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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Custer had told them to steal the Lakota’s horses, but Bloody Knife and the other Indian scouts were alert to additional possibilities. Already the Crows accompanying Custer’s battalion had come upon the ten-year-old boy Deeds, whom they’d first seen that morning near the divide with his father, Crawler. Deeds and his father had spent the last few hours on the run, desperately trying to stay ahead of the galloping soldiers and their scouts. Finally, in the timber on the east side of the Little Bighorn, at least one of the Crows had caught up with the boy and killed him. His father, however, had escaped and was now on his way to warn the village.

  In the meantime, the Arikara had infiltrated the timber along the river; some had even recrossed the Little Bighorn, and in the flats to the east they discovered not only a herd of horses but a group of Hunkpapa women and children digging turnips. There are conflicting accounts of what happened next, but this much is certain: Six women and four children were killed early in the battle, most probably before any of the soldiers had fired a shot. Among this group were Gall’s two wives and three children.

  For many of the soldiers in Reno’s battalion, this was their first time in combat. Their horsemanship skills were rudimentary at best. They were fine sitting on a walking or even trotting horse, but galloping among 130 mounted troopers over uneven, deceptive ground was a new experience.

  Horses are extremely sensitive animals, and like humans, they can panic. Fueled by adrenaline and fear, a horse can become dangerously intoxicated with its own speed. Not until astride a runaway horse, it has been said, does a rider become aware of the creature’s true physical power.

  Private Roman Rutten’s horse had started acting up at the fording place on the Little Bighorn. By the time the battalion had begun galloping down the plain, Rutten’s horse had become completely unmanageable and had rocketed ahead in a crazed rush. A trooper typically attempted to slow or stop his horse by tugging on the reins, which were attached to the metal bit in the horse’s mouth. The bit was placed into the gap between a horse’s front and back teeth. A horse that didn’t want to be restrained might pop the bit up with its tongue and clench the bit with its teeth, hence the phrase “take the bit between your teeth.”

  Unable to stop or even slow his horse, Rutten apparently did what another trooper in the Seventh had done three years earlier when his horse bolted in an engagement during the Yellowstone campaign. “I, in desperation, wound the [reins] in one hand as far ahead as I could reach,” the trooper remembered, “and pulled with all my might and pulled his head around . . . and got him turned.” Rutten’s horse kept running, but at least he was now running in a circle. Over the course of the next two and a half miles, Rutten’s horse literally ran circles around the troopers, circumnavigating the battalion no fewer than three times.

  They were charging through an ever-thickening cloud of dust. Ahead of them the ghostlike figures of mounted warriors could only dimly be perceived, “running back and forth across the prairie . . . in every direction,” Lieutenant Varnum remembered, “apparently trying to kick up all the dust they could.” Since the encampment was still hidden behind the river, there was nothing tangible for Reno and his men to see: only that dizzying cloud of dust filled with the distant specters of warriors and horses. Ironically, it was Custer’s battalion—separated from them by more than a mile of impassable terrain—that now had the best view of the village, even if, unknown to Custer, not even he had yet seen all of it.

  Reno peered into the swirling enigmatic haze and saw the makings of an ambush. “I soon saw,” he wrote, “that I was being drawn into some trap.” Eight years earlier, Reno’s predecessor Major Joel Elliott had followed some fleeing Cheyenne warriors and never returned. There was also the example of Captain William Fetterman, who ten years before had died with all eighty of his officers and men after being lured beyond the safety of Fort Phil Kearny by a small decoy party that included Crazy Horse. Earlier that year in New York, Custer had ominously said, “It will take another Phil Kearny massacre to bring Congress up to a generous support of the army.” Reno was not about to fall victim to such a debacle, especially since Custer—the originator of this dubious scheme—was nowhere to be seen.

  Not far from Reno was Captain Thomas French, the commander of M Company. French had a high squeaky voice, an expansive gut, and an inordinate love of booze. In the years to come his demons would make a mess of his life, but when in battle he was, according to Private William Slaper, “cool as a cucumber.” Amidst the chaos that was to come, Slaper would look to French for some assurance. “I searched his face carefully for any sign of fear,” he remembered; “it was not there.”

  French looked into the dusty cloud and saw not an ambush, but a cavalry officer’s dream. “Military life consists simply in waiting for opportunities . . . ,” he later wrote. “Sometimes one minute is of far more value than years afterward. . . . I thought that we were to charge headlong through them all—that was the only chance.”

  Reno was well aware that this was, potentially at least, an unmatched chance for advancement. “Never in my life,” he later testified, “did I feel more interested in the success of an engagement . . . because it was essentially my own regiment.” By leaving him out here without the promised support, Custer almost seemed to be taunting him with one last chance to seize the glory he had elected not to pursue during his first scout up the Rosebud.

  A cavalry charge, especially a charge involving a tiny battalion and what is presumed to be a vast Indian village, makes no logical sense. But cavalry charges are not about logic; they are about audacity, about using panic and fear to convince the enemy that you are stronger than they are, even if that is not even close to being the case.

  Between 1868 and 1878, there were eighteen cavalry attacks on Indian villages of two hundred tepees or fewer, and every one of these attacks proved successful. No U.S. cavalry officer before or since had what Reno now faced: the chance to see if a mounted battalion could push the collective psyche of a thousand-tepee village past the breaking point and transform this giant seething organism of men, women, children, horses, and dogs into a stampeding mob. The question was who, besides possibly Captain Thomas French, wanted to be the guinea pig in this particular experiment.

  General Sheridan had observed that Custer was the only married cavalry officer he knew who had not been “spoiled” by having a wife. As Sheridan’s remark suggests, it was not normal for a happily married man to be completely unmindful of his own personal safety, and Sheridan later ascribed Custer’s eventual defeat to, in part, “a superabundance of courage.” Reno, the widower, no longer had a wife, but he did have a young son who would be an orphan without him. He, along with all his officers and men, had everything to live for.

  But Reno had demons of his own. Ever since the death of his wife, he’d been beset by a corrosive, soul-consuming sadness that he tried to neutralize with whiskey. It also didn’t help that even sober he was without a jot of the charisma that made Custer and, in a very different way, Benteen so appealing. But Reno was not, as has been so often insisted, a coward. As he’d demonstrated during the scout on the Rosebud, he could combine pluck with a sensible amount of caution. The problem on the afternoon of June 25 was that he was drunk.

  Even before crossing the river, the major had made a most unorthodox offer to Dr. Henry Porter, one of the two surgeons accompanying the battalion. Reno asked if Porter wanted his carbine. His horse was giving him trouble, he said, and “the gun was in the way.” Porter didn’t say as much, but the implication was clear: Reno was not acting in a manner consistent with a sober, clear-thinking commander.

  As the battalion drew closer to the shadowy warriors in the dust cloud up ahead, many of the soldiers began to cheer—a laudable sentiment to be sure given the circumstances. But Reno wanted none of it. “Stop that noise,” he shouted peevishly, then gave the order, “Chaaarrrrrge!”

  Something about the way he said it—a sloppy slurring—caused Private William Taylor to g
lance over to his commanding officer. He saw Reno in the midst of drinking from a bottle of “amber colored liquid,” which he then passed to his adjutant, Lieutenant Benny Hodgson. Although Reno had expressed worries about his ability to manage his Springfield carbine while galloping on a horse, he apparently had no problems handling a bottle of whiskey.

  Drinking before and during a battle was not unusual in the nineteenth century. Many of Wellington’s officers and men indulged at the Battle of Waterloo. Fred Gerard had his own bottle of whiskey. Several of the Cheyenne warriors who fought in the battle later claimed that many of Custer’s soldiers had whiskey in their canteens. The hoped-for jolt of “Dutch courage” is proverbial, but in reality, alcohol is a depressant, a particularly powerful one when a person is hungry and dehydrated on a hot summer afternoon. If his conduct over the course of the next half hour is any indication, whiskey had a most deleterious effect on Reno, making him appear hesitant and fearful at a time when his officers and men needed a strong, decisive leader.

  On they galloped into the swirling cloud. Up ahead to the left, the Arikara were chasing after an inviting herd of horses. Reno later claimed that “the very earth seemed to grow Indians” as they approached the village, but the truth is that the mounted warriors they could see were still out of effective range of their Springfield carbines. Even now the village was not yet fully visible, although the tops of some of the tepees were just beginning to emerge over the timber to the right. Fearing a trap, fearing the size of the village up ahead, Reno decided that “I must defend myself and give up the attack mounted.”

  When the true size of the Indian village was later revealed, his decision to abort the attack seemed more than justified. But Reno didn’t know the size of the village when he gave the order to halt. That the reality ultimately justified his suspicions does not justify his conduct during the charge. According to Reno’s own testimony, he did not trust Custer’s judgment; as a result, he’d had qualms about the wisdom of the charge from the beginning—qualms that were amplified, it seems certain, by the insidious workings of alcohol.

  “Halt! Prepare to fight on foot—dismount!”

  The Number Ones, Twos, and Threes leapt off their horses while the Number Fours remained mounted to their left. On the side of each horse’s bridle was a leather strap with a buckle at one end and a snap hook at the other. Each of the three dismounted soldiers unhooked the link from his horse’s bridle and snapped it into the halter ring of the horse to the left. With the four horses linked together, the horse holder began to lead the three other horses toward the safety of a crescent-shaped grove of scrubby timber to the immediate right of the emerging skirmish line.

  The maneuver was executed with surprising crispness, one sergeant later testified, given the poor quality of the horsemanship throughout the battalion. There were, however, several soldiers, including poor Private Rutten, whose panicked mounts carried them to where Reno had refused to go. As he galloped wildly past the skirmish line, Rutten continued to yank the reins to the right and was finally able to turn his horse before becoming lost in the terrifying maze of tepees up ahead. Rutten saved himself, but two others were carried into the village and never seen alive again.

  The remaining ninety or so men, each separated by approximately five yards, formed a skirmish line and marched ahead on foot. After proceeding about a hundred yards, they halted. Each company’s flag bearer plunged the brass end of his nine-foot lance into the earth, and with the battalion’s three swallow-tailed guidons fluttering in the northerly breeze, the soldiers—some standing, some kneeling, others lying down—began firing their carbines. Ahead of them, about a quarter mile away, was the village of Sitting Bull.

  By the time Reno’s battalion was halfway down the valley, many of the Hunkpapa at the southern end of the camp were aware that they were about to be attacked. They could see a battalion of soldiers approaching, the glittering barrels of their Springfield carbines looking to some of them like sabers. But the soldiers they were watching weren’t Reno’s; they were Custer’s, working their way north along the bluff on the eastern side of the river.

  Pretty White Buffalo Woman was packing up her tepee in the Hunkpapa circle for an anticipated move downriver when she saw Custer’s battalion, “more than a rifle-shot,” she remembered, “from the river.” In anticipation of an attack, warriors had already begun to rush for the horse herd to the west, confident that it would take the soldiers up there on the ridge at least another fifteen minutes to reach the fording place about a mile downriver from the Hunkpapa circle.

  Suddenly Pretty White Buffalo Woman heard firing—not from the east, but frighteningly near her to the south. Due to the same loop of timber that had hidden the village from Reno’s view, the Hunkpapa had not been able to see the soldiers charging toward them down the valley. Portions of the timber on the west side of the river had been set on fire, and the smoke had also helped screen Reno’s advance. “Like that,” she remembered, “the soldiers were upon us.”

  The shock of Reno’s unexpected advance had a devastating effect on the noncombatants in the village. “The camp was in the wildest commotion,” Pretty White Buffalo Woman remembered, “and women and children shrieked with terror. More than half the men were absent after the pony herd.” Now it was the Lakota’s turn to assume they’d fallen victim to an artfully laid trap. “Long Hair had planned cunningly,” Pretty White Buffalo Woman later insisted, “that Reno should attack in the rear while he rode down and gave battle from the front of the village looking on the river.”

  Terror swept through the six circles of the village like a great keening wave. “Women would call to children,” Little Soldier later told an interviewer, “and children would recognize mothers’ voices.” The Cheyenne Kate Bighead saw a mother “jumping up and down and screaming, because she could not find their little son.” The twelve-year-old Oglala Black Elk had been swimming in the Little Bighorn when he’d heard about the soldiers. “I could see the little ones all naked running from the river,” he remembered. The cumulative sounds of the village—the cries, the shrieks, the shouts—rose up into one wild, disembodied din. “It seemed that all the people’s voices were on top of the village,” Little Soldier reported.

  To Pretty White Buffalo Woman, it seemed as if this huge, rambling village was about to dissolve in a chaotic fury of panic and fear. If Reno’s battalion had “brought their horses and rode into camp . . . ,” she claimed, “the power of the Lakota nation might have been broken.” But then something miraculous happened. The soldiers to the south, she gradually realized, had stopped. Instead of charging into the village, Re-no’s troops, for reasons that Pretty White Buffalo Woman never fathomed, had formed into a stationary skirmish line. Even though almost all the women and children were running for the hills to the west and many of the warriors were away retrieving their horses, the soldiers had chosen not to attack the village. Reno, she later contended, “had the camp at his mercy, and could have killed us all or driven us away naked on the prairie.”

  Sitting Bull appears to have interpreted Reno’s sudden pause as the prelude to possible negotiations. “I don’t want my children fighting until I tell them to,” he said. “That army may be com[ing] to make peace, or be officials bringing rations to us.” He turned to his nephew One Bull, who stood beside him with his friend Good Bear Boy. Taking the gun out of One Bull’s hand, Sitting Bull gave his nephew one of his most cherished possessions, his shield. Sitting Bull’s father had made it out of the thick rawhide from a buffalo’s hump. On its front he’d reproduced the vision he’d seen in a dream: a birdlike human figure in red with a blue-green background and yellow border. A Lakota shield provided physical protection, but it was the shield’s spiritual power that made it special. In fact, this was the same shield Sitting Bull had held when he’d killed the Crow chief twenty years ago.

  Sitting Bull uttered a brief prayer “to keep me from doing something rash,” One Bull remembered, then said, “You and Good Bear Boy
go up and make peace.”

  They mounted their horses and began to approach the skirmish line. They’d gotten to within thirty feet of the soldiers when a bullet smashed through both of Good Bear Boy’s legs. “I got so angry at the soldiers,” One Bull remembered, “that I couldn’t make peace.” One Bull took his lariat and looped it around Good Bear Boy’s chest and pulled him to safety. “I could hear his bones rubbing together,” he remembered.

  By this time, Sitting Bull had mounted his favorite horse, a handsome gray that is depicted in doting detail in the sequence of drawings he created for his adopted brother Jumping Bull. When two bullets felled his beloved horse, the Hunkpapa leader quickly abandoned all hopes for peace. “Now my best horse is shot,” he shouted. “It is like they have shot me; attack them.”

  Reno’s soldiers were lined up along the edges of a large prairie dog village, and some of the men tried to use these honeycombed mounds as a breastwork. The Indians were still far enough away that the troopers did not feel particularly threatened. “The men were in good spirits, talking and laughing,” Private Thomas O’Neill remembered, “and not apprehensive . . . the Sioux toward the village were riding around kicking up a big dust but keeping well out of range.”

  Some of the officers used the lull to follow their leader’s example. Soon after the deployment of the skirmish line, Sergeant Charles White watched in disgust as several officers passed around a bottle. “With my own eyes, I saw these officers . . . drinking enough to make any ordinary man drunk. I then witnessed the greatest excitement among intoxicated officers I ever saw.”

  Left without adequate supervision, the soldiers on the skirmish line began blasting eagerly away—what Captain Myles Moylan described as a “wild and random” fire. Lieutenant Varnum even reported seeing “a good many men shooting right up in the air.” Since a Springfield carbine was accurate to within about 250 yards and the Indians were all well beyond that, there really was no reason to be firing. Each trooper had been given a total of a hundred rounds of carbine ammunition—half of which he carried with him, often in the loops of a waist belt, the other half in his saddlebags. With only fifty rounds on his person and an ever-growing number of warriors ahead, it was essential that each soldier make every bullet count. Since it was possible to fire as many as seventeen rounds a minute, it could take only a few minutes for an overenthusiastic soldier to blast away every available round.