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The Dust Rose Like Smoke
The Subjugation of the Zulu and the Sioux
By James O. Gump UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8453-1
CHAPTER 1
The Little Bighorn in Comparative Perspective
In early June 1876 Sitting Bull called together one of the largest Indian camps ever assembled on the Great Plains for the annual Sun Dance. Most of those who gathered in the ceremonial circle on the west bank of the Rosebud River belonged to Sioux bands, yet some northern Cheyenne allies participated as well. For the Sioux no occasion held more significance than the Sun Dance. The anthropologist Clark Wissler, writing in 1911 to James Walker, a physician at the Pine Ridge agency, described the Sun Dance as "the one great unifying ceremony of the Plains Indians toward which all other ceremonial activities converged." Sioux informants told interpreter Antoine Herman in 1896 that the "Sun Dance is the greatest ceremony that the [Sioux] do. ... If one has scars on his breast or his back that show that he has danced the Sun Dance, no [Sioux] will doubt his word. He is eligible for leadership of a war party or for chieftainship."
The Sun Dance offered warriors an opportunity to demonstrate personal heroism in the interests of tribal unity, yet more important, it brought Sioux together to seek favor from Wakan Tanka. For the Sioux, wakan connoted everything that was sacred. They believed that all life forms of the universe were one and embodied wakan. The Sioux also held that everything in the natural world was circular and therefore regarded the circle as sacred. Seeking harmony with this natural order, the Sioux pitched circular tipis in circular camps and conducted rituals in ceremonial circles. "The wholeness of the circle ... represented the wholeness and oneness of the universe." Wakan was the animating force of the universe. The totality of this life-giving force "was called Wakan Tanka, Great Incomprehensibility, the whole of all that was mysterious, powerful, sacred, holy."
A number of Sioux men entered the sacred circle of the Sun Dance Lodge, seeking to demonstrate their courage, generosity, fortitude, and virility. Holy men gashed the votaries' breasts, inserted skewer sticks just beneath the muscles, and suspended the men from a twenty-foot pole with a tautly stretched fifteen-foot rawhide lariat. Thus fastened, the warriors danced, staring constantly at the sun, deprived of food, drink, or sleep. The dance ended when the skewers tore through the flesh. Successful dancers had prepared themselves for a prophetic vision.
Sitting Bull, who bore many scars from past Sun Dances, participated enthusiastically in the painful ritual. He offered one hundred pieces of flesh to Wakan Tanka, cut methodically from each arm by his adopted brother, Jumping Bull. Blood streaming, he danced. Eighteen hours later Sitting Bull fell into a trance and experienced the vision for which he had hoped. He saw soldiers and Indians falling upside down into the Sioux camp. This vision could only mean that the Sioux and their Cheyenne allies would destroy the bluecoats.
Sitting Bull's vision heartened the camp, dispelling the lingering anxiety. Cognizant of soldiers entering Powder River country from the east, west, and south, the Sioux recognized the gravity of the situation. The U.S. government had identified the Powder River Sioux as "hostiles." The Sioux knew, therefore, that they faced severe reprisals, even extermination, at the hands of the army. Yet with Sitting Bull's vision of a favorable spiritual dispensation, Sioux warriors looked forward to such an encounter with unbounded enthusiasm. When the Sun Dance ended, the camp shifted westward toward more plentiful supplies of game in the valley of the Little Bighorn River, where new arrivals from the agencies would join them. By the third week of June the Sioux and their allies could place from 1,500 to 2,000 warriors in the field.
On June 24 the Seventh Cavalry, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, discovered the abandoned Sun Dance camp. Lieutenant Edward S. Godfrey, one of the expedition diarists, wrote disparagingly of "a large 'Sun-Dance' lodge" that contained "the scalp of a white man." Custer's Arikara scouts, who had carefully studied the camp the night before, did not miss its significance. One of them, Red Star, noted:
Here there was evidence of the Dakotas having made medicine, the sand had been arranged and smoothed, and pictures had been drawn. The Dakota scouts in Custer's army said that this meant the enemy knew the army was coming. In one of the sweat lodges was a long heap or ridge of sand. On this one Red Bear, Red Star, and Soldier saw figures drawn indicating by hoof prints Custer's men on one side and the Dakota on the other. Between them dead men were drawn lying with their heads toward the Dakotas. ... All the Arikara knew what this meant, namely, that the Dakotas were sure of winning.
The Arikaras now concurred with Mitch Boyer, the famous Sioux scout on loan from Colonel John Gibbon's column who told Godfrey on the eve of the ascent up the Rosebud that the Seventh was "going to have a damned big fight."
The Seventh Cavalry commenced its ascent at noon on June 22. Custer commanded a regiment totaling 31 officers, 566 enlisted men, and 35 Indian scouts. Several quartermaster employees, the Bismarck Tribune reporter Mark Kellogg, and Custer's nephew Autie Reed accompanied the regiment. Alfred Terry, the brigadier general commanding the Powder River expedition, had issued written instructions to Custer on the morning of June 22 to guide the regiment's movement up the Rosebud. Terry told Custer to "proceed up the Rosebud until you ascertain definitely the direction in which the [Indian] trail ... leads." He added that "should it be found (as it appears to be almost certain that it will be found) to turn toward the Little Big Horn ... proceed southward perhaps as far as the headwaters of the Tongue, and then turn toward the Little Big Horn." Terry hoped the Indians might be enclosed by Custer's column, moving northward, and Colonel Gibbon's column, moving southward from the Yellowstone as far as the forks of the Big and Little Bighorn Rivers. The general told Custer to conform to these instructions "unless you shall see sufficient reason for departing from them. [I place] too much confidence in your zeal, energy, and ability, to wish to impose upon you precise orders which might hamper your action when nearly in contact with the enemy." Afforded such latitude in pursuing the Indians, Custer feared that contact with the enemy might not be made in time to prevent the "hostiles" from escaping to the Bighorn Mountains. Failure to engage the Sioux was Custer's only concern.
In 1878 the Zulu king Cetshwayo kaMpande called his age-set regiments — his amabutho (singular ibutho) — to Nodwengu, his father's capital, to take part in the annual umkhosi, or first-fruits festival. Cetshwayo's own capital was at Ulundi (oNdini), yet he reckoned the more traditional site would enhance Zulu morale. The umkhosi, performed before each harvest in either December or January, functioned as the Zulus' most important ritual occasion, serving a host of ideological and practical functions. For example, it provided a forum for the expression and reinforcement of values, beliefs, and goals; it reasserted the connection among the ancestral spirits, the true foundation of the polity, and the living king; and it allowed the king to form and review his amabutho and reward his supporters with gifts of cattle and marriage partners.
Zulu kings also invoked uNkulunkulu, the great mystery and source of all life, only at the umkhosi. Directly seeking uNkulunkulu's influence required the utmost reverence and therefore the skilled efforts of izinyanga (doctors). Typically the Zulu sought uNkulunkulu's influence more indirectly through intermediaries, such as recently departed kinsmen. Ancestors were praised, cajoled, and scolded into acting on behalf of the living. Such a cosmology linked the generations and provided continuity and predictability in the Zulu social universe.
A Zulu informant, Lunguza kaMpukane, told the Natalian magistrate James Stuart in 1909 of a great umkhosi at Mgungundhlovu under the Zulu king Dingane. The ceremony commenced at sunrise, when Dingane entered the main cattle kraal with his doctors. The amabutho, which had gathered several days before, encircled the king and led him out of the kraal. "Immediately before the sun rises," Lunguza recollected, "the King takes a mouth full of water, flings [calabashes] with his right arm holding at full length toward the sun the instant it appears above the horizon and then squirts the water from his mouth at the sun." As his regiments sang national anthems and shouted Dingane's praises, the king then reentered the cattle kraal and disappeared into his compound.
Following the king's performance, his amabutho washed in a nearby river. The king returned in the afternoon to issue proclamations and grant permission for members of female amabutho to marry male veterans. As Ndukwana kaMbengwana told Stuart, since "men were not permitted to [marry] whilst still young, girls were obliged to marry old or elderly men." The actual marriage might not take place for three years, and even then the men were obliged to exchange cattle for their spouses.
For Cetshwayo the umkhosi in 1878 offered the king a chance to revitalize his own power and to renew the allegiance of his people. Two factors, however, mitigated the king's optimism. First, conflict was brewing among his amabutho. The iNgcugce regiment of girls refused to marry into the iNdlondlo regiment after ordered to do so by Cetshwayo because many had taken lovers among the uDloko ibutho. As Magema Fuze recalled, this event "became a very serious matter to the king, because such a thing had never happened to the Zulu kings, that a king should be defied by a troop of girls." Second, a schism sparked by intergenerational tensions erupted between the Ngobomakhosi and the older Thulwana regiment, leaving at least seventy dead. This conflict also led to the disaffection of Thulwana's induna (commander) Hamu, Cetshwayo's elder brother, who withdrew to the northwest with a number of his warriors. As Fuze put it, "[It] was perfectly plain that nothing would be right at this umkhosi ceremony."
Another even more serious issue faced Cetshwayo. The British had seemed bent on war with the Zulu kingdom since 1877, and by the end of 1878 such a war appeared inevitable. Cetshwayo could not know that on December 10, 1878, South African high commissioner Sir Bartle Frere drafted a memorandum to the British colonial secretary arguing for "the necessity for now settling this Zulu question thoroughly and finally." Four weeks later the British Army invaded the Zulu kingdom in three major columns, intending to destroy the Zulu military system.
Frederick Thesiger, who became Lord Chelmsford when his father died in October 1878, commanded the British forces. On the eve of the invasion Chelmsford wrote Frere that "our cause will be a good one ... and I hope to be able to convince [our critics] before many weeks are over that for a savage, as for a child, timely severity is greater kindness than mistaken leniency." Chelmsford's plan was to sweep toward Ulundi in three large columns. He placed the northern column under the command of Colonel Evelyn Wood, the eastern column under Colonel Charles Pearson, and the central column under Colonel Richard Glyn. Chelmsford established two smaller columns as well, one under the command of Colonel Anthony Durnford, which was held in readiness on the Natal border, and another in the far north, commanded by Colonel Hugh Rowlands, to monitor the Transvaal Boers and the Swazi kingdom. Chelmsford and his staff accompanied Glyn's column, which struck out from Rorke's Drift on January 11, 1879. The following day Chelmsford, who in effect superseded Glyn as column commander, ordered an attack on inkosi (chief) Sihayo kaXongo Ngobese's homestead on the east bank of the Batshe River. The assault leveled Sihayo's homestead and killed one of his sons. Brimming with confidence, Chelmsford's column made its next camp at the base of Isandlwana Mountain, approximately ten miles east of Rorke's Drift, on January 20.
Donald Morris, a noted scholar of the Anglo-Zulu War, argues that Isandlwana was the best campsite in the vicinity, with ready access to wood and water. In addition, "the view of the approaches was as good as could be expected in a hilly country, and there was no cover for an attacking force within a mile and a half of the camp." For this reason and because Isandlwana was a temporary encampment, Chelmsford decided not to laager or entrench, although he had been warned of such a necessity by a number of experienced advisers. Even the Boer nationalist Paul Kruger, who felt little empathy for the British, impressed upon the general in 1878 "the absolute necessity of laagering his wagons every evening." Chelmsford's decision not to reinforce the camp did not please some of the officers present. Captain R. Duncombe erupted: "Do the staff think we are going to meet an army of school girls? Why in the name of all that is holy do we not laager?"
The central column consisted of Glyn's Twenty-Fourth Regiment, first and second battalions; the Natal Mounted Police and Mounted Infantry; 120 irregular cavalry (Natal Carbineers, Buffalo Border Guard, and Newcastle Rifles, under the command of Major John Dartnell); a Rocket Battery from the Royal Artillery; the Third Regiment of the Natal Native Contingent (NNC) under Commandant Rupert Lonsdale; and the Natal Native Pioneers. Chelmsford, with a few mounted volunteers, left camp at noon on January 20 to scout the terrain to the southwest. He returned to camp at 6:30 p.m. without encountering Zulu yet "far from satisfied that the [Nkandla] Hills were empty, or that the Malakata Hills and [Hlazakazi] Mountain were not masking the approach of a large force." Early the next morning Chelmsford dispatched Dartnell to the Nkandla Hills with mounted volunteers and Lonsdale southeast to Hlazakazi with sixteen companies of the Natal Native Contingent.
By the evening of January 21 Dartnell encountered a Zulu force near the Mangeni River. Staff officer Henry Harford later wrote that "it was very evident that we were opposite a very large impi [age-set regiment], if not the whole Zulu army," but in fact this force consisted of only approximately 1,500 men. The main Zulu army, numbering twenty-five thousand, had advanced to within five miles of the Isandlwana camp without detection. As the writer J. Y. Gibson pointed out at the turn of the twentieth century, "The army had advanced in the day time across open country, and ought, with proper vigilance, to have been discovered." Chelmsford failed to find it. By the evening of January 21 the Zulu army was resting, waiting for an attack on January 23 at the earliest. The Zulu did not wish to attack on the twenty-second, the day of the new or "dead" moon, for as Stuart's informant Mpatshana later said, "It was not customary to fight [when] ... the moon had waned."
By the time the Seventh Cavalry reached the deserted Sun Dance camp on June 24, 1876, it had advanced forty-five miles up the Rosebud. It traveled slowly along the east bank until it reached Muddy Creek, where Custer called the noon halt. Just above Muddy Creek the Indian trail signs seemed to be changing, and Custer extended the halt to four hours to interpret the variation. A well-defined trail, broken periodically by a large campsite, no longer existed. Instead "the valley was now covered from one side to the other with innumerable lodge-pole trails, and campgrounds appeared in profusion. And many of the signs were suddenly much fresher. It was puzzling." Custer, fearing that the village might be scattering, ordered his scouts to pay close attention to any diverging trails. When his scout George Herendeen reported spotting a trail splitting off to the left at Muddy Creek, Custer dispatched Lieutenant Charles Varnum with a party of Arikaras to investigate. Herendeen wrote in 1878 that "Custer said he did not want to lose any of the lodges, and if any of them left the main trail he wanted to know."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Dust Rose Like Smoke by James O. Gump. Copyright © 2016 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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