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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

Others quickly followed until only one man was left on the firing line—the scout George Herendeen.

However, in three different battles, one of them fought only a few miles from where they were now, the Lakota saw for the first time what a cadre of brave, experienced, and well-equipped gunfighters could do. “They appeared to go just where they wanted,” reported Johnnie Brughiere, who heard about the expedition from the Lakota. “[The Indians] could get nowhere near them without losing men or horses…. They could not understand it except on the theory that some new race of strangers had come into the country.

Unless someone rose to the occasion and organized the three companies into a fighting unit, they would be overrun by the warriors.

Even though they were deep within the sun-dappled shade of these little woods, the sounds of the battle were terrific—“one continuous roar,” Private Newell remembered, as hundreds of warriors blew on their eagle-bone whistles and galloped on their whinnying, hoof-pounding ponies and either fired their rifles or shot arrows that cut through the leaves of the cottonwoods and sent puffy white seedpods raining down on them like snow.

“The Indians were using the woods as much as I was,” Reno remembered, “sheltering themselves and creeping up on me…. I knew I could not stay there unless I stayed forever.”

Whether or not he was responsible for the deaths of Gall’s wives and children, he knew for a certainty that many of the warriors now approaching through the timber were Hunkpapa who knew him by sight.

before, Wooden Leg had been

Every man for himself!” someone cried as Major Reno put the spurs to his horse and galloped out of the timber. Captain Thomas French couldn’t believe it. Just one minute before, Reno had assured him “he was going to fight.” And then, without so much as a bugle call to inform the battalion of what he was doing, he had fled, leaving those behind in wild confusion, many of them still looking for their horses, many of them not yet even aware that their commander had just bolted from the timber. French later claimed he considered stopping his commander with a bullet. “Although the idea flashed through my mind,” he wrote, “yet I did not dare to resort to murder—the latter I now believe would have been justifiable.”

It was not the fact that Reno chose to quit the timber that was unjustifiable; it was the way he did it. Instead of retreating in an organized fashion, Reno followed the example of the battalion’s spooked horses and ran.

Only belatedly did Lieutenant Varnum realize that the battalion had begun to retreat. “For God’s sake men…,” he shouted. “There are enough of us here to whip the whole Sioux nation.”

They were in the midst of every officer’s worst nightmare: the wild disorder of a battalion left to fend for itself. These were no longer soldiers; these were the frightened members of a desperate mob. Since no attempt had been made to cover the soldiers’ retreat, the Indians were free to hunt the men as if they were buffalo: riddling them with bullets, pummeling them with stone hammers, and shooting them with arrows.

Making the slaughter all the more one-sided was the condition of the horses. The soldiers’ mounts were famished, exhausted, and burdened with equipment, while the Indians’ ponies were well watered, fresh, and, in many instances, barebacked.

It is tempting to dismiss French’s self-aggrandizing account of how he fought off hundreds of warriors so that his men might retreat to the river unmolested. Sufficient evidence exists from both sides of the battle, however, to credit French with being one of the few officers to actively resist the enemy during the battalion’s retreat.

“For God’s sake, Doctor,” the soldier cried, “don’t leave me to be tortured by those fiends.” By then the bullets were “flying thick and fast,” and Porter was on his way out of the timber without his patient.

By then the African American interpreter Isaiah Dorman’s horse had also fallen. Dorman was down on one knee, firing his sporting rifle at the approaching Indians, when his good friend Private Roman Rutten, whose runaway horse had already carried him into the Hunkpapa village and back, rode past. “Goodbye Rutten!” Dorman called out as the private roared by on his still panicked horse.

Luckily for Rutten, his horse was still traveling at a scorching clip. “The horse tore right across the circle of Indians of which McIntosh was the center,” Rutten later told an interviewer, “and on [I] went.”

Best to let the horse do whatever he wanted. “Without any communication by bit or spur,” Rutten simply hung on as the horse veered suddenly away from the warriors and headed for the river. Up ahead was a tangle of downed trees. “These,” Rutten remembered, “were no obstacle to him.” Without so much as a pause, the horse leapt over the tree limbs and stumps and bounded toward the Little Bighorn.

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?”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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?

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.’”

Thompson ran for his life, plummeting down the steep hillside in a desperate dash for the river, “going,” he told his daughter, “like a bat out of hell with his wings on fire.”

It is one of the more surreal aspects of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. As Reno’s Valley Fight was reaching its terrible crescendo of dust, smoke, and deafening gunfire, the troopers to the north found themselves in another, almost hermetically sealed world. Not only did the broken hills and cottonwood trees cut off their view of Reno’s battle; they acted as an acoustic shield.

“When men are fighting…,” the veteran F. E. Server recalled, “they do not know what is going on around them six feet away…. They see only that closely in front.”

A prisoner of his own necessarily myopic perspective, Thompson was wandering aimlessly through a terrifying and unknown terrain in search of his battalion.

The flag gave them confidence that the encampment was now occupied by their own troops, even though there were no soldiers presently in sight.

We know that a group of Arikara scouts killed six women and four children on the flats to the east of the Little Bighorn, not far from where Thompson saw the Indian scout and the Lakota woman.

Then there is the possibility that Thompson really did see Custer alone on the banks of the Little Bighorn.

Many believe that Custer was trying to draw the Indians away from Reno even as the three companies of the battalion’s Right Wing, under the command of Captain Keogh, remained on the bluffs, waiting for the imminent arrival of Benteen.

If Peter Thompson is to be believed, Custer was once again alone in the midst of excessive and exhilarating danger, attempting to extricate himself from a mess of his own devising. It was exactly where a deep and ungovernable part of him liked to be.

Even though the Indians had been methodically torturing and killing the wounded for the last half hour or so, Reno held out hope that Hodgson was still alive.

While Reno remained here, licking his wounds and searching for Hodgson, Benteen might have taken at least a portion of his battalion north to see where all the warriors had gone. Instead, he and the rest of the officers sat on the bluff and talked about Custer.

“Gentlemen,” he declared, “in my opinion General Custer has made the biggest mistake in his life, by not taking the whole regiment in at once in the first attack.”

Weir went to his second-in-command, Lieutenant Edgerly. “[He] asked me,” Edgerly remembered, “if I would be willing to go to Custer if the rest of the command did not. I told him I would.”

Officers and men lounged casually on the bluff. Reno and Benteen had not even taken the precaution of throwing out a skirmish line. The whole battalion, McDougall later testified, might have been annihilated if the Indians had suddenly chosen to attack.

Standard military procedure dictated that the battalion march toward the sound of the guns. But Reno, McDougall euphemistically testified, “did not appear to regard the seriousness of the situation.” McDougall pointed to the north and said, “I think we ought to be down there.”

Benteen remembered, Reno’s trumpeter sounded the call to halt, but Benteen pretended not to hear. It was time to see, Benteen wrote, “what I had left my valley hunting mission for.”

Inevitably contributing to Edgerly’s feelings about the incident were the circumstances of the farrier’s death. Charley was later found with a stick—perhaps the broken piece of Corporal Wylie’s flagstaff—jammed down his throat.

He then turned to Lieutenant Wallace of G Company. “Wallace,” he shouted, “put your troops here!” Wallace had inherited the leadership of his decimated company from Lieutenant McIntosh. “I have no troop,” Wallace said, “only three men.”

Clustered in the center, in a “saucer-like depression of prairie,” were the mules and horses, positioned so as to screen the wounded, who were stationed in what was loosely termed Dr. Porter’s hospital: “the blue canopy of heaven being the covering,” Benteen remembered, “the sage brushes [and] sand being the operating board.”