Bloody Knife - Death at The Battle of Little Bighorn

Death At The Battle of Little Bighorn

In 1876, during the Little Bighorn campaign, Bloody Knife repeatedly tried to warn Custer there were too many Indians to fight. In spite of the overwhelming odds, he refused to stay out of the battle. By some accounts, before the battle began, Bloody Knife signaled to the sun with his hands, "I shall not see you go down behind the hills tonight."

Bloody Knife was assigned to Major Marcus Reno, who had a command of 140 soldiers, at the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876. During the battle, Custer directed Bloody Knife and the other Arikara and Crow scouts to drive off the herds of Indian ponies in the Sioux camp. Reno and his men retreated into woodland near the river, and Bloody Knife was shot in the head and killed while mounted on his horse. Reportedly, Bloody Knife was standing next to Reno, who had motioned for Bloody Knife to approach him so he could ask Bloody Knife what the Indians would do when his command began to move away from their village. Reno, his face smeared with the gore from Bloody Knife's wound, panicked, and his poor response cost many of his troops their lives. Bloody Knife was one of three Arikara scouts assigned to Reno to die during the battle; the others were Little Brave (also known as Bear's Trail or Little Soldier) and Bobtail Bull. The US Army suffered a huge defeat.

Bloody Knife was decapitated by the Sioux. According to Bloody Knife's sister, her daughters had found his body on the battlefield, and unaware that it was the body of their uncle, cut off his head and took it to the Hunkpapa village where it was displayed on a pole. When she saw the head and recognized it as that of her brother, Bloody Knife's sister was horrified. According to David Humphreys Miller, an interviewer who talked with many of the participants and witnesses from the battle, she cried out: "Gall has killed him at last!" However, other accounts do not mention Gall nor the sisters' reactions at their discovery of the head's identity. In the aftermath of the battle, Colonel John Gibbon's troops found and identified by its gray color pattern the scalp of Bloody Knife in an empty Sioux lodge. These remains were buried on the battlefield on June 27, 1876.