feelings of confidence or distrust?"

Reno again responded that he and the general got along all right: "My feelings toward Gen. Custer were friendly."

"I insist that the question shall be answered," said Lee.

"Well, sir, I had known General Custer a long time," Reno said, "and I had no confidence in his ability as a soldier."

Reno's counsel was a civilian named Lyman Gilbert and after all witnesses had been examined he addressed the Court on Reno's behalf. Speaking of the retreat, Gilbert asked rhetorically: "Was he justified in doing so?"

Gilbert pointed out that the Indians, rather than confronting the battalion as might be expected, began separating in an attempt to surround it—thus leaving their camp exposed to direct attack. This circumstance illustrated their strength. If they had been afraid, said Gilbert, undoubtedly they would have resisted any approach to the village: "but when they gave way, and invited an attack that if successful would have destroyed their homes, they declared to the commanding officer that they were not only able to protect themselves, but were able to destroy his command." And it must follow, therefore, that when Reno signaled a retreat he acted wisely.

During a recess in this trial Captain Frederick Benteen was asked by a Chicago Times reporter why there seemed to be so much trouble with Indians. Benteen answered that larceny by agents of the Indian Bureau was responsible. There had been, he said, "enormouspilferingandstealing." Agents whose annual salary was $1,500 were saving as much as $15,000 annually. Treat the Indians honestly and there should be no problem.

Charles Campbell, who served in the Third Infantry and later as a government agent in Oklahoma, had this to say—not at Reno's trial but long afterward: "The Indian agent has for years been the butt of the paragraphist and cartoonist, held up to public view as a grafter, if not a persistent robber ... . As a rule they were a set of underpaid officials who had assumed the duties at the call of the various religious denominations to which they belonged, at much sacrifice of comfort and ease, not only to themselves but as well to their families, to help bear the white man's burden. It is not possible to conceive that they would foment disorder or endanger the lives of those dear to them, by acts that would foster rebellion ... ." Campbell may have been correct about the situation in Oklahoma, but there was hanky-panky elsewhere. For example, it is known that a Baltimore contractor who supplied flour to theSioux arranged with an agent to defraud the Indians by using three sacks. From Baltimore to Cheyenne came the flour, at which point the inspector stamped each sack "100 pounds," whereupon one hundred pounds of flour was distributed and three sacks retained as evidence that three hundred pounds had been delivered.

Things were different in Canada. Bishop Henry Whipple pointed out that on the northern side of the boundary lived "the same greedy, dominant Anglo-Saxon race, and the same heathen." Yet the Canadians escaped massacre and warfare. There was no single reason for this, but above all the Canadian government kept its word. As Benteen implied, Canadian bureaucrats had sense enough to treat the natives honestly.

When asked how the Sioux felt about being forcibly transported from one reservation to another, he suggested that one act with a little consideration for an Indian's feelings, just as with other people. "I am a southerner, and I have noticed that you may take a negro far away from home, but he will always have an inclination to return. The same feeling actuates the salmon ... ."

The Court eventually decided that Reno had been opposed by such overwhelming force that any deeper penetration into the hostile village would have brought about the annihilation of his command. While his subordinates may in some instances have accomplished more for the safety of all concerned, "there was nothing in his conduct which requires animadversion from this Court." Such a verdict suggests that his decision to retreat was based on a rational understanding of the situation. Perhaps this is true. To a degree undoubtedly it is true. But after they had withdrawn into the cottonwoods