The two men rode forward about fifty yards. They halted on a slight rile, but there was nothing to be seen to the front except rolling grass-covered hills and a small gap between them.
Custer used the tail of his red cravat to wipe sweat from his face. It was hot already, the temperature somewhere in the mid-90s and likely to get higher. Two Crow scouts raced up and reported in sign language that they had spotted some Sioux nearby. The Sioux had ridden off quickly to the north. Custer dismissed the scouts with a wave of his hand. There was no doubt the seventh had been spotted. The problem was, despite his time on the Crow’s Nest, Custer still had no real idea where exactly the Indian camp was.
He knew the Little Big Horn ran in a roughly northeasterly direction and that the Sioux were most likely on the west side of the river; at least that’s what all the scouts agreed on. If the hostiles were going to run, they would run either north or south along the river, Custer decided. West was high ground leading to the Rocky Mountains; it was possible they might go that way, but if they did, Custer wasn’t exactly in position to stop them, being to the east. To loop around to the west would take much too long.
Eight years earlier, in November 1868, Custer had been in t similar situation on the Washita. In the dead of night he’d divided the Seventh into four groups and surrounded the village. It had been over in fifteen minutes. One hundred three Indians lay dead, their blood seeping into the snow. It had been glorious. Custer remembered. Riding forward at the head of his troopers, the strains of “Garry Owen” in the air, he had rushed through the village, firing his pistol at any red target that presented itself. It had been hailed as a great victory, perhaps the greatest of the western Indian Wars to date. By God, Custer remembered, General Phil Sheridan himself had ridden down from Fort Hays in the middle of the winter to congratulate Custer personally. Custer hoped to top that now.
Today, though, Custer knew he had a time problem. At Washita he’d been able to deploy the regiment at night to surround the village. He’d also known exactly where the village as. Right now he was still more than twelve miles away from the little Big Horn River, and he didn’t know exactly where along the water the village was. It was likely the regiment had been spotted, so the element of surprise might well have been lost. And if he didn’t burry, he might even lose what daylight he had left. To wait for next morning. He knew there would be no village.
Custer turned to look at the head of the regiment. Waiting like a deadly snake, the body stretching out to the east. His mind wrestled with the tactical situation. Then he spotted Benteen. His shock of white hair making him easily visible. Benteen had been with him at the Washita victory, but ever since then the man had become an irritating presence in the regiment Farther back in the column, Custer knew Reno was riding. Another burr.
If those were rebels down there, Custer had no doubt about what he’d do. Swing the regiment on line along the valley floor. Making sure they were south of the village. And weep up it, taking the enemy head-on. But if he tried that against the Sioux, he knew they wouldn’t stand and fight. They’d run, especially if the entire might of the Seventh was brought to bear.
No. Custer thought, this was going to be difficult to pull off. “How far do you make it, Cooke’?” he asked, pointing through the gap in the bills ahead to a dark line that marked the river.
‘’Ten miles or so, sir,” Cooke replied.
There was a creek a quarter-mile ahead. Ash Creek, the scouts had told him. It divided farther down, but eventually led into the Little Big Horn. To the right were rolling ridges, the same to the left with the Wolf Mountains behind them.
Custer noticed a group of riders coming in from the left. He waited impatiently, feeling success tick away with each minute. It was Varnum with his scouts, come from Crow’s Nest.
“General, we spotted some Sioux moving north along Ash Creek ahead of you,” Varnum reported.
Bloody Knife’s hands moved in the hand symbols typical of the Indian. They are too many!
Bouyer had come up to meet Varnum and the other scouts. He echoed Bloody Knife’s hands. “There are many in the village. It fills the valley.”
“How many is many?” Custer demanded.
Bouyer shrugged. “Two thousand warriors. Maybe more.”
Custer blinked. “They’ve never had that many in one place before. They couldn’t feed their ponies or their people.”
Bouyer didn’t answer.
“Even if they did,” Custer continued, “they can’t coordinate a force like that.”
“If you go in there,” Bouyer said, pointing ahead, “you will never come out.”
“Are you afraid?” Custer demanded, his patience with the temperamental scouts snapping.
A slight smile crept across Bouyer’s face, which irritated Custer, but the man said nothing.
Bloody Knife’s hands moved, gesturing toward the sun. Custer knew the sign language well enough to read it: I will not see the sun go down behind the hills tonight.
Custer ordered the scouts to move back to the column. He needed a moment to think. He stared straight ahead as if he could see through the blocking hills to the Indian camp.
He turned to Cooke. “Relay my orders to Captain Benteen. He is to take Companies D, H and K and move to the southwest along those hills there.” Custer pointed in the desired direction. “He is to explore that terrain for hostiles and also make sure that no Indians make their escape in that direction.”
Lieutenant Cooke was startled by the command, but he nodded and rode off toward Benteen.
BENTEEN
Benteen and Custer were like two wolves prowling the same territory. Custer had the rank, but Benteen had something else, a look in his eyes, that belied his gentle appearance. And the one time the two had come head to head, it had been Custer who had backed off.
Benteen was used to conflict, having grown up in a southern family that had owned slaves in Virginia and prior to the Civil War had moved to St. Louis in the border state of Missouri. When war came, Benteen accepted a commission in the Tenth Missouri, a move that stunned and angered his father, who promptly disinherited him. The father went to work for the Confederacy aboard a supply steamboat that plowed the Mississippi. As fate would have it, the Tenth Missouri captured that same steamboat, so the younger Benteen, disinherited though he might have been, held sway over his father.
While his father was held in custody the rest of the war, · Frederick Benteen served with bravery throughout numerous campaigns. He had been recommended for brevet brigadier general on June 6, 1865, but the brevet’ wasn’t approved due to the influence of politicians and the West Point network. Like many of the other officers now in the Seventh Cavalry, · at the end of the war his rank was reduced back to his regular Army commission as a captain.
Benteen came to the Seventh Cavalry in January 1867. From the very first meeting he didn’t hit it off with Custer. Benteen was older and he’d served more time with troops than Custer. But Custer was West Point and Benteen wasn’t. Still, Benteen had tried to be professional. Then came Washita and the issue of Major Elliott that put acid in the moat between the two men.
The “great victory,” as Benteen would caption the event, had almost gotten Benteen killed. It was something he wasn’t likely ever to forget. He’d charged into the village and spotted a young brave escaping, running from a lodge. Benteen gave chase, signaling for the brave to surrender. The man had turned and fired at Benteen, the bullet whistling by his ear. The brave fired again, and the bullet hit Benteen’s horse, knocking him to the ground. Benteen had rolled to his feet and finally shot back, killing the brave.
But it wasn’t that incident that soured and sickened Benteen at the Washita. It began after that, when Custer ordered the Indian ponies captured by the regiment to be killed. Almost a thousand of the animals were slaughtered. Even here, under the harsh summer sun, Benteen still shivered when he thought of that cold December morning just before Christmas. He could clearly recollect the screams
of wounded horses and Custer riding about. Shooting the Indians’ dogs with his pistol as if it were the greatest sport in the world. Benteen shook his head as he watched Custer and Cooke talk.
Benteen jerked back on his horse’s bit as he remembered. And then there was the counting in the village. Everything had to be counted. Bodies, saddles, rifles, spears, shields, everything. Benteen had seen the official report and almost burst a vein in his forehead from anger. Custer reported 103 dead warriors. More like two dozen, Benteen had estimated from his Own ride through the camp. The rest of the bodies · were women, children, and old men who couldn’t even lift a spear any more.
And then there was Major Elliott and his eighteen men. Elliott had taken a platoon of men, charged after Indians fleeing down the river and simply disappeared. The rest of the command finished butchering the animals and burning the lodges and then Custer ordered them to form to return to post. It would be dark soon, he explained to astonished junior officers who wanted to search for Elliott’s party, and they had no idea if there might not be more large bands of hostiles in the area.
So they left without even looking for Elliott.
Benteen had been with the force that returned to the Washita two weeks later. They went downstream from the scorched site of the battle and found what remained of Elliott’s command. Nineteen mutilated bodies lay frozen in the snow inside a small hollow next to the river. Piles of spent cartridges next to the bodies pointed to a desperate last stand.
Maybe we could have saved Elliott, Benteen wondered not for the first time. If Custer had acted like any decent commander and--Benteen spit. He’d played it out in his head a · thousand different ways, but the fact of the matter was that his friend Joel Elliott and eighteen troopers had been killed and tom apart while Custer and the rest of the regiment, Benteen among them, rode for the safety of their fort.
Benteen could still see Elliott’s body, preserved by the cold weather. His arms had been ripped out of the sockets and placed alongside his head. Deep gashes ran down each thigh, cut through the muscle to expose white bone. His genitals had been severed and shoved into his mouth. His torso had been riddled with more than fifty arrows, so many arrows that Benteen couldn’t pull all of them out. He’d had to break them off to get the body into the burial wagon. Naturally, Elliott was scalped, the top of the head a mixture of white bone and red flesh.
Benteen wrote about the entire episode in a letter that he mailed to a colleague with whom he had served in the Tenth Missouri. The letter found its way into the hands of a man working for the St. Louis Dispatch, where it was published without the identity of the writer being revealed. It was a blemish on what Custer had claimed was a flawless victory and helped unleash a backlash of negative press, especially among the more liberal papers back east that decried the massacre of women and children.
Custer knew he wrote it. He threatened Benteen inside his command tent, a copy of the paper in his hand, and Benteen had asked him to step outside and take it up with weapons. Benteen had waited outside for more than a sufficient amount of time and then walked away as Custer continued to rant and rave inside the tent but dared not show his head outside.
Benteen grimaced as Cooke and the new scout came up. The adjutant had his head so far up Custer’s rear, Benteen often wondered if those damn whiskers tickled Custer’s bottom. The scout was a strange creature, one of those who’d spent so much time on the frontier and alone they didn’t seem to fit in around other people.
Cooke relayed the orders for the march without meeting Benteen’s eyes. Benteen didn’t acknowledge the orders directly.
“Do I get a surgeon?” he asked.
“One has not been detailed to you, sir,” Cooke replied.
“And if I make contact with the hostiles?”
“You are to pitch into them, sir,” Cooke replied vaguely.
“’Pitch into?’” Benteen repeated. “Is that a military term that is taught at the Academy? I am afraid I do not have the benefit of such an excellent education.”
“You are to engage the enemy, sir.”
“Engage with a hundred and twenty men?” Benteen asked rhetorically.
The adjutant rode back to Custer, whose back was turned to the column. The scout, Bouyer, dawdled. Benteen rode up to him. “What is it?”
“There’s no one to the southwest.” Bouyer said.
“I know that. But 1 have orders. You heard them.”
Bouyer nodded. “1 heard, major. But you don’t have to ride hard to the southwest.”
“Custer wants all the glory,” Benteen said. “Why should I worry about--”
“It ain’t about Custer,” Bouyer interrupted. “It’s bigger than him.”
“What’s bigger than him?”
“What’s going to happen today.”
“And that is?”
“I think you have an idea.”
Benteen stared hard at the scout but didn’t say anything. Bouyer reached into a large sack tied off to his horse’s pommel and pulled out something wrapped in a leather pouch. “Here.”
Benteen took the pouch, surprised both at the weight and the warmth being propagated by whatever was inside. “What is this?” he asked as he reached to loosen the drawstring.
‘’Don’t.’’ Bouyer held up his hand, indicating Benteen should stop. “Not now. Just carry it for today.”
“What is it?”
“You’ll see.”
Benteen was tempted to open the satchel and look, but there was something about Bouyer’s demeanor, a seriousness that drew him in. Benteen not only had a strong feeling that · something was going to happen today, his military sense told him a battle would be engaged today. There was too much evidence to ignore. And the battle would not be to the southwest, · but somewhere along the Little Big Horn.
“All right,” Benteen said.
Bouyer nodded. ‘’Ride slow, sir.” With that he turned and headed back to the column. Benteen watched him for a few moments, then twisted in the saddle and barked orders, getting the three companies that were to form his battalion in line. He dispatched Lieutenant Gibson and ten men to form a forward screen in the difficult terrain to guard against ambush.
“Left oblique, march!” Benteen cried out With a hundred and ten men he marched to the southwest.
“Where are you going?” Major Reno shouted from Benteen’s left as the newly formed battalion began moving.
Benteen pointed. “To those hills.”
“For what purpose?” Reno asked in a lower voice, coming closer so Custer couldn’t hear, although Benteen doubted the general could hear anything above the noise the column made moving.
“To drive everything before me,” Benteen said sarcastically.
Reno turned and looked at the Wolf Mountains toward which Benteen’s battalion was moving, and his face reflected what Benteen felt. There was nothing more to be said. Benteen didn’t particularly care for Reno either, and, if the truth be known, he’d rather have Custer in command than the major.
Almost immediately upon leaving Ash Creek the column hit rough going. That struck Benteen immediately in the tactical sense, telling him that no reasonable group of Indians would be camped here. They were down on the Little Big Horn as every sign and every scout in the regiment had indicated.
Benteen smiled grimly to himself. The boy general wanted the valley for himself. Well, so be it. Custer and Reno could take on the Sioux. Benteen would do as he was ordered.
Then he looked at the satchel Bouyer had given him and the smile slipped away. Today was shaping up to be a most strange day.
RENO
Reno and Custer had much in common and that fact darkly amused the major whenever he happened to reflect on it, which wasn’t often. Custer graduated last in his class at West Point, and Reno had failed to graduate with the class he entered with, the class of 1855. Then he failed to make it with the class of ’56 for the same reason: excess demerits. In fact, Reno had so many he set an Academy record of 1,0
31 demerits; of course he had six years to achieve that somewhat dubious honor, whereas most cadets only had four. Custer had once pointed out what an achievement that high number was, when there were actually some cadets who graduated without a single demerit, a notable example being Robert E. Lee, who had achieved some fame during the War Between the States, Custer had been sure to add. Reno had finally made it out of the Point in 1857, the year Custer entered the Academy.
When Custer had laughed about his demerits, Reno had been forced to bite his tongue. While Reno was punished for excess dements at West Point, Custer was court-martialed. Reno had heard the story from one of Custer’s classmates. Just before graduation, in 1861, Custer was officer of the guard at West Point when two cadets became involved in an altercation. Custer, instead of doing his duty and stopping the fight. Ordered the bystanders back and directed the belligerents to conduct a fair fight. Unfortunately for Custer, the officer of the day, a commissioned, regular Army officer, happened to hear these words and Custer was brought up on charges. Only the onset of the Civil War kept his Army career going.
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