A Terrible Glory

by James Donovan

  With Yates’s two companies, his regimental staff, and the others — his brothers Tom and Boston, his nephew Autie, correspondent Kellogg on his mule, the ailing Dr. Lord, and Mitch Boyer — behind him, Custer led the wing northwest along the half-mile-long ridge. Covered with sagebrush and grass, the surface was not steep, and a horse could gallop over any part of it.21

  The superior view revealed the daunting size of their task. On the other side of the river were thousands of Indians — probably women, children, and older men — streaming into the hills and ravines south and west of the village. Custer had corralled only fifty-three of them on the Washita; the job at hand would require more than two depleted and tired companies missing several officers and Sergeants.

  When Custer and the eighty-odd men behind him reached the far end of the ridge, they continued down into a swale and then turned left toward the Little Bighorn.22 Behind them a group of Indians rode to the crest line they had just left and fired down at them as they galloped away.23

  A few minutes later, the wing reached the river — what looked like a good crossing — and ran into strong resistance.24 The brush on the west side of the water was thick with warriors, and they fired arrows and bullets into the soldiers. Custer halted the command and traded fire while he assessed the enemy’s strength. He realized quickly that there were too many hostiles and that he needed reinforcements, and soon. He turned and led his men back toward the high ridge. More than halfway there, on a flat rise a few hundred yards short of it, he ordered a halt. They would wait there for Keogh and Benteen before proceeding. Meanwhile, Dr. Lord, though weak himself, could attend to the casualties. Kellogg was nowhere in sight — when last seen, he had been down by the river, desperately spurring his mule to keep up with the large army mounts.25

  The General raised his field glasses, looked upstream, and saw nothing but thick clouds of dust. Keogh was out of sight a mile to the southeast, somewhere below the long ridge. The constant roar of gunfire from that direction could only be his three companies.

  Whether he realized it or not, Custer had now surrendered the offensive to the enemy. The Indians, not the white men, would decide the course of this battle.

  AT THE FAR end of the ridge, Myles Keogh had deployed his forces around the base of the hill. Keogh divided his strongest company, Jimmi Calhoun’s forty-four-man L Troop, into two platoons and ordered them along the crest of a spur running off the ridge. As the officers and Sergeants yelled orders and the horse holders in each set of four gathered their mounts and moved to the rear, about eighteen troopers in each platoon moved down the slope, extending the skirmish line about a hundred yards. The company’s two officers stood in the rear to direct fire. Calhoun, who had fought as an enlisted man during the Civil War, stood behind one line. His second in command, young John Crittenden, scion of a long line of military men but a West Point reject and an infantry officer for only a few months, stood thirty feet away behind the other. Keogh placed C Company, with the most inexperienced men, behind Calhoun. He pulled his own I Company back in reserve, in a swale below the eastern side of the crest line.

  Even before he had finished his deployment, the Indian fire had increased. Most used bows and arrows, but plenty of the hostiles carried rifles. From the sound of the reports, they seemed to be of every sort: old muskets, some army Springfields and other breechloaders, and quite a few magazine guns, probably Winchesters, Henrys, and Spencers, though the repeaters were not very accurate outside a couple of hundred yards. Few of the Indians approached within that range, but over the next half hour, they surrounded the position, using gullies, bushes, and the occasional rock to close in on the soldiers on their flanks and in their front.

  When a group of mounted warriors emerged from a large coulee and made a charge toward the command, several volleys drove them back, but more intimate action was needed to clear the ravines of Indians encroaching from the Little Bighorn. Keogh ordered the only officer present with the company, Second Lieutenant Henry Harrington, to lead a skirmish line of C troopers down along a ridge toward the river, just past Calhoun’s L Company. Anchoring the line were three Sergeants: First Sergeant Edwin Bobo, a veteran of the Washita; Jeremiah Finley, an Irishman who had served in the Civil War and another Washita veteran; and George Finckle, a tall German who had once been a Captain in the Prussian army.26

  The tactic was effective, but not for long. As Harrington’s group advanced, the Indians retreated to safer positions, but they soon reemerged in overwhelming numbers and surrounded the line. Every available rifle was needed, so each trooper held his own reins with one hand. As arrows rained down into their position, the injured horses bucked and kicked, making it increasingly difficult to shoot with any accuracy or to reload. Some of the thirsty horses broke free and made for the river. Soon the men began to drop. Finley and Finckle remained on the line and fell fifty yards from each other; half of their company died with them. As Indians began to overrun the position, some troopers turned and galloped north to Calhoun’s company and beyond. Harrington and Bobo retreated with them.

  But Calhoun’s position had also been taking casualties. Indians waving blankets and screaming got close enough to stampede the soldiers’ horses. From a ridge a few hundred yards to the east, several Indians with repeaters fired into L Company, aiming for the small clouds of gray smoke belching from the soldiers’ Springfields.

  AS HUNDREDS MORE warriors arriving from the valley forded the river and made their way up the ravines and over the hills east of the Cheyenne camp, Crazy Horse galloped downstream. He had made a brief stop at his lodge to make his medicine strong and do the same for about ten of the younger men who had vowed to follow him anywhere in battle.27 Some of his Oglalas had become impatient at his lengthy prayers to Wakantanka, but now these and other warriors followed him with bold assurance. At a point about a mile north of the Cheyenne circle, they splashed across the river and up a deep, wide ravine.28 Almost half a mile east, where the coulee forked, they turned right. When it narrowed a quarter mile farther, they dismounted and walked their ponies. Crazy Horse stopped and gave his horse to his cousin Flying Hawk to hold. Then he crawled up out of the gully. When he reached the top, he could see a line of soldiers just south of him. He aimed his Winchester and shot at them as fast as he could.29

  Other warriors carefully crawled from one ravine to another, hiding behind bushes and hills as they approached the soldier lines. Gradually, they made their way closer. Most of them had no guns, but from the protection of the gullies, they arced thousands of arrows into the bluecoats. As they got within range, more and more found their marks, and soldiers fell as frightened horses reared and kicked, many of them breaking loose and galloping away toward the river.

  The Hunkpapa Crow King, a celebrated fighter and the leader of a band that included eighty warriors, was known for a temper so fierce that he had once killed another Lakota in a fit of rage.30 He had ridden up the coulee behind the Cheyennes and worked his way north toward the wasichus. Two of his brothers had died in the fight upstream, and Crow King wanted revenge. Now he and his men readied their ponies for a charge.

  Though they were not without fear, they knew their medicine was good that day. After all, they had defeated the soldiers to the south, and only a few brave warriors had just turned back a much larger force at the river. Now there were many more fighting men. How could the wasichus withstand them?

  To bolster their courage, each man whipped another’s horse as they charged upon the bluecoats, whooping and blowing their eagle-bone whistles. Low Dog, a fearless Oglala warrior and leader of his own band, yelled to the men around him, “This is a good day to die — follow me!” and rushed forward.31

  Lame White Man had also made his way close to the soldiers. When forty of the bluecoats charged down the ridge and dismounted, he had retreated with the others. But they soon began moving forward again, and the endless stream of arrows and bullets took its toll as the soldiers started falling. Now, to the warriors gathered
around him, Cheyenne and Lakota, Lame White Man said, “Come. We can kill all of them,” and he led a charge against what remained of the bluecoats on the hill.32

  From the east, the west, and the south, the Indians converged on the soldiers and overwhelmed them, shooting and clubbing the few who remained. Then they stormed through the next group of bluecoats to the north, who had made a good stand for a long while. Many coups were counted in the close fighting. A violent roar filled the air: horses screaming, hooves pounding, warriors and soldiers yelling, skulls and bones breaking, flesh tearing, and over it all the deafening roar of close-quarters rifle and pistol fire. The two officers at the rear of the soldier lines bravely stood their ground and died facing the onslaught.

  One soldier, a balding, heavyset man with side-whiskers and yellow stripes on his arms, took off southwest toward the river. Several warriors galloped after him. He was almost to the wide coulee a mile away when a bullet dropped his mount and threw the soldier to the ground. He knelt near his horse and began firing his rifle at his pursuers, hitting several of them. He kept the warriors at bay for a while, but several surrounded him and crept closer until one shot him from behind.33

  KEOGH HAD NO choice but to eke one last ounce of strength out of Comanche. The tough little horse already bore several wounds but responded gamely as Keogh whirled him around once again to rally the men running madly up the ridge — the remnants of C and L spreading confusion and panic among his own I Troop. Everything was falling apart. The best he could hope to do now was to get the men north to consolidate with Custer on the far end of the ridge.

  A bullet smashed into Keogh’s left knee — the knee that had been giving him trouble for years. The round went clear through his leg into Comanche’s body. Both went down.34

  With that, any hope of an orderly withdrawal was gone. His two Sergeants, Varden and Bustard, came off the line to help him. His trumpeter stayed with him, too, relaying orders that amid the chaos went unobeyed. The bulk of I Troop was still clustered around its Captain when the wave of Indians swept over them all.

  WHITE BULL had worked his way around the soldiers to the east. Most of the fighting there was still at a distance. Several Lakotas with magazine rifles lay behind a ridge a couple of hundred yards away and poured a steady fire into a group of about sixty bluecoats north of the others, making their way along the east side of the long ridge.35 White Bull joined them and put his seventeen-shot Winchester to good use. But he soon grew impatient; there were no opportunities for coups in this kind of fight, and therefore no glory won. With perfect timing, Crazy Horse, who had just skirted the soldiers’ position, challenged White Bull to a bravery run to cut off the large group of bluecoats before they all turned and galloped north.

  White Bull cried, “Only heaven and earth last long!” and the two warriors whipped their horses forward, across the hills and up the east side of the ridge, through a gap between the soldier groups. They leaned down over the necks of their ponies, and bullets whizzed by them as they crested the grassy ridge and rode over it, then turned around and galloped back.36

  Having done it once, they decided to do it again. As they did so, others followed them, and the army horses stampeded and ran for the river. The bluecoats fired at the horsemen, and when they stopped to reload, the rest of the warriors, mounted and afoot, charged in among them, fighting hand to hand. The soldiers threw down their rifles and used their pistols against the warriors’ tomahawks and clubs. Many coups were counted during that charge as the Indians pulled men off horses and ran down others on foot.37 An officer rallying his troops near the rear of the column was shot off his claybank horse, and several soldiers with yellow stripes on their sleeves futilely surrounded him before hundreds of warriors overwhelmed the whites, killing them all.38

  Scores of exulting Lakotas and Cheyennes joined in from the south. Warriors stopped to grab rifles, pistols, and ammunition from the dead and their horses. Then it was another buffalo stampede as they chased the line of soldiers fleeing northwest along the ridge. Some of the mounted wasichus escaped their pursuers, but most of them were brought down before getting too far, shot or chopped or bludgeoned.

  One officer on a powerful horse galloped through the dark clouds of dust and gray gunpowder and headed west over hills and down ridges for a mile or more. Several warriors on ponies chased him, but eventually they gave up one by one. The last man had just reined in his horse and was about to turn around when he saw the soldier shoot himself in the head with his pistol and pitch from his mount. The warrior rode up and counted coup on the dead soldier, then stripped him of ammunition and valuables, took his horse, and returned to the battle.39

  EVEN WITH DERUDIO’S excellent field glasses, Custer still could not tell how things were going at the far end of the high ridge. Keogh had apparently placed his troops on the spurs below the southern end, but only a haze of gunsmoke and dust and the steady crackle of gunfire indicated action. It was clear that Benteen had not arrived, since the General could see no cavalry movement toward him.40

  Things were heating up around Custer, too. As yet there were only a few Indians closer than a couple of hundred yards — just out of range of arrows and of all but the most accurate marksmen, which excluded most every Indian as well as most troopers. But slowly, inexorably, hundreds of warriors were surrounding the position on all sides. Below the wide ridge to the south, scores could be seen running up the large ravines that snaked from the river and moving over the hills. To the north and east, several groups had begun sniping from a distance. Others approached from the crossing to the west. Action was necessary.

  A large ravine a couple of hundred yards to the south seemed to be the main avenue of infiltration. Custer ordered Algernon Smith to take E Company and move down toward it to form a skirmish line along the coulee and drive the hostiles back.

  As Smith and his troopers moved down into the basin below and extended a line almost halfway to the river,41 Custer led the regimental staff and F Company up to the high ground at the end of the hogback ridge. The Indians at its crest quickly mounted and galloped down the far slope to a hill two hundred yards farther east. There they took up prone positions and resumed firing their rifles at the soldiers.42

  In the green buffalo grass near the top of the ridge, on its western slope, Custer deployed his men. The position was vulnerable, with little or no cover, but it was the high ground. He ordered almost all the horses shot in a rough semicircle facing the warriors attacking from the west and southwest — primitive breastworks and, given a cavalryman’s dependence on his mount, a stark declaration of the seriousness of the situation. On the summit, four or five more animals were felled. There, on a narrow flat area, Custer set up his command position. Around him were his brothers, his nephew, and his regimental staff. Sergeant Robert Hughes planted Custer’s personal guidon, its red and blue swallowtails fluttering in the sporadic breeze.

  The men on the side of the hill and on its crest threw themselves down behind the dead horses and resumed firing. They were now fighting for their lives, and they knew it.

  The troopers of the Gray Horse Company dismounted at skirmish intervals. Holding their reins, they fired into the Indians in and around the ravine. Their fire forced the warriors to retreat — for a while. Then a group of about twenty young Indians galloped boldly down into them from the ridges to the northwest and shattered the line, killing several where they stood and stampeding their horses. Some of the soldiers managed to drop a few of the Indians, but more warriors rushed toward them. Many of the troopers ran or jumped or even galloped down into the deep ravine they had just cleared out and made for the river. At a point where the gully deepened to twenty feet with steep sides, men and horses bunched up. Indians ran to the edges and shot down at them; one or two eager warriors fell in and were killed also. Soon the bottom was a mass of dead men and horses. One Private was just a stone’s throw from the river when he was overtaken and killed.43

  Only a few of the exhausted cavalryme
n managed to stagger up the slope to safety,44 Algernon Smith among them. He settled in near his commanding officer. No report was necessary. There was no further strategy to discuss. They could only try to expend their cartridges judiciously — a difficult proposition when sitting on an open hill surrounded by more than a thousand hostile Indians — and hope they could withstand the enemy until Benteen and Keogh arrived.

  THE FIRING FROM the north had almost stopped completely. Weir asked Edgerly if he would be willing to ride in that direction with their troop even if the other companies would not go. Edgerly assented. So did their First Sergeant.

  Weir walked over to where Benteen and Reno were. He and Reno detested each other. At Fort Lincoln, before Custer had returned from the East, Reno had preferred charges against Weir for insubordination, though General Terry had refused to pursue the matter. Now Weir’s request for permission to ride quickly devolved into angry words, arm waving, and gesticulating.45 In a few minutes, he came back and without a word mounted his horse and with an orderly rode off in the direction of the firing. Edgerly assumed Weir had received permission; he mounted his troopers and set out after the Captain.

  Weir rode northeast along the crest of the bluffs, with his men following in a shallow ravine to the right. They made for the highest point in the area, a trio of peaks a mile away, the two on the right connected by a sugarloaf ridge. Almost an hour had passed since Reno’s command had reached the hill.

  CUSTER’S HOPE OF relief from Benteen and Keogh was soon quashed. Along the ridge from Keogh’s position came several troopers, most of them C Company men on sorrels and a few afoot, gasping their way toward the General, a horde of Indians behind them. A volley of covering fire drove back the warriors. As the last of the troopers reached safety, their mounts were shot, their carcasses forming a small redoubt facing south down the ridgetop. About fifty men now occupied the position.