AFTER THE BATTLE THE INDIANS waited to see if there would be an immediate response. None came; late on the second day after the battle the Indians decided to leave. It was feared that, by then, many white soldiers might be coming to the Little Bighorn, to avenge Long Hair.

Only a few white scouts happened to see this great exodus. To them it seemed that the prairie had become a moving carpet of people, with travois, thousands of horses, dogs, babies, and the people themselves, many of them subdued. Most went south at first, though some angled off to the northwest. Neither Terry or Gibbon laid a finger on them—though that calm would not prevail for long. The whites, Sitting Bull knew, were a determined people. They would be coming.

The whites, indeed, did come, but in the short run ended up with very little to show. At first they put their strength in numbers: Crook had two thousand men, an absurdly cumbersome troop, and Terry had nearly that many, about 1,600. In a way it was the Hancock expedition all over again. The Indians stayed mobile and easily eluded these armies. Their only real slipup was Mackenzie’s raid, that freezing night, on Dull Knife’s camp. Otherwise there were mainly small skirmishes: a few dead here, a few dead there. Slim Buttes, where the first little skirmish was fought, had only a handful of lodges, not enough to satisfy a public howling for revenge. The public wanted the Indian to be struck a terrible blow, but this didn’t happen.

One encounter that at least made good copy was Buffalo Bill Cody’s taking of the famous “First Scalp for Custer.” Cody, at the time pursuing a career on the stage, was way over in the Carolinas when Custer fell, but not for nothing was he a showman. He quickly got himself west and was sent to serve under General Wesley Merritt’s command, then operating near Fort Robinson, in Nebraska—the fort where Crazy Horse was killed. General Merritt was trying to get as many Indians as possible to go into the Red Cloud agency, where they could be peaceably processed.

On his first morning in camp Cody put on one of his velvet suits—later it was rumored that the Indians liked his suit better than they liked his fighting, but, be that as it may, Cody loped off, observed by two soldiers with telescopes, who were supposed to keep him from getting into trouble—no easy job with Buffalo Bill. There was an abundance of Cheyenne to the north, and one warrior decided to attack Cody—or he may have hoped to bag two couriers on their way from the fort.

In the reported version of this event, and in the movie version, in which Jeff Chandler played Cody, the two hurled insults at one another, but if so neither of them was in earshot and neither of them could speak the other’s language. All the dialogue between them in various books and movies is wholly bogus.

What wasn’t bogus was that the encounter was deadly, and Cody—despite having his horse step in a hole and go down—did kill the Cheyenne, who was named Yellow Hair, not Yellow Hand, as has sometimes been said.

Cody did scalp the dead Yellow Hair and did hold up the first scalp for Custer—it turned out to be one of only a few. Cody may not have been a scout of the first rank, but he had done a fair amount of real scouting and he was well aware that lots of Cheyenne would soon be coming down upon him.

BUFFALO BILL SCALPS YELLOW HAIR.

The scalp itself followed a curious path. Cody sent it to his wife, Lulu, in Rochester, New York. The two were on the outs at the time. They mainly were on the outs, following an initial period of bliss.