It was then that the phantoms of the previous night became real. A large number of mounted troopers, their guidons waving in the soft morning breeze, appeared to the north. “Of course…,” Trumpeter William Hardy remembered, “we thought it was Custer’s command.” The cavalrymen marched to within four hundred yards of the entrenchment and halted. Then they opened fire. They were Indians dressed in the clothes of the soldiers’ dead comrades.
