Washita ‘Battlefield’ Misnamed

Yesterday we visited the Washita Battlefield National Historic Site. This is the location of Black Kettle’s village of Southern Cheyenne at the Washita River in Indian Territory (now western Oklahoma). On November 27, 1868, the 7th Cavalry attacked the village just before dawn. (This event is portrayed in the movie Little Big Man.)

Here is what took place, as described by James Welch in Killing Custer:

Just before midnight, they crawled to the edge of a bluff which overlooked a river valley. One of the scouts announced he could smell smoke. The other heard a dog bark. Custer could not see anything, and he did not smell smoke or hear the dog. But in the quiet moments of listening, he heard a baby cry. He had found his Indians.

Custer divided his command into four detachments, which would surround the village, north, south, east, and west, and wait for dawn. On his command, they would charge from the four directions.

At first light, Custer turned to the band leader and directed him “to give us ‘Garry Owen’ [his favorite song]. At once the rollicking notes of that familiar marching and fighting air sounded forth through the valley, and in a moment were re-echoed back from the opposite sides by the loud and continued cheers of the men of the other detachments, who, true to their orders, were there and in readiness to pounce upon the Indians the moment the attack began. In this manner the battle of the Washita commenced.”

The “battle” in the village was short, barely fifteen minutes. The soldiers drove the people from their lodges barefoot and half naked, shooting them in the open. Many of the warriors managed to reach the trees, where they began to return fire; a few of them escaped, but after a couple of hours, the firing ceased and 103 Cheyennes lay dead in the snow and mud. Custer reported that they were fighting men, but others said that ninety-two of them were women, children, and old people. Black Kettle, the sixty-seven-year-old leader of the band, and his wife, Medicine Woman Later, who had survived nine gunshot wounds at the Massacre of Sand Creek four years before, had been shot in the back as they attempted to cross the Lodge Pole or Washita River. Their bodies, trampled and covered with mud, were found in the shallow water by the survivors.

The soldiers seized everything in the village—guns, bows and arrows, decorated clothing, sacred shields, tobacco, dried meat, dried berries, robes, and fifty-one lodges—and burned it. In addition, they captured 875 horses and mules. Custer gave the order to slaughter these animals by cutting their throats, but the horses feared whiteman smell and shied away, and after several attempts, the men grew tired. Custer gave the order to shoot the animals instead. Custer himself slaughtered camp dogs. Then the 7th Cavalry took its captives, mostly women and children and old ones, and headed north to its base of operations, Camp Supply.

Custer’s attack on the village of Southern Cheyennes was hailed as a great victory in the Indian wars.

[The National Park Service says “approximately 30 to 60 Cheyenne” were killed.]

It wasn’t a battle and isn’t a historic battlefield. It was state-sponsored terrorism and should be renamed a national memorial.