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.
—THE MARCH OF THE SEVENTH CAVALRY, June 21-24, 1876—
They made camp at what may be one of the most hauntingly beautiful valleys in the world. On the east side of the river is a ridge of rolling hills, a miniature mountain range of grass and sagebrush that follows the river for about eight miles. To the south, the hills stand up against the river in precipitous bluffs that loom as high as three hundred feet. Moving downstream to the north, the hills back away from the river and soften into undulating grasslands that look bland enough from a distance but are cut and enfolded in deceptively complex ways. The Lakota called this river the Greasy Grass. Some said this referred to the muddy, alkaline slickness of the surrounding grass after a heavy rain; others said it was because of the milky foam created by the ponies when they chewed a kind of seed pod unique to the grass near the river’s headwaters.
All spring and summer, Wooden Leg’s people, the Cheyenne, had been leading the Lakota to each new campsite, and they were the first to set up their tepees on the west bank of the Little Bighorn, across the river from the northern portion of the ridge. Behind them to the west spread a wide plain where the huge pony herd could graze on the fertile grass while remaining within easy access of the village and the river.
Just upriver from the Cheyenne were the Sans Arcs, followed by the Minneconjou, who made camp directly across from a V-shaped fold in the hillside to the east. This portion of the Little Bighorn, where a beaver dam caused the river to swell into a deep placid pool, came to be known as Minneconjou Ford. The next tribal circle was taken by Crazy Horse’s people, the Oglala, who were located well back from the river, to the south and west of the Minneconjou. Finally, at the southernmost point of the village, were Sitting Bull’s people, the Hunkpapa, whose circle, the largest of the village, was adjacent to a thick stand of timber on the river’s western bank.
Diagonally across the river from the Cheyenne circle, at the northernmost point of a narrow hogback ridge that paralleled the meandering Little Bighorn, was a high, flat-topped hill. That evening, as the sun began to set, Sitting Bull and his nephew One Bull climbed to this tabular peak. Below them, they could see the entire village spread out for almost two miles. Twelve years before, when Sitting Bull was thirty-three years old, he’d witnessed a similar scene from Killdeer Mountain in North Dakota. A huge village, much like this one, had assembled, and on July 28, 1864, it was attacked by an army of twenty-two hundred soldiers.
For Sitting Bull and the Hunkpapa, what became known as the Battle of Killdeer Mountain was their introduction to the washichus’ way of war. When the soldiers began the attack, the Lakota’s confidence was so high that they left their tepees standing as the women, children, and old men climbed into the surrounding hills to watch the fighting.
It soon became clear, however, that the soldiers’ modern weaponry made it impossible for the warriors, who were equipped with bows and arrows and a handful of old muskets, to resist the army’s onslaught. By the end of the day the entire village was in flames, and the Lakota were on the run.
About a week after the Battle of Killdeer Mountain, in the badlands along the Little Missouri River, the Hunkpapa found themselves in another skirmish with the soldiers. During a lull in the fighting, Sitting Bull shouted out an exasperated question to the soldiers’ Indian scouts on the other side of an echoing gorge. “The Indians here have no fight with the whites,” he said. “Why is it the whites come to fight with the Indians?”
Twelve years later, Sitting Bull was still waiting for an answer.
The Lakota believed that the first white man had come from the sea, which they called mniwoncha, meaning “water all over.” The sea was also home to another predator, the shark. The Lakota had a word of warning, “Wamunitu!” that had come to them, the intrepreter Billy Garnett claimed, from the Indians who lived near the Atlantic Ocean, where sharks sometimes threatened their swimming children. There were no sharks in the rivers and lakes of the northern plains, but when it came time for their children to get out of the water, the Lakota nonetheless cried “Wamunitu!”—an admonition that, like the washichus, had worked its inevitable way west.
Now, if the scouts were to be believed, the washichus were working their way up the watery tendrils of both the Rosebud and Bighorn rivers. In addition to the soldiers of the Dakota and Montana columns, there was the steamboat Far West, which after ferrying Gibbon’s troops across the Yellowstone was now pushing against the current toward the mouth of the Little Bighorn.
These armies and what the Indians called the “fireboat” represented an unprecedented threat, but times had changed since the Battle of Killdeer Mountain. Like the soldiers, the Lakota and Cheyenne were armed with pistols and rifles, including repeaters made by Henry and Winchester that gave them an advantage over the soldiers’ single-shot Springfields when the fighting was at close quarters. The Indians were also armed with a renewed sense of outrage over the seizure of the Black Hills. They had already repelled Crook’s army when the camp had been half this size. What these warriors, who had their women and children to defend, would do if attacked once again was frightening to contemplate. As decades of intertribal warfare had taught, too complete a victory was never, in the long run, good for the victor. Nothing inspired the enemy like revenge.
That evening on the hill overlooking the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull brought his pipe, some buckskin-wrapped tobacco tied to sticks of cherry, along with a buffalo robe. He presented the offerings to Wakan Tanka and, standing, began to chant. “Great Spirit,” he said, “pity me. In the name of the tribe I offer this pipe. Wherever the sun, the moon, the earth, the four points of the winds, there you are always. Father, save the tribe, I beg you. Pity me, we wish to live. Guard us against all misfortunes or calamities. Pity me.”
Meanwhile, in the valley below, the Cheyenne Wooden Leg was having what he later remembered as the time of his life. Unlike the week before, he had no interest in sneaking out of the village in search of soldiers. He had other priorities on the night of June 24. “My mind was occupied mostly by such thoughts as are regularly uppermost in the minds of young men,” he remembered. “I was eighteen years old, and I liked girls.”
He soon found himself beside a bonfire, where young people danced around a pole standing in the center of the Cheyenne circle. “It seemed that peace and happiness was prevailing all over the world,” he remembered, “that nowhere was any man planning to lift his hand against his fellow man.”
CHAPTER 8
The Crow’s Nest
It was already beginning to get dark when Frederick Benteen arrived at the night’s campsite on the Rosebud. Captain Myles Keogh, who was a thirty-six-year-old Irishman and the leader of I Company, was there to greet him. “Come here, old man,” he called out. “I’ve kept the nicest spot in the whole camp next to me for your troop.” “Bully for you, Keogh!” Benteen responded. “I’m your man.”
Keogh had been born to a well-to-do Catholic family in county Carlow and at twenty left for Italy to join the army of Pope Pius IX in its battle against Garibaldi’s Italian revolutionaries. He was recognized for his bravery, and after the eventual defeat of the papal forces, he headed for America to fight in the Civil War. Once again, Keogh distinguished himself as a gallant and trustworthy officer. Like Custer (whom he first met while serving on General McClellan’s staff), he looked good on a horse, and like Custer, he knew it. Remembered one officer, “His uniform was spotless and fitted him like the skin on a sausage.”
But Myles Keogh was no Custer. “A certain lack of sensitiveness is necessary to be successful,” he reflected i
n a letter to one of his many siblings back in Ireland. “This lack of sensitiveness I unfortunately [did] not inherit.” He’d fallen in love with a young widow at the end of the Civil War, and when she died in June of 1866, he was heartbroken. Whether or not it was because of this loss, Keogh drank more than was good for him. He was so often “hopelessly boozy,” remembered Libbie Custer, that he’d been forced to hand over the management of his financial affairs to his orderly.
Keogh, ever the dandy, wore buckskins like the Custers, but he was by no means a member of the Custer clique. Custer had no patience with Keogh’s sentimentality and fits of depression; his frequent requests for leave meant that he’d missed every major engagement in the regiment’s nearly decade-long history. Just this last winter, Keogh had once again requested leave, a request Custer denied. Tensions appear to have been particularly high between the two of them at the onset of the campaign. Lieutenant Edgerly later felt compelled to assure his wife that Custer “gave Keogh command strictly in accordance with his rank on the morning of the fight.”
Part of Custer’s problem with Keogh may have been the Irishman’s good looks. He was an inch or two taller than Custer, had high cheekbones, dark hair and eyes, and a look of sad yet raffish intelligence. He was, without question, the handsomest man in the regiment. In a photograph taken at an 1875 picnic, Keogh and Custer stand on either side of Libbie. Keogh, dressed all in black, leans suggestively on the back of Libbie’s chair while Custer, dressed in his white buckskin suit, looks away from the two of them, his arms awkwardly crossed.
Weeks after the captain’s death at the Little Bighorn, Benteen found himself dreaming about the man beside whom he spent his last night before the battle. “I had a queer dream of Col. Keogh . . . ,” he wrote to his wife; “ ’twas that he would insist upon undressing in the room in which you were. I had to give him a ‘dressing’ to cure him of the fancy. I rarely ever thought of the man—and ’tis queer I should have dreamt of him.”
That night after supper, Keogh sat down beside Benteen, who had just taken off his boots and was reclining beneath a bullberry bush, listening to Lieutenant Charles DeRudio regale a group of officers about his adventures in Europe. Before serving in the Civil War, the Italian-born DeRudio, a small man with an elfish face, had been involved in a botched attempt to assassinate France’s Napoleon III. His sentence of death by guillotine had been commuted to life at the notorious Devil’s Island in French Guiana, from which he had managed to escape to England. The stories of DeRudio, known as “Count No Account,” always seemed to change with each telling, and Benteen was not about to lose a night’s rest to another one of the officer’s endless yarns.
“See here, fellows,” he said, “you want to be collecting all the sleep you can, and be doing it soon, for I have a ‘Pre’ [for premonition] that we are not going to stay in this camp tonight, but we are going to march all night, so, good-night.”
They’d traveled almost thirty miles that day and were now camped near where the Indians’ trail, which had suddenly become even larger and fresher, veered away from the Rosebud toward the rugged divide to the west, known as the Wolf Mountains. On the other side of the divide was the Little Bighorn.
“I had scarcely gotten the words from my lips,” Benteen wrote, “before the orderly trumpeter notified us that we would meet at the commanding officer’s headquarters at once.”
There was no moon that night, and with a ban on fires and lanterns, the officers had a difficult time finding Custer’s tent. “We groped our way through horse herds, over sleeping men, and through thickets of bushes,” remembered Lieutenant Godfrey. Finally, Godfrey came upon “a solitary candle” flickering beside the general’s tent. Once most of the officers had assembled, Custer explained that the Crow scouts, who’d marched to the verge of the divide that afternoon, claimed the trail led into the valley beyond. However, due to glare from the setting sun, they were unable to see any sign of a village. The Crows, along with Lieutenant Varnum, the scout Charley Reynolds, and some Arikara, were now on their way back up to the divide, where they hoped to catch a glimpse of the village “in the early morning when the camp fires started.”
In the meantime, Custer wanted to get the column as close as possible to the divide, some fifteen miles away. His plan was to march all that night, and after concealing the regiment beneath the eastern brow of the Wolf Mountains, spend the next day scouting out the location of Sitting Bull’s village. If all went according to plan, they’d march for the village on the night of June 25 and attack at dawn of the twenty-sixth. As Godfrey and the other officers undoubtedly realized, this was almost precisely the strategy Custer had used at the Battle of the Washita in 1868.
That summer the newspaper correspondent John Finerty accompanied General Crook’s Wyoming Column. Of all his experiences during that eventful time, nothing compared to the thrilling mystery of a night march. “You are conscious that men and animals are moving within a few paces,” Finerty wrote, “and yet you cannot define any particular object, not even your horse’s head. But you hear the steady, perpetual tramp, tramp, tramp of the iron-hoofed cavalry . . . , the jingle of carbines and sling-belts, and the snorting of the horses as they grope their way through the eternal dust.”
In the early-morning hours of June 25, Lieutenant Godfrey used the dust as a navigational aid. As long as he kept himself and his horse within that choking cloud, he knew he was moving in the right direction. The trouble came, Godfrey wrote, when “a slight breeze would waft the cloud and disconcert our bearings; then we were obliged to halt to catch a sound from those in advance, sometimes whistling or hallowing, and getting a response we would start forward again.”
The regiment was marching toward a range of mountains, just the topographical feature that the Native peoples of the plains used to commune with the forces of Wakan Tanka. Sitting Bull had seen his vision of the great white cloud crashing into the dust storm from the top of a butte. Only a few hours ago, he’d climbed the hill overlooking the Little Bighorn for his tearful appeal to Wakan Tanka. Now Custer was climbing to the top of the Wolf Mountains in search of his own vision. For on the other side of the divide he hoped to glimpse the village that was to determine his destiny.
Within the hills, the Indians believed, lived the “below powers”—mysterious forces often represented by the bear and buffalo that could see into the future. That night as the Seventh Cavalry marched through the dusty darkness, it marched toward a destiny foreshadowed to a remarkable degree by a battle fought more than seven and a half years earlier on the plains of Oklahoma.
In the fall of 1868, General Sheridan recalled Custer from his yearlong suspension to lead the Seventh Cavalry in a winter campaign against the Cheyenne. Upon his return from exile, Custer proceeded to turn the regiment inside out.
For “uniformity of appearance,” he decided to “color the horses.” All the regiment’s horses were assembled in a single group and divided up according to color. Four companies were assigned the bays (brown with black legs, manes, and tails); three companies were given the sorrels (reddish brown with similarly colored manes and tails); one company got the chestnuts; another the browns; yet another the blacks; and yet another the grays; with the leftovers, euphemistically referred to as the “brindles” by Custer, going to the company commanded by the most junior officer.
It might be pleasing to the eye to assign a horse color to each company, but Custer had, in one stroke, made a mockery of his officers’ efforts to provide their companies with the best possible horses. And besides, as every cavalryman knew, horses were much more than a commodity to be sorted by color. Each horse had a distinct personality, and over the course of the last year, each soldier had come to know his horse not only as a means of transportation but as a friend. “This act,” Benteen wrote, “at the beginning of a severe campaign was not only ridiculous, but criminal, unjust, and arbitrary in the extreme.” But Custer was not finished. During his absence, he announced, the regiment had become lax in m
arksmanship. To address this failing, he established an elite corps of forty sharpshooters. He then named Benteen’s own junior lieutenant William Cooke as the unit’s leader.
Benteen certainly did not appreciate these moves, but there was one officer who had even more reason to view them as a personal affront. Major Joel Elliott had assumed command during Custer’s absence. Elliott, just twenty-eight, was an ambitious and energetic officer; he had also done his best to quietly undercut his former commander, and Custer, Benteen claimed, knew it. By so brazenly establishing his own fresh imprint on the regiment, Custer had put Elliott on notice.
From the start, the regiment had expected cold and snow, but the blizzard they encountered before they left their base camp on the morning of November 23 was bad enough that even the architect of this “experimental” winter campaign, General Sheridan, seemed reluctant to let them go. Already there was a foot of snow on the ground and the storm was still raging. “So dense and heavy were the falling lines of snow,” Custer remembered, “that all view of the surface of the surrounding country, upon which the guides depended . . . , was cut off.”
They were marching blind in the midst of a howling blizzard, and not even the scouts could tell where they were headed. Rather than turn back, Custer took out his compass. And so, with only his quivering compass needle to guide him, Custer, “like the mariner in mid-ocean,” plunged south into the furious storm.
They camped that night beside the Wolf River in a foot and a half of snow. The next day dawned clear and fresh. Before them stretched an unbroken plain of glimmering white, and as the sun climbed in the blue, cloudless sky, the snow became a vast, retina-searing mirror. In an attempt to prevent snowblindness, the officers and men smeared their eyelids with black gunpowder.
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