The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn

by Nathaniel Philbrick

As McIntosh and his men pilfered trinkets from the bodies before throwing them in the river, at least one soldier cautioned the lieutenant “that G troop might be sorry for this.

Foremost in the desecration, however, was the Custer clan, aided by Custer’s regimental adjutant, Lieutenant William Cooke. “Armstrong, Tom and I pulled down an Indian grave the other day,” Custer’s brother Boston happily reported to his mother. “Autie Reed got the bow with six arrows and a nice pair of moccasins which he intends taking home.”

For his part, the interpreter Fred Gerard became convinced that the ultimate demise of the three Custer brothers, Autie Reed, and Lieutenant Cooke was “the vengeance of God that had overtaken them for this deed.

Reno must have been in a state of extreme excitement. He had not just ignored Terry’s orders, he had flagrantly disobeyed them, and now he was marching in the direction of a hostile Indian camp that, if the trail they were following was any indication, seemed to be growing by the minute.

What he didn’t know was that farther up the Rosebud, less than sixty miles to the south, General George Crook and his army of more than a thousand men had found the Indians. Actually, the Indians had found them.

George Custer might fancy himself America’s premier Indian fighter, but it was George Crook, the commander of the Wyoming Column, who had achieved the actual results. In many ways he was the anti-Custer. Instead of dressing up like a buckskinned dandy, he affected a grubby anonymity; in fact, he looked so ordinary in his dirty shirt and shapeless black hat that at least one new recruit had mistaken him for an enlisted man—much to Crook’s amusement.

He’d been so successful that it had been Crook, not Custer, who’d been elevated two grades from lieutenant colonel to brigadier general. (Custer’s Civil War rank of major general had been only a brevet, or honorary, rank.)

What had really happened was that the Lakota and Cheyenne had succeeded in putting a deep and enduring fright into George Crook and his army. “Their shouting and personal appearance was so hideous that it terrified the horses…and rendered them almost uncontrollable,” recalled Captain Mills. For his part, Crook never forgot the sound of that battle, in particular “the war whoop that caused the hair to raise on end.”

But once Crook had ensconced himself and his column at Goose Creek (where he remained for six long weeks), he tried to forget about the humiliating encounter with the Lakota and Cheyenne by fishing for trout and shooting, on one memorable day, a cinnamon bear.

Not until July 9—more than two weeks after the Battle of the Little Bighorn—did news of Crook’s encounter finally reach General Terry.

The extremity of Terry’s anger is curious. He might have recognized that Reno’s balanced combination of gumption and caution had saved him from an embarrassing gaffe.

For the meticulous and bookish Terry, whose personal motto, “Blinder Eifer schadet nur,” translated from the German into “Zeal without discretion only does harm,” the plan was what mattered, and Reno’s daring and insubordinate initiative had made a mockery of his plan.

As it turned out, Custer’s dispatch did not appear until well after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Not only did the article make shockingly clear Custer’s feelings toward his second-in-command, it also demonstrated that Custer, like Benteen before him, had no qualms about using the press for his own self-serving ends even if it might prove destructive to the morale of the regiment.

“Faint heart never won fair lady,” he wrote; “neither did it ever pursue and overtake an Indian village.”

It was now time for Terry to do what Terry did best, devise another plan. He retreated to his cabin on the Far West and, surrounded by his staff, set to work. As far as the reporter Mark Kellogg was concerned, it was as if a benevolent, omniscient god—“large brained, sagacious, far reaching, cool”—had set up shop aboard the riverboat, and whatever plan he came up with “must be successful.”

Unfortunately, the mobility of the Indians meant that attempting to trap a village between two columns of cavalry was like trying to catch a glob of mercury between two sticks. From the start, the likelihood of successfully coordinating the movements of two different regiments over a vast and largely unknown territory was remote at best.

Even though he was the source of their latest and best information about the Indians, Marcus Reno was not invited to the meeting.

There was an unwritten code in the military: Violating an order was accepted—in fact, encouraged—as long as it resulted in victory.

Custer, they all knew, was not going to let a blue pencil line prevent him from becoming a hero once again.

Ever since the Civil War, Terry had distinguished himself as both a negotiator and an administrator. He had no interest in leading troops in battle.

Hindsight has a way of corrupting people’s memories, inviting them to view a past event not as it actually occurred but as they wished it had occurred given the ultimate result.

One of the few contemporary accounts we have is provided by Gibbon’s chief of scouts, Lieutenant James Bradley. “It is understood,” he recorded in his diary, “that if Custer arrives first he is at liberty to attack at once if he deems prudent. We have little hope of being in at the death, as Custer will undoubtedly exert himself to the utmost to get there first and win all the laurels for himself and his regiment.”

Finally there is the testimony of Custer’s friend the actor Lawrence Barrett. Barrett visited Terry and his staff in St. Paul several months after the battle. “[The] story of [Custer’s] disobedience of orders is false,” he wrote to his wife on October 3, 1876, “as he was told to act according to his own judgment at his final interview with Terry.”

In truth, Gibbon and everyone else present at the meeting knew perfectly well what Custer was going to do once Terry, in the words of Major Brisbin, “turned his wild man loose.”

Terry was that most egotistical of egotists: the humble man. Unlike Custer, who compulsively needed to tell anyone who would listen how great he was, Terry was patient and smart enough to let others do the praising for him. He was modest, but he was also, as he admitted in a letter to his sister, “day-velish sly.”

Custer did not stride through history doing what he wanted; he, like any military man, spent most of his time following orders.

Terry had helped draft the Treaty of 1868, and only after he had assured Sheridan that it was legal “to make surveys and explorations” in land that had been granted in perpetuity to the Lakota did Sheridan go through with the expedition.

The written orders Custer received on the morning of June 22 are a case in point. On their surface they seem to say that Custer has been granted free rein. But lurking beneath the orders’ sometimes fulsome surface are hidden qualifiers.

If Custer bolted for the village and claimed a great victory, it was because Terry had had the wisdom to give him an independent command. If Custer did so and failed, it was because he had disobeyed Terry’s written orders.

Terry was an intelligent and empathetic man, but he was unwilling to let his own sense of right and wrong interfere with the wishes of his superiors. Custer was to attack the village.

But, in many ways, it was Terry who was moving the chess pieces. Even though his legal opinion launched the Black Hills gold rush and his battle plan resulted in one of the most notorious military disasters in U.S. history, Terry has slunk back into the shadows of history, letting Custer take center stage in a cumulative tragedy for which Terry was, perhaps more than any other single person, responsible.

Custer ended the meeting with the words, “You had better carry along an extra supply of salt; we may have to live on horse meat before we get through.”

“Few officers,” he wrote, “have ever had so fine an opportunity to make a successful and telling strike and few ever so completely failed to improve their opportunity.” For Custer, there would be no turning back.

Back in 1867, Custer’s regimental adjutant, the tall and elegantly whiskered Lieutenant William Cooke, had survived a terrifying encounter with the Cheyenne during which he and about fifty other men were attacked by an estimated five hundred warriors. They were able to hold off the Indians for three hours until reinforcements arrived and the Cheyenne fled.

Also on the fence about going with Custer were his younger brother Boston, to whom Grant Marsh had offered a cabin on the Far West, and his nephew Autie Reed.

In the week ahead, Sitting Bull’s village more than doubled in size to eight thousand men, women, and children, making it one of the largest gatherings of Indians in the history of the northern plains.

On a warm night in June of 1876 on the Little Bighorn River, it must have been a magnificent sight. A thousand tepees were assembled in six horseshoe-shaped semicircles, each semicircle facing east, as was each tepee’s entryway.

In his hesitant and evasive way, Terry had unintentionally planted the seeds of doubt and paranoia in a psyche that not even the president of the United States had been able to crack.

In the old days, trappers and scouts had all worn buckskin. But in the last ten to fifteen years, with the advent of the railroads and the ready availability of cloth garments, most westerners, including the scouts Charley Reynolds and Bloody Knife, had abandoned buckskin, which was slow to dry when wet and didn’t breathe the way cotton and wool did. The advantages of the new clothing were so obvious that even the Lakota traditionalist Sitting Bull had taken to wearing a cotton shirt.

But for Custer, who was all about image and romance, buckskin was the clothing of choice, even if in the eyes of many, including Charley Reynolds, who referred to Custer as “George of the quill and leather breeches,” it was more than a little absurd.

These were devastating losses, of course, but a part of Benteen seemed to revel in the adversity. “In Russia,” he later wrote, “they’d call me a Nihilist sure!”

Why Benteen, who claimed to loathe Custer, would have urged his return is difficult to fathom. But for Benteen, whose greatest joy in life was proving how inadequate his superiors were, there was no better commanding officer than General George Armstrong Custer.

After the fight, Custer had noted that Varnum was “the only officer that remained mounted during the fight,” a compliment Varnum never forgot, and in the days before leaving Fort Lincoln, he and Custer had shared in the ritualistic act of shaving their heads with a set of clippers.

Whether he was pursuing Lee’s army at the end of the Civil War or tracking the Cheyenne warriors through the snow to Black Kettle’s village on the Washita, there was nothing Custer enjoyed more than the chase.

Time meant everything to Custer in June of 1876. If he was to rebound from his debacle with Grant in the spectacular fashion he had originally envisioned, the victory had to happen quickly—preferably before the Democratic Convention, which opened in St. Louis on June 27, and at the very latest, before the Fourth of July celebration at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.

The pack train was making its way over a steep bluff when one of the more ornery mules, known as Barnum, slipped on the loose rocks and tumbled down the hill. Barnum was loaded with two heavy boxes of ammunition, and as he rolled toward the river, the troopers speculated as to “how much mule would be left” when the ammo exploded. As it turned out, Barnum reached the bottom of the hill in one piece. “He scrambled to his feet again with both boxes undisturbed,” Peter Thompson remembered, “and made his way up the hill again and took his place in line as soberly and quietly as if nothing had happened.”

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of travois poles had scribbled their weird hieroglyphics across the bottomlands.

To have the normally brazen Custer suggesting that the Indians might be in greater numbers than he’d anticipated was troubling. “Not too many to lick, though,” Burkman worriedly responded.

As Custer puffed away on a pipe, Medicine Arrow told him that if he should ever again attack the Cheyenne, he and his men would all be killed. Custer’s own description of the ceremony, in which he failed to mention that the pipe’s ashes were ultimately poured onto the toes of his boots, makes it clear that he was entirely unaware that he was being, in effect, cursed.

During a lull in the fighting, Sitting Bull shouted out an exasperated question to the soldiers’ Indian scouts on the other side of an echoing gorge. “The Indians here have no fight with the whites,” he said. “Why is it the whites come to fight with the Indians?” Twelve years later, Sitting Bull was still waiting for an answer.