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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Morris had no choice but to dismount and refasten the saddle. Before him was a flat section of land that led to a two-hundred-foot-high hillside cut up into a confusing series of ridges and ravines. Morris started up the steep incline, his hands clinging to Stumbling Bear’s mane as the force of gravity threatened to slide him off the saddle. Some of the horses were too winded to make it the whole way, forcing the men to walk their mounts up the grassy slope, “little puffs of dust rising from the ground all around” as the warriors fired on them from both the valley below and the hilltops above.

  Two-thirds of the way up the hill Morris came upon Privates William Meyer and Henry Gordon. “That was pretty hot down there,” Morris commented.

  “You will get used to it, shavetail,” Gordon replied.

  At that moment, the warriors above unleashed a vicious volley, instantly killing Gordon, who was shot through the windpipe, and Meyer, who was hit in the eye. Morris, it turned out, was the lucky one, suffering only a bullet wound to the left breast. Unable to remount his horse, he did what Lieutenant Hodgson had done in the river; he grabbed Stumbling Bear’s stirrup, and his trustworthy horse dragged him the rest of the way to the top of the bluff.

  Once on the ridge, Morris saw that Captain Moylan, who had been at Reno’s side for much of the retreat, was still on the run as he and what remained of his company continued to dash to the east. By that time, Lieutenant Luther Hare had reached the top of the bluff. “If we’ve got to die,” Hare proclaimed, “let’s die here like men.” Hare was, in his own words, “a fighting son of a bitch from Texas,” and he shouted after Moylan’s company, “Don’t run off like a pack of whipped curs.”

  The outburst appears to have finally startled Reno into acting like a commanding officer. “Captain Moylan,” Reno said. “Dismount those men.” Moylan was slow to obey, and Reno repeated the order. Reluctantly, Moylan, who was seen a few minutes later “blubbering like a whipped urchin, tears coursing down his cheeks,” told his men to dismount.

  It was, according to Private Morris, “one of the bravest deeds of the day.” Hare, a mere second lieutenant and only two years out of West Point, had “saved the command from a stampede then and there.”

  In the chaotic aftermath of Reno’s departure, Sergeant Henry Fehler, the A Company flag bearer, mounted his horse. Before Fehler could insert the butt end of the guidon’s staff into his boot top, the swallow-tailed silk flag slipped from his hand and fell to the ground. Rather than retrieve the guidon, he followed the others out of the timber.

  Lieutenant DeRudio decided it was his duty to go back for the flag. He scooped up the guidon and laid the flagstaff against the pommel of his saddle. He was riding through the timber when the flag became entangled in the brush and once again fell to the ground. He’d just jumped down to retrieve it when his horse was hit by a Lakota bullet and galloped off in fright. Stranded at the edge of the timber, with an estimated three hundred Indians just fifty yards away, seemingly all of them shooting at him, DeRudio leapt into a nearby thicket.

  Burrowing into the dense undergrowth, he came upon a buffalo wallow—a small round depression about twenty yards from the open flat. There were three others in it already: the interpreter Fred Gerard, the scout Billy Jackson (both of whom still had their horses with them), and thirty-year-old Private Thomas O’Neill from G Company. Jackson’s horse was a mare and Gerard’s was a stallion, and it wasn’t long before, Gerard recounted, “the horses began to act badly.”

  Warriors were within only a few yards of them, and the whinnying of these two horses had to be stopped. Jackson stuffed a clump of dry grass into each of their mouths and tied their heads together. It would have to do for now.

  And so, in this hollow in the woods, surrounded by the horrifying sounds of unseen Lakota warriors slaughtering their unseen comrades, DeRudio, an Italian aristocrat by pretension if not birth, lay alongside O’Neill, an Irishman from Dublin; Jackson, a quarter-blood Pikuni Blackfoot; and Gerard, an American of French Canadian descent with a son by a full-blooded Piegan woman. Together these four men and their two muffled, amorous horses waited to see what would happen next.

  It took Private Henry Petring a long time to get out of the timber. Like many soldiers, he was dismayed to discover that his horse had been killed by the Indians. He mounted a second only to have that horse shot out from underneath him. By the time he mounted his third horse of the day, he was well behind the rest of his company.

  When Petring finally left the timber, the dust and smoke made it so difficult to see that he temporarily lost his bearings, and it’s likely that he came to the river well below Reno’s crossing. His horse had just jumped into the water when Petring realized that four or five warriors were waiting for him on the other side. As one of the Indians took aim, he lifted up his carbine and fired. To his amazement, both the warrior and his cream-colored horse dropped to the ground.

  Before the other warriors could start firing, Petring leapt off his horse into the waist-deep river and let the current push him several hundred yards downstream. After ducking under a stump that extended out from the river’s western bank, he took refuge in a stand of willows. “[I] thought my situation most desperate,” he remembered, “and wondered if, after all, the best thing I could do would . . . be to shoot myself.”

  He was crouched in the shallows when out of the shadowy gloom he saw a sudden glint of reflected sunlight and then heard the sound of someone approaching through the undergrowth. The flash had come, he soon discovered, not from the barrel of a Lakota’s rifle, as he had at first feared, but from one of the buttons on Private Benjamin Johnson’s blue fatigue blouse.

  Johnson informed Petring that he was right back where he’d started: the timber. But not to fear: They were not alone. Huddled in the trees, it turned out, were thirteen soldiers, including Private Samuel McCormick, whose horse had been taken by Lieutenant McIntosh, and the civilian scout George Herendeen, who had already emerged as the group’s leader. “[They] were a badly scared lot of fellows and they were already as good as whipped,” Herendeen remembered. “I told them I was an old frontiersman, understood Indians, and if they would do as I said, I would get them out of the scrape, which was no worse than scrapes I had been in before.”

  Several of the soldiers still had their horses. Herendeen insisted that they let the animals go, but not before collecting all the ammunition from the saddlebags. Some of the soldiers wanted to make a run for it, but Herendeen persuaded them to stay put. They would wait, he insisted, until the time was right.

  Thomas French made much of how he “sought death” that afternoon, but he was not the only one. The Arikara scout Young Hawk was with half a dozen Arikara and Crows in the brush on the east bank of the Little Bighorn, and they were surrounded. As fellow Natives—“Palini” to the Lakota—the Arikara were special targets, and they knew it. “I made up my mind I would die this day,” Young Hawk remembered.

  In addition to Bloody Knife, two other Arikara, Little Brave and their leader Bobtail Bull, were killed that afternoon. Young Hawk’s friend Goose had just been injured in the hand. Young Hawk helped him off his horse and leaned him against a tree. He also helped the Crow scout Half Yellow Face with his wounded compatriot White Swan.

  “Seized with rage,” Young Hawk stripped to the waist and prepared for the end. In anticipation of being killed and scalped, he unbraided his hair and tied it with eagle feathers. But first he must say good-bye to his horse. Wrapping his arms around the pony’s neck, he said, “I love you.”

  On the other side of the brush was a group of Lakota warriors. Once he’d finished bidding his horse farewell, Young Hawk burst out of the timber, his pistol blazing, then took refuge behind a pile of driftwood, where he found his grandfather Forked Horn.

  “It is no way to act,” Forked Horn admonished.

  Miraculously, Young Hawk had not been injured. Instead of throwing away his life, he decided to take his grandfather’s advice. Like the soldiers and scouts on the othe
r side of the Little Bighorn, he would wait.

  By approximately 4:10 p.m., 80 or so survivors of Reno’s 130-man battalion had gotten out of the timber and made it to the top of the bluff, leaving in their wake dozens of dead, wounded, and missing men. Now that all resistance from the soldiers had ceased, Lakota women, old men, and children joined the warriors along the river and began killing the wounded soldiers and stripping and mutilating the dead. “The Indians were mad and it was hard to check them,” Black Elk remembered; “they were plumb crazy.” They had reason to be outraged. The troopers had attacked their village without provocation and killed six women, four children, and ten warriors.

  Black Elk and his friends were riding their ponies near the river when they came upon what he described as a “kicking soldier.” “Boy,” a warrior commanded him, “get off and scalp him.” Black Elk obediently took out his knife and started to hack away at the soldier’s head. “Probably it hurt him,” he remembered, “because he began to grind his teeth. After I did this I took my pistol out and shot him in the forehead.”

  One of the wounded was the African American interpreter Isaiah Dorman. Since he was married to a Hunkpapa woman at the Standing Rock Agency, he was well known to many of the Indians gathered there that day, one of whom was Moving Robe Woman. Still mourning the death of her ten-year-old brother, Deeds, she approached the wounded interpreter on her black horse, with her hair braided, her face painted red, and a six-shooter in her hand.

  “Do not kill me,” Dorman said, “because I will be dead in a short while anyway.”

  “If you did not want to be killed,” Moving Robe Woman said, “why did you not stay home where you belong and not come to attack us?”

  She raised her pistol and pulled the trigger, but the cartridge did not fire. The second cartridge worked, however, and Moving Robe Woman killed Isaiah Dorman.

  Dorman’s body was later found beside his coffee kettle and cup, both filled with his own blood. His penis had been cut off and stuffed in his mouth and his testicles staked to the ground with a picket pin.

  Not far from Dorman lay Lieutenant McIntosh, who had taken a leading role in the desecration of the dead at the Lakota burial ground on the Tongue River. What apparently drew the attention of McIntosh’s enemies on the afternoon of June 25 was the lieutenant’s clearly discernible Iroquois ancestry. Given that he was last seen by Private Rutten surrounded by more than twenty warriors, it’s likely that his death was both slow and excruciatingly painful. Only a distinctive button given to him by his wife and later recognized by his brother-in-law, Lieutenant Gibson, made the identification of his remains possible.

  Looking down on this horrifying scene from the hilltop to the east was the men’s commander, Major Marcus Reno. The Lakota had set fire to the grass and trees, and billows of smoke rose up from the valley. In the river, the pale bodies of the soldiers floated like dead fish. But as their moans and cries for help indicated, many of the soldiers scattered across the hillside and valley below were still very much alive. At one point a soldier suggested that Reno send a detail to rescue the wounded. Reno responded by saying that the soldier could rescue the wounded himself. “This had a discouraging effect on the men,” Sergeant White remembered.

  Almost half his battalion was dead, wounded, or missing. McIntosh’s G Company had been particularly hard hit. Lieutenant Wallace, who when he wasn’t serving as the regiment’s engineering officer had been McIntosh’s second lieutenant, inherited a troop with only, as far as he could tell, three functional members.

  Like the captain of a sinking ship, the commanding officer of a retreating cavalry battalion was expected to attend to the evacuation of his men. Instead of being the first to safety, the commander should be one of the last. But Reno had led all the way, and in just half an hour, forty of his men—three officers, thirty-two soldiers, two civilians, and three Indian scouts—had been or were about to be killed.

  There was only one way Reno could justify his behavior that afternoon. Instead of having led the regiment in a retreat, he had led them in an attack. It was patently ridiculous, of course, but it was the story Reno stuck to for the rest of his life.

  One of the dead included Dr. James Madison DeWolf, whose body lay within sight of the bluff. Dr. Henry Porter was the only surgeon left to attend to more than a dozen wounded men.

  “Major,” Dr. Porter said, “the men were pretty demoralized.”

  As if answering the unseen accusers in his head, Reno replied, “That was a charge, sir!”

  About two hours before, Custer had ordered Frederick Benteen and his battalion to swing left from the Indian trail in search of a glimpse into the Little Bighorn Valley—a duty that the captain later described as “valley hunting ad infinitum.”

  Benteen prided himself on his skills at poker, and like any good gambler, he’d come to rely on his premonitions about the future. While he was riding futilely through the hills, a voice told him: “Old man, that crowd ahead is going to strike a snag . . . so you’d better get back to that trail, and you will find work.”

  About this time, Lieutenant Gibson, who was riding well ahead of the battalion, reported seeing the much-sought-after valley. As it later turned out, Gibson had glimpsed not the Little Bighorn but a southern tributary to Sun Dance Creek. In any event, the valley contained no Indians; time to quit this wild-goose chase and return to the main column.

  With the order “Right Oblique,” Benteen led the battalion on a diagonal course back to the trail on Sun Dance Creek. They could see the dust of the slow-moving pack train to the right. Even though they had spent close to two hours searching for an illusive valley, they were still ahead of Captain McDougall and the mules when they rejoined the trail.

  But Benteen was in no rush. After crossing the divide, Custer had berated him for leading the regiment at too fast a pace, and he wasn’t about to set any speed records now. “We continued our march very leisurely,” Lieutenant Godfrey recorded in his journal.

  They came to a soggy mud hole, a morass that had a sufficient puddle of water sitting in it for the horses to drink. So they stopped and watered the horses, who’d been without a drink since the evening before.

  Watering the horses was perfectly understandable, but what Benteen decided to do with his own horse—a horse with a reputation for being as sly and ornery as his owner—was anything but. “Old Dick” had a habit of running away when the bit was taken out of his mouth. “You could not hold him by the strap of the halter,” Benteen explained, “no one could, and away he would go.” Even though a horse is capable of drinking with the bit in its mouth and gunshots were just beginning to be heard to the northwest, Benteen tied his horse to an ironwood stump with a lariat and removed the bit. After drinking his fill, Dick pulled the lariat taut and looked to his master, “as if to say,” Benteen wrote, “‘Well, I didn’t much care to go off this time anyway.’”

  It was a strange time to be playing mind games with a horse, and several of Benteen’s officers began to wonder why they were lingering at the morass. Firing could be heard in the distance. They should be moving on. Captain Thomas Weir of D Company, the troop Benteen had specifically requested, was getting particularly impatient. Like Adjutant Cooke, Weir had once been part of Benteen’s H Company. And like Cooke, he was now one of Custer’s good friends.

  —BENTEEN’S SWING LEFT, June 25, 1876—

  Weir was already on his horse at the head of the column. He pointed ahead and said, “They ought to be over there,” and without waiting for an order from Benteen, started down the trail with his troop.

  By that time the pack train had caught up to them, and mules were bolting for the morass. Whether or not Weir had shamed him into it, Benteen immediately gave the order to advance.

  Benteen had returned to the head of the column by the time they came upon Sergeant Kanipe, the messenger sent back by Custer after first glimpsing the village from the bluff. Since the orders were for McDougall and the pack train, Kanipe paused only briefl
y to speak to Benteen. “We’ve got them, boys!” he was overheard to say as he made his way toward the rear of the column. It was beginning to look as though they had already missed the action.

  After another couple of miles, they came upon yet another messenger, Trumpeter John Martin, with a written order for Benteen himself. By this time the captain was, according to Martin, “riding quite a distance in front of the troops, with his orderly trumpeter, at a fast trot.” After leaving Custer’s battalion, Martin had been fired on briefly by some warriors before coming upon Boston Custer. The youngest of the Custer brothers had returned to the pack train for a fresh horse and was now on his way to rejoin the battalion.

  “Where’s the general?” Boston asked Martin.

  “Right behind the next ridge you’ll find him.”

  By the time Martin reached the bluff with a view of the valley below, Reno’s battalion had engaged the Indians. “I did not have time to stop and watch the fight,” he remembered. A half hour or so later, Martin found Benteen and handed over the note telling him that it was a “Big Village” and to “Be Quick” and to “bring packs.” As Benteen noted in a subsequent letter to his wife, Cooke had apparently been so excited that he’d left out the k in packs when he repeated the word in the postscript.

  “Where’s the General now?” Benteen asked.

  Martin said that the Indians were running (Benteen claimed his exact word was “skedaddling”) and that he assumed Custer had already “charged through the village.”