(Taken with permission)
This is the final conclusion of the following:
Moxtaveto ("Black Kettle") at Washita: November 27, 1868 (Introduction) (Updated Title),
Moxtaveto ("Black Kettle") at Washita: 11- 27, 1868 (Re-introduction),
Custer In The Whitehouse & The Abandonment Of Major Elliot (Updated),
Custer "Stayed The Course" & The Kansas Raids,
Custer's Indian Hostages: (One White Woman & 2 White Children, Part 1),
and Custer's Indian Hostages: (One White Woman & 2 White Children, Part 2),
Crossposted at Progressive Historians
The sensory components of the genocide at Washita in now Cheyenne, Oklahoma must be held in mind in order to capture the entire breadth of it. These are sound, smell, and sight. For example, the shrill crying of the noncombatant Cheyenne women and children, and the yelling of the charging 7th Calvary with their knives and guns would have been beyond deafening. And the fog with gunpowder smoke must have been worse than any nightmare, while the red blood - stained snow and the smell of death permeated the ground and air.
The Death & Vision of Moxtaveto ( Black Kettle)
A woman dashed into the village to warn Black Kettle of the coming troopers; he hastily snatched his rifle from his lodge and fired a warning shot for all to awaken and flee. If he had attempted to meet the soldiers and ask for peaceful negotiations, that would have been useless; as a result, he then mounted his horse with his wife, Woman Here After, and tried to escape through the North direction. His horse was shot in the leg before bullets knocked him and his wife off the horse and into the Washita River, where they both died together.
Source
"Both the chief and his wife fell at the river bank riddled with bullets," one witness reported, "the soldiers rode right over Black Kettle and his wife and their horse as they lay dead on the ground, and their bodies were all splashed with mud by the charging soldiers." Custer later reported that an Osage guide took Black Kettle's scalp.
A few miles from Black Kettle's death
Warriors, eleven who died, rushed out of their lodges with inferior firepower to defend the village. Simultaneously, the overall noncombatants ran for their lives into the freezing Washita River.
(Taken with permission)
Jerome A. Greene. Washita. Chap.7. pp130-131
There, as the people fell at the hands of the troopers, one woman, in a helpless rage, stood up with her baby, held it out in an outstretched arm, and with the other drew a knife and fatally stabbed the infant - erroneously believed by the soldiers to be a white child. She then plunged the blade into her own chest in suicide.
The 7th hunted them down and murdered them, and although the orders were to "hang all warriors;" it was much more convenient to shoot the Cheyenne. All wounded Cheyenne were shot where they laid.
Osage scouts mutilated women and children. In fact, they did a "roundup" of their own by using tree limbs to herd the defenseless Cheyenne women and children back to the village, where the mutilations could continue. Custer halted the slaying of women and children at one point, but he raped them later in captivity.
One Osage scout beheaded a Cheyenne.
Jerome A. Greene. Washita. Chap.7. pp120
They (Osages) "shot down the women and mutilated their bodies, cutting off their arms, legs and breasts with knives."
The 7th Calvary captured the Cheyenne and then started bonfires. They burned the 51 lodges to the ground. Winter clothing that was depended upon for winter survival was incinerated in the bonfires, as was food supplies. In addition, weapons and all lodge contents were burned, including any sacred items. Finally, 875 horses were shot, thus stripping away their last means of survival and independence.
Dee Brown. "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee." P.170
Late in December the survivors of Black Kettle's band began arriving at Fort Cobb -
Little Robe was now the nominal leader of the tribe, and was taken to see Sheridan he told the bearlike soldier chief that his people were starving - they had eaten all their dogs.
Sheridan replied that the Cheyennes would be fed if they all came into Fort Cobb and surrendered unconditionally. "You cannot make peace now and commence killing whites again in the spring." Sheridan added, "If you are not willing to make a complete peace, you can go back and we will fight this thing out."
Little Robe knew there was but one answer he could give.
"It is for you to say what we have to do," he said.
The Cheyenne women were "transported" by an officer named Romero to the other officers once they were prisoners at Fort Cobb.
Rape.
Custer "enjoyed one" every evening in the privacy of his tent. Presumably, he stopped raping the Cheyenne women when his wife arrived.
Source
Custer's wife, Elizabeth (Bacon), whom he married in 1864, lived to the age of ninety-one. The couple had no children. She was devoted to his memory, wrote three books about him, and when she died in 1933 was buried beside him at West Point.
Her Tenting on the Plains (1887) presents a charming picture of their stay in Texas. Custer's headquarters building in Austin, the Blind Asylum, located on the "Little Campus" of the University of Texas, has been restored.
Further information regarding accurate numbers of deaths, captives and list of names are in Jerome A. Greene's wonderful book, "Washita."
Source
We have been traveling through a cloud. The sky has been dark ever since the war began.
Black Kettle
