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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  It seemed as if the pack train could not proceed more than a few steps before sloppily tied packs began to spill from the mules’ sides, requiring that the train halt as the mules were laboriously repacked. After the first day, Custer must have begun to realize that given the realities of traveling with a pack train, at least this pack train, he might as well have brought along the Gatling guns, which could easily have kept up with this group of obstinate and poorly tended mules.

  In an attempt to improve the efficiency of the 175-mule pack train, Custer placed Lieutenant Edward Mathey in charge of its operations. Each of the twelve companies had a group of mules it was responsible for, and Custer ordered Mathey to report the three companies whose mules were “the most unmanageable in the regiment.” The next morning, those three companies were given the onerous duty of guarding the pack train, which meant that they must spend the day at the rear of the column, eating the dust of the entire command. On the morning of June 23, Benteen was notified that his company was one of the three worst. “I saluted the General,” Benteen recounted in his typically sardonic manner, “and awaited the opportunity of crossing the Rosebud in rear of the regiment.”

  At 5 a.m. sharp, Custer, dressed in his white buckskin suit, followed by two flag bearers, trotted off at the head of the column. As Benteen was well aware, the members of the Custer clique identified themselves by what they wore, and a full-fledged Custer man wore buckskin.

  In the old days, trappers and scouts had all worn buckskin. But in the last ten to fifteen years, with the advent of the railroads and the ready availability of cloth garments, most westerners, including the scouts Charley Reynolds and Bloody Knife, had abandoned buckskin, which was slow to dry when wet and didn’t breathe the way cotton and wool did. The advantages of the new clothing were so obvious that even the Lakota traditionalist Sitting Bull had taken to wearing a cotton shirt.

  But for Custer, who was all about image and romance, buckskin was the clothing of choice, even if in the eyes of many, including Charley Reynolds, who referred to Custer as “George of the quill and leather breeches,” it was more than a little absurd. All three Custer brothers wore buckskin, as did their brother-in-law Lieutenant James Calhoun and five additional officers—Captain George Yates, Captain Myles Keogh, Lieutenant James Porter, Lieutenant Algernon Smith, and Custer’s adjutant, Lieutenant William Cooke.

  Benteen had no patience with such pretentious silliness. Ever since he had first met Custer almost a decade earlier, he had been unimpressed by this frustratingly young and charismatic popinjay. Benteen, a Virginian by birth, had never known the closely knit family unit that had produced the Custer brothers and, by extension, the Custer clique. When Benteen told his father, a former slave owner, that he was going to fight for the Union, the old man told his son that he hoped “the first god damned bullet gets you.”

  During the early years of the Civil War, Benteen’s two commanding officers feuded incessantly; the scuffle that killed one of them and sent the other to prison seems to have been a kind of object lesson for Benteen, who, as several officers in the Seventh could attest, instinctively reached for his pistol whenever he felt his honor had been slighted. Benteen loved his wife, Frabbie, intensely and passionately (he sometimes decorated his letters to her with anatomically precise drawings of his erect penis), but they were a couple who had known more than their share of hardship. Benteen’s combative relationship with Custer meant that he was inevitably assigned to the most miserable and primitive posts, and over the course of the last decade, he and Frabbie had lost four out of five children to illness. These were devastating losses, of course, but a part of Benteen seemed to revel in the adversity. “In Russia,” he later wrote, “they’d call me a Nihilist sure!”

  Benteen could easily have sought a transfer from the Seventh, but he was not about to give Custer and his minions the pleasure of seeing him leave. “I had far too much pride,” he later wrote, “to permit Custer’s outfit driving me from it.” Benteen took credit for orchestrating Custer’s court-martial back in 1868; but he also took credit for Custer’s early return less than a year later. Benteen claimed that General Sheridan’s adjutant had offered him command of the Seventh in the weeks prior to the Washita campaign. With the two officers who outranked him on leave and with Custer cooling his heels in Monroe, Michigan, Benteen might have led the Seventh in the field. But Benteen “politely declined” the offer. He was full of pride, but he was not, apparently, full of ambition. Instead, he suggested to the adjutant that General Sheridan invite Custer back. Perhaps after his time in Michigan, he had learned his lesson. “So Custer came!” Benteen later remembered.

  Why Benteen, who claimed to loathe Custer, would have urged his return is difficult to fathom. But for Benteen, whose greatest joy in life was proving how inadequate his superiors were, there was no better commanding officer than General George Armstrong Custer.

  While Benteen watched in disgust as it took an hour and a half to get the pack train across the river, Custer and the rest of the regiment moved effortlessly up the wide green corridor of the Rosebud. With Custer at the head of the column were Mitch Boyer and the six Crow scouts, along with Bloody Knife and his fellow Arikara.

  Ever since departing from Fort Lincoln, twenty-seven-year-old Lieutenant Charles Varnum had been in charge of coordinating the activities of the Arikara scouts. Varnum’s prematurely balding head and angular nose had earned him the Arikara nickname of “Peaked Face.” He had first seen action against the Lakota on the Yellowstone River back in 1873. When the bullets started to fly and all the other officers and enlisted men hit the dirt and began firing their rifles, he had stayed on his horse to better direct his men. After the fight, Custer had noted that Varnum was “the only officer that remained mounted during the fight,” a compliment Varnum never forgot, and in the days before leaving Fort Lincoln, he and Custer had shared in the ritualistic act of shaving their heads with a set of clippers.

  As leader of the Arikara scouts, Varnum spent much of his time at the head of the column with Custer, and he happened to be near his commander when they came upon the remains of the first sizable Indian village. They rode their horses among the rain-washed and sun-baked ruins of the ephemeral city, counting the circular outlines of about four hundred tepees. All around them were scraps of buffalo hide, broken animal bones, the ashes of extinguished fires, dried pony droppings, and acre upon acre of closely nipped grass. It was the first fresh evidence of hostile Indians Custer had so far seen on this campaign, and it seems to have incited an almost chemical reaction within him. Whether he was pursuing Lee’s army at the end of the Civil War or tracking the Cheyenne warriors through the snow to Black Kettle’s village on the Washita, there was nothing Custer enjoyed more than the chase. Stretching before him to the south was the widest Indian trail he had ever seen.

  He called Varnum over to his side. “Here’s where Reno made the mistake of his life,” he said. “He had six companies of Cavalry and rations enough for a number of days. He’d have made a name for himself if he had pushed on after them.”

  Custer had expressed a similar sentiment in one of his last letters to Libbie, then added, “Think of the valuable time lost.” Time meant everything to Custer in June of 1876. If he was to rebound from his debacle with Grant in the spectacular fashion he had originally envisioned, the victory had to happen quickly—preferably before the Democratic Convention, which opened in St. Louis on June 27, and at the very latest, before the Fourth of July celebration at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. As he’d told the Arikara, it didn’t matter how big a victory he won (“only five tents of Dakotas” was sufficient, he claimed), the important thing was that “he must turn back as soon as he was victorious.” Already, he knew, it was too late for the Democratic Convention, but as Private Peter Thompson had overheard, he still had hopes for the Centennial. After all, he had a lecture tour to promote.

  By the time the last mule made it across the Rosebud at approximately 6:30 a.m.
on June 23, Custer and the rest of the regiment were already six miles ahead of Benteen and the pack train. For all intents and purposes, Benteen and the mules were on their own. As they proceeded along the river, the country became increasingly broken into gullies and ravines—just the type of terrain to conceal large numbers of hostile warriors. The pack train was making its way over a steep bluff when one of the more ornery mules, known as Barnum, slipped on the loose rocks and tumbled down the hill. Barnum was loaded with two heavy boxes of ammunition, and as he rolled toward the river, the troopers speculated as to “how much mule would be left” when the ammo exploded. As it turned out, Barnum reached the bottom of the hill in one piece. “He scrambled to his feet again with both boxes undisturbed,” Peter Thompson remembered, “and made his way up the hill again and took his place in line as soberly and quietly as if nothing had happened.”

  By about mile six, the pack train had become so strung out that it was impossible for Benteen’s three companies, which had been ordered to remain at the rear of the column, to provide adequate protection. This was typical of Custer. As he and his acolytes galloped ahead of the regiment in search of Indians and glory, Benteen was left to deal with the one element of the column upon which the future success of the campaign ultimately depended: the supplies. If the Indians should attack him now, the entire train might be obliterated before Custer was even aware that there was a problem. It might be in violation of Custer’s original orders, but something must be done.

  Benteen sent a bugler galloping to the front of the pack train with orders to halt. Once the mules had been gathered into a single group, Benteen placed one of his companies in advance of the train, another on the right flank—so that the troopers were between the mules and the hills—and the third company at the rear. Once again, Benteen, the self-appointed leader of the “anti-Custer faction,” had in his own eyes saved the day.

  It was nearly dark by the time the pack train finally came into camp after a march of thirty-five miles. Custer’s adjutant, Lieutenant Cooke, directed Benteen to where his company should camp for the night. Until he had been lured away by the siren song of Custer, Cooke had served in Benteen’s company. Cooke was debonair and well liked—the Arikara scouts called him “the Handsome Man”—and his decision to transfer to another, more Custer-friendly company still rankled Benteen, especially since Cooke had “never said good-by even.” Now, as Custer’s trusted adjutant, Cooke was in a position to wield a most exasperating power over his former company commander.

  That evening, Benteen asked Cooke to inform Custer of his experience with the pack train and how he had rearranged his battalion for better protection from possible attack. “No, I will not tell General Custer anything about it,” Cooke announced. “If you want him to know it, you must tell him of it yourself.” The next morning Benteen did exactly as Cooke suggested. But instead of being offended by what Benteen assumed would be construed as a challenge to his authority, Custer expressed his thanks and promised to “turn over the same order of march for the rear guard to the officer who relieves you.” For Benteen, who had spent the last day and night steeling himself for another epic confrontation, it must have been almost disappointing.

  On the morning of June 24, they once again departed promptly at 5 a.m. It was a beautiful day with a brisk headwind blowing out of the south. With each mile the valley became more confined as the dark sandstone hills moved toward them like curious beasts.

  By now the entire river valley seemed to be, at least to Lieutenant Varnum, “one continuous village.” Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of travois poles had scribbled their weird hieroglyphics across the bottomlands. The scouts studied the scratches and gouges in the earth, the pony dung, and maggot-filled pieces of buffalo meat and tried to calculate how close they were to the hostiles up ahead.

  What they were seeing were the signs of two different migrations. First, there had been the gradual, majestic march of Sitting Bull’s village of about 450 lodges up the Rosebud. Then there was the more recent, and inevitably more confusing, evidence left by the agency Indians. Just as Custer and his men were now following the trail left by the main village, so had the agency Indians made their way to the Rosebud and headed south in search of Sitting Bull.

  The previous day, Custer had clearly been impressed by the size of the trail. At some point, he and his orderly, John Burkman, were riding together well ahead of the regiment. “There’s a lot of them,” Custer said, “more than we figured.”

  For the last two days, Custer had been, in Burkman’s words, “unusually quiet and stern.” There was none of the buffoonery with his brothers that had typified the march from Fort Lincoln. To have the normally brazen Custer suggesting that the Indians might be in greater numbers than he’d anticipated was troubling. “Not too many to lick, though,” Burkman worriedly responded.

  Custer smiled and instantly became, much to his orderly’s relief, the swaggering braggart of old. “What the Seventh can’t lick,” he said, “the whole U.S. army couldn’t lick.”

  But by June 24, with the increased number of fresh trails coming in from the east, a new concern began to enter Custer’s mind. From the start, his primary worry had been that the hostile village might scatter before he had the chance to attack it. The village they’d been following up the Rosebud was large, and they all knew large villages could last only as long as the buffalo, grass, and firewood allowed. Even though the scouts realized that the trails had been made by Indians coming from the agencies, Custer seems to have developed a theory of his own. Perhaps the new trails led the other way—to the east. Instead of getting bigger, perhaps the village was already succumbing to the centrifugal forces of “scatteration” and was, in effect, dispersing before his very eyes. Throughout the course of the day, Custer became obsessed with making sure that no Indians had escaped to the east. He instructed Varnum and the Indian scouts “to see that no trail led out of the one we were following.”

  At 7:30 a.m. they came upon the site of Sitting Bull’s sun dance. Two weeks earlier, it had been here, tucked beneath the brooding, owl-like presence of the Deer Medicine Rocks, that Sitting Bull had seen his vision of the soldiers—of them—falling into camp. The frame of the sun dance lodge still stood amid the flattened meadow, and hanging from one of the poles was the still-moist scalp of a white man. The bloody piece of flesh and hair was passed around among the officers and men (who decided it had belonged to one of Colonel Gibbon’s soldiers) and eventually ended up inside the saddlebag of Sergeant Jeremiah Finley.

  All around them were what Sergeant Daniel Kanipe described as “brush sheds” made out of the branches of cottonwood trees. These were wickiups, temporary dwellings typically used by young warriors in lieu of tepees. This meant that the lodge circles the soldiers had been dutifully counting represented only a portion of the village’s warrior population. The Arikara and Crow scouts were well aware of this, but not the soldiers, who speculated that the structures had housed the Indians’ dogs.

  The scouts were also well aware that this abandoned holy ground still radiated an unnerving spiritual power, or medicine. Pictographs on nearby rocks, designs drawn in the sand, piles of painted stones, a stick leaning on a buffalo skull—all these indicated that the Lakota were confident of victory.

  Custer prided himself on his knowledge of the Indians’ culture. He knew enough about the Arikara’s customs that when they left out a specific observance from one of their ceremonies, he always insisted that they include it. “Custer had a heart like an Indian,” remembered Red Star.

  Custer’s sensitivity to Native ways had its limits, however. Seven years earlier, during his attempts to convince the southern Cheyenne to come into the reservation, he had participated in a ceremony in the lodge of Medicine Arrow. As Custer puffed away on a pipe, Medicine Arrow told him that if he should ever again attack the Cheyenne, he and his men would all be killed. Custer’s own description of the ceremony, in which he failed to mention that the pipe’s ashes were ultima
tely poured onto the toes of his boots, makes it clear that he was entirely unaware that he was being, in effect, cursed.

  Five years later, in 1874, he seems to have been similarly unconcerned about the possible consequences of leading the first U.S. expedition into the Lakota’s holiest of holies, the Black Hills. Just the week before at the confluence of the Tongue and Yellowstone rivers, he had supervised the desecration of a Lakota grave site, an act that shocked several of his officers and men but seems to have made no impression on him. That morning on the Rosebud, he stood among the remnants of the sun dance lodge in which the demise of his regiment had been foretold and, if his officers’ lack of comment is any indication, felt nothing.

  The wind was still blowing briskly from the south. Custer had ordered officer’s call, and as they gathered around him, a sudden gust whipped across his red-and-blue headquarters flag and blew it to the ground. Lieutenant Godfrey picked up the flag and stuck the staff back into the hard-packed earth. Once again, however, the wind knocked it flat. This time Godfrey placed the flag beside a supporting clump of sagebrush and, by boring the bottom tip of the staff into the ground, made sure it finally held.

  Almost fifty miles to the southwest, Sitting Bull’s village was moving at a leisurely pace down the Little Bighorn River. Large herds of antelope had been sighted in this direction, and after six days at their initial campsite on the Little Bighorn, the villages were in need of fresh grass for the ponies and a new source of firewood. So they moved northwest, following the Little Bighorn toward its confluence with the Bighorn.