The Last Stand

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  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.

  Although the Springfield carbine’s accuracy was limited to about 250 yards, it was capable of hurling a bullet as many as 1,000 yards, and as the Hunkpapa were already aware, some of the soldiers’ bullets had managed to splinter the tops of their tepee poles and had wounded at least one noncombatant. There were two members of M Company who had rifles with a much longer range than the shorter-barreled carbines. Captain French had the infantry version of the Springfield, known as a “Long Tom,” while Sergeant John Ryan, who claimed to be the first soldier in Reno’s battalion to fire his weapon that day, was the proud owner of a fifteen-pound Sharps rifle equipped with a telescopic sight. These two members of M Company managed to score several “hits,” including, it seems, Good Bear Boy and Sitting Bull’s favorite horse.

  At some point, one of the soldiers looked to the bluff on the other side of the river. “There goes Custer,” he said. “He is up to something, for he is waving his hat.” Several other officers and men, including Lieutenants Varnum and DeRudio, also claimed to have seen Custer’s battalion on the ridge that afternoon.

  Reno later insisted that he never saw any sign of Custer and that no one in his command reported his presence on the ridge. The mutual fogs of war and alcohol had apparently made it impossible for him to focus on anything beyond the building bedlam ahead.

  As Custer’s officers had suspected, many of the village’s warriors were away hunting. Of the warriors in the Hunkpapa circle who had not gone after buffalo, almost half were now retrieving their horses in the flats to the west. Only the boys who had been racing their ponies prior to the attack were mounted and ready to fight. “Warriors,” Sitting Bull exhorted, “we have everything to fight for, and if we are defeated we shall have nothing to live for; therefore let us fight like brave men.” Little Soldier was just fourteen years old that day. “Old men sang death songs for [us],” he remembered. “Sweethearts, young Indian mothers, and children all wailing and crying.”

  The twenty-three-year-old Hunkpapa Moving Robe Woman had been digging turnips when she, like Pretty White Buffalo Woman, had seen Custer’s soldiers stirring up an ominous cloud of dust above the hills to the east. She immediately ran to her parents’ tepee, where her mother informed her that her ten-year-old brother Deeds was dead. Like Gall, who soon learned that he’d lost his wives and children, Moving Robe Woman was immediately filled with a volatile mixture of sorrow and anger. “My heart was bad,” she remembered. “Revenge!”

  She dried her eyes the way all Lakota women did, placing the lower portion of her palms into the sockets of her eyes and wiping away the tears. She braided her hair and painted her face bright red. “I was a woman,” she remembered, “but I was not afraid.” Her father, Crawler, appeared outside the family tepee with her black horse. Crawler had been one of the first, if not the very first, Lakota to see Custer’s regiment that morning on the divide. He’d already lost his son, and now he and his daughter were preparing to avenge the boy’s death. Moving Robe Woman mounted her horse, and together father and daughter joined the warriors galloping toward the skirmish line. The warrior Rain in the Face later remembered that Moving Robe Woman looked as “pretty as a bird” as she leaned forward on her pony. “Always when there is a woman in the charge,” he added, “it causes the warriors to vie with one another in displaying their valor.”

  The warriors charged into Reno’s soldiers. Sergeant Ryan estimated there were about five hundred Indians in the first wave, which emerged from a ravinelike section of benchland about midway between the skirmish line and the village’s edge. “They tried to cut through our skirmish line,” Ryan wrote. “We poured volleys into them, repulsing their charge . . . and emptying a number of saddles.”

  Those warriors who survived the first onslaught swung to the right toward the foothills to the west, “lying low upon their horses and firing rapidly,” remembered the scout Billy Jackson. A choking cloud of dust followed in the warriors’ wake and rolled over the skirmish line. “It drifted upon us like a thick fog,” Jackson remembered, “and obscured the sun.” More than half a dozen warriors had been killed or wounded in the charge. Included in the dead that day was Young Black Moon, son of the elder who had announced Sitting Bull’s sun dance vision.

  After the repulse, the warriors paused beside a hill near a dry creek just beyond the carbines’ range. By this time, many of the older warriors had retrieved their horses. Some joined the nucleus of impetuous young warriors gathered on the hill; others worked their way around the end of the skirmish line to the south. To the east, warriors, many of them on foot, infiltrated the timber; still others crossed the river and began to work their way south along the eastern bank. Instead of a wall of defense, the skirmish line, which reached only 250 yards into the valley, was in danger of becoming surrounded.

  In the beginning, the momentum had all been on Reno’s side. He had been completely oblivious to it, but his sudden arrival had sent the village reeling. Just ten to fifteen minutes later, however, everything had changed. By hesitating, Reno had given the village’s warriors the time they needed to collect themselves for a decisive attack. The bolt of fear that had sizzled across the Hunkpapa circle like an electric shock had begun to flow back toward the soldiers as they came to realize the growing danger of their situation.

  Captain Myles Moylan of A Company turned to the Indian scout Billy Jackson. It was important they get a message to Custer, Moylan said; did Jackson think he could deliver it? Jackson looked behind them to the south. “No man can get through there alive,” he said.

  At least some of Reno’s men had seen Custer on the ridge, waving his hat. Soon after, Custer descended from the hill and joined the rest of his battalion waiting behind the bluffs. Hidden from Reno’s battalion by the intervening bluff, Custer and his men proceeded north. Up ahead, the Crow scouts assured him, was a winding series of seasonal riverbeds, known as coulees, that would take them down to a ford at the north end of the village.

  Contrary to what Pretty White Buffalo Woman had assumed, Custer had had no concrete plan when he’d sent Reno’s battalion charging toward the village. It was only after seeing the encampment that he could begin to devise a strategy based on any solid information. Already he had sent back a messenger to McDougall and the pack train urging them to hurry up with the ammunition. But as he was soon to realize, his first glimpse of the village had been dece
ptive. Instead of seeing the entire encampment from the hill, he had seen only a portion of it. Once again, the bluffs had found a way to block his view.

  It may have been Mitch Boyer who revealed the truth to Custer. He along with the four Crow scouts had remained on the higher ground to Custer’s left, where, unlike Custer down in the coulee, they could see the valley below. As they worked north, they gradually came to realize that the village was close to twice the size they had originally thought. They also saw that instead of charging into the village, Reno had decided to throw out a skirmish line.

  Once he became apprised of the true dimensions of the village and the fact that Reno’s charge had stalled at its edge, Custer must have realized that he should have kept the two battalions together and led the charge himself. But there was nothing he could do about that now. He was separated from Reno’s battalion by a mile-wide stretch of valley, but if he had seen Reno from the bluff, Reno had also seen him. Surely the major must know by now that Custer intended to support him not from the rear, as originally planned, but from the right. As long as Reno kept the Indians occupied to the south, Custer still had a chance of doing some damage from the east.

  Given the size of the village, Custer knew he needed not only the pack train; he needed every fighting man he could get. He hated to admit it, but he needed Frederick Benteen.

  He called over the trumpeter John Martin. “Orderly,” Custer said, “I want you to take a message to Colonel Benteen. Ride as fast as you can and tell him to hurry. Tell him it’s a big village and I want him to be quick and to bring the ammunitions packs.” When excited, Custer had a tendency to talk too rapidly. “[He] rattled off his order so fast,” Libbie remembered, “that it was almost impossible for one unacquainted with his voice to understand.” Adding to the potential confusion was that John Martin, an Italian by birth, was still fairly new to the English language. Before Martin could gallop off, Custer’s adjutant, Lieutenant Cooke, said, “Wait, orderly, I’ll give you a message.”

  From his pocket, Cooke pulled out the same notebook upon which he and Custer had worked out the fateful division of the regiment into three different battalions. On a fresh piece of paper he wrote out the order with which Custer hoped to reunite the regiment. It read: “Benteen, Come on, Big Village, Be Quick, bring packs, W. W. Cooke. P.S. Bring pac[k]s.”

  Cooke handed the message to Martin. “Ride as fast as you can to Colonel Benteen,” he instructed. “Take the same trail we came down. If you have time, and there is no danger, come back; but otherwise stay with your company.”

  Martin turned his horse and started back up the coulee. “The last I saw of the command,” he said, “they were going down the ravine. The Gray Horse Troop was in the center and they were galloping.”

  From the beginning of the battle, Crazy Horse, the greatest of the Lakota warriors, had been in no particular hurry. The Oglala circle was to the north of the Hunkpapa, well back from the river. After learning of the soldiers’ approach, he had paused to pray with a holy man and then carefully painted his face, drawing a red zigzag from the top of his forehead to one side of his nose and back to the cleft of his chin. “This he did very coolly,” Standing Bear remembered. “He delayed so long that many of his warriors became impatient.” When he finally began to gallop toward the foothills beside the dry creek, a cry went up that could be heard throughout the village: “Crazy Horse is coming!”

  Like Custer’s brother Tom, Crazy Horse had suffered a gunshot to the face that had left him with a permanent scar across his cheek. Unlike Tom, who’d been wounded in battle, the Oglala warrior had been shot by the jealous husband of the woman he’d run away with. For having placed his own interests ahead of the greater good of the tribe, Crazy Horse had lost the prestigious position of Shirt Wearer.

  In the years since that scandalous incident, he had rededicated himself to what he did best. “Crazy Horse considered himself cut out for warfare,” the interpreter Billy Garnett remembered, “and he therefore would have nothing to do with affairs political or social or otherwise.” Sitting Bull had guided the northern Lakota through the tumultuous events of the last few months and days. Now it was Crazy Horse’s turn to lead them in battle.

  By the time he reached the hill to the west of the soldiers’ skirmish line, the growing throng of warriors was, according to Garnett, “almost uncontrollable.” What they needed more than anything else, Crazy Horse realized, was some composure. “[He] rode up and down in front of his men talking calmly to them,” Garnett said, “telling them to restrain their ardor till the time he should give the word.” Native warriors were known for their independence and lack of discipline in battle. But in this instance, the Lakota had the advantage over the washichus of a strong and forceful leader.

  They must wait, Crazy Horse said, for the soldiers’ guns to heat up “so they would not work so well.” So they sat upon their horses as the soldiers on the skirmish line continued to blast ineffectually away.

  Compared with modern-day brass shell casings, which remain remarkably stable when heated, the copper shell casings of the .45-caliber ammunition used by Reno’s men were more malleable. After about half a dozen quickly fired shots, the extractor mechanism had an unfortunate tendency to rip through the flange at the bottom of the heat-softened shell, leaving the barrel clogged with the remnants of the expended casing. The soldier’s only recourse was to try to dislodge the mangled shell with a knife—a laborious and increasingly nerve-racking procedure, especially when the enemy was massing for a charge.

  Having successfully slowed the tempo of the battle, Crazy Horse once again addressed the warriors gathered on the hill. It was now time to attack, he said. “Do your best, and let us kill them all off today that they may not trouble us any more. All ready! Charge!”

  Twelve-year-old Black Elk lay hidden in the timber near the river. “Just then,” he remembered, “I heard the bunch on the hillside to the west crying: ‘Hokahe!’ and make the tremolo. We heard also the eagle bone whistles. I knew from this shouting that the Indians were coming, for I could hear the thunder of the ponies charging.”

  By this time, the soldiers’ skirmish line had pivoted to the left so as to face the growing threat to the west. Reno had been warned that the Indians were also threatening the horses in the timber to the east. He’d already sent Lieutenant McIntosh’s G Company into the woods to provide the animals with some protection; as a result, the ranks of the skirmish line had become distressingly thin. Fred Gerard watched as Reno, too, left the line for the timber. “I saw him put a bottle of whiskey to his mouth,” he remembered, “and drink the whole contents.”

  It was time, Reno decided, to bring everyone into the timber. As Crazy Horse’s warriors charged toward them and the soldiers began to run for cover, Captain French, angered by the fact that no effort was being made to withdraw the battalion in a coordinated fashion, shouted, “Steady men! I will shoot the first man that turns his back to the enemy—fall back slowly. Keep up your fire!”

  But it was little use. “The men ran into the timber pell mell,” remembered Fred Gerard, “and all resistance to the Sioux had ceased.”

  Out in the middle of the skirmish line, about forty to fifty yards from the edge of the timber, Sergeant Miles O’Hara crumpled to the ground. He’d been hit and needed assistance. But no one was willing to go back for him. Private Edward Pigford never forgot the sergeant’s final words. “For God’s sake, don’t leave me,” O’Hara cried as the rest of the command ran for the safety of the trees.

  Bordering the western edge of the timber was a four-foot-deep trench carved out by one of the river’s divergences. It was ready-made for defense, and several of the scouts, including George Herendeen, planted themselves there along with the soldiers and began firing at the Indians out on the plain. “The Sioux would gallop in bunches,” Private Newell remembered, “and deliver their fire and then retreat, their places to be filled instantly by another bunch.”

  —THE VALLEY FIGHT, June 25,
1876—

  Captain Moylan turned to Lieutenant Varnum and said the men were beginning to run out of ammunition. It was time to bring up the horses so the soldiers could get the extra fifty rounds from their saddlebags. Varnum entered the timber, and after a strange encounter with Reno’s adjutant, Lieutenant Hodgson, who urgently asked him to check his horse for a nonexistent wound, Varnum brought A Company’s horses up to the trench’s edge. He’d just settled in beside the scout Charley Reynolds when the interpreter Fred Gerard offered Reynolds a sip from his flask. Reynolds had already experienced unsettling premonitions about the battle; he was also suffering from a painful infection on his hand. Varnum could not help but stare as the scout, famed for his quiet courage, struggled with trembling hands to drink from the flask. “I was paying more attention to that,” he later admitted, “than to the Indians.”

  Varnum heard some men shouting behind him in the woods and went to investigate. Others quickly followed until only one man was left on the firing line—the scout George Herendeen.

  Two years before, Herendeen had been part of what was called the Yellowstone Wagon Road and Prospecting Expedition: 150 men, most of them experienced Indian fighters, equipped with repeating rifles and even a few cannons, who ranged the Rosebud, Little Bighorn, and Bighorn river basins, looking for gold. It was an outrageous affront to Lakota sovereignty, and Sitting Bull had led several hundred warriors, including at one point Crazy Horse, against this cocksure group of frontiersmen.

  Compared with the regiments of infantry and cavalry they had confronted before, this was a tiny group of washichus, and Sitting Bull had expected to send them quickly back to their home in Bozeman, Montana. However, in three different battles, one of them fought only a few miles from where they were now, the Lakota saw for the first time what a cadre of brave, experienced, and well-equipped gunfighters could do. “They appeared to go just where they wanted,” reported Johnnie Brughiere, who heard about the expedition from the Lakota. “[The Indians] could get nowhere near them without losing men or horses. . . . They could not understand it except on the theory that some new race of strangers had come into the country.”