“‘I will die with you, my brother.’” —Bloody Knife to George Custer, attributed, 1876 (A Terrible Glory, Donovan, 2008)
A Youth Forged in Blood
Around 1840, along the Missouri River’s muddy banks in Dakota Territory, a boy enters the world. Bloody Knife, born to an Arikara mother and a Hunkpapa Sioux father, carries no name in his first cries, just a faint echo of the blade he will one day wield. He grows up in his father’s camp near Sitting Bull’s sprawling Hunkpapa village, a half-breed outcast caught between worlds. His Arikara blood is mocked as “Corn Eater” by Sioux tongues too proud to bend. Gall, a hulking Hunkpapa youth with a warrior’s fire already kindling, turns that scorn into something personal. Around 1855, a teenage Bloody Knife, perhaps fifteen, crosses Gall’s path one too many times. Fists rain down, cracking his ribs, leaving him sprawled in the dirt, coughing blood. “He hated me from a boy,” Gall would later shrug (Gall: Lakota War Chief, Larson, 2007), but Bloody Knife’s hatred smolders deeper, a coal waiting to blaze. By 1856, his mother has endured enough. She flees with her sons back to her Arikara kin along the Missouri’s eastern reaches, abandoning a Sioux father and perhaps a sister to the Hunkpapa’s scorn.
Around 1860, Bloody Knife, now twenty, rides back to test the waters. He visits his father, daring the camp once more. Gall lies in wait, grown into a warrior now. He ambushes Bloody Knife with his Hunkpapa braves. They strip Bloody Knife bare, spit in his face, and batter him near death with coup sticks and musket ramrods. “Get out, half-blood,” they snarl. In the fall of 1862, the knife twists deeper. Gall leads a Sioux war party against an Arikara village near Fort Berthold. Two of Bloody Knife’s brothers fall beneath their blades, scalped, their eyes gouged out, their bodies left to rot beneath the vast prairie sky. “Gall did it,” he seethes, an oath of vengeance takes root. Arikara elder Rhoda Star, kin to Bloody Knife, recounted it years later: “Gall’s hate ran deep, a bully’s mark on a boy who’d become a blade” (Billings Gazette, 2023).
Scouting for Revenge
By 1866, Bloody Knife, now twenty-six, steps into the shadow of Fort Stevenson in Dakota Territory. His frame is lean as a coyote’s after a hard winter, his eyes hardened by Gall’s scars. He has signed on as a corporal with the U.S. Army, earning thirteen dollars a month to hunt Sioux. Gall’s shadow remains ever his spur. He’s no stranger to whites. Years hauling furs for the American Fur Company at Fort Clark and running mail through hostile plains from 1860 to 1865 have honed him sharp. General Alfred Sully’s campaigns against the Sioux between 1864 and 1865 temper him further. His Sioux tongue and Arikara knowledge of the plains make him an unmatched scout.
In the fall of 1865, fate deals a card. Gall’s camp looms near Fort Berthold. Bloody Knife, scouting for Sully, spots his old tormentor and leads a detachment to strike. Bayonets flash. Gall takes steel to the gut and sprawls bleeding on frozen earth. Bloody Knife levels his shotgun at Gall’s skull, vengeance a heartbeat away, but Lt. Henry Bassett, Sully’s cavalry officer leading the detachment, kicks the barrel wide, firing a shot into the dirt. “He’s finished!” Bassett barks. Bloody Knife snarls back, “He’s alive!” but the officer stands firm. Gall crawls twenty miles to aid and survives, leaving Bloody Knife seething anew (The Killing of Crazy Horse, Powers, 2010).
In 1873, Bloody Knife finds himself at Fort Rice. George Armstrong Custer, the 7th Cavalry’s brash lion with hair like spun gold, takes the field. Bloody Knife’s Sioux savvy and Arikara grit catch Custer’s eye. He is hired as a lance corporal, his pay jumping to seventy-five dollars a month. A silver medal stamped with his name slips into his hand from Custer’s own pocket. “Brother,” Custer calls him. Libbie Custer later writes of their talks, sitting in grass with maps scratched in sand, camp dogs sprawled nearby (Tenting on the Plains, Elizabeth B. Custer, 1887). The Yellowstone Expedition of 1873 tests their bond. Bloody Knife scouts Sioux trails, spots a village of a thousand warriors, and saves Custer’s flank at Honsinger Bluff on August 4 (A Terrible Glory, Donovan, 2008). In 1874, the Black Hills trek looms. He warns of Sioux massing, “Too many, Brother!” but Custer brushes it off, yet Bloody Knife rides on.
On August 7, 1874, in the Black Hills, a grizzly hunt sours. Custer shoots a bear twice. Bloody Knife and William Ludlow close in. The bear’s blood sprays Custer’s tunic, splashes Bloody Knife’s forehead, and streaks his neck. He bolts to a creek, scrubbing it off, muttering of bad medicine. Custer laughs. Two days later, on August 9, wagons bog down at a bank. Scout Charley Reynolds blames Bloody Knife. Custer’s temper flares, revolver drawn, and potshots whistle past their heads. They dive behind trees. “It is not a good thing you have done to me,” Bloody Knife growls, his voice low and steady, eyes like flint, “If I had been possessed of madness too, you would not see another day.” Custer cools. “My brother,” he replies, “it was the madness of the moment, and it is gone now. Let us shake hands and be friends again” (A Terrible Glory, Donovan, 2008). Bloody Knife grips his hand. Trust holds, but a wary edge lingers.
War on the Plains: Little Bighorn’s Blood
On June 25, 1876, in the Little Bighorn Valley, dust chokes the air beneath a relentless sun, pierced by Sioux war cries that echo off the hills. Bloody Knife, now thirty-six, rides alongside Major Marcus Allen Reno. One hundred thirty-seven troopers and thirty-five Arikara scouts form one prong of Custer’s 7th Cavalry, split into three forces. George Armstrong Custer has veered north with 210 men to strike Sitting Bull’s camp from above, while Captain Frederick Benteen’s 125 hold southwest to block any escape. Reno’s task is the middle. He’s ordered to charge the village’s southern end, a sprawling encampment of 1,500 souls, women, children, and 800 warriors, Gall among them, coiled and ready for blood. Four days earlier, on June 21 at Rosebud Creek, Bloody Knife had warned Custer: “There are too many Sioux—it would take us four days to kill them all!” (A Terrible Glory, Donovan, 2008). Custer grinned. “Enough for glory,” he’d shot back, 600 against thousands, a gambler’s roll. At 11:20 AM, Reno’s battalion, 137 troopers and 35 Arikara scouts, Bloody Knife among them, charges down the Little Bighorn Valley toward the village’s southern end, teepees dense along the western bank (A Terrible Glory, Donovan, 2008). Bloody Knife rides ahead with fellow scouts, probing the haze.
By 11:30 AM, Reno halts, ordering “Dismount!” Men form a skirmish line 150 yards out. At first, spirits lift. Troopers laugh and joke as firing is light, but Hunkpapa and Cheyenne, 500 strong, surge from the camp, resistance mounting fast (Reno Court of Inquiry, 1879; Donovan, 2008). Around 12:00 PM, Reno pulls back into the timber west of the river, a thin shield of cottonwoods buckling under fire. By 12:15 PM, with the timber a cauldron of gunfire and screams, a Sioux bullet slams into Bloody Knife’s skull, entering through his left temple and bursting out the back. His brains splash across Major Reno’s coat as he slumps to the earth beside Reno. Death strikes as Reno’s nerve cracks, shouting, “Men, to your horses!” then “Dismount!” and “Mount!” again in rapid confusion (A Terrible Glory, Donovan, 2008). “All who want to live, follow me!” he cries, ordering retreat eastward toward the river as chaos erupts. Reno’s withdrawal surges from the timber, not a disciplined charge but a desperate rout aimed at the bluffs across the Little Bighorn. Troopers stumble under conflicting commands, the line fracturing in panic (Reno Court of Inquiry, 1879).
Fellow Arikara scouts Half Yellow Face and Bobtail Bull bolt alongside the fleeing troopers. The Sioux close like a noose. Gall’s Hunkpapa fighters, joined by Oglala warriors, cut down forty men in the timber, their bodies crumpling amid the underbrush (Son of the Morning Star, Connell, 1984). The retreat turns into a slaughter as Reno’s men reach the river. Troopers splash through chest-deep water under a hail of Sioux bullets. Lieutenant Donald McIntosh is shot from his horse, Arikara scout Stabbed drops lifeless, and ten more troopers sink into the blood-red river, its currents stained with the carnage (A Terrible Glory, Donovan, 2008). By 12:20 PM, the survivors, ninety men left from Reno’s command, claw their way up the bluffs east of the river. Captain Benteen joins them with his 125, and their combined force of 350 holds through June 26. Bloody Knife lies dead in the timber behind them, while Custer’s 210 are wiped out to the north, their glory turned to dust.
In the village below, Gall’s heart twists. Two of his wives and several children fall in the battle’s melee, cut down by Reno’s fleeing troopers or perhaps Arikara scouts caught in the chaos. “It made my heart bad,” Gall later told white chroniclers, an echo of loss to match Bloody Knife’s own, though who wielded the blades remains shrouded in the battle’s fog (The Killing of Crazy Horse, Powers, 2010). Bloody Knife’s feud ends here. Gall lives on, his own kin buried in the cost of that day’s fury.
Did honor or revenge carve his path to that bloody end? You decide—sound off below. Join me on my next quest—history’s echoes, faith’s sparks, mysteries uncharted. What’s your battle?
Sources and Further Reading:
A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn – the Last Great Battle of the American West- by James Donovan- https://amzn.to/4im1RLj
Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn-by Evan S. Connell-https://amzn.to/3QAEL7N
The Arikara Narrative of Custer’s Campaign- by O.G. Libby- https://amzn.to/3Xn87KC
The Killing of Crazy Horse- by Thomas Powers- https://amzn.to/3ETYmxc
The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull- by Robert M. Utley- https://amzn.to/3QHK3hy
Gall: Lakota War Chief- by Larson- https://amzn.to/4kkRyJ1
Reno Court of Inquiry: Conduct at the Battle of the Little Bighorn- by Brian V. Hunt- https://amzn.to/43i7xBK
Lakota Noon: The Indian Narrative of Custer’s Defeat- by Gregory F. Michno- https://amzn.to/3QJXcqp
Billings Gazette (2023, Rhoda Star)