The overrunning of the L Company position marked the beginning of the end for Custer’s doomed battalion. Battle veterans explaining the action to Colonel Miles two years later stated that to that point it had been an “even fight” : after it, the troops began to unravel along the hogback, with the warriors “rolling [Custer’s] command up in confusion and destruction.” As Gall’s warriors paused to loot bodies of their guns and ammunition belts, the fleeing troops won a brief reprieve.55
Four hundred yards to the right, White Bull had sickened of the long wait. Just as the retreat from Calhoun Hill began, he whipped up his pony, hugging its neck as he dashed between Companies I and L, drawing I Company’s fire before looping back to rejoin Crazy Horse. Seeing the C and L Company survivors in full retreat, White Bull decided to repeat the run, declaring, “This time I will not turn back.” Crazy Horse surely realized that the moment of critical imbalance for the right wing had arrived. With a stream of warriors stringing behind him, Crazy Horse charged after White Bull. The Calhoun Hill retreat turned suddenly to rout, men racing to join their I Company comrades.56
The warriors collided into the rout in a chaos of dust and powder smoke. Some mounted soldiers deserted their unhorsed comrades in the race for safety. Riderless cavalry mounts, still running in formation, sped ahead of panicked troopers racing along the hogback. A few troopers breasted the hogback and raced downhill toward the river. Gall’s contingent smashed into the rear of the retreat, firing looted carbines and revolvers in a chaotic reprise of the Reno flight.57
Mounted men were shot from their saddles as Crazy Horse’s charge smashed into their right flank and turned to track the flight, warriors and soldiers all mixed up in the melee. I Company horse holders had brought up their remaining mounts from the coulee, but as Keogh’s trumpeter sounded the order to mount, the charge enveloped the I Company line. The battle was breaking right for Crazy Horse. The same moment of kicamnayan imbalance that had almost consumed Royall’s men at the Rosebud opened for Keogh’s right wing. The Indian charge stampeded a great number of Keogh’s bays over the ridge crest. Warriors whooped the mounts down to the river, where women and old men—leaving their refuge points now that the troops were on the defensive—herded them together. White Bull had wrestled a trooper from his mount, striking the first coup before Crazy Horse rode up to count the second.58
Crazy Horse saw that the head of the retreat was passing the I Company position, fleeing toward the hill commanding the head of the battle ridge. If he wished to ensure the isolation of the battalion wings, he would have to act quickly. He whipped up his pinto and began to ride the length of the I Company line, strung along the east face of the ridge. Keogh’s men delivered a disciplined volley at Crazy Horse’s followers, who hung over the offside of their ponies’ necks as they charged after the war chief. An Arapaho warrior, Waterman, was one of the observers. Given the inherent chauvinism of Plains Indian life, his testimony is an incomparable tribute to Crazy Horse’s bravery. “Crazy Horse, the Sioux Chief, was the bravest man I ever saw. He rode closest to the soldiers, yelling to his warriors. All the soldiers were shooting at him, but he was never hit.”59
Crazy Horse’s brave run inspired many Lakotas and Cheyennes to follow him. Nearing the end of the I Company line, he veered sharply to the left and rode right through the soldiers. The charge cut through one of the hogback gaps to the riverward side of the ridge, “cutting the line in two,” and “splitting] up [the] soldiers into two bunches,” as He Dog observed. Up ahead, the front of the retreat hurried on to the hill “where the final stand was made [recalled Runs the Enemy], but they were few in numbers by then.” No more than twenty survivors of the right wing made it through to the hill. The rest were about to be engulfed around I Company’s position.60
Most of Crazy Horse’s warriors closed in to finish off Keogh. Around I Company’s position, Flying Hawk remembered, “they made another stand. . . and rallied a few minutes.” Simultaneously, a new warrior charge from the river crested the ridge. While more cautious warriors continued to circle Keogh’s crumbling line, bolder spirits smashed through the troops, fighting at close range with war clubs.61
As the last defenders fell, warriors paused to loot carbines, revolvers, and ammunition, then moved up the east side of the ridge to where the last stage of the action was unfolding. By now, a thin screen of old men and boys, having advanced around the north end of the battle ridge, was calling encouragement from the safety of the gullies farther east.62
As Crazy Horse and a stream of followers breasted the hogback, he became instantly aware of a changed tactical situation. In the previous five chaotic minutes, Custer’s left wing had finally maneuvered in support of their comrades. Remounting, Companies E and F had charged four hundred yards south to the entrenched gully of Deep Ravine, then swung left along its north branch to a new position in the shallow basin below the hogback ridge. Within one-quarter mile of Keogh’s position, F Company dismounted and threw out a skirmish line along the draw. Across the hogback, the dust and uproar signaled onset of the right-wing collapse. White Bull, cresting the hogback in pursuit of Keogh’s bays, saw the new soldier line. From this point, White Bull asserted, Custer “don’t go any farther” toward the right wing. While the commander and his staff remained with F Company, E was detailed to secure the low hill at the head of the ridge—the best defensible position for the battalion to have a chance for survival.63
Company E moved four hundred yards north to a point high up the long ridge below the hill, dismounting a few feet north of the modern Custer Battlefield Visitors’ Center. From there, E was forced to back up the remaining three hundred yards toward the hill, under increasing pressure from riverward threats.64
E Company fired a volley to pin down the infiltration from the river. Fifteen-year-old Standing Bear was in the breaks, keeping his head down under the barrage.65 The volley bought E Company a minute’s reprieve, and they pressed up the slope. This was the situation when Crazy Horse cut the retreating line and crested the battle ridge midway between Keogh’s position and the refuge hill. He could see the dismounted gray-horse company, barely four hundred yards obliquely left. Observing the warriors charge over the hogback in pursuit of right-wing comrades, E Company poured in a raking volley. Crazy Horse and his followers rode over the hogback for cover.66
Momentarily, pressure slackened on E Company, but the continuing flow of reinforcements via the lower crossings now permitted a breakthrough charge like those that had unraveled the right wing. Twenty Lakota and Cheyenne warriors— evidently members of the Strong Hearts Society and its Cheyenne counterpart the Crazy Dogs—had pledged themselves to die in defense of their people. Heralds announced that the “Suicide Boys” would ride up from the river. In a sudden charge, followed by scores of warriors incited to bravery by the Suicide Boys’ example, they cut across the long ridge from the Squaw Creek crossing, smashing into the rear of E Company.67
Part of the charge aimed for the company’s horses, scattering a score or more of the grays down the course of modern Cemetery Ravine. Infiltration warriors in the breaks ran forward to join the breakthrough, overran E’s line, and rolled on up the slope, the “fronters” breasting the battle ridge to join the final carnage in the Keogh sector. Young Standing Bear saw the stunned E Company men “sitting with their hats off.” Nevertheless, officers regrouped their men and renewed their fire, desperately maintaining the defense.68
Other warriors grappled in hand-to-hand combat with dismounted troopers, sending some scattering to join comrades in the F Company line. The main charge veered downhill after them. Some panicked troopers galloped toward the refuge hill, but the warriors turned to drive them across the hogback. A deadly hand-to-hand melee followed, but the hundreds of warriors leaving the Keogh position were on hand to overrun the tiny stand, concluding action along the hogback. Upwards of seventy more troopers had been killed since the flight from Calhoun Hill; half of Custer’s battalion was already dead. A general rush
of warriors now flowed up the east side of the hogback toward the refuge hill.69
In the shallow draw that heads Deep Ravine, F Company also came under pressure. Over the ridgetop, the action was climaxing in the Keogh sector, and a dozen or so troopers fled downhill, probably joining F. Inevitably, warriors tracked the flight: White Bull, pursuing horses, could not resist the opportunity for coups; Yellow Nose, the Cheyenne, bearing L Company’s guidon as his coup stick, also laced through the line. Barely was this repelled when part of the Suicide Boy charge took F from the rear. It is to the credit of Custer and Captain Yates that they were able to effect an orderly withdrawal up the ridge to the hill where right-wing survivors were grouping.70
Across the hogback, White Bull rode up to Crazy Horse and returned to his favorite argument: A swift charge could stampede E Company’s remaining grays. Crazy Horse concurred, but recognizing futile bravado, he “backed out.” White Bull slashed another solitary brave run across the E Company front as it approached the hill under heavy fire. Officers maintained tactical cohesion; horse holders led their plunging animals, guarded by dismounted skirmishers. Only in the last few yards, as they neared their comrades at the refuge point, did the orderly company lines collapse, and “the soldiers turned and rushed to the top of the hill.”71
They joined the twenty or so survivors of the right wing in a grim defensive knot. E Company took up positions along the southwest slopes, F deploying around the southeast segment. Some men lay; others knelt or stood behind their horses. Foolish Elk observed that the one hundred or so soldiers on the hill were “all in confusion.” Nevertheless, E Company delivered another volley that sent warriors, advancing from the river in the wake of the Suicide Boys, scrambling over the ridge to the north. As the survivors prepared for further action, barely two hundred yards away, Crazy Horse and hundreds of warriors from the Keogh sector milled in the gullies, awaiting the final assault.72
“All dismount” heralds cried as they paced through the throng. Elders like the Miniconjou chief Flying By harangued for courage. Infiltration tactics were employed again, warriors creeping from cover to cover to encircle the east and north flanks of the hill, sniping at men and horses. Occasionally a warrior darted out to catch a loose horse. Arrows were fired in high short arcs to fall among the troopers. If a warrior showed his head, soldiers snapped off a shot, one trooper managing to kill a Lakota warrior whose headdress made too conspicuous a target. As horses fell from Indian shooting, troopers hunkered down behind these ready-made breastworks.73
The customary brave runs of individual warriors punctuated this brief infiltration phase. Yellow Nose, a surreal figure with his Stars and Stripes guidon defiantly wrapped around his body, charged right over the hilltop, striking down an officer with a blow from the flat of an old saber. Sensing an end, infiltrators from the draws crept uphill. Soldiers fronting this sector fired again, briefly pinning down the assault. Standing Bear kept up his head long enough to note that there still seemed “many [soldiers] there,” then dropped down as a heavier barrage of Indian shooting opened, from a position behind a low knoll southeast of the battle hill. As these ragged volleys faded, Standing Bear noted that there now seemed “very few of [the soldiers] left” standing.74
Suddenly, to cries of “They have gone!,” the troopers drove most of their surviving mounts down the north slope of the hill, where waiting boys hurried to head them off in their thirsty career to the river. A ragged volley sounded, and a trumpet was heard. Then, in a desperate bid to reach the river, about forty-five soldiers—Company E and assorted stragglers—raced off the hill. “They are gone!” went up the cry. Across the river, young Black Elk observed the pathetic flight: “They were making their arms go as though they were running, but they were only walking.” A body of Hunkpapa warriors rose to meet them, and the troopers veered left to run down the spiny ridge toward Deep Ravine. Two or three mounted troopers swung left again to race for Calhoun Coulee and a southward escape: they were cut off. The troopers, firing wildly overhead, were met above the head wall of Deep Ravine by a force of Cheyennes coming up from the river. “We could see some Indians right on top of them whirling around all over the place,” Black Elk recalled. A dozen or so men fell here; twenty-eight managed to leap into the brushy ravine where their mopping-up would occupy several more minutes.75
On the hill, the survivors awaited the end. As sniping resumed through a thickening pall of dust and smoke, Crazy Horse decided a defining moment had again arrived. With a shrill blast on his eagle wing-bone whistle, he kicked the pinto into a gallop and “rode between the two parties.” As Crazy Horse circled the hill, the surviving soldiers “all fired at once, but didn’t hit him. The Indians got the idea the soldiers’ guns were empty and charged immediately. . . right over the hill,” overrunning the last defenses. Warriors raced up from the ravines to envelop the hill’s southern approaches. Standing Bear recalled the terrific barrage as all these Indians converged on the hill: “Then I could see the soldiers and the Indians all mixed up and there were so many guns going off that I couldn’t hear them. The voices seemed to be on top of the cloud.”76
On the hill, Flying Hawk remembered that there “was so much dust we could not see much, but the Indians rode around and yelled the war-whoop and shot into the soldiers as fast as they could until they were all dead.” A second bunch of about a dozen soldiers suddenly sprang up and raced downhill, where continuing shots from the gulch of Deep Ravine at least signaled continuing resistance. A mounted party of warriors poured down the hill to cut off these soldiers.77
On the hill, Crazy Horse was finishing off soldiers with his war club. A few troopers made a last break down the hogback only to be cut off on its western slope. As the dust cleared, one soldier was seen “running away to the east but Crazy Horse saw him and jumped on his pony and went after him. He got him about half a mile from the place where the others were lying dead.”78
By the time Crazy Horse returned to the hill, all resistance was over. It was about 5:30, barely forty-five minutes since Custer’s battalion had reunited along Calhoun Ridge. The furious action since the overrunning of Calhoun Hill had occupied perhaps twenty minutes. Warriors rode around the field, shooting into the bodies. Downslope, the last shots faded in Deep Ravine.79
Already women were climbing the slopes from the refuge points across the river to search for loved ones, to loot clothing and apparel, to hack and mutilate the bodies of the wasicu soldiers who had come to kill or capture them and their families.80
Upstream, Reno’s and Benteen’s battalions showed little appetite for supporting their commander. By 4:30 all the Indians had withdrawn to fight Custer, but the demoralized troopers remained behind their lines. Only when Custer’s signal volleys from Calhoun Ridge alerted some officers to their commander’s plight did a puny, uncoordinated force venture downstream. Topping the outcrop of Weir Ridge about 5:25, they were in time to see the closing moments of “action” on the battlefield: groups of Indian warriors riding their horses in slow circles and shooting at objects on the ground. As the warriors sighted the feeble troop advance, they started after the new foe. A sharp running skirmish followed, but by 6:10, Reno’s and Benteen’s men had regrouped at their refuge point. Confirming that they were now on the defensive, the men began digging breastworks topped with packs and cracker boxes to withstand a siege.81
It was evening, but warriors settled along the ridges to snipe while the light lasted, killing another five soldiers, wounding six more. Only darkness ended the barrage. The war leaders conferred and agreed to keep relays of warriors in the field all night: “We couldn’t get at the soldiers,” recalled Standing Bear, “so we decided we would starve or dry the soldiers out.”82
At sundown, the first relay of warriors rode back to the village to find it repitched in a tighter formation downstream. Fires were lit all across the campground, but everyone was too keyed up to celebrate. They knew that their great victory had come at a price: sixteen warriors had been ki
lled in the action against Custer, to add to the nineteen people lost in the Reno fight. And another youth, riding too close to the defenses, had been killed in the evening siege.
Before dawn, heralds ordered warriors to relieve their comrades. Beginning at daybreak, the surviving 362 officers and men of the Seventh Cavalry were subjected to a relentless fusillade. Tired warriors even mustered a charge. A final two Lakotas were killed in these clashes, totaling Indian fatalities at about thirty-eight. The Indians’ galling fire killed another seven troopers, wounding thirty-nine, but clearly, the defenders would hold. About noon, Sitting Bull ordered disengagement, and the warriors slowly drifted away from the field.83
By early afternoon, rumors of troops approaching from the north were rife. Crazy Horse, coordinating village defense, detailed Short Bull and He Dog to scout down the Little Bighorn. Fifteen miles northward, the combined commands of Terry and Gibbon were probing gingerly up the river, aware that the smoke pall some miles ahead betokened a great Indian presence.84
Crazy Horse monitored incoming reports, noting with dismay the presence of Gibbon’s infantry. “They saw infantry,” Oglala veterans told interpreter John Colhoff, “and they don’t seem to like them—they bury themselves in the ground like badgers and it’s too slow fighting.” Crazy Horse detached up to three hundred warriors to make a reconnaissance in force. Others torched the grass to deter pursuit. With panic already gripping the women and children, there was little to do but order a remove south. At sundown, the massive procession retraced its trail up the west side of the valley. Over two miles long, spreading half a mile across the bottomland, the Northern Nation paraded past Reno’s and Benteen’s beleaguered command. As they passed, a ragged cheer rose from the ranks of these survivors of the great dust storm from the east.85
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