The Last Stand

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  With hundreds of miles between them, Terry and Crook (who did not like each other) were operating in virtual isolation. A horse-mounted messenger might have covered the distance between them in a matter of days (assuming, of course, he was able to evade the hostile Indians), but at no time during the campaign did either general make a serious attempt to contact the other.

  —THE MARCH OF THE DAKOTA COLUMN, May 17-June 9, 1876—

  This was not the case with Terry and Gibbon, who planned to link up at a rendezvous point on the Yellowstone River. Now that Terry knew Sitting Bull was not on the Little Missouri, he was desperate for news from Gibbon to the west. As it so happened, on June 3, the day the column broke camp after the snowstorm, three horsemen were spotted riding toward them from the northwest. They proved to be scouts from the Montana Column with a dispatch from Gibbon.

  In obedience to Terry’s earlier orders, made when the Indians were thought to be on the Little Missouri, Gibbon was making his way east along the north bank of the Yellowstone. Almost as an aside, Gibbon reported that his scouts had recently sighted an Indian camp “some distance up the Rosebud.” This meant that Gibbon was now marching away from where the Indians had last been seen.

  That night Terry overhauled his plan. Gibbon was to halt his march east and return to his original position on the Rosebud River. Since the Indians were so far to the west, Terry must move his base of operations from the original rendezvous point in the vicinity of modern Glendive, Montana, to the mouth of the Powder River, approximately 50 miles up the Yellowstone. In the meantime, Terry and the Seventh Cavalry were to march west, with a slight jog to the south to avoid another patch of badlands, to the Powder River. After three weeks of hard marching, they were, it turned out, only halfway to their ultimate destination, about 150 miles to the west.

  Over the course of the next week, they encountered some of the worst country of the expedition—a sere and jagged land cut up by deep ravines and high ridges, bristling with cacti and prickly pear. An acrid smoke billowed from burning veins of lignite coal. In the alkaline bottomlands, chips of satin gypsum sparkled in the sun. But it was the blue cloudless sky that dominated everything. The troopers had a saying—“the sky fitting close down all around”—that ironically captured the oppressive sense of containment that even an experienced plainsman felt when surrounded by so much arid and empty air. They all wore hats, but the men still suffered terribly beneath the unrelenting sun. “My nose and ears are nearly all off and lips burned,” Dr. James Madison DeWolf recorded in his diary. “Laughing is impossible.” DeWolf now understood why Custer and so many of his officers hid their lips beneath bushy mustaches.

  On the night of June 6, they were encamped on O’Fallon Creek with thirty-five miles of even worse country between them and the Powder River. That day, the scout upon whom Terry had come to depend, the quiet and courtly Charley Reynolds, became so hopelessly disoriented that he led them six miles to the south before realizing his mistake. None of the guides, including the Arikara scouts, knew anything about the badlands between them and the Powder River. Terry asked Custer if he thought it possible to find a passable trail to the Powder. Custer predicted he’d be watering his horse on the river by three the next afternoon.

  Custer took half of his brother Tom’s C Company, along with Captain Weir’s D Company. They had been riding west into the rugged hills for nearly an hour when Custer ordered Corporal Henry French to ride off in the direction of a spring Custer had seen earlier. French was to determine whether the spring might be useful in watering the column’s horses. As French went off in one direction, Custer, with only his brother Tom accompanying him, set out to the west at a furious clip, leaving the rest of the troopers “standing at our horses’ heads until his return,” Private Peter Thompson remembered. “This action would have seemed strange to us had it not been almost a daily occurrence,” Thompson wrote. “It seemed that the man was so full of nervous energy that it was impossible for him to move along patiently.”

  Custer had grown into manhood during the Civil War, when the frantic, all-or-nothing pace of the cavalry charge came to define his life. “The sense of power and audacity that possess the cavalier, the unity with his steed, both are perfect,” remembered one Civil War veteran who attempted to describe what it was like to charge into battle. “The horse is as wild as the man: with glaring eye-balls and red nostrils he rushes frantically forward at the very top of his speed, with huge bounds, as different from the rhythmic precision of the gallop as the sweep of the hurricane is from the rustle of the breeze. Horse and rider are drunk with excitement, feeling and seeing nothing but the cloud of dust, the scattered flying figures, conscious of only one mad desire to reach them, to smite, to smite, to smite!”

  But Custer was something more than the harebrained thrill junkie of modern legend. Over the course of the war, he proved to be one of the best cavalry officers, if not the best, in the Union army. He had an intuitive sense for the ebb and flow of battle; his extraordinary peripheral vision enabled him to capitalize almost instantly on any emerging weaknesses in the enemy line, and since he was always at the head of a charge, he was always there, ready to lead his men to where they were needed most. Like many great prodigies, he seemed to spring almost fully formed from an unlikely, even unpromising youth. But if one looked closely enough, the signs of his future success had been there all along.

  He’d been a seventeen-year-old schoolteacher back in Ohio when he applied to his local congressman for an appointment to West Point. Since Custer was a Democrat and the congressman was a Republican, his chances seemed slim at best. However, Custer had fallen in love with a local girl, whose father, hoping to get Custer as far away from his daughter as possible, appears to have done everything he could to persuade the congressman to send the schoolteacher with a roving eye to West Point.

  Custer finished last in his class, but it was because he was too busy enjoying himself, not because he was unintelligent. Whenever the demerits he’d accumulated threatened to end his days at the Point, he’d put a temporary stop to the antics and bring himself back from the brink of expulsion. This four-year flirtation with academic disaster seems to have served him well. By graduation he’d developed a talent for maintaining a rigorous, if unconventional, discipline amid the chaos. Actual battle, not the patient study of it, was what he was destined for, and with the outbreak of the Civil War he discovered his true calling. “I shall regret to see the war end,” he admitted in a letter. “I would be willing, yes glad, to see a battle every day during my life.”

  His rise was meteoric. He started the war in the summer of 1861 as a second lieutenant; by July 3, 1863, just two years later, he was a freshly minted twenty-three-year-old brigadier general at the last, climactic day of the Battle of Gettysburg. As Confederate general George Pickett mounted his famous charge against the Union forces, a lesser-known confrontation occurred on the other side of the battlefield. The redoubtable Jeb Stuart launched a desperate attempt to penetrate the rear of the Union line. If he could smash through Federal resistance, he might meet up with Pickett’s forces and secure a spectacular victory for General Lee.

  As it turned out, all Stuart had to do was punch his way through a vastly outnumbered regiment from Michigan and victory was his. But as the Confederates bore down on their northern counterparts (who were outnumbered by four to one), an event occurred that changed the course of the battle and, arguably, the war.

  Custer, dressed in an almost comical black velvet uniform of his own design that featured gaudy coils of gold lace, galloped to the head of the First Michigan and assumed command. Well ahead of his troops, with his sword raised, he turned toward his men and shouted, “Come on, you Wolverines!” With Custer in the lead, the Michiganders started out at a trot but were soon galloping, “every man yelling like a demon.”

  When Custer’s and Stuart’s forces collided on what is now called East Cavalry Field, the sound reminded one of the participants of the thunderous crash of a
giant falling tree. “Many of the horses were turned end over end and crushed their riders beneath them,” a cavalryman remembered. The bodies of some of the combatants were later found “pinned to each other by tightly-clenched sabers driven through their bodies.” Custer’s horse was shot out from underneath him, but he quickly found another mount and was back in the fray. Soon the Federals had the enemy on the run. As one Union officer later commented, it had been “the most gallant charge of the war.” But for Custer, it was just the beginning of a long string of spectacular victories that ultimately prompted General Philip Sheridan to award Libbie the table on which Grant and Lee signed the surrender at Appomattox. Included with the gift was a note: “permit me to say, Madam, that there is scarcely an individual in our service who has contributed more to bring this desirable result than your gallant husband.”

  Once Custer had completed his frenetic search for a trail across the badlands to the Powder River, he returned to ask Corporal French about the spring he’d been sent to find. French claimed the spring didn’t exist. “You are a liar,” Custer shouted. “If you had gone where I told you, you would have found it.”

  The men had become accustomed to the often embarrassing eruptions of Custer’s temper. A week earlier near the Little Missouri, Custer had berated his black interpreter, Isaiah Dorman, for not directing the column in the way he had instructed. Red Star, one of the Arikara scouts, had seen Isaiah “on his knees before Custer, who was cursing him furiously, while [the interpreter] was crying and begging for mercy. The next day as punishment Isaiah had to go on foot all day.” Two years before, during the Black Hills Expedition, Custer became infuriated with Bloody Knife. A wagon had become stuck, and Custer felt the Arikara scout was somehow responsible. Custer took out a revolver and fired several times over Bloody Knife’s head. Once Custer had returned the pistol to its holster, Bloody Knife walked up to him and said, “It is not a good thing you have done to me; if I had been possessed of madness, too, you would not see another day.”

  Custer was unable to reach the Powder River by 3:00, as he’d promised Terry the night before, but he did make it by 3:30. When the river first came into view, he turned to Lieutenant Winfield Edgerly and said, “You and I are probably the first white men to see the Powder River at this point of its course.” Terry and the head of the column arrived at 6:55, while the rear of the column rumbled in at 9:00. “We marched,” Terry wrote, “through an extremely difficult country & over a ridge which must be more than a thousand feet above both our starting point and the valley of the Powder. For the first time, we met pine covered hills—long ridges wooded to their tops. We had at times literally to dig & ‘pick’ our way through.”

  Terry was deeply appreciative of Custer’s efforts. “Nobody but General Custer,” he said, “could have brought us through such a country.” For his part, Custer appears to have hoped that his performance that day had convinced Terry to defer to his judgment in the future. “I do hope this campaign will be a success,” Custer’s brother Boston wrote to his mother the following day, “and if Armstrong could have his way I think it would be, but unfortunately there are men along whose campaign experience is very limited, but, having an exalted opinion of themselves, feel that their advice would be valuable in the field. But I think before this trip is over they will be thoroughly understood by those who should know.”

  The next day, Terry and two companies of the Seventh Cavalry rode from the column’s encampment approximately twenty miles down the Powder to the river’s confluence with the Yellowstone. Terry was delighted to find the Far West tied up to the bank, her thirty-man crew collecting firewood. The next morning, Terry directed Captain Grant Marsh to take him upriver to a rendezvous with Colonel Gibbon and the Montana Column, reported to be about thirty miles to the west.

  After a month of riding a jolting horse and sleeping in a leaky, wind-whipped tent, it was quite astounding to be sitting in the plush cabin of the Far West watching the wild, strikingly beautiful Yellowstone flow past. Even when steaming against the current, the Far West traveled as fast as a column of cavalry; when going down the river, the steamboat reached speeds worthy of a Thoroughbred racehorse. But the Far West was more than a boat; it was a movable island of American culture in a largely uncharted one-hundred-thousand-square-mile sea of western wilderness, a place where Terry could enjoy a gaslit dinner served on china plates and a clean tablecloth. Over the next few weeks he spent as much time as possible aboard the Far West.

  Terry had left Custer encamped on the Powder, with orders to direct preparations for an expedition to the west with about half the regiment. Gibbon’s scouts had last seen the Indians on the Rosebud River, approximately seventy miles to the west. Common procedure was to go to where the Indians had last been seen and then follow their trail. But Terry was not, as Custer was quick to point out, an experienced Indian fighter. He thought in terms of the latitudes and longitudes of the maps he pored over every night, and his systematic mind thought it best to make sure there were no Indians between them and the Rosebud before he ventured to their last known location. For Terry, it was a question of reducing the variables rather than pursuing the prey. If, as he suspected, the Powder and the next river to the west, the Tongue, were free of hostiles, he would then combine the Dakota and Montana columns in a coordinated movement against the Indians on the Rosebud.

  The Yellowstone was at its snowmelt-infused height in early June, and the river boiled along at between six and nine miles an hour. Bucking the current, the Far West took eight and a half hours to cover the thirty-five miles to Gibbon, whom they found with a company of scouts just below the Tongue River. During his meeting with Gibbon and his officers, Terry learned that while he and the Dakota Column had been crawling west, Gibbon and the Montana Column had apparently been doing their best to avoid the Indians.

  Twice Gibbon’s scouts had located sizable villages, first at the Tongue River and then at the Rosebud, and twice he’d failed to attack. Gibbon claimed the current was too strong to get his column across the Yellowstone, but the audacity of the Lakota warriors, who had managed to kill three of his men and steal a large number of horses from his Crow scouts, may have contributed to his decision to remain on the north bank of the river. Terry ordered Gibbon to return to his original position across from the mouth of the Rosebud, where Terry planned to meet up with him after the completion of the reconnaissance to the Tongue River. By noon, Terry was headed back down the Yellowstone on the Far West, which with the aid of the current was now moving along at close to twenty miles an hour.

  Terry had known the Far West’s captain for almost a decade. Back in 1867, Grant Marsh had taken him on an inspection tour of the military posts along the upper Missouri. About 150 miles above the mouth of the Yellowstone, on a wide plain of grassy bottomland known as Elk Horn Prairie, they had seen an enormous herd of buffalo approaching the river from the north. The moving brown mass reached out beyond the horizon, and just as the boat approached Elk Horn Prairie, the leaders of the herd splashed into the river and began swimming for the southern bank. Before Marsh could make any kind of evasive maneuver, the boat was surrounded by bison, some of them hurling themselves against the boat’s sides, others pawing at the stern wheel with their hooves. Marsh had no choice but to stop all forward progress as the riverboat became a raft in a roiling sea of buffalo. When they finally emerged from the bellowing herd and once again started up the Missouri, the buffalo were still streaming across the river behind them.

  As Terry knew from firsthand experience, Marsh was a most steady and reliable individual—just the man he needed amid the uncertainties of this campaign. On the afternoon of June 9, 1876, as the Far West approached the confluence of the Powder and Yellowstone rivers, they were approximately 250 miles from Bismarck. They also happened to be almost precisely 250 miles from Bozeman, the closest town to the west. They were smack dab in the middle of an immense territory of defiant and potentially dangerous Indians, with only the Far West to provide t
hem with food, ammunition, and, if the worst should happen, a way out.

  By 3 p.m., the Far West had reached the mouth of the Powder, and Terry was on his way back up the river for a showdown with Custer. At some point during that all-night ride through a driving rain, he decided to send an unmistakable message to his subordinate. He knew that Custer, having led the most recent march across the badlands and before that the scout up the Little Missouri, fully expected to lead the upcoming scout. He also knew that Custer was itching to break free of him and engage the Indians. But now, Terry was convinced, was not the time. He first needed to get Gibbon in proper position on the Yellowstone, where he could block any Indians attempting to flee north.

  He decided that in good conscience he couldn’t give the scouting mission to Custer—at least not yet. Major Reno had been hoping to lead the regiment all spring. Well, now was his chance for an independent command. The likelihood of Reno actually coming across any Indians was slim to none, but so much the better. Once they’d all regrouped at the mouth of the Tongue River after Reno’s scout west, they would proceed against the Indians—but on his terms, not Custer’s.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Dance

  By early June, Sitting Bull’s village had traveled about thirty miles up the Rosebud River. On a flat section of grass on the east bank, they prepared for the Lakota’s most sacred of ceremonies, the sun dance. A tree was selected from a cottonwood grove and carried to a hoof-flattened plain. Shorn of branches except for one sprig of green leaves at the top, and painted red, the tree was dropped into a carefully dug hole, where it became the center of the arborlike sun dance lodge.

  Eleven years earlier, during a sun dance on the Little Missouri River, Sitting Bull had “pierced the heart.” Two sharp sticks had been thrust through the flesh and muscle wall of his chest. Ropes were attached to the sticks, and with an eagle-bone whistle in his lips, he had hung suspended from the top of the sacred pole at the center of the lodge. There was a downy white feather at the end of the whistle that danced pulselike with each breath. Even though his lifelong training as a warrior helped him endure the searing pain, he did his best to lay bare all his pitiful human frailties before Wakan Tanka and, weeping, prayed “for his people to be healthy and have plenty of food.”