The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick
Just prior to the departure of Reno’s battalion, Lieutenant Varnum arrived from scouting the left side of the creek. Still desperate for information, Custer asked him what he’d seen.
“I guess you could see about all I could see of the situation,” Varnum said.
“I don’t know,” Custer replied. “What did you see?”
“The whole valley in front is full of Indians.”
Custer knew that Varnum was exhausted. Over the course of the last twenty-four hours his scouting duties had required him to ride more than sixty miles, and he’d been without significant sleep for a day and a half. “Nothing but the excitement of going into action kept me in the saddle at all,” Varnum remembered. Custer told him that if he was up for it, he and Hare were both free to join the Arikara in the attack.
As Varnum prepared to gallop off, he turned to his good friend Lieutenant George Wallace. Wallace, the regiment’s topographical engineer, was in charge of keeping a record of the column’s daily movements and was riding next to Custer. The tall, skeletal Wallace, known as Nick to his friends, had been Varnum’s roommate at West Point; he’d also been the officer who three nights earlier had feared that Custer was doomed to die. “Come on, Nick, with the fighting men,” Varnum quipped. “Don’t stay back with the coffee coolers.”
Custer laughed and shook his fist at Varnum, then indicated to Wallace that he was free to go. As Varnum and now Wallace spurred their horses to catch up with Reno and the Arikara, Custer pulled off his hat and waved good-bye. “That was the last time either of us saw him alive,” Varnum later remembered.
Reno and his battalion were not alone as they thundered down the left bank of Sun Dance Creek toward the Little Bighorn. Galloping beside him were Custer’s adjutant, William Cooke, and the senior officer in Custer’s battalion, Captain Myles Keogh. Cooke rode a horse so pale it was almost completely white. Despite his falling-out with Frederick Benteen, he was known for his charismatic charm and winning manner. “[H]is very breath [was] nothing but kindness,” the Arikara scout Soldier claimed. As Reno approached the eastern bank of the Little Bighorn, Cooke called out to him in what Reno later remembered as “his laughing, smiling way”: “We are all going with the advance and Myles Keogh is coming, too.” But as Reno’s horse jumped into the cool, fast-flowing waters of the Little Bighorn and paused to drink, Reno lost track of Custer’s adjutant and never saw him again.
Lieutenant Charles DeRudio, the former European revolutionary and friend to Frederick Benteen, had a reputation as one of the poorest horsemen in the regiment’s officer corps; he was also unhappy with his current assignment. By all rights, he should have been the commander of the Gray Horse Troop, Company E. Instead, Custer (who had never returned DeRudio’s cherished field glasses) had given that plum position to Lieutenant Algernon Smith and placed DeRudio under the command of Captain Myles Moylan in A Company. Moylan had immediately made it clear he did not like the idiosyncratic officer, even refusing to share his meals with him.
A Company had been assigned to Reno’s battalion, and DeRudio was lagging well behind his troop when his horse, which always seemed slightly beyond his ability to control, plunged into the Little Bighorn. As it turned out, Major Reno was still in the middle of the river astride his horse. But the horse wasn’t the only one pausing for a drink. Reno was in the process of downing what appeared to be a considerable quantity of whiskey when the surge from DeRudio’s horse splashed the major with river water. “What are you trying to do?” Reno complained. “Drown me before I am killed?”
By the time Reno emerged from the river and made his way through the belt of brush and timber along the western bank, Fred Gerard was already on his way back. The Lakota up ahead were not behaving as he’d so melodramatically announced at the Lone Tepee. Instead of running away, they were “coming in large numbers to meet them.”
“Major,” Gerard said, “the Sioux are coming to give us battle.”
Earlier that year, Reno had unsuccessfully attempted to get Gerard fired. No matter how important the message might be, he refused to acknowledge the interpreter’s presence. He may also have begun to feel the effects of his recent slug of whiskey. He looked insensibly down the valley for a few seconds, then gave the order, “Forward, men!”
Having been so thoroughly rebuffed by Reno, Gerard felt he must inform Custer of this spectacular news himself. Once again, the Arikara scouts would have to do without the services of their interpreter.
Soon after recrossing the river, he came upon Adjutant Cooke on his way back to Custer’s battalion, which was concealed from view by a high grassy knoll.
“Well, Gerard,” Cooke said, “what is the matter now?”
“The Indians are coming to fight us, instead of running as we supposed.”
“All right,” Cooke responded, “you go back and I will report to General Custer.”
By the time Cooke returned with Gerard’s news, Custer had stopped at a small tributary to Sun Dance Creek to water the battalion’s horses. “Don’t let the horses drink too much,” Custer cautioned; “they have to travel a great deal today.” Soon a messenger from Reno arrived confirming the fact that instead of running, the Indians were coming up to meet Reno.
Custer was probably encouraged by the report that the Indians were advancing. In order to cover the retreat of the women, children, and old people, the village’s warriors typically engaged the enemy in a temporary rearguard action. Since it was just to provide their loved ones with enough time to escape, the warriors’ attack would not, in all probability, be especially fierce. However, if Reno could hold the Indians’ attention long enough, it might give Custer the opportunity to perform a clandestine end run.
On the east side of the tree-fringed river, the guide Mitch Boyer and the Crow scouts informed him, was a line of bluffs that rose several hundred feet above the valley. If he climbed up onto these bluffs and rode several miles downriver, he might be able to work his way around the village. As Reno attacked from the south, Custer would swoop down out of the hills, gallop across the river, and attack what was left of the dispersing village from the east.
But all this was simply conjecture. None of them had, as of yet, even seen the village, which still remained hidden behind the looming hills ahead—all the more reason to climb to the top of that bluff to the right and finally look down into the valley below.
Before continuing, Custer took off his buckskin jacket and tied it to the back of his saddle. One of Custer’s sergeants shouted out that there were Indians up there on the hill to the east. That decided it—they were not following Reno into the valley; they were swinging right.
At some point, Custer divided his battalion into two subsets: the Right Wing, composed of three companies under Captain Myles Keogh, and the two-company Left Wing, which included Lieutenant Algernon Smith’s distinctive Gray Horse Troop, commanded by Custer’s old friend Captain George Yates.
Yates, with thinning blond hair and a thick, carefully clipped mustache, shared Custer’s obsessive attention to cleanliness. Whereas Custer was known for frequently washing his hands and brushing his teeth, Yates ended each day by turning the pockets of his pants inside out and carefully scouring them with a brush. Yates was always so neat and precise that he looked, in the proverbial phrase of the day, “as if he’d just stepped out of a bandbox,” the cylindrical container of thin wood in which a gentleman’s hat and other crushable pieces of clothing were kept. Taking their cue from their meticulous leader, Yates’s F Company was known as the “Bandbox Troop.” About this time, Custer dispatched a squad of F Company soldiers as an advance guard. Whereas Benteen had been sent left, these troopers would swing far to the right in an effort to see whether anything of importance lay to the east of the bluffs.
As they mounted the hill, Custer and Tom paused to review the battalion. The companies had previously been marching in columns of two. In order to make the battalion less strung out during its potentially conspicuous dash along the bluffs, Cu
By the time they’d climbed out of the valley and onto the bluffs, the small group of Indians they’d seen had disappeared into the rolling green hills. They rode on until they were approaching the ridgeline and suddenly they saw it: the flat and seemingly endless expanse of the Little Bighorn Valley through which wandered the sparkling blue-green ribbon of the river. And there, two miles to the northwest, nestled into the wooded meanders of the Little Bighorn, was the largest Indian village any of them had ever seen: hundreds of gleaming white tepees beneath the soaring transparent canopy of the sky. Beyond the lodges to the west was a weirdly kaleidoscopic sight: a swirling sea of reddish brown that the soldiers only gradually realized was the village’s herd of fifteen thousand to twenty thousand ponies.
Gerard, it turned out, could not have been more wrong. Not only was the village not running; it was also not moving up to meet Reno, whose three companies were visible on the other side of the river about a mile to the west as they, too, rode north toward the village ahead.
Custer had done it. He had somehow managed to catch Sitting Bull’s village by complete surprise in the middle of the day. That in itself was an extraordinary achievement—a stroke of Custer luck that not even he could have dared hope for. By all rights, the valley below should be much like the site of the freshly abandoned village beside the Lone Tepee: a hoof-pocked plain of debris and still-smoking lodge fires, devoid of Indians. Instead, here was a village, a huge village, intact and complete, its inhabitants apparently oblivious to their presence.
The soldiers gave three cheers as they urged their tired horses north across the uneven hills. Some of the mounts, exhausted after a week of almost continual marching, began to lag behind; others, spurred on by their enthusiastic riders, began to edge past the regiment’s commander. “Boys, hold your horses,” Custer cautioned; “there are plenty of them down there for us all.”
Up ahead was a prominent hill that looked as if it might provide the best view yet of the valley below. Custer ordered the battalion to halt at its base as he and his staff climbed to the top. With the help of DeRudio’s field glasses, he studied the village. According to the Italian trumpeter John Martin, who was destined to be the only surviving witness to Custer’s first careful inspection of the valley, he could see women, children, and dogs lounging tranquilly around the lodges, but nowhere could he see any warriors. Where were they? Were they asleep in their tepees? Some of Custer’s officers speculated that they must be off hunting buffalo.
It was the Washita times ten, perhaps even times a hundred. As Reno galloped down the valley from the south, Custer would strike like a thunderbolt from the east and hundreds, if not thousands, of noncombatants would be theirs. When their husbands, fathers, and sons returned to the village, they’d have no choice but to surrender and follow the soldiers back to the reservation.
Given the village’s immense size, Custer’s first priority was to bring up the pack train as quickly as possible. If he hadn’t done so already, it was at this point that he sent back a messenger to McDougall, telling him to hurry up with the ammunition.
Custer pulled the binoculars from his eyes and turned toward the five companies waiting expectantly at the bottom of the hill. Beside him were his brother Tom and his adjutant, William Cooke, along with Martin, the trumpeter. If all went well, the Seventh was about to win its most stunning victory yet; and best of all, it looked like this battalion of Custer favorites was about to deliver the coup de grâce. Around 3:30 p.m. on June 25, Custer took off his wide gray hat and waved it exultantly in the clear blue air. “Hurrah, boys, we’ve got them!” he shouted. “We’ll finish them up and then go home to our station.”
CHAPTER 10
Reno’s Charge
An hour or so earlier, as the Seventh Cavalry marched down out of the Wolf Mountains, Wooden Leg and his brother Yellow Hair had been lingering sleepily over the meal their mother had prepared for them. Like many other young people in Sitting Bull’s village, they’d enjoyed a long night of dancing and were not yet fully awake.
There had been talk about the possibility of an attack, but on the morning of June 25 it was generally assumed the soldiers were still at least a day away. Once Wooden Leg and Yellow Hair had finished their meal, they decided to head to the river for a swim.
The sun had already edged into the western portion of the sky by the time they began the walk from their family’s tepee at the north end of the village to the Little Bighorn to the east. The surrounding plain was relatively flat, but there were portions of the valley, particularly near the river, that dipped and rose in unexpected ways. Every spring, the rain-swollen river wandered in a new direction, and the accumulated loops and swirls of old riverbeds had carved the surrounding bottomland into a complex mosaic of alternating levels known as benches. This meant that anyone traveling up or down the valley must navigate the often sharply chiseled troughs left by these ancient waterways, some of which had created terracelike depressions as many as twenty feet below the surface of the valley.
To Wooden Leg’s right, on the flats beyond these desiccated riverbeds, boys raced horses and played games. Among the outlying hills on either side of the river, groups of women, children, and old men dug wild turnips with ash sticks.
That afternoon the river was alive with splashing swimmers; others sat fishing in the shade of the cottonwood trees. One of these was the famed Santee chief Inkpaduta, over sixty years old and nearly blind. More than twenty years before, he had led his people in a bloody uprising in Minnesota before fleeing west to join the Lakota. Inkpaduta had been there with Sitting Bull at Killdeer Mountain when the soldiers had first attacked the Hunkpapa. After years of self-imposed exile in Canada, he was back with Sitting Bull’s people, fishing beside the crystal waters of the Little Bighorn with his grandsons.
A village of this size—almost two miles long and more than a quarter mile wide with as many as eight thousand people living in approximately a thousand lodges—could exist only beside a water source like the Little Bighorn. In addition to the village’s human occupants, the seemingly numberless pony herd needed vast quantities of water, as did the herds of buffalo, antelope, and other game on which the Lakota and Cheyenne depended.
Water provided the Indians with the essentials of life, but it was also the source of great spiritual power. Crazy Horse had experienced his life-changing vision beside a lake. Roman Nose, the greatest warrior of Wooden Leg’s youth, had once built a raft of logs and floated out into the middle of Medicine Water Lake in northern Wyoming. After four days and four nights of fasting and exposure to the sun, during which his raft was pummeled by a series of horrendous storms, Roman Nose finally returned to shore. His prayers, he said, had protected him. “The water had been angry, crazy . . . ,” Wooden Leg recalled, “but not a drop of it had touched him.”
That afternoon on the Little Bighorn, Wooden Leg and his brother enjoyed a brief swim. “The sun was high,” he remembered, “the weather was hot. The cool water felt good to my skin.” The boys climbed up onto the grassy bank and talked about their adventures at the dances the night before. The conversation petered out until both of them closed their eyes and gradually drifted off to sleep.
Some three miles to the south, Major Marcus Reno and his battalion of about 150 soldiers and scouts had just crossed the Little Bighorn. Ahead of them extended a narrow plain covered with three to four inches of ashlike dust. A group of about fifty or so Indians—refugees from the abandoned village at the Lone Tepee—had already churned the valley into tawny billows as they rode toward the encampment ahead. To the right was the weaving timberline of the river’s western bank; beyond that, on the other side of the river, rose the crumbling, clifflike bluffs over which Custer’s battalion was beginning to march. To the left was a series of low foothills. Still out of sight, incredibly enough, was Sitting Bull’s village. About two and a half miles downriver, the Little Bighorn looped dramatically to the west, and the acco
As his earlier words to DeRudio might suggest, Reno had had misgivings about his assignment from the start. Despite having pretended to ignore Gerard’s warning, he’d already sent back one messenger telling Custer the Indians were “all in front of me . . . and were strong.” Another messenger was soon to follow.
Reno’s three companies paused for at least ten minutes to prepare for the attack. They cinched the dark blue woolen webbing of their saddle girths, checked their Colt .45 six-shooters and single-shot Springfield carbines, and took their proper places. Before leaving the divide, the men in each company had counted off by fours. When it came time to fire their weapons, common procedure was for the Number Ones, Twos, and Threes to dismount and form a skirmish line while the Number Fours remained mounted in the rear with the other men’s horses.
The soldiers swung into their saddles, and with the orders “Left front into line! Forward guide right!” they were soon moving down the valley at a slow gallop. Already well ahead of them were Custer’s favorite Indian scout, Bloody Knife, and about twenty-five fellow Arikara. There were also two Crow scouts, Half Yellow Face and White Swan. Their instructions were simple. Instead of fighting the Lakota, they were to cripple the enemy’s warriors by stealing their horses.
For Bloody Knife, who wore the black handkerchief with blue stars that Custer had brought back with him from Washington, this was a very personal battle. His mother was an Arikara, but his father was a Hunkpapa, and Bloody Knife had grown up with Gall, Sitting Bull, and many of the other warriors gathered here today on the Little Bighorn. Whether it was because of his Arikara parentage or his sullen personality, Bloody Knife had been tormented by the other Hunkpapa boys, with Gall—barrel-chested, outgoing, and easy to like—leading in the abuse. Bloody Knife eventually left to live with his mother’s people, but in 1860, at the age of twenty, he returned to visit his father on the mouth of the Rosebud, only to be once again beaten up and humiliated by his old nemesis, Gall.