Digital Tradition Mirror

Custer's Last Charge

(This score available as ABC, SongWright, PostScript, PNG, or PMW, or a MIDI file)
Pennywhistle notation and Dulcimer tab for this song is also available

Custer's Last Charge

Across the Big Horn's crystal tide, against the savage Sioux
A little band of soldiers charged, three hundred boys in blue;
In fron rode blond-haired Custer bold, pet of the wild frontier
A hero of a hundred fights, his deeds known far and near.

"Charge, comrades, charge! There's death ahead, disgrace lurks in our rear!
Drive rowels deep! Come on, come on!" came his yells with ringing cheer.
And on the foe these heroes charges, there rose an awful yell
It seemed as if those soldiers stormed the lowest gates of hell.

Three hundred rifles rattled forth, and torn was human form,
The black smoke rose in rolling waves above the leaden storm.
The death groans of the dying braves, their wounded piercing cries,
The hurling of the arrows fleet did cloud the noonday skies.

The snorting steed with shrieks of fright, the firearms deafening roar
The war song sung by the dying braves who fell to rise no more,
O'er hill and dale the war song wav'd 'round craggy mountainside
Along dow death's dark valley ran a cruel crimson tide.

Our blond-haired chief was everywhere 'mid showers of hurling lead
The starry banner waved above the dying and the dead,
With bridle rein in firm-set teeth, revolver in each hand
He hoped with his few gallant boys to quell the great Sioux band.

Again they charged, three thousand guns poured forth their last-sent ball
Three thousand war-whoops rent the air, gallant Custer then did fall,
And all around where Custer fell ran pools and streams of gore,
Heaped bodies of both red and white whose last great fight was o'er.

The boys in blue and their savage foe lay huddled in one mass
Their life's blood ran a-trickling through the trampled prairie grass;
While fiendish yells did rend the air and then a sudde hush
While cries of anguish rise again as on the mad Sioux rush.

O'er those strewn and blood-stained fields those goading redskins fly,
Our gang went down three hundred souls, three hundred doomed to die;
Those blood-drunk braves sprang on the dead and
Three hundred bleeding scalps ran high above the fiendish crew.

Then night came on with sable veil and hid those sights frim view,
The Bighorn's crystal tide was read as she wound her valleys through,
And quickly from thosemfields of slain those gloating redskins fled
But blond-haired Custer held the field, a hero with his dead.

note: re last line. I guess it' a matter of how you keep score. RG

RG

Thanks to Mudcat for the Digital Tradition!