"He talked a long time. All the Indians gave him the credit of winning the fight because his medicine won it. But he wasn't in the fight. Gall got mad at Sitting Bull that night. Gall said: 'We did the fighting, you only made medicine. It would have been the same anyway.' Their hearts were bad towards each other after that always.
"After that fight we could have killed all the others on the hill (Reno's command) but for the quarrel between Gall and Sitting Bull. Both wanted to be head chief. Some of the Indians said Gall was right and went with him. Some said Sitting Bull was. I didn't care, I was my own chief and had my bad young men; we would not obey either of them unless we wanted to, and they feared us.
"I was sick of fighting—I had had enough. I wanted to dance. We heard more long swords were coming with wheel guns (artillery, Gatlings). We moved camp north. They followed many days till we crossed the line into Canada. I stayed over there till Sitting Bull came back, and I came back with him. That is all there is to tell. I never told it to white men before."
When he had finished, I said to him: "Rain, if you didn't kill Long Yellow Hair, who did?" "I don't know. No one knows. It was like running in the dark." "Well," asked Mae, "Why was it Long Yellow Hair wasn't scalped, when every one else was? Did you consider him too brave to be scalped?"
"No one is too brave to be scalped; that wouldn't make any difference. The squaws wondered afterward why they couldn't find him. He must have lain under some other dead bodies. I didn't know, till I heard it long afterward from the whites, that he wasn't scalped."
Rain-in-the-Face was about sixty-two years of age at the time of his death, which occurred at Standing Rock Agency, North Dakota, September 12, 1905, and was the last chief to survive and tell the tale of the Custer fight, Gall and Sitting Bull have both gone to hunt the white buffalo long since. Rain could write his name in English. He was taught to do it at the World's Fair in order to sell Longfellow's poem entitled, "The Revenge of Rain-in-the-Face." He didn't know the significance of it after he had written it. His knowledge of English was confined to about thirty words, but he could not say them so any one could understand him, though he could understand almost anything that was said in English. The author recalls seeing him at the World's Fair while hunting Indian data. He looked then very much like his picture and walked with crutches.
Like many other Indians, his gratitude was for favors to come and not for favors already shown. You could depend upon any promise he made, but it took a world of patience to get him to promise anything. Even at the age of sixty he was still a Hercules. In form and face he was the most pronounced type of the ideal Fenimore Cooper dime novel Indian in America.
Upon the arrival of news of the Custer fight at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, General Miles and the Fifth Infantry were ordered to proceed to the scene of hostilities and form part of the large command already there. The order was at once obeyed.
On October 18 Lieut.-Col. E. S. Otis, commanding a battalion of four companies of the Twenty-third Infantry, was escorting a wagon train of supplies from Glendive, Montana, to the cantonment, when he was attacked by a large force of Indians. The soldiers had a hard fight to keep the animals from being stampeded, and the train from capture. They finally beat off the Indians, and during a temporary cessation of hostilities, a messenger rode out from the Indian lines, waving a paper, which was left on a hill in sight. When it was picked up Colonel Otis found it to be an imperious message, probably written by some half-breed, but dictated by the subject of this sketch. It ran as follows:
"Yellowstone.