The Brave Squaw Battle

About this time of evening 138 years ago, Crazy Horse led his triumphant Sioux and Cheyenne light cavalry northward to the Great Camp on the Little Big Horn. Behind him, General George Crook retreated southward from the valley of Rosebud Creek.

The prelude to Little Big Horn was  over, final score Indians 53 kills, Blue Coats 8, a lopsided upset of the White Eyes and personal victory for the man who has come down to us as Crazy Horse (nee Curly and, later, Strange Man).

We remember it (if at all)  as the the Rosebud Battle. The Indians recall it as the Fight Where Buffalo Calf  Woman Saved Her Brother.

Warrior "chief" Comes-in Sight was shot from his horse. She batted her own mount into action, charged no-man's-land, and whisked him to safety as the Blue Coats lobbed big .45-70 bullets all around her.  Nine days later, Indian legend has it, she was fighting alongside her husband some 30 miles to the north and was perhaps the warrior queen who knocked Custer from his horse.

(So, a century before Ms. Magazine, women of the Horse Indians were welcome to combat  duty if they wished. It was no big deal. Certainly it was something other than a social experiment in gender politics.)

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The airy, opinionated,  and semi-dependable Mari Sandoz wrote briefly of Rosebud in her biography,  Crazy Horse.* She credits him with the same decoy tactics he used in the 1868 Fetterman slaughter.  More interestingly, she somehow knows his private thoughts as he overlooked the creek valley where Crook's mule-mounted infantry rested  in marching order.  (Flop where you stop and don't get too worried about guards and pickets.)  Crazy Horse wished for better guns, she wrote, and for braves who would fight cooperatively and win rather than made mad rushes for coups and die.

It didn't matter much at Rosebud, nor later at the Custer fight. The Indian alliance mixed up some sound unit tactics with their traditional lust for individual glory and won. Both times.

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Crook's order of battle is fairly clear, about 960 of the mule-riding infantry,  some 250 civilian employees and hangers-on, and up to 300 Shoshone and Crow "scouts." It may be telling that he ordered  an ammunition allowance of just 100 rounds per man for their 1873 Springfield single shots.

Crazy Horse didn't have an orderly to write up nice neat daily morning reports.  So the Indian TOE that day isn't clear, although the weaponry ranged from war clubs and bows to a few modern rifles and revolvers taken from the enemy dead in earlier battles. He appears to have been one of the leaders of something like 1,000 fighting men. And one valiant woman.

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Travel note: It is a middling-hard slog into the actual battle site, and I was glad for high ground clearance. In wet weather the four-wheel-drive would have been a necessity rather than my macho manhood symbol. Still, it's an interesting and beautiful site, and if you're in the neighborhood I suggest you pop in. Carry a snake stick for sure, and a sidearm may make you feel a little more secure in the well-ravined isolation.

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*ISBN 978-0803292116, pp. 317-322

The federal government has learned that Marshalltown, Iowa, is full of lazy, flabby kids, a crisis of deep national concern, so:

Last fall, the Marshalltown School District ... (landed a $1. 4 million DOE grant)  to focus on getting kids active. The district purchased 4,000 pedometers with the grant money and found many students weren’t reaching a recommended goal of 9,100 steps a day.

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Physical fitness in the 1950s:

Scene: The breakfast table.

Dad: Cut the grass this morning.

Jim: But I was going to hike down to Kalo with Richie and Ron. 

Dad: Cut the grass first.

So it was spoken. And done.

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Free pedometers for layabout kids? ? You have to sh*tting me.

The Youth Physical Fitness plank in my 2016 presidential campaign platform.:

"Cut the grass you lazy little creeps."

Do I need glasses or is truth really getting even fuzzier?

Three days ago our Commander-in-Chief stood on the White House lawn and told America: No combat troops to Iraq.  That was pleasant to hear given that American warriors are relatively untrained in adjudicating disputes between rival religious sects.

This afternoon we learn that he has told congress he's sending "up to"  275 special forces troops to Iraq.

If I know government flackery correctly, the Ministry of Truth is warp-speed keyboarding the logical explanation that these forces are not "combat"  troops. While "equipped for direct fighting," they're really some other kind of troops. Therefore the White House/State Department complex is not nearly as schizoid as any intelligent observer would first believe.

If so -- if they are other than active warriors -- then WTF are we directing them to do? Organize block parties? Hold knitting bees? Help the Jihad reduce its carbon foot print?

When we learn to our amazement that none of this works, we can surge in some more people. Why not? It is certainly a vital national interest to promote a reasoned dialog about who gets first crack at the afterlife virgins, not to mention the lion's share of oil loot; well worth all the young American blood it takes.

Storms, then and now and leggy

I fell asleep reading about one storm, 160,000 years ago,  and woke up in time to experience another one, still going on.

As my body succumbed to the fatigue of more work (actual work; moving matter) than I'm accustomed to lately, Donald Goldsmith* was telling me about Supernova 1987A. It actually happened sometime around the era when homo sapiens was killing off, and perhaps eating, competing bi-pedals, but it was far away.  So far that the radiation didn't knock on our door until February 23, 1987.

And, rude Earthlings that we are, we turned out the lights, drew the drapes, and pretended not to be home.  The neutrinos were left to their wanderings.

Of course, everyone these days knows something about neutrinos, a product of exploding stars. They are notable for being almost non-existent in a material sense. No gravitas. But they are blessed with a blind and driving energy, and if you want to explain this to your kids by an analogy involving Barack Obama, it's okay with me.

A few days later the rest of the rays and particles from the explosion started calling. This time we were paying attention. The most noticeable result? Hundreds of ambitious astronomers and physicists rushing about and tripping over one another in a mad dash for research grants.

That part of Space Storm 1987A is calming down, as is the great Camp Jiggleview Deluge of June 16, 2014. The most noticeable result of this one will be the Commandant's activities tomorrow. Moving matter, downed burr oak branches and assorted small debris blown around here and there.

There's no real damage, just a certain annoyance that my recovery day will be delayed. I'll entertain myself by photographing the foot of so of water standing in the shallow ditch in front of the private Camp Jiggleview Forest. It's happened before, a great big puddle that goes way in a day or two.  Of course when I'm telling my Green Party friends about it I use the term "rain garden."

All that done, I'll start getting ready to replace some blown roofing on the shop-office-guest room building.  So (sigh) If I seem a little surly for the next few days, please be understanding and kind.

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I'd have preferred this one, but not even exalted Commandants get everything they want.

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*In "The Astronomers" 1991, ISBN 0-312-05380-0. (It's a little dated, of course, but still a rather useful explanation of cosmology for lay folk, especially when read with Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything." If I'd read it before Hawking's two popular books I might have understood more of what he said in fewer than three readings.)