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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Custer rode off, and before his two staghounds, Bleucher and Tuck, were able to follow along as usual, Burkman had them by their collars. The two dogs barked and whimpered, but Burkman held fast until their master was safely out of sight.

  Almost as soon as the regiment crossed the divide, Custer was finding fault with Frederick Benteen. The captain, Custer complained, was “setting the pace too fast.” Custer took over the advance and after marching just a few miles, abruptly ordered the command to halt. As Benteen looked on from the head of the column, Custer and his adjutant, William Cooke, moved off beyond earshot and, with paper and pencil in hand, began to talk—about “what,” Benteen later wrote, “we knew not.”

  But he had his suspicions. Seven and a half years before, after the publication of Benteen’s letter about the abandonment of Major Elliott at the Battle of the Washita, Custer had banished him from the regiment’s headquarters at Fort Hays to the remote outpost of Fort Dodge, almost a hundred miles away. As it turned out, Benteen did not stay long at Fort Dodge. A fortuitous meeting with an old friend with connections at department headquarters soon brought his banishment to an end. He was riding back to Fort Hays across the plains of Kansas when he came upon a herd of buffalo. He’d just shot a cow and was in the process of cutting her throat when Lieutenant Cooke appeared on the crest of a nearby hill. When he saw Benteen bent over the dead buffalo with a knife in his hand, Cooke, the Custer loyalist, said, “At your old business, I see.”

  “Yes,” Benteen replied, “I can’t keep out of blood.”

  Now, after fifteen minutes of “talking and making notes on a scratch pad,” Cooke and Custer called for Benteen. Once again, he’d been banished. As Custer and the majority of the regiment continued to follow the wide Indian trail toward the Little Bighorn—about fifteen miles away and still hidden behind the hills ahead—Benteen was to lead a battalion of three companies toward a line of bluffs about two miles to the left. The supposed aim of the detour was to find a perch from which he could look into the Little Bighorn Valley and report what he saw. He was also to “pitch in” to any Indians he might come across. Not even a half hour after crossing the divide, Benteen was no longer in the advance.

  The real purpose of this order, Benteen’s friends later claimed, was to remove him from the head of the column. But Custer may have had other reasons for sending his senior captain off to the left. For the last two days, Custer had been obsessed with preventing any Indians from escaping in that direction. The night before, as they marched toward the divide in the dust and darkness, he had instructed the Crow and Arikara scouts to “follow the left-hand trail, no matter how small it might be—he didn’t want any of the Sioux to escape him.” By sending Benteen off at a forty-five-degree angle to the left, Custer was continuing to make sure no Indians escaped that way.

  The fact remained, however, that Custer was proposing to send approximately 20 percent of his attack force away from the apparent location of the village, a village that was, at least according to the scout Charley Reynolds, “the biggest bunch of Indians he’d ever seen.” And as any soldier knew, dividing your command in the face of a superior force was never a good idea.

  Benteen was speaking with Custer and Cooke when Private Charles Windolph approached with a question about his horse. Windolph was waiting to speak to his captain when he overheard Benteen say to Custer, “Hadn’t we better keep the regiment together, General? If this is as big a camp as they say, we’ll need every man we have.”

  “You have your orders” was Custer’s preemptory reply.

  But Benteen wasn’t finished with his commander. He was being sent out alone into the middle of an unknown country with just three companies. If there were any Indians over there, he’d need all the soldiers he could get, and he wasn’t happy with the small size of one of the companies he’d been assigned. Instead, he wanted D Company, the strongest company in the regiment as far as the number of men. D Company was commanded by Captain Thomas Weir, who, like Adjutant Cooke, had once served under Benteen. When Benteen insisted that he needed Weir’s troop, Custer was overheard to reply, “Well damn it to hell, take D Company.”

  Benteen had managed to make Custer, who’d long since vowed never to use profanity, swear for the second time in one day.

  Custer next turned his attention to his second-in-command. Ever since their departure from the Far West, Major Marcus Reno had been left without a direct command responsibility. “I was not consulted about anything,” he later complained. Custer decided it was now time for him to lead a battalion of his own. Reno and three companies were to continue down the left bank of Sun Dance Creek as Custer and the remaining five companies of the regiment marched parallel to them on the right bank.

  By 1 p.m., all three battalions were off, Benteen trotting glumly toward a seemingly irrelevant bluff to the left as Custer and Reno followed the dusty Indian trail down Sun Dance Creek. The convolutions of the creek, combined with the irregular nature of the Indian trail, meant that Custer and Reno were sometimes virtually side by side and sometimes farther apart, but always over the course of the next half hour or so they remained in proximity.

  Custer was dressed in a wide gray hat and white buckskin suit, his distinctive red tie—a holdover from the Civil War—fluttering over his shoulder. Reno wore a blue cavalry uniform with yellow cords running down the sides of his legs. Instead of the standard-issue felt campaign hat, which could be folded up front and back to make an officer look like a backwoods Napoleon, he wore the straw hat he’d purchased from the sutler on the Yellowstone River. Inside his jacket pocket sloshed a flask of whiskey.

  Given that Custer had demonstrated nothing but disdain for his subordinate since their confrontation on the Tongue River back on June 19, one wonders why he chose to keep Reno so close to him during the regiment’s final approach toward the Indian village. Perhaps he was taking one final measure of the man he had anonymously pilloried in his last dispatch to the New York Herald. All we know for sure is that Reno more than reciprocated his commander’s lack of respect. “I had known General Custer . . . for a long time,” he later recounted under oath, “and I had no confidence in his ability as a soldier.”

  —INTO THE VALLEY, June 25, 1876—

  On the afternoon of June 25, as their husbands galloped toward the valley of the Little Bighorn, the officers’ wives of the Seventh Cavalry gathered in the living room of the Custer residence at Fort Lincoln. They were all, Libbie remembered, “borne down with one common weight of anxiety.” It was a Sunday, and to distract themselves from their worries, they began to sing some of the old hymns they’d learned as children. But instead of soothing them, the songs only intensified their fears. “I remember the grief with which one fair young wife threw herself on the carpet,” Libbie wrote, “and pillowed her head in the lap of a tender friend.”

  It was not the first time they had sought one another’s company in a time of desperation and dread. One spring morning two years ago, the keeper of the regiment’s mule herd had ridden up to the Custer house and announced that “the Indians were running off the herd.” In just minutes, Custer and almost all his officers and men were galloping furiously out of the garrison in pursuit of the Indians and the regiment’s mules. Only after their husbands had disappeared over the horizon did the wives come to realize that they’d been “almost deserted.” In the “mad haste of the morning,” just a single officer and a handful of soldiers had been left to defend the fort.

  “We knew that only a portion of the Indians had produced the stampede,” Libbie wrote, “and we feared that the remainder were waiting to continue the depredations.” The wives gathered at the Custer residence, where they took turns scanning the surrounding hills from the roof of the house’s porch. Not until evening, after a “day of anxiety and terror,” did their husbands finally return.

  Custer, Libbie knew, could be impulsive. He had little concern for the consequences of his actions because always, it seemed, things turned out just fine
in the end. He loved his family dearly, but there was no one—not even his brothers Tom and Boston, his brother-in-law Jim Calhoun, his young nephew Autie Reed, and yes, not even Libbie—whom he loved as much as the chase. As General Sheridan had marveled in the weeks after Libbie and Custer’s marriage during the Civil War, “Custer, you are the only man whom matrimony has not spoiled for a charge.”

  Except for the Crow scouts’ early-morning glimpse of a huge pony herd, no one had so far seen the supposedly vast Indian village along the Little Bighorn. What Custer needed, more than anything else as he marched toward the river, was solid information. But the closer he got to the Little Bighorn, the more he realized how deceptive the country was. What had looked from the divide like a smooth, rolling green valley was actually cut up into almost badland-like crevices and ravines. Just when he thought he was about to gain a glimpse of the river ahead, he discovered there was yet another bluff blocking his view.

  He soon recognized that Benteen had no chance of viewing the Little Bighorn from the bluff to the left. So Custer sent a messenger telling him that if he couldn’t see down the valley from the first bluff, he should move on to the next. Not long after, Custer sent yet another messenger telling Benteen to continue to the next bluff after that.

  As Custer pushed Benteen farther and farther to the left, he became increasingly anxious about what was happening ahead. As orderly, it was Private Martin’s job to ride just behind Custer, and he watched as scouts came in from the field and reported to the general. Custer “would listen to them,” Martin remembered, “and sometimes gallop away a short distance to look around.”

  But Custer wanted to know more. Up ahead, a rapidly moving cloud of dust seemed to indicate that the intermediate village he’d seen from the divide was fleeing toward the Little Bighorn. Lieutenants Varnum and Luther Hare were in the advance with the Indian scouts, and Custer kept pestering them for information. Unfortunately, their view of the valley was no better than Custer’s, especially since the general was now moving so quickly that his scouts were finding it difficult to keep ahead of him. Custer, Hare later remembered, “seemed . . . very impatient.”

  Custer still held out hope that there were a significant number of Indians left at the intermediate village. He picked up the pace and quickly left Reno’s battalion well behind. About this time, Benteen, far to the left, caught a glimpse of the most visible portion of Custer’s battalion, the Gray Horse Troop under the command of Custer’s good friend Lieutenant Algernon Smith, galloping down the valley. “I thought of course,” Benteen wrote, “they had struck something.”

  What they had struck, it turned out, was a village that had been abandoned just minutes before. Fires still smoldered beneath the hot afternoon sun. A variety of cooking implements lay scattered on the ground. Only a single tepee, beautifully decorated with charcoal drawings, was left standing. The Arikara scout Young Hawk had already cut the lodge open with his knife, and inside, laid out in splendor on a scaffold, was the body of a Lakota warrior fatally wounded the week before at the Battle of the Rosebud. Custer, who had hoped so fervently to catch this little village by surprise, ordered the tepee burned.

  Behind the site of the abandoned village was a bluff where Mitch Boyer and several of the Crows were taking turns peering at the valley through a telescope. As the scouts studied the valley, the interpreter Fred Gerard galloped to the top of a nearby knoll on his big black stallion.

  Gerard was an interpreter with a chip on his shoulder. He was, at least to his own mind, a man of immense experience. He’d been in Indian country now for close to thirty years and was the only white man in the command who could claim to have met Sitting Bull. That winter, while Custer was in New York, Major Reno had dismissed Gerard for stealing from the government. On his return in the spring, Custer had promptly reinstated the interpreter, but Gerard still felt he had something to prove. Even though this campaign marked his first military experience on the plains, he’d taken it upon himself to advise both Custer and General Terry about what they could expect in the days ahead. Custer appears to have grown increasingly annoyed by the interpreter’s assumption that he was indispensable. Just a few hours before, when Gerard had insisted on joining officer’s call, Custer had stared icily at him and said, “Go where you belong, and stay there.”

  Ever since leaving the divide, Gerard had chosen to accompany Custer instead of riding with the Arikara. This meant that the scouts were left without anyone to tell them what Lieutenant Varnum wanted them to do. In the ensuing confusion, they had abandoned Varnum and his orderly, who were well to the left of Sun Dance Creek, and ridden over to investigate what has come to be called the Lone Tepee, where they had enjoyed some of the meat and soup left for the dead warrior’s journey into the afterlife. When Gerard finally arrived at the Lone Tepee, the Arikara One Feather was fuming. “I scolded Gerard for not staying with us . . . to give us the orders,” he remembered.

  But Gerard, whom the Arikara called “Fast Bull,” had decided he had more important things to do than interpret. Instead of stopping to speak with his charges, he rode his big black horse to the top of a knoll overlooking the Lone Tepee. There he saw what the Crow scouts had been observing for some time now: billowing clouds of dust rolling up the Little Bighorn Valley in the northerly breeze. Gerard turned his horse sideways and waving his hat in his hand shouted out to Custer, “Here are your Indians, running like devils!”

  As his actions at the last officer’s call indicated, Custer knew better than to trust the grandstanding Gerard. In this instance, however, the interpreter had found a way to make his commander finally pay attention. Waving his hat as if he were Buffalo Bill Cody, Gerard had played directly to Custer’s worst fears. Not only had the relatively small village at the Lone Tepee disbanded; the much larger encampment on the Little Bighorn was, at least according to Gerard, also on the run.

  Custer immediately began to rethink his strategy. If the village was rapidly disintegrating into fragments, its great size was no longer a concern. What mattered now was capturing as many of the fleeing Indians as possible. As it turned out, Benteen’s battalion to the left was well positioned to meet any Indians that might try to escape up the Little Bighorn to the southeast; Custer must now get himself and Reno down into the valley to the west and attack whatever Indians were left at the original encampment site, still hidden from view by an exasperating bluff. At the very least, they could drive the fleeing village down the valley toward the Montana Column to the north. According to the schedule outlined aboard the Far West, Terry and Gibbon should be arriving soon at the mouth of the Little Bighorn.

  By now, Reno’s battalion, which had been left behind during Custer’s final sprint to the Lone Tepee, was just arriving on the left side of the creek. Custer motioned to his second-in-command with his hat. Reno crossed the creek to receive his orders, delivered to him by Adjutant Cooke. Half a dozen people later claimed to have heard Custer’s orders, and as a consequence there are half a dozen versions of what the adjutant said. This is the gist: “Mr. Gerard reports the Indians are two and a half miles ahead and running. Move forward at as fast a gait as you think prudent and charge as soon as you find them, and we will support you with the whole outfit.” Except for telling Reno to take the Indian scouts along with him, that was it.

  The major turned to go with his three troops down the left bank of Sun Dance Creek. But there was a problem with the Arikara scouts. Instead of galloping ahead of Reno’s battalion, they remained clustered behind Custer and his staff. Custer turned to Gerard and told him to tell the scouts, “You have disobeyed me. Move to one side and let the soldiers pass you in the charge. If any man of you is not brave, I will take away his weapons and make a woman of him.” All of the Arikara knew what the real problem was. Gerard had been too busy pretending he was a member of Custer’s inner circle to explain to them what they were supposed to do. One of the scouts turned to the interpreter: “Tell him if he does the same to all his white soldiers, who are n
ot so brave as we are, it will take him a long time indeed.” The scouts laughed and to assure the general of their bravery indicated in sign language that they were “hungry for battle.” Gerard later took credit for getting the Arikara back on track, but in actuality he was the cause of the problem in the first place.

  Just prior to the departure of Reno’s battalion, Lieutenant Varnum arrived from scouting the left side of the creek. Still desperate for information, Custer asked him what he’d seen.

  “I guess you could see about all I could see of the situation,” Varnum said.

  “I don’t know,” Custer replied. “What did you see?”

  “The whole valley in front is full of Indians.”

  Custer knew that Varnum was exhausted. Over the course of the last twenty-four hours his scouting duties had required him to ride more than sixty miles, and he’d been without significant sleep for a day and a half. “Nothing but the excitement of going into action kept me in the saddle at all,” Varnum remembered. Custer told him that if he was up for it, he and Hare were both free to join the Arikara in the attack.

  As Varnum prepared to gallop off, he turned to his good friend Lieutenant George Wallace. Wallace, the regiment’s topographical engineer, was in charge of keeping a record of the column’s daily movements and was riding next to Custer. The tall, skeletal Wallace, known as Nick to his friends, had been Varnum’s roommate at West Point; he’d also been the officer who three nights earlier had feared that Custer was doomed to die. “Come on, Nick, with the fighting men,” Varnum quipped. “Don’t stay back with the coffee coolers.”