The Last Stand

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Thompson continued down the trail. Ahead of him in the valley below was Sitting Bull’s village. It seemed almost deserted, “so quiet and deathlike was the stillness.” It is one of the more surreal aspects of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. As Reno’s Valley Fight was reaching its terrible crescendo of dust, smoke, and deafening gunfire, the troopers to the north found themselves in another, almost hermetically sealed world. Not only did the broken hills and cottonwood trees cut off their view of Reno’s battle; they acted as an acoustic shield.

  But there were other factors contributing to Thompson’s eerie sense of isolation. The most important, perhaps, was the fact that he was totally deaf in the left ear, the ear facing Reno’s portion of the battle. The inevitable fear and disorientation of battle also had the effect of dramatically shrinking a soldier’s frame of reference. “When men are fighting . . . ,” the veteran F. E. Server recalled, “they do not know what is going on around them six feet away. . . . They see only that closely in front.” A prisoner of his own necessarily myopic perspective, Thompson was wandering aimlessly through a terrifying and unknown terrain in search of his battalion.

  Down below, at the foot of the bluff near the river’s edge, he saw a trooper on a horse. It was Private James Watson, also from C Company, “riding in a slow, leisurely way” along the same trail Thompson was following. Like Thompson, Watson had become separated from the battalion as his horse started to give out. At that moment, Watson turned to the left and began riding upriver toward a group of Indians gathered just below Thompson. Despite the more than ninety-degree heat, they were wrapped in government-supplied blankets stamped with the letters I.D., for Indian Department. The black mosquitoes were particularly fierce along the river, and the blankets provided the Indians with some protection as they talked among themselves “in a very earnest manner.” Thompson decided he must warn Watson of what lay ahead of him.

  He jumped off the trail and cut diagonally across the hillside to his right. He came to a deep ravine and, unable to stop himself, fell several feet, kicking up the dried flakes of alkaline mud into a dusty gray cloud as he tumbled down the hill, finally arriving at the riverbank just ahead of Watson. Thompson breathlessly asked where he was going. “To our scouts, of course,” Watson replied without betraying the least bit of surprise at the sudden appearance of a trooper from his own company. Thompson explained that the Indians gathered along the river up ahead were not Arikara; they were hostiles. “I told him,” Thompson wrote, “that I.D. stood for Immediately Dead if he went over [there].” But where to go next?

  As far as they could tell, there were few, if any, warriors in the village. The bluffs on their side of the river, however, were infested with them. The safest thing to do was to cross the river and enter the village, where they could see a guidon from one of Reno’s companies stuck into the ground beside a tepee. The flag gave them confidence that the encampment was now occupied by their own troops, even though there were no soldiers presently in sight.

  They started toward the river, Watson leading the way, with Thompson hanging on to the tail of his horse, when they saw something unusual. Up ahead was, Thompson maintained, the Crow scout Curley leading a bound and struggling Lakota woman by a rawhide rope.

  Making this already bizarre scene even more fantastic was the sudden appearance of none other than General George Armstrong Custer, all alone on his horse Vic. Custer rode upriver to the Crow scout, and the two began to converse. Soon after, Curley released the woman, who, after waving what Thompson thought was a knife in his and Watson’s direction, crossed the river and disappeared back into the village while Curley proceeded up the river toward Reno.

  —PETER THOMPSON’S WALKABOUT, June 25, 1876—

  Whether or not the heat, exhaustion, and intense fear had caused Thompson to hallucinate, he remained convinced that this dreamlike interlude was real. Yes, he insisted for the rest of his life, he’d seen Curley with a captured Lakota woman talking to Custer on the banks of the Little Bighorn. But is this as absurd as it at first might seem? As Theodore Roosevelt allowed, “odd things happen in a battle.”

  We know that a group of Arikara scouts killed six women and four children on the flats to the east of the Little Bighorn, not far from where Thompson saw the Indian scout and the Lakota woman. We also know that it was common practice among the warriors of the northern plains to take wives from rival tribes. Given Thompson’s tendency to confuse the identities of the people he saw during the battle, the possibility exists that the scout he saw was an Arikara, not a Crow, who’d decided to take a Lakota wife.

  There is also the possibility that Thompson was mistaken about Custer. The question is, whom did Thompson really see? Perhaps a light-haired and mustachioed soldier or scout from Reno’s battalion (Charley Reynolds looked quite Custer-like) rode downriver in an unsuccessful attempt to get a message to the other battalion and stumbled on the two privates from C Company. Then there is the possibility that Thompson really did see Custer alone on the banks of the Little Bighorn.

  The Cheyenne and Lakota reported that a portion of Custer’s battalion made it to the banks of the Little Bighorn at the mouth of a dry watercourse leading down from the bluffs called Medicine Tail Coulee. Since most of the warriors were either fighting Reno or retrieving their horses, there were only a handful of Lakota and Cheyenne on the west bank of the ford to oppose the troopers’ advance. And yet, after only scattering fire, the soldiers eventually retreated back up into the hills to rejoin their comrades on the bluff.

  As several historians have suggested, this was probably a feint—a diversionary tactic similar to the one Custer had used with such spectacular success at the Battle of the Washita. During that battle, he had marched boldly toward the enemy’s village with the band playing. This time, Captain George Yates and the two companies of the battalion’s Left Wing marched down Medicine Tail Coulee with, at least one warrior claimed, their bugles blaring. In both instances, Custer was attempting to attract the enemy’s attention.

  Many believe that Custer was trying to draw the Indians away from Reno even as the three companies of the battalion’s Right Wing, under the command of Captain Keogh, remained on the bluffs, waiting for the imminent arrival of Benteen. Custer’s brother Boston had joined the battalion soon after Trumpeter Martin’s departure and would have reported that Benteen was less than a half hour away. Given the immense size of the village, it only made sense to wait for reinforcements before initiating the attack.

  In the meantime, the feint down Medicine Tail Coulee would not only draw the enemy away from Reno; it might also provide Custer with the chance to perform some much-needed reconnaissance. As Yates and the Left Wing made a great show at the bank of the river, Custer would dash south on his fast and relatively fresh horse toward the scene of Reno’s engagement.

  It was a strange and outrageously risky thing for the commander of a cavalry regiment to do, but Custer had done this type of thing before. “Everyone was used to Custer’s unpredictable actions,” Thompson told his daughter Susan, “and thought nothing of it.” During the column’s approach to the Powder River, Custer and his brother Tom had impulsively left the regiment to scout out a trail across the badlands. Seven years before, while pursuing the Cheyenne in the months after the Battle of the Washita, Custer and Lieutenant Cooke had taken what others viewed as an unnecessary, even suicidal gamble by leaving the rest of the regiment behind and entering an Indian camp alone—a story Custer had taken great relish in describing in My Life on the Plains. Also recounted in that book was the event that helped introduce him to the West: his “rashly imprudent” decision to stray from the column and chase the giant buffalo.

  While pursuing his first buffalo, Custer had made an already precarious situation worse by accidentally shooting his horse in the head. Almost a decade later on the Little Bighorn he’d placed himself at a similar disadvantage by prematurely scattering his command into four distant fragments. If Peter Thompson is to be believed, Custer
was once again alone in the midst of excessive and exhilarating danger, attempting to extricate himself from a mess of his own devising. It was exactly where a deep and ungovernable part of him liked to be.

  According to Thompson, once Custer had finished communicating with the Indian scout, he turned his horse around and headed back downriver. As he passed Thompson and Watson, who were no doubt staring openmouthed at the man they took to be their commander, he “slightly checked his horse and waved his right hand twice for us to follow him.” Without uttering a word, he pointed downstream and, putting his spurs to his horse, disappeared around the bend of the Little Bighorn.

  In the years to come, as the controversy over Custer and the battle raged on, it became difficult even for those who had been present that day to separate their own memories from the confusing welter of conflicting accounts. One veteran, Private William Taylor, confessed to a retired army officer “that after hearing all the stories he doubts that he was there and only dreamed that he was there.” Thompson’s memories were like the memories of all battle veterans, infuriatingly confused and incomplete. Unlike just about every other Little Bighorn survivor, he had written many of those memories down back in 1876. He was more than a little odd and obstinate, but he always stuck to the same story—no matter how incredulous his audience.

  On the afternoon of June 25, Thompson insisted, he saw Custer—all by himself—riding along the banks of the Little Bighorn.

  It being a very hot day, [Thompson wrote,] [Custer] was in his shirt sleeves; his buckskin pants tucked into his boots; buckskin shirt fastened to the rear of his saddle and a broad brimmed cream colored hat on his head, the brim of which was turned up on the right side and fastened by a small hook and eye to its crown. This gave him the opportunity to sight his rifle while riding. His rifle lay horizontally in front of him; when riding he leaned slightly forward. . . . This was the appearance of Custer . . . just one half hour before the fight commenced between him and the Sioux.

  Whether or not Thompson imagined it or mistook someone else for his commander or really did see Custer, the image was encoded in his brain: Custer, leaning forward on his horse, frozen like the figures on the Grecian urn described by the poet Keats, in the still, airless atmosphere of eternity.

  By the time Thompson and Watson reached the mouth of Medicine Tail Coulee, Custer was long gone. They couldn’t tell if he’d recrossed the river or exited into the hills to the right, but they could see that both banks of the river were “wet with splashing made by the animals going to and from the village.” Still hopeful that the soldiers had established control of the almost empty village, they decided, once again, to cross the river.

  But first Watson agreed to ride out into the middle of the rushing stream to check the river’s depth. Ever since Thompson was ten years old, when he’d fallen off the immigrant ship that was carrying his family from Scotland to America, he’d been terrified of water. “Much over knee high in swift water was high enough for him all his life afterward,” his daughter Susan wrote. “Animals could swim across swift water, if necessary, but not Peter Thompson.”

  As Watson started on his horse, Thompson paused at the riverbank for a drink. Watson was in the midst of the Little Bighorn when Thompson realized that three Indians had appeared on the opposite bank, and he shouted out a warning.

  “What in thunder is the matter?” Watson asked.

  “If you don’t get off your horse at once,” Thompson replied, “you will get shot.”

  Watson obediently dove into the river as Thompson scrambled up the slippery red mud banks to higher ground, where he loaded his carbine and fired at the Indians. He began to reload for a second shot only to discover that, just as had happened to several of the troopers on Re-no’s skirmish line, the cartridge casing had jammed in the barrel. Finally, after extracting the spent shell with his thumbnail, he fired once again and succeeded in hitting one of the Indians.

  By that time Watson had made it back to the east side of the river, and the two troopers started down the bank on foot in search of Custer’s command. As they scurried to the north, they noticed that the village on the other side of the river had begun, in Thompson’s words, “to teem with life.” With the defeat of Reno, warriors had started to arrive in large numbers. “Ponies were dashing here and there with their riders urging them on,” he remembered; “the dust would rise and mingle with the smoke of the burning grass and brush.”

  A little ways up ahead, the river looped to the west, creating a small peninsula on the eastern bank where Thompson and Watson decided to hide themselves in a clump of red berry bushes. A driftwood log lay amid the brush and made, Thompson commented, “quite a comfortable seat for us.” It was very much like a duck blind against the clifflike bank of the river, and concealed behind the leaves and berries, they watched as warriors continued to return to the village from the south.

  Suddenly, around 4:25 p.m., a “heavy volley of rifle shots” erupted from the bluffs downriver. Thompson stood up and, using the barrel of his carbine to part the brush, “the stalks being covered with long sharp thorns,” took a look.

  Custer’s battalion had finally engaged the enemy.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Forsaken

  Somewhere to the south of Thompson and Watson’s lair, George Herendeen and a dozen or so soldiers were also doing their best to conceal themselves in the timber and brush. They, too, heard the beginning of Custer’s battle—what Herendeen remembered as two earthshaking volleys followed by the crackling pop of uncoordinated fire. More than two miles farther south, Captain Thomas McDougall, who was still marching north with the pack train, also heard volleys: “a dull sound,” he later remembered, “that resonated through the hills.” On the bluff occupied by Reno’s and Benteen’s battalions, which had just been reunited after Benteen’s “valley hunting” expedition to the south, the volleys were so distinct that Lieutenant Varnum shouted “Jesus Christ! What does that mean?” Even Lieutenant Godfrey, who, like Peter Thompson, was deaf in one ear, heard the volleys. But not Marcus Reno or Frederick Benteen.

  Soon after his arrival on what became known as Reno Hill, Benteen introduced one of his favorite topics: Major Joel Elliott and the Battle of the Washita. Once again, Benteen claimed, Custer had forsaken his second-in-command, and this time “the abandoned party” was Reno. Custer wasn’t beyond the bluffs, fighting for his life; he was on his way to the mouth of the Little Bighorn, where he planned to meet up with Terry and Gibbon. Yes, Benteen assured Reno, they were in the midst of “another ‘Major Elliott affair.’ ”

  This meant, of course, that the volleys to the north could not exist, and both Reno and Benteen later claimed to have never heard them. It was more difficult to ignore yet another indication that Custer had, in fact, engaged the enemy.

  When Benteen’s battalion first arrived, there were an estimated nine hundred warriors in the valley below them. And then something strange started to happen: The Indians left. As if pulled by an unseen current, the swirling mass of warriors began to flow north. In a matter of minutes, the bottom had been virtually evacuated.

  Instead of wondering whether this might indicate that a new battle was being fought on the other side of the bluffs, Reno had more immediate concerns. With the Indians gone, it was now safe to venture down to the river. He must go in search of his fallen adjutant, Lieutenant Benny Hodgson. Even though the Indians had been methodically torturing and killing the wounded for the last half hour or so, Reno held out hope that Hodgson was still alive. Leaving Captain Benteen in command of approximately three hundred men with absolutely nothing to do but wait for the approaching pack train, Reno started down the bluff with Dr. Porter and a platoon of soldiers.

  When Benteen first received Custer’s orders to “Come on,” he’d decided that he didn’t have time to wait for the ammunition packs. But now, even though fighting was obviously occurring to the north, he resolved to wait.

  Benteen might have told Reno that he had no choice bu
t to push on to Custer. Unlike Reno’s exhausted and frightened companies, his men were relatively fresh. While Reno remained here, licking his wounds and searching for Hodgson, Benteen might have taken at least a portion of his battalion north to see where all the warriors had gone. Instead, he and the rest of the officers sat on the bluff and talked about Custer.

  Myles Moylan had been weeping uncontrollably only a few minutes before. Now that the Indians had all left, he was in a more assertive mood. “Gentlemen,” he declared, “in my opinion General Custer has made the biggest mistake in his life, by not taking the whole regiment in at once in the first attack.”

  Instead of judging Custer, Captain Weir was still trying to figure out what his commander was up to. Moylan had served as Custer’s adjutant at the Washita. Weir asked him whether Custer had ever explained why he was issuing a particular order. No, Moylan insisted, “Custer never told me what he was going to do.”

  About this time, Private Edward Davern called Weir’s attention to a pillar of dust rising from the flats along the river to the north. “That must be General Custer fighting down in the bottom,” he said.

  “Yes, I believe it is,” Weir agreed.

  Weir went to his second-in-command, Lieutenant Edgerly. “[He] asked me,” Edgerly remembered, “if I would be willing to go to Custer if the rest of the command did not. I told him I would.”