Two Moons

By editor

Busby, Big Horn County, Montana, June 1876

The land along U.S. Highway 212 south of Busby does not announce itself. The road runs through the dry hills of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, past wire fences and weathered outbuildings, and a traveler moving fast might miss the grave entirely. It sits a quarter mile south of Russell Lane, on the right side of the road when heading south: a stone monument behind an iron fence, with an inscription that reads, in part, "Here lie the remains of Two Moons, Chief of the Cheyenne Indians who Led his men against General Custer in the Battle of Little Big Horn, June 25, 1876."

The man who erected the marker was W.R. Moncure, an Indian trader. He knew Two Moons in the years after the battle, when the chief had made his peace with the Americans and was living on the reservation. Moncure understood that the grave deserved a marker, and he provided one. It is a simple thing, and it is enough.

Two Moons was born around 1847 into the Northern Cheyenne nation. His people had lived on the northern plains for generations, following the buffalo and the seasons, making war on their enemies and peace with their friends, and conducting their affairs according to a code of honor that the Americans who came to displace them never fully understood and rarely tried to. By the time Two Moons came to manhood, the world his parents had known was already changing. The buffalo were fewer. The soldiers were more. The treaties that promised the Cheyenne their lands were honored until they were not.

In the spring of 1876, Two Moons was camped on Powder River with fifty lodges of his people when soldiers under Colonel Ranald Mackenzie attacked the camp. The Cheyenne were scattered, their horses run off. That night, Two Moons and his warriors crept back and recaptured the horses. Then they rode north to find Crazy Horse.

Two Moons told this story himself, twenty-two years later, to the journalist and novelist Hamlin Garland. Garland traveled to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in 1898 and found Two Moons at his cabin near the Rosebud. The chief was an old man by then, "tall, big-chested, erect, and martial of bearing," with a face that Garland described as "broadly benignant." He spoke through an interpreter named Wolf Voice, and he spoke carefully, as a man speaks when he knows that his words will be written down and read by people who were not there.

"Crazy Horse said to me," Two Moons told Garland, "I'm glad you are come. We are going to fight the white man again. I said, All right. I am ready to fight. I have fought already. My people have been killed, my horses stolen; I am satisfied to fight."

The great encampment on the Little Bighorn that June was the largest gathering of Lakota and Cheyenne people in the memory of anyone living. Sitting Bull had called for unity, and the people had come from every direction. They had whipped General Crook at the Rosebud on June 17. They believed, with good reason, that they had moved beyond the reach of the Americans. They were dancing and feasting and preparing for more dancing when the soldiers came.

Two Moons was watering his horses at the creek on the morning of June 25 when a Sioux messenger rode in shouting that soldiers were coming. He ran to his lodge, told his brother-in-law to get the horses, and rode out to rally his people. "I am Two Moon, your chief," he called out. "Don't run away. Stay here and fight. You must stay and fight the white soldiers. I shall stay even if I am to be killed."

He rode toward the south end of the village, where Major Marcus Reno's three companies were charging across the valley floor. He watched Reno's men advance and then fall back and then run for the river. Then he rode north, toward the sound of new firing.

What he saw when he arrived at the northern end of the village was Custer's five companies deploying on the bluffs above the river. He described it to Garland with the precision of a man who had studied the ground afterward and thought about it for two decades: "I saw flags come up over the hill to the east like that. Then the soldiers rose all at once, all on horses, like this. They formed into three branches with a little ways between. Then a bugle sounded, and they all got off horses, and some soldiers led the horses back over the hill."

Then the warriors went up the ridge.

"The shooting was quick, quick," Two Moons said. "Pop-pop-pop very fast. Some of the soldiers were down on their knees, some standing. Officers all in front. The smoke was like a great cloud, and everywhere the Sioux went the dust rose like smoke. We circled all round them, swirling like water round a stone. We shoot, we ride fast, we shoot again. Soldiers drop, and horses fall on them."

According to Arapaho warrior Water Man, Two Moons took command of the Cheyenne forces after Lame White Man was killed early in the fighting. Weasel Bear, another Cheyenne warrior, confirmed it: "We Cheyennes were led by Two Moon." It was Two Moons who directed the Cheyenne up the left side of the ridge while the Sioux came up the right, completing the encirclement that Custer's men could not break.

When it was over, Two Moons counted the dead with six other chiefs. They used a bundle of sticks, handing one to another man for each body they found. They counted 388 soldiers. Thirty-nine Sioux and seven Cheyenne had been killed.

"All the soldiers were now killed," Two Moons told Garland, "and the bodies were stripped. After that no one could tell which were officers. The bodies were left where they fell. We had no dance that night. We were sorrowful."

That detail -- the silence after the victory, the grief that followed the killing -- is not the detail that appears in most accounts of the Little Bighorn. The Americans who wrote about the battle in the years that followed were interested in the death of Custer, not in the sorrow of the people who killed him. Two Moons understood that his people had won a battle and were losing a war, and that the dead on both sides were equally dead.

He surrendered to the army in 1877 and eventually became a scout and a liaison between the Northern Cheyenne and the government. He traveled to Washington. He met presidents. He watched his people be assigned to a reservation in the hills of southeastern Montana, which was not the worst outcome available to them, though it was far from what they had been promised.

In 1913, the sculptor James Earle Fraser was designing a new five-cent coin for the United States Mint. He wanted the obverse to show a composite portrait of an American Indian, and he sought out three men to serve as models. Two Moons was one of them. The coin that resulted, the Buffalo Nickel, circulated from 1913 to 1938. For twenty-five years, the face of the man who had led the Cheyenne at the Little Bighorn passed through the hands of every American who bought a cup of coffee or a newspaper or a loaf of bread.

Two Moons died in 1917, at approximately seventy years of age. He was buried along the highway south of Busby, on the reservation where his people had been placed. The trader Moncure put up the stone.

The inscription does not say that Two Moons was right or wrong to fight. It does not say that Custer was right or wrong to attack. It says only that Two Moons was a chief, that he led his men, and that the battle was on June 25, 1876. These are facts that no one disputes. They are enough.

See also

• Two Moons at Busby, Big Horn County (W.R. Moncure, Indian Trader, erected c. 1920s)
• Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument -- 25 miles northwest of Busby via U.S. 212