More Than Cowboys

by Tim Slessor

  ***

  Guided by a friend, Emerson Scott, who has long studied the geography and the history of these parts, I recently stood where those scouts once stood: the Crow’s Nest. It is a lonely spot, well away from any road; one needs a 4-wheel-drive to get there. From the piney knoll of the Crow’s Nest, looking out over those 15 miles, one can just see the slow-moving dot of the occasional truck making its way north along the four-lane highway that is Interstate 90; the highway passes right over the ground on which that pony herd would have been grazing. There is a small cairn at Crow’s Nest; the plaque tells one that “When General Custer came here and scanned with his field glasses he saw nothing.” Would it be more accurate to say that, even with field glasses, General Custer said he saw nothing? Who knows? Maybe it is fairer to give him the benefit of the doubt. By the time he looked, the sun would have lifted and the morning haze may indeed have been too smudgy.

  ***

  In coming down from the Crow’s Nest and rejoining the main column, Custer was told about those Sioux and that missing mule. Then, more bad news; he learned that other Indians had been seen. Obviously, the enemy village would now be warned. He had lost the vital element of surprise (if, indeed, he had ever had any right to expect it). Even now, the Sioux might be packing up and, to use Custer’s own word, “scatterating”. Suddenly he knew that his plan to wait a day in order to carry out a reconnaissance, prior to attacking with the next dawn, must be abandoned. If he were to catch the Indians, he must ride forward at once - and to hell with any plans to send scouts forward to reconnoiter.

  The regiment was on its way within minutes. The scouts went out ahead. When they were in rolling country some way beyond the divide, they came upon a very recently abandoned campsite. Indeed, they could see the occupants, about 40 of them, galloping away in the direction of the village. To Custer, this would have been yet further confirmation of his obsession: he must attack immediately, before the now-alerted enemy had the chance to get away. His Crow scouts did not share that analysis; again they warned him that this was likely to be a very big village with thousands of warriors. Again, Custer ignored them, and now, as the regiment cantered down the upper reaches of a small stream (since called Reno Creek) which ran towards the Little Big Horn, he briefly halted. He divided his command: Major Benteen was ordered to take three companies (between 120 and 130 men) away to the south-west, to cut off any escapers who might head that way toward the Big Horn Mountains. Benteen is said to have suggested to Custer that, in light of the unknown possibilities ahead, might it not be better for everyone to stick together? Custer is alleged to have cut him short with an abrupt, “Major, you have your orders.” Another three companies were assigned to Major Reno; he was to lead them down the left side of the stream. Custer, with five companies, would ride down the right side. One company, under Captain McDougall, was detached to guard the mule train which would follow more slowly.

  Custer’s orders were quick and peremptory; as always, he led more by physical example than by verbal explanation. Consequently, on this crucial and, as it would turn out, perhaps fatal decision to split his command, some historians have complained that we lack strong evidence as to just why Custer did what he did. But surely his rationale is obvious, given his first conviction, that what lay ahead was just a medium-sized village; and second, that now the village knew of his approach, its inhabitants would be preparing to flee and disperse. His mistake lay in those two convictions. Plus, if one is still unpersuaded, there is the important fact (maybe it is the deciding element) that the man had the self-confidence of a gambler who had never lost yet - Custer’s Luck.

  They rode on. Presently Custer sent his adjutant across Reno Creek with a further instruction for Major Reno: he was to chase those Indians still running ahead of him and, once he was onto the river flats (having forded across to the far side of the Little Big Horn), he was to charge any village that might lie across his front, “and you will be supported by the whole outfit”. Custer seems to have intended that, whatever the size and spread of the village ahead, Reno would charge in from the front while he, Custer, would ride on for some distance behind a line of bluffs which closely paralleled the east side of the river and which, at this point, still blocked his view. Somewhere down there, maybe in a couple of miles or so, he would find a ford. He would then cross the river and attack the village from the rear or from the side. Major Reno was certainly not informed of this part of the plan; he had reason to assume that Custer’s promised “support” would be both closer and more immediate.

  Knowing what we know now (but what Major Reno could not have known then), Custer obviously planned that, once across the river and into the village, he would cut across the path of the panicking hordes he expected to be fleeing from Reno’s frontal assault. Custer had used the same tactic back in the Civil War. Anyway, a two-pronged assault of this kind has been a standard stratagem since at least the time of the Romans. But perhaps it is not quite so standard when a commanding officer is unknowing of what lies ahead. And Custer was in total ignorance because the intervening terrain blocked his sight line. In short, when he made the decision to divide his command, he could not see the village. So he could have had no idea of its size, despite those earlier warnings back at the Crow’s Nest. Nor could he see the ground over which he intended to lead his flanking and “supporting” detachment. Nor did he know if the river would be easily fordable lower down. Nor did he know if the enemy would be alert to the possibility of his launching an attack at that point. But again one has to make the point that throughout his life of soldiering Custer had taken risks, successfully.

  But, risks or not, he was unknowing of three other factors for which he must be excused; there was no way he could have known of these. First, he did not know that, only nine days earlier, the Sioux and Cheyenne had decisively repulsed the advance of General Crook. The battle had occurred not many miles away, on the upper reaches of the Rosebud. (If Custer had obeyed his order to proceed further up the Rosebud, he would have come upon some evidence of that battle and, who knows, he might have been more careful thereafter.) As far as the Sioux were concerned, they had come away from that full-day encounter as the clear victors. They had every right to that view: having killed some soldiers and wounded a number of others, they had seen Crook and his considerable force of about 900 troopers (plus 300 civilian muleteers and scouts) turn and go back the way they had come. Now, a few days later, they were, to use the modern term, still “on a high”. Their exultation would have been further boosted by the news that one of their most respected spiritual leaders, Sitting Bull, had recently had a particularly strong vision in which he had clearly seen the easy slaughter of more soldiers than he could count. In short, everyone who mattered was in a state of confident euphoria. This is sometimes held as the reason for their casualness in not posting outlying pickets to give warning of any approaching soldiers. But it has to be said that “posting outlying pickets” was just not their style, and never had been. It is more likely that they simply did not expect the Army to mount another thrust quite so soon.

  There was another thing Custer did not know. It seems likely that the trail he had been following up the Rosebud had been made by Sioux (some of whom had recently come away from the Reservation over the preceding weeks) who were intending to join up with their fellow tribesmen who were already in the region; the latter had, after all, had their encounter with Crook a whole nine days earlier. In short, the Indian encampment may have been even bigger than even the pessimists (the realists?) had reckoned.

  And there was still one other thing Custer did not know: the Sioux were much better armed than he would have calculated. Not only had they accumulated a whole variety of ancient firearms over many years (though he would have known about that), but they had also recently bought a useful consignment of much more modern rifles from traders and gun-runners. These included at least 200 Winchester and Henry (lever action) “repeating” rif
les which could be pre-loaded, with up to 16 rounds. While they were not long-range weapons, they were excellent up to 150 yards and adequate for another 100 yards beyond that; they could be fired from horseback at the rate of a round every 2-3 seconds. The 7th Cavalry had no Winchesters or Henrys; they had single-shot, breech-loading 1873 Springfield (45/70) carbines with a maximum rate, in the hands of an expert (of which the 7th was short) of possibly eight rounds a minute. But even an expert would have problems if, in reloading, he was also trying to control a nervous horse. For this reason cavalrymen often chose to dismount when hard-pressed by an enemy. Anyway, it seems that upwards of 200 Sioux were better armed than any of the soldiers. One further thought: in the time it took a dismounted soldier to load his next shot (say, 7 seconds), a mounted Indian could be on top of him from 80 yards away. Then, unless the soldier could quickly bring his revolver to bear, or was closely supported by his immediate colleagues, a deftly swung club might be all that was needed.

  Anyway, as events developed over the next half-hour, one wonders who were the more surprised: the Indians when they first learned that soldiers were much closer than they had anticipated, or Custer when he began to realize that this might be a far bigger village than he had expected. In fact, this was probably the largest Hostile village ever assembled on the northern plains. Weeks later, after the Sioux had long disappeared, a military party counted the number of tepee circles (i.e. where the grass had been flattened under each tepee). There were more than 1,500 of them. Further, there were several hundred “wickiups” - rough shelters put up by single men, or men who had left their families back on the Reservation. It was usually reckoned that there would be 5-6 Indians (including women and children) to a tepee and that at least one of them, more often two, would be a warrior. So, including the wickiups, simple arithmetic shows that, opposing the 7th Cavalry, there would have been at least 2,000 warriors. Some say that there were half as many again. But it must be stressed that even today, more than 130 years later, this matter of numbers is still debated; it still fascinates. For example, Edgar I. Stewart, a much-respected author on the Custer story, devotes a footnote which runs to three pages of small print (over 2,000 words) to the “numbers” debate. He quotes more than 20 sources; a few even agree with each other. Not surprisingly, some historians accuse the military of subsequently exaggerating enemy numbers, in order to mitigate the disaster. Perhaps. But if one averages out the more reasonable estimates, one arrives at a figure of between 1,500 and 2,500 warriors. Whatever... it was enough.

  Anyway, back to the narrative. Maybe, as Custer had always hoped, the Indians were taken almost unaware. But, if so, they did not then follow the second part of his script: they did not turn away in an attempt to escape. On the contrary, no doubt bolstered by their recent success against Crook, and confident in their numbers, hundreds of them swarmed out to block Reno. So Reno’s advance, let alone the intended charge, was brought up short. Reno had just 112 men. With the warriors now aggressively riding to and fro across his front, and kicking up an obscuring dust cloud, the Major shouted for his men to dismount and form a skirmish line, with several yards between each man.

  Reno’s under-strength command now came up against some very serious difficulties. These problems were not new; they had occurred before when, for example, Indians swept in from an ambush. Cavalrymen could suddenly find themselves (as Reno’s men did now) deployed as infantry. In other words, while their horses gave them mobility across country, much of the actual fighting (especially in any tight, defensive situation) throughout the Indian wars had to be done dismounted. This was largely due to a limitation in the cavalry’s principal weapon, that single-shot Springfield carbine. It was a difficult weapon to use on horseback because, after each shot, the spent cartridge case had to be ejected and a new round pushed into the chamber, then the “trapdoor” breech had to be closed and the weapon cocked. Certainly, at anything above a gentle walk, the task of controlling one’s horse (with shooting and shouting all around) while, at the same time, following the sequence involved in reloading a Springfield (the task needed both hands) was difficult. Further, the firing of a carbine from horseback with reasonable accuracy at any but the closest range was thoroughly chancy. As a partial solution, each of Custer’s cavalrymen carried a Colt revolver; some carried two. (They had left all their sabers back in the Far West.) Each Colt could be loaded with six rounds, but their range was limited to what one might call close-quarter fighting. Even then, once he had fired his six rounds (or twelve), the cavalryman would have to dismount to reload.

  There were two further problems, and Reno’s men would have been nervously aware of both. Dismounted as infantry, if a man were fully trained (and in the 7th Cavalry, that was a big if), he could load and fire his Springfield seven or even eight times a minute with a degree of proficiency and accuracy, provided someone held his horse while he and his fellow cavalrymen were banging away. The standard practice was that every fourth cavalryman became a horse-holder for three of his colleagues. Not only did this reduce a unit’s firepower by a quarter, but, in all the shooting and shouting, any horse would be difficult to control; holding four of them (even at some distance back from the firing line) was very difficult. Indeed, it had become a standard Indian tactic to try to frighten those horses, to “spook” them, to drive them off. This did nothing for the confidence of the three riflemen; each was likely to have at least one eye nervously turned to check that his horse was still there, in case an order was given to move. To be left behind without one’s horse was to face almost certain death.

  The other problem was inherent in the lack of training. Such was the parsimony of the War Department, or more accurately the US Treasury, that funds only allowed for each soldier to fire at most a couple of dozen rounds a year in target practice. Indeed, it seems that some of the newer recruits of the 7th Cavalry had only fired ten rounds since joining. The lack of firearms training had a significant side-effect. It seems that no one of sufficient seniority had noticed that in battle (as compared with the slow and measured firing on a practice range) a prone or kneeling trooper would sometimes remove several rounds at a time from his belt-bandoleer and lay them on the ground immediately in front of him; that way, reloading was quicker than reaching (or fumbling?) into his bandoleer each time. But the rounds (specifically, the copper cartridge casings), for a reason no one had bothered to examine, could become slightly sticky. So, laid on the ground, they might pick up a minute piece of dirt. Further, copper expands quickly with heat. So if the weapon had been firing at the rate of six or seven rounds per minute (likely in battle but very unlikely on the practice range), the chamber would get hot, and thus the copper casing would expand. Extracting the empty casing could be difficult; if there were flecks of dirt involved, it could be even more difficult. In short, in the literal heat of battle, the weapon might jam until a knife was used to lever out the offending casing.

  We know from subsequent reports that some troopers had earlier complained about this problem. Some months later, it was realized that the “stickiness” was caused by a chemical reaction between the copper of the casing and the leather of the belt-bandoleers; it produced a thin deposit of tacky verdigris. The solution later adopted was, first, to make the bandoleers out of canvas rather than leather and, second, to modify the metal composition of the cartridge casings. Interestingly, to this day, there is some debate about this jamming problem. How frequent was it, and what significance might it have had for the battle’s outcome? The answer must surely be that even if every rifle had been entirely reliable, the final result of the battle (given all the other “mistakes”) would still have been much the same. Nevertheless, the thought that his weapon might let him down must have had a serious effect on a man’s morale and confidence, and therefore on his fighting ability.

  Anyway, in one way and another, Reno’s companies were about to pay for these various problems and shortcomings. Dismounted, his men were strung out in an i
rregular line over several hundred yards, facing toward the village and maybe half a mile out from it. In that intervening space the Sioux were riding backwards and forwards, taunting, shouting, screaming, shooting. Every now and then, a cavalryman’s shot would find a fleeting target through the dust; and sometimes a cavalryman would fall, from arrow or bullet. Reno must have wondered about Custer’s promised support. Soon it became obvious that some Sioux were closing round the open, western end of the skirmish line. Indeed, a few of them were already firing from the rear.

  Reno yelled an order to remount and pull back a mile or so to a large area of cottonwoods nearer the river: supposedly better shelter, better cover, but it was neither. Again, after perhaps 20 minutes, concerned that ammunition might be running low and with the enemy creeping ever closer (the cover of trees and brush was at least as useful to the attackers as it was to the troopers), Reno shouted again. Some never heard him. For those who did, the retreat was a gallop across some open ground and then a scramble through the river and a climb up a very steep slope of about 300 feet. Some were caught and clubbed, or shot in the water; some, riding two to a horse, made it. From the top of that bluff, exhausted, they could overlook the enemy; but they were missing nearly 50 men. Strangely, the Sioux did not chase them up that slope. Quite suddenly, they had disappeared. Maybe something else had attracted their attention...

  And Custer? As far as anyone now on Reno’s Hill (as the hill just behind the crest of that bluff has been known ever since) could guess, Custer and his five companies had ridden off to the north, on a line roughly parallel to (but hidden from) the river. Presently, firing could be heard in that direction. Presently, too, Major Benteen and his men arrived at Reno’s Hill. He had given up on what he saw as a pointless excursion. Now, at least, there was some safety in numbers. Then the pack train straggled in; now there was more ammunition. In some confusion, Reno and Benteen organized a defense. Reno was the senior of the two; but some subsequent accounts say he was indecisive. Surprisingly, this was Reno’s first serious encounter with Indians; and he was still spattered with the blood and brains of a man who, standing just beside him, had been shot in the head when they were down by the river. Some historians think that this last occurrence had left him in shock, traumatized. But there is also strong evidence (from at least a dozen witnesses after the battle) that he had been trying to steady his nerves with whiskey.