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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

The two officers positioned the men so there were about five yards between them. Many of the soldiers had never been in battle before, and as the fire of the warriors increased, they began to bunch protectively together.

Waving his white flag, he galloped toward the soldiers, who fired at the warriors behind him as the warriors fired at the soldiers. About a hundred feet from Reno’s line, the crossfire caught Young Hawk’s beloved horse, and the two of them tumbled to the ground. Young Hawk was quickly back on his feet, and with the white flag still in his hand, he ran to the entrenchment just as the guns of the Lakota and Cheyenne began what he later remembered as “a continuous roar.”

The adrenaline rush of having held back more than a thousand warriors with his single troop seems to have endowed Godfrey with a giddy sort of bravado.

It was clear to everyone but Godfrey that his actions were drawing the Indians’ fire, not only on him but on those who lay at his feet, and Lieutenants Hare and Edgerly both told him repeatedly to get down.

Godfrey’s cook, Private Charles Burkhardt, begged him to “please lie down, Lieutenant, you will get hit. Please, sir, lie down.” Reluctantly, Godfrey retreated to the rear of the line. Only then did he realize that his actions had been “endangering others.” As Benteen later observed, Godfrey was always the last officer in the regiment to “see the nub of a joke.”

Two years later, Hanley was awarded the Medal of Honor for having “recaptured singlehandedly, and without orders, within the enemy lines and under a galling fire lasting some 20 minutes, a stampeded pack mule loaded with ammunition.”

It was when the soldiers were firing that they could see, however briefly, what they were up against. Gathered amid the surrounding hills and on the flats along the river were many more warriors than could fit along the firing line. As a consequence, most of the Indians were reduced to being spectators. “The hills were black with Indians looking on,” McDougall remembered, “while warriors were as thick as they could get within firing range.” The wonder was that the Indians didn’t overwhelm them with one deadly charge. Instead, they seemed content to test them with volley after halfhearted volley, knowing that time was on their side.

By this point officers and men alike were so exhausted, hungry, and dehydrated that no one was thinking very clearly. Instead of dedicating a few hours to an activity that might save their lives, all they wanted to do was sleep. “Many of the men showed but little interest…,” Taylor remembered, “officers less.

Benteen’s premonitions usually served him well, but not in this instance. His refusal to take even the most rudimentary measures to defend his troop meant that in the horrifying, blood-soaked day to come, his men suffered twice the casualties of any other company.

it is unclear why Reno’s proposition—if, in fact, he ever made it—was the dark crime against humanity that Benteen made it out to be. In truth, the one undeniable crime committed by an officer that night was Benteen’s refusal to attend to the welfare of his own company. However, compared to some of his other actions that day, this was a relatively minor transgression.

Bell had fought with the Seventh at the Washita but was away on leave during the Battle of the Little Bighorn. At the Washita, Bell had succeeded in doing what Custer had wanted Benteen to do: arrive just in the nick of time with the precious ammunition.

By the time Bell reached the encampment, the Cheyenne from the larger village to the east had Custer surrounded. Without extra ammunition, Custer was at the warriors’ mercy. But Bell courageously ran the wagon through enemy lines and came to his commander’s rescue.

It will never be known what would have happened if Benteen had done everything in his power to reach Custer in a timely manner on the afternoon of June 25—if not with the ammunition packs, at least with his even more desperately needed battalion of soldiers. Given the size of Sitting Bull’s village and the mistakes Custer had already made, it might very well have resulted in the demise of the entire regiment. But that did not justify Benteen’s passive-aggressive refusal to “Come on,” and deep down he knew it.

Instead of plotting to abandon the wounded, Reno appears to have spent the night nursing his whiskey and complaining about Custer.

Standing alone in the darkness with a bottle in his hand was Major Reno. “Are the mules tight?” Reno said. Assuming the major had misspoken, one of the packers asked if he meant to ask whether the mules were “tied.” “Tight, goddamn you,” Reno shouted as he lunged toward the man and showered him with whiskey.

That night Peter Thompson went to check on his horse. When he’d last seen the animal, it was one of five horses being held by Private John McGuire, who’d been so frightened by the terrific fire of the Indians that he’d scrunched down as low as was humanly possible and still hold five horses. When Thompson arrived several hours later, McGuire was in the exact same position, even though three of the horses were dead.

In the beginning Thompson attempted to tell his fellow soldiers what he’d witnessed. They were perfectly willing to believe that he had seen Custer on the river, but they refused to believe that Custer had gotten “the worst of the fight, that was bosh.” Instead of attempting to convince them of the truth, Thompson decided to “say nothing further about it as contradiction was a thing I could not stand, when I was right.”

One of the buglers in the battalion sent out an answering call. But the response was yet another meaningless, discordant blast. The Indians were mocking them, they decided, with a captured bugle.

The superstitious among them might have wondered whether they’d witnessed the departure of Custer’s battalion for the afterlife. But no one (with the exception of Thompson and Watson, who’d seen glimpses of the desperate fighting to the north) could imagine that Custer and his men were dead. The life force burned so vigorously within George Armstrong Custer that it was impossible to believe it could be extinguished. Despite all the circumstantial evidence—the captured guidons and bugles, the dust cloud they’d seen hovering over the hills—the officers and men of Reno and Benteen’s battalion remained convinced that Custer was alive and that, as Benteen had maintained from the start, he had forsaken them.

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.

After ignoring Custer’s order to “Come on,” after refusing to dig rifle pits and build barricades, after sleeping while his men endured the worst fire of the battle, Benteen had finally decided to wake up and fight.

Benteen loved the sport. Back in Kansas, he’d organized a pickup game in the midst of the wide and rolling prairie and proudly speculated that it was probably the first time baseball had been played in such a remote part of the American West. Late in life his hands began to give him problems, a condition he blamed on years of playing baseball.

In 1873 H Company organized “Benteen’s Base Ball Club.” Over the last three years, the Benteens had played throughout the Dakota Territory, even staging a game in the Black Hills, where they defeated a team of “citizen teamsters” 25–11. With the help of baseball, H Company had developed a cohesiveness and camaraderie that no other troop in the regiment could match.

His men remembered him for his courage, but Benteen’s most distinct memory of that day was being “so confoundedly mad and sleepy.” More than anything else, Benteen wanted to take a nap, but the Indians had made that impossible. He told his men he “was getting mad, and I wanted them to charge down the ravine with me when I gave the yell.”

Given the topography, it was impossible to see how many warriors were massed in the ravine below, but this also meant that the warriors could not see them. With Benteen in the lead and with every man screaming at the top of his lungs, the soldiers poured over the barricade toward the unsuspecting warriors. “To say that ’twas a surprise to them,” Benteen wrote, “is [putting it mildly], for they somersaulted and vaulted as so many trained acrobats, having no order in getting down those ravines.” The charge continued for close to a hundred yards and effectively rid the ravine of warriors.

Some of the soldiers grew so desperate for a drink that they reverted, the Cheyenne claimed, to collecting urine from the horses.

The soldiers were all suffering from dehydration, but for the more than forty wounded men, most of whom had lost significant amounts of blood, the torment—technically known as volumetric thirst—was beyond imagining. “It was awful…,” remembered Dr. Porter, who lacked the water even to clean the soldiers’ wounds, “the groans of the men…crying and begging piteously for water to moisten their parched lips, which were soon to close and stiffen in death.”

True to his oddly original nature, Thompson responded to the enemy’s expletive-laden taunt by bleating like a sheep.

Below them was a sight that was never seen again: a village of eight thousand Lakota and Cheyenne and twenty thousand horses moving as one.

From his hiding place in the trees near Reno’s original fording place, Gerard could “plainly see wounded warriors on travois and dead warriors thrown across and tied to the backs of horses. Above all the noise and rattle and the hum of voices and cries of children, we could hear the death chanting of the squaws.”

For two days, fewer than 400 soldiers, scouts, and packers had held off approximately 2,000 Lakota and Cheyenne warriors.

At the court of inquiry that was later called to investigate Reno’s conduct, Captain McDougall gave a most perceptive assessment of his commander. “He could make as stubborn a fight as any man,” McDougall testified, “but I don’t think he could encourage men like others…. Men are different, some are dashing and others have a quiet way of going through. I think he did as well as anyone could do.”

The judgment of everyone on Reno Hill was impaired by a powerful combination of fatigue, dehydration, and fear, but it’s safe to say that no one was as exhausted by that morning as Frederick Benteen.

“I shall never forget Terry’s anxiety and impatience to get on,” Major Brisbin wrote.

They were the first listeners to the horrid story of the Custer massacre, and outside of the relatives and personal friends of the fallen, there were none in this whole horrified nation of forty millions of people to whom the tidings brought greater grief.

“The feeling of anxiety was overwhelming,” he wrote. By this time, Lieutenant Bradley had descended from the much closer hills almost directly across the river to the east. He rode up to Gibson and Terry. “I have a very sad report to make,” he said. “I have counted one hundred and ninety-seven dead bodies lying in the hills.”

Terry was well aware of the history between Custer and Benteen. “I think you are mistaken,” he responded, “and you will take your company and go down where the dead are lying and investigate for yourself.”

There is evidence, however, that Custer was very much alive by the time he reached Last Stand Hill. Unlike almost all the other weapons fired that day, Custer’s Remington sporting rifle used brass instead of copper cartridge casings, and a pile of these distinctive casings was found near his body.

What follows is a necessarily speculative account of how this desperate attempt to secure hostages ultimately led to Custer’s Last Stand.

The other battalions, Boyer told Curley, had been “scared out” and were not about to respond to Custer’s summons. “That man,” Boyer said, “will stop at nothing. He is going to take us right into the village, where there are many more warriors than we are. We have no chance at all.”

Hindsight makes Custer look like an egomaniacal fool. But as Sitting Bull, Runs the Enemy, and many other Lakota and Cheyenne realized that day, he came frighteningly close to winning the most spectacular victory of his career.

As Custer and the Left Wing marched north and Keogh’s Right Wing awaited Benteen in the vicinity of Calhoun Hill to the south, hundreds of warriors streamed up from the Little Bighorn through this vast, virtually invisible network of dry watercourses.

From earliest childhood, a warrior was taught how to stalk game without being detected, and this was exactly what was happening now. The Cheyenne and Lakota could see the soldiers, Wooden Leg remembered, but “the soldiers could not see our warriors, as they had left their ponies and were crawling in the gullies through the sagebrush.”

“The arrows falling upon the horses stuck in their backs,” Wooden Leg remembered, “and caused them to go plunging here and there, knocking down the soldiers.”

As anyone who has ridden a horse across the Little Bighorn Battlefield knows, once you are down within the smothering embrace of this grassy landscape, you have no way of knowing what is happening around you. It is quite likely that as the troopers of the Left Wing worked their way north, they found themselves in a surprisingly quiet, self-contained world, almost completely insulated from the growing sense of alarm gripping the officers and men of the Right Wing to the south.

Whether it was fired by the Indians stationed at the ford or by those in the hills to the east, one of the warriors’ bullets struck and killed the newspaper reporter Mark Kellogg. Three days later, the reporter’s body, all by itself along the remote reaches of the river, was one of the last to be discovered.

The collapse of Reno’s battalion had been unfortunate, but it had also prepared the way for a masterstroke to the north—a masterstroke that depended, unfortunately, on the arrival of Benteen.

Just as Reno and Benteen were sitting on their hill to the south raging against Custer, Custer and his staff were, no doubt, raging against Reno and Benteen.

Some of the warriors later told Sitting Bull how the troopers’ legs trembled when they dismounted from their horses. “They could not stand firmly on their feet,” Sitting Bull told a reporter. “They swayed to and fro…like the limbs of cypresses in a great wind. Some of them staggered under the weight of their guns.”

The soldiers were certainly exhausted, but they were also trembling with fear.