The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick
After another couple of miles, they came upon yet another messenger, Trumpeter John Martin, with a written order for Benteen himself. By this time the captain was, according to Martin, “riding quite a distance in front of the troops, with his orderly trumpeter, at a fast trot.” After leaving Custer’s battalion, Martin had been fired on briefly by some warriors before coming upon Boston Custer. The youngest of the Custer brothers had returned to the pack train for a fresh horse and was now on his way to rejoin the battalion.
“Where’s the general?” Boston asked Martin.
“Right behind the next ridge you’ll find him.”
By the time Martin reached the bluff with a view of the valley below, Reno’s battalion had engaged the Indians. “I did not have time to stop and watch the fight,” he remembered. A half hour or so later, Martin found Benteen and handed over the note telling him that it was a “Big Village” and to “Be Quick” and to “bring packs.” As Benteen noted in a subsequent letter to his wife, Cooke had apparently been so excited that he’d left out the k in packs when he repeated the word in the postscript.
“Where’s the General now?” Benteen asked.
Martin said that the Indians were running (Benteen claimed his exact word was “skedaddling”) and that he assumed Custer had already “charged through the village.”
The written order had told Benteen, in no uncertain terms, to proceed as fast as possible, but instead of forging ahead, he continued his conversation with Martin.
“What’s the matter with your horse?” Benteen asked.
“Just tired out, I guess.”
“Tired out? Look at his hip.”
Martin saw that, unknown to him, his horse had been hit by a bullet.
“You’re lucky it was the horse and not you,” Benteen said.
By this time, Captain Weir and Lieutenant Edgerly had joined them, and Benteen handed Weir the note. Benteen claimed to be perplexed by the order. “Well! If he wants me in a hurry,” he asked rhetorically, “how does he expect that I can bring the packs? If I am going to be of service to him I think I had better not wait for the packs.” Besides, Benteen reasoned, if the village was indeed “skedaddling,” as Martin claimed, ammunition was less of a priority than personnel. Best if they forget about the packs for now and push on to Custer.
As the column moved out at a fast trot, Martin found his place with his company. Although he’d made no mention of Major Reno’s battalion to Benteen (who’d seemed more interested in his horse), Martin began to regale the soldiers of H Company with an account of how the Indians had been “asleep in their tepees” and how “Reno had attacked the village and was killing Indians and squaws right and left.” Martin “seemed jubilant,” Lieutenant Edgerly remembered, “and I was afraid we would not get to the front till the fighting was over.”
As they approached the Little Bighorn, the trail diverged in two directions. “Here we have the two horns of a dilemma,” Benteen said. There was a disagreement as to which of the trails to take. Finally the appearance of three of the regiment’s Crow scouts—who ominously repeated the phrase “Ottoe [too many] Sioux, ottoe Sioux”—confirmed that they should climb the bluff to the right.
The first thing the soldiers saw in the valley below was the smoke. Lieutenant Godfrey assumed that given what the two messengers had said, Custer and his men “were burning the village.” But when Benteen saw what looked to be a dozen or so dismounted soldiers on the river bottom “being ridden down and shot by 800 to 900 Indian warriors,” he realized that something was terribly wrong.
Benteen was well ahead of the rest of the column by the time he first saw Major Reno in his red bandanna, riding toward him. The major was breathing heavily and holding his hand in the air. “For God’s sake, Benteen,” he said, “halt your command and help me. I’ve lost half my men.”
Benteen looked coolly toward Reno—an officer he’d never liked—and said, “Where is Custer?”
CHAPTER 12
Still Point
Custer had performed a vanishing act. He’d last been seen by Reno’s men about a half hour before on the bluffs bordering the river. After pausing to wave his hat, he’d disappeared behind the hill and was gone.
When Trumpeter John Martin left Custer with his message for Benteen some five minutes later, at about 3:30 p.m., the battalion was within minutes of reaching the Little Bighorn. Reno had not yet fled the timber. Custer might have stormed across the river and into the village and provided Reno with the promised support. But something happened up there in the hills above the Little Bighorn.
The gap between Reno’s retreat and Custer’s eventual attack was long enough that Sitting Bull, who was watching the battle unfold from the west side of the river, mistakenly believed that Custer’s and Reno’s troopers were one and the same. Not until Reno had retreated across the river, Sitting Bull maintained, did the troopers begin their final thrust to the north. This meant that Custer, the officer of seemingly perpetual motion, had paused—possibly for as long as forty-five minutes—at the most crucial stage in the battle.
No one knows for sure what Custer was doing during this hiatus—unless, of course, you believe the three Crow scouts who claimed to have been there with him.
In the fall of 1907, the photographer and ethnographer Edward Curtis visited the Little Bighorn battlefield. Curtis was in the midst of creating The North American Indians, a twenty-volume compilation of text and photographs documenting the Native cultures of the United States and Canada. When it came to the Indians of the northern plains, there was no story more important than that of the Little Bighorn, and Curtis resolved to give the battle its due. By the time he visited the battlefield in 1907, he’d already spent the summer traveling to several Lakota reservations to conduct interviews. Once at the site of the battle, he secured the services of three of the Crow scouts who had accompanied Custer thirty-one years before: Goes Ahead, Hairy Moccasin, and White Man Runs Him, along with the interpreter Alexander Upshaw.
With White Man Runs Him (who’d been named for an uncle who was once chased by a white trader) setting the pace, they followed Custer’s path from the divide to the ridge beside the Little Bighorn. Once they’d reached a high hill, the Crows told of how Custer and his staff had dismounted at this natural viewing platform and stopped to watch Reno’s battle unfold in the valley below. While Custer and his officers lingered on the hill, the Crows continued north to a hill overlooking the village, where they fired off a few rounds before returning to Custer. By then, Reno’s battle was raging, and White Man Runs Him “scolded” Custer for not immediately descending to the valley floor and assisting the struggling battalion. “No, let them fight,” Custer replied; “there will be plenty of fighting left for us to do.” As Reno’s battalion retreated in chaos, Custer waited. Only after he knew he had the huge village all to himself did he descend from the bluffs.
Curtis found the story difficult to believe. To think that Custer had purposefully postponed his attack until he knew that Reno’s battalion had been defeated was, to paraphrase an officer Curtis later consulted about the Crows’ account, “too terrible to contemplate.” But after repeated questioning, Curtis became convinced that the Crows were telling the truth.
To publish the Crows’ claims would surely incite a firestorm of outrage, most of it directed at him. But to conceal a version of the truth simply because it did not meet the public’s perception of an American hero was to perpetuate a blatant falsehood. In desperation, Curtis decided to send a detailed summary of the Crows’ testimony to one of the foremost chroniclers of the American West, Theodore Roosevelt. In the past, Roosevelt, who also happened to be president of the United States, had been a champion of Curtis’s work; perhaps he would know what to do with these incendiary claims.
Roosevelt found the Crows’ account “wildly improbable.” This, however, did not necessarily make it untrue. “Of course, human nature is so queer that it is hard to say that anything is impossible . . . ,” Roosevelt wrot
It wasn’t the source of the evidence that prompted Roosevelt to doubt the story; it was the passage of time. “I need not say to you,” he wrote, “that writing over thirty years after the event it is necessary to be exceedingly cautious about relying on the memory of any man, Indians or white. Such a space of time is a great breeder of myths.”
As it turned out, the testimony of the three Crows may have been influenced by a rivalry within the tribe. There had been a fourth Crow scout accompanying Custer’s battalion that afternoon, the nineteen-year-old Curley. Curley claimed to have stuck with Custer long after the other three Crows had fled, and as a consequence he’d gained a national reputation as the sole survivor of the Custer massacre, a status the other scouts inevitably resented.
According to Goes Ahead, Hairy Moccasin, and White Man Runs Him, Curley was the one who left Custer’s battalion early. Curtis could understand why the three Crows might cast aspersions on Curley. But why depict Custer as, in Roosevelt’s words, “both a traitor and a fool,” unless, of course, Custer—whose anonymous defamation of Reno made plain his feelings for the major—had in fact acted as they had claimed?
It was a question that became more and more perplexing the more Curtis pondered it, especially since White Man Runs Him insisted that Custer “was always very good to us Crow scouts, and we loved him.” Taking Roosevelt’s advice to heart, Curtis elected not to publish the results of his interviews with the three Crow scouts. “I am beginning to believe,” he wrote, “that nothing is quite so uncertain as facts.”
Curtis was not the only one at the beginning of the twentieth century wrestling with the mysteries of memory and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. There was also Walter Mason Camp, the editor of a railroad trade journal based in Chicago, Illinois. Over the span of several decades, Camp crisscrossed the country interviewing more than 60 survivors of Reno’s command and more than 150 Lakota and Cheyenne participants in the battle. He also tracked down dozens of firsthand accounts published soon after the battle in newspapers and magazines, as well as the official documents related to the campaign. Camp never published a book about the battle, but the evidence he collected is voluminous.
Like Roosevelt, Camp was skeptical of the Crow scouts’ claims about Custer’s movements along the ridge. He seems to have had more faith in Curley even though he recognized that the scout’s accounts had shifted over time. (Curley defended himself by insisting, “I have always told the same story but there have been different interpreters.”) Camp also realized, however, that there were others besides White Man Runs Him and his fellow Crow scouts who had questioned Curley’s veracity.
Custer’s striker, John Burkman, had been relegated to the pack train at the divide. As the train approached the valley of the Little Bighorn, Burkman recognized Curley riding with a group of Arikara scouts as they drove a small herd of Lakota ponies east. If Burkman’s perception was accurate, Curley had, as the other Crow scouts insisted, left Custer’s battalion long before it engaged the enemy. But, like White Man Runs Him and the others, Burkman also had reasons to be jealous of Curley’s status as the last to have seen Custer alive. Burkman had wanted desperately to be with the general at the end, and to think that someone else, and an Indian at that, had been granted that right (and lived to tell about it) must have been difficult for Burkman to bear.
We interact with one another as individuals responding to a complex haze of factors: professional responsibilities, personal likes and dislikes, ambition, jealousy, self-interest, and, in at least some instances, genuine altruism. Living in the here and now, we are awash with sensations of the present, memories of the past, and expectations and fears for the future. Our actions are not determined by any one cause; they are the fulfillment of who we are at that particular moment. After that moment passes, we continue to evolve, to change, and our memories of that moment inevitably change with us as we live with the consequences of our past actions, consequences we were unaware of at the time.
For the historian, the only counter to the erosive effect of time is to emphasize those accounts that were recorded as close to the event as possible. But to dismiss an account simply because it was collected well after the event is to ignore testimony that has the potential of revealing a new, previously unrecorded side to the story, particularly when it comes to an event that included thousands of participants. The great, never-to-be-repeated advantage enjoyed by Camp and his contemporaries was that they were able to seek out and find so many living participants in the battle.
But no matter how many soldiers and warriors Camp and the other researchers talked to, there were a distressing number of instances in which it was impossible to verify a participant’s account. Despite all the testimony, all the points of view, a single, largely unanswerable question remained: When there was no corroborating evidence, whom could you believe?
In the end, telling the story of the past requires the writer to assemble as much information as is available and make a judgment as to what really occurred. When it came to the Battle of the Little Bighorn, this was Walter Camp’s lifework. After conducting hundreds of interviews, after receiving hundreds of letters, after visiting the battlefield close to a dozen times, he’d developed an overall sense of how the battle had unfolded. Some of the evidence was contradictory, but as in the case of the disagreement between Curley and the other Crow scouts, he could understand why those inconsistencies might exist.
There was one participant, however, whose testimony continued to confound Camp. Twenty-two-year-old Private Peter Thompson had been uniquely positioned on that hot afternoon to see what really occurred between Reno’s Valley Fight and Custer’s Last Stand. The only problem was that what Thompson saw, or at least claimed to see, was so head-scratchingly strange that most historians have chosen to ignore or even mock his testimony—as did several of his contemporaries.
In 1921, Thompson, who’d been awarded the Medal of Honor for bravery during the Battle of the Little Bighorn and was by then a highly respected rancher in Montana, attended the burial of the Unknown Solider in Washington, D.C. That night he joined a gathering of Little Bighorn veterans at the Army and Navy Club. But when Thompson told of his experiences during the battle, the other veterans refused to believe him, and Thompson angrily left the party.
By the time Thompson walked out of the veterans’ dinner, Walter Camp had already visited Thompson at his ranch and even toured the battlefield with him. “I tried to discuss with him the impossibility of [some of ] these things,” Camp wrote Daniel Kanipe, the soldier who delivered Custer’s message to Captain McDougall and the pack train and who accompanied Camp and Thompson during their tour of the battlefield, “but there was ‘nothing doing’ and I saw that he would take offense if I persisted.” Camp remarked that if just a few crucial incidents in Thompson’s account were adjusted or deleted, the story would make perfect sense, “but I hardly think,” he wrote, “the historian would have the moral right to do that.”
As becomes clear after studying his twenty-six-thousand-word narrative, not published until thirty-eight years after the battle, Thompson, like many battle veterans, remembered the past as a series of almost static, disconnected tableaux. But while Thompson’s memories were highly visual and detailed, he sometimes confused the chronology of events as well as the identities of who did what. He also had an unfortunate tendency to incorporate the unverified stories of others while imitating the florid, overblown style of the dime-store novels he had read as a child. When combined with his hardheaded refusal to admit to any personal fault whatsoever, it is no wonder no one believed him.
But, as Camp clearly realized, to reject all of Thompson’s testimony out of
Thompson may have sometimes had the identity of the participants and the order of events mixed up, but the essence of what he remembered— the scene burned into his dendrites—proved remarkably trustworthy when it was possible to compare his account to those of others. “It may be as a preacher told me once,” Thompson wrote in a letter to Camp, “‘Thompson, your memory is too good.’”
Peter Thompson had been a member of C Troop, one of the five companies in the battalion under Custer’s command. They’d been galloping north along the edge of the bluffs, the valley to their left, when Thompson’s horse began to tire. As he lagged farther and farther behind the battalion, he stopped to put on his spurs. But his trembling fingers refused to work. “[H]e was shaking so badly and was in such a hurry,” remembered his daughter Susan, who listened to her father recount his experiences and later wrote a fascinating unpublished commentary on her father’s narrative, “that he simply could not fasten those . . . spurs.” Thompson was eventually forced to give up on trying to ride his horse, “for I was afraid he would fall down under me, so stumbling and staggering was his gait.” He was, he realized, in “a terrible predicament . . . : alone in enemy’s country, leading a horse practically useless.”
The appearance of a group of Lakota warriors prompted him to abandon his horse and seek refuge in a ravine full of wild cherry bushes. After taking stock of how much ammunition he had left (five cartridges for his pistol, seventeen for his carbine), he started on foot down the bluff toward the Little Bighorn. Custer, he reasoned, was probably in the village by now, and it was his duty to join him.