Half Yellow Face's Doomsday Prediction

"You and I are going home today by a road we do not know.” – Crow scout Half Yellow Face, speaking through the interpreter Mitch Bouyer

Half Yellow Face had the misfortune of being assigned to the 7th Cavalry under the command of Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer as he prepared to launch an attack on an Indian encampment along the Little Bighorn River that was overflowing with Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors. Despite repeated warnings about the massive size of the village, Custer decided to go ahead with the attack instead of waiting for the reinforcements that were only a day away.

Mitch Bouyer (also spelled Boyer or Bowyer), who served as an interpreter for the Indian scouts traveling with Custer, was an experienced frontiersman. In fact, Gen. John Gibbon once called him “next to Jim Bridger, the best guide in the country”.

Just imagine the expression on Bouyer’s face as he translated Half Yellow Face’s words to Col. Custer, basically saying that they were all about to die that fateful June day in 1876. The only unknown – at least to Half Yellow Face – was the actual road to be traveled once they got there.

Two thousand years before the Battle of the Little Bighorn, a similar conversation took place between two men, but no translator was needed because they both spoke Hebrew and Aramaic. However, in mid-conversation, the second man did need to ask the first Man for some clarification as to the meaning of what He had said.

“Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me,” the first Man began. “In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also. And where I go you know, and the way you know.”

The second man must have had a puzzled look on his face and maybe he even started scratching his head a little. Finally, he responded, “Lord, we do not know where You are going, and how can we know the way?”

“I am the way, the truth, and the life,” the first Man said. “No one comes to the Father except through Me.”

If only Half Yellow Face – and Mitch Bouyer, for that matter – had known and trusted the first Man, Jesus, they would have known for sure the road home to heaven.

“Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me will live, even though he dies.’” John 11:25 (BSB)

- Rev. Dale M. Glading, President