An Obituary for Major Reno

by Richard S. Wheeler

  Reno sprang into action: build breastworks, see to the defenses, plug gaps, figure out a strategy. He patrolled the lines, looking for weaknesses. The digging in went slowly for the want of shovels, but in time a few shallow rifle pits were completed, the men never ceasing to protect themselves in any way they could, though some didn’t seem to care, or supposed Custer would soon rescue the command.

  Reno found slackers among the civilian packers, collared them and told them to drag anything, everything, out to the lines, slabs of bacon, chests, boxes, and above all, to put spare ammunition within easy reach of every company.

  “Get out there, get to work, or I’ll have your hide,” he growled.

  Then he called a staff meeting, and one by one the officers trailed in and sat close to him in the thickening darkness.

  “We need to reach Custer. It’s as dangerous as anything gets. Any volunteers?”

  No one volunteered.

  “I’ll talk to the scouts,” said Varnum.

  “We need to talk about our tactics tomorrow. We could pull out tonight, in the quietest, darkest time of night, head for the Powder. If we can’t hook up with Custer, we should look for Gibbon. That column is due here tomorrow.”

  “And leave the wounded?” Benteen asked.

  “We would have to if that’s what the choice is. We have no litters and no spare mounts.”

  “Never,” said Benteen.

  “Well, that’s my sentiment too,” Reno said quietly. “But it had to be considered. It comes down to this: we can get out under cover of darkness, or fight tomorrow. There’s going to be some Sioux watching us all night. They’re not all at that scalp dance. But we can slide past, I think.”

  “We don’t know where Custer is,” Wallace said.

  “He’s north of us and can’t get through,” Weir said. “I could see something of that fight. The whole village is between us and him.”

  “He might try to signal us. He knows where we are,” French said.

  “Tell the pickets to keep a lookout.”

  “They’ll come at us at first light, and we’d better be dug in because we’re going to be hit from all sides, and maybe rushed from all sides.” That was Moylan speaking. He had lost several men from his A Company, in its exposed position.

  “You’re exposed. You got a shovel?”

  “We’ve got one and we’re digging.”

  “I see no need for works,” Benteen said. “We’ll be out of here before my men get dug in.”

  The meeting came to very little. They were trapped and surrounded and bone dry and running out of time.

  Reno sent a trumpeter to the eminence at the north end of the perimeter, and told him to signal Custer. Maybe the quiet night air would carry that call over the fields and hills and bluffs to the other command. The trumpeter took up his call, the mournful brass-bound notes of “Tattoo” echoing over the hills. After that, the trumpeter played “Taps.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A LITTLE WHISKEY COMFORTED A MAN AND SUBDUED THE ACHES OF his body. Marcus Reno didn’t care who knew he nipped at a flask. His officers sipped, and sometimes shared a flask with him. It was one thing to sip; another to drink too much and impair his command. He had never crossed that line while on duty and never intended to.

  That June night was balmy, and he lay on a shelter half that was spread over grass on a protected slope. Men moved freely in the stygian deeps, safe from the searching rifles of the hostiles. One could not ask for much more, save for the want of water. No one had any, except that Dr. Porter kept back a pint for the desperately wounded.

  The distant throb of war drums and dancing rose darkly into the night, lancing the peace of every trooper and packer in the hilltop camp. Reno could hear men scraping rifle pits with cups and mess plates, or dragging cases of hardtack into place. Anything to turn a bullet.

  Benteen commanded the companies facing east and south; Reno the companies facing west, over the river bluffs, and north. Both men had restlessly walked their lines, tightening them, seeing to discipline. Reno had dressed down some packers who were malingering, and ended up kicking one’s hindquarters.

  The first sergeants had completed a list of casualties and missing, and Reno knew there were big holes now in every company. Some of the dead had been dragged away from the lines, out of sight as much as possible. There were many more bodies below, near the river. Lieutenant DeRudio was missing and presumed dead, left below somewhere.

  Now Reno sat on his shelter half, eyeing the bright stars in clear heavens; it would not rain. Benteen settled beside him in the grass.

  Reno pulled his flask and handed it to Benteen. There was little whiskey left.

  “Keep it,” Benteen said.

  “Where is he? You have any idea?”

  “He got mauled pretty badly up there and skedaddled. He probably did try to reach us, but there’s too damned many Indians. He probably thinks we’re all right. Could be clear up the Bighorn linking up with Gibbon’s column.”

  “What’ll happen tomorrow?”

  Benteen didn’t reply for so long that Reno wondered whether he would. Then, “Custer’s gone. He’s quit us. That means the whole village can work on us. It’ll be pretty hot for us.”

  “Water?”

  “We can hold a while. A massed charge by a thousand or more hostiles is what worries me.”

  “You think Custer’s circling around to come for us from the south?” Reno asked.

  “We’d know it. We’d see Indian movements to counter him. Maybe even a bonfire, a signal. What we saw all evening until full dark was more and more warriors right here.”

  Danger had drawn them together, these two officers who had barely been on speaking terms. Reno felt comfortable with Benteen, even though he didn’t much care for Benteen’s intrigues and politics and harsh judgments. He was a first-rate man in the field, and had won the loyalty of every man under him.

  “He’s probably writing Libbie,” Benteen added.

  Reno laughed.

  “We need to think about tomorrow,” the captain said, drawing Reno back to some planning.

  “I have no plan. Either we hold out long enough for Custer or Gibbon to reach us, or we don’t. Get some sleep. You’ll need it.” He watched Benteen clamber to his feet. “Frederick, you fought like a lion today,” Reno said. “Thank you.”

  “Tell it to Terry,” Benteen said. “Good night, major.”

  He vanished into the night. Reno pulled out his flask and sucked it dry. There wasn’t another drop of spirits in the whole command.

  Far away, the drumming continued, the scalp dance shooting fear into the night like embers. But Reno thought he heard wailing too; plenty of red men had died this day.

  He lay back, his eyes upon bright stars, but his mind was clouded with doubts. If he could relive this day, would he have done anything different ? He visited the crucial moments, the key decisions. He felt worst about the failed attack. Should he have kept on, riding hard into that village, his men armed only with revolvers because carbines were almost useless at short range?

  To think it was to know the answer: that was suicide. Had he failed Custer? No, Custer had failed him, failed to find him and help him, as the man had promised. The other bad moment was the flight to the hilltop, which ended up a rout. But could he have prevented it? The company commanders had not been able to slow down the men, organize a rear guard, keep the swarming warriors—who very nearly reached the column as it fought the riverbank—from killing troopers at will.

  Could something he had ordered or done saved Ben Hodgson? Reno could not think of a single thing that any commander could have done differently.

  Could he have reached Custer from the hilltop? Not until ammunition was available; it would have been madness to gallop into another fight with only a few rounds per man.

  Had anyone failed him?

  His mind turned again to Benteen, who had arrived an hour too late. But Reno put that out of his head. Custer had sent th
e man out on a wild goose chase.

  Tom Weir? The captain had taken off on his own and came close to being shot to bits, along with his company.

  Reno dozed lightly until around two, when something stirred. He hastened to south, along the bluff, and found a dozen troopers crawling up the slope, shouting their presence so they wouldn’t get shot.

  They were led by a first sergeant.

  “Sergeant, please report,” Reno said, yawning.

  “We hid in deep brush, sir. Indians everywhere. If we’d been found, we wouldn’t have lasted but a few moments.”

  “Any wounded behind?”

  “The wounded are not alive, sir. All killed, stripped, and … violated. You would not want to see it.”

  “Lieutenant Hodgson?”

  “You would not want to see him, sir.”

  “What about Lieutenant DeRudio? He’s missing.”

  “We know nothing of him, sir.”

  “You bring any water?”

  “No, sir. We have no canteens.”

  Thirteen men safe. Reno sighed. The men were fed hardtack, supplied with ammunition, and directed to their companies. They had no water but most had drunk heartily at the river before ascending.

  Back from the dead. The news was whispered from company to company, and men rejoiced.

  By two thirty the northeastern horizon was turning blue.

  Slowly the heavens lightened, turned murky gray, while the veils of darkness drew apart and distant horizons came into view.

  Then the Sioux and Cheyenne started in. A shot from very close, and then a scatter of shots, and then the ping and snap and thump of bullets everywhere, long before full light. A man would take his life in his hands walking from one company’s line to another. But both Reno and Benteen were up, patrolling the lines even as the northeastern sky bloomed into color.

  Almost at once, Benteen’s Company H, defending the southernmost ridge, took casualties because its commander had scorned breastworks. Swiftly, its men dragged whatever lay at hand into shelter, and set to work with the shovels, but while they worked, men died, tumbling silently to the ground, or screaming, or sobbing into death.

  Reno wished that Benteen, an excellent soldier, hadn’t been full of bravado the night before. Benteen’s men were paying for it now, and within a short period, the company was decimated.

  It boded trouble.

  The first sergeants kept the men down and heads low.

  “Don’t reply. You’ll be shot. Let them waste their rounds,” they advised.

  Another man’s rifle had jammed; the extractor had pulled off the head of the copper cartridge leaving a tube stuck in the chamber. The cursing trooper tried to claw it out with a knife.

  “Find another carbine for the man,” Reno ordered, not sure there were any.

  The sharpshooters on the higher ridges to the east commanded the whole hilltop, but at a thousand yards. They were good at it, too. When their rifles barked, men died. One ridge to the northeast was the source of murderous fire as the warriors lying in the grass picked off men, one by one by one as the June sun burned away from the horizon and threw an eerie orange glow over the hilltop.

  Now and then groups of Sioux or Cheyenne rushed the line, only to be driven back by disciplined volleys. But usually one or another soldier was hit, and Dr. Porter had another injury to treat in his perilous hollow.

  Reno studied the horizons looking for Custer, looking for guidons, listening for bugles, wanting to see the blue column riding by fours, wanting to see the Stars and Stripes, fringed with gold, wanting to see a general’s pennant flapping in the bright breeze.

  His men had no more moisture in their body to sweat. Porter told him that unless the wounded got water right away, they would die.

  And still Major Reno waited through the hot fierce morning of June twenty-sixth.

  But he heard no bugles. And no blue-bloused army appeared, not even in mirages riding in ghostly procession across the white sky, as the heat built and men grew desperate for cool, cool water.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE WORD FROM DR. PORTER WAS UNAMBIGUOUS: WATER, NOW, OR the wounded will die fast.

  The rest of the command was suffering grievously in the hot June sun.

  Reno studied that seductive river at the foot of the bluffs, where abundant cool water flowed steadily toward the Bighorn. “We need water right now,” he said to Benteen. “See about volunteers.”

  The captain stared. “That bluff’s crawling with Indians. I don’t know if we’ll get any volunteers.”

  “See about it!”

  Benteen ducked and dodged his way south, toward his own company, spreading the request as he went.

  Amazingly, there were volunteers, enough to sally down the closest gulch to water, fill whatever came to hand, and maybe return alive—some of them.

  Empty canteens and kettles were swiftly handed down the lines to the spot overlooking the gulch where the volunteers were collecting. Reno admired those men. They would race into the maw of a hundred rifles, collect what water they could, and race back again.

  The whole command watched. Their hopes lay with fourteen volunteers and four others who had agreed to stand up, draw fire, and return fire while the water party slid and careened down those arid, hot slopes.

  Reno thrust his tongue around his own cottony, dry mouth, so dry he could not even make spit. Men had tried everything, even sucking at the pulpy insides of prickly pear cactus, but nothing helped.

  Benteen raised and lowered an arm. Four riflemen from H Company jumped to their feet. Indian fire crackled; the foursome returned fire wherever they saw puffs of smoke. The volunteers, pails and buckets and canteens rattling loudly in the morning heat, leapt into the gulch, skidded, and slid downward.

  The hostiles understood and began sniping at the water party; bullets snapped close, then one was wounded and another. The water party wasted no time fighting back, but careened downward, almost faster than the hostiles could shoot, reached the river, scooped water into the kettles, plunged canteens under, and struggled slowly uphill carrying water, their bodies undefended.

  One slumped, fell, died, spilling his cooking kettle. Another, saddler Michael Madden, caught a bullet at the ankle and fell. The rest grabbed him and pulled him along, even as the Sioux made it hot. The standing sharpshooters rained bullets against the hostiles, evening the score a little.

  The volunteers returned with water, and a cheer erupted along those thin, blue lines. The first canteen went to Dr. Porter, there in the hollow with his suffering wounded.

  The top sergeants took over, passing canteens along the lines and growling when anyone took a second swallow. Men took one and passed the precious water along. There wasn’t much of it, not for over three hundred men, and nothing for horses and mules. But there was enough to stave off madness.

  Porter looked to the wounded volunteers. Six had been hit, none gravely save for Madden. One had died down below. They were all heroes, along with the riflemen who had drawn fire away from the water party.

  Reno dodged his way to them.

  “You’re brave men. The entire command thanks you. You’ll be remembered,” he said. “You are heroes and every man in the command will never forget.”

  Then he took his own drink, wanting badly to swallow many more times. He knew now they could get to the river; not cheaply, not without loss, but unless the hostiles congregated there, they could get water. The Sioux and Cheyenne preferred to fight from the eastern grasslands where they could command barren ridges from which they could shoot down upon the soldiers.

  All that hot, weary, ominous morning the rifle fire continued, and many of those shots the troops recognized as the familiar deep-throated bang of the Springfield carbine. Whatever had happened to Custer’s command, it had left weapons and ammunition behind.

  The toll continued to mount; Dr. Porter had a procession of new casualties to treat. And he faced a daunting task: Madden’s shattered ankle would go to gangrene
in that stinking hot hollow unless his leg below the knee was amputated at once, right there, without so much as a fire with which to cauterize the wound.

  Porter administered some medical brandy to dull the pain and set to work. Madden took the surgery quietly, and won himself another slug of brandy from the surgeon when it was over. The news spread through the command, and men cheered.

  Then, midmorning, the steady fire from the warriors slackened noticeably, and Reno sensed change in the air, though he did not for a moment suppose the assault was ended. Some of the Indians were observed retreating from the ridges, heading toward the huge village. Indeed, things were stirring in the village, though no one on the hilltop could say what was transpiring.

  Not that much had changed. If fewer bullets were coming, that did not mean that sharpshooters had abandoned the ridges. There were hostiles out there trying to pick off the whole command. Reno himself, walking briskly through the command, felt the whisper of a bullet, and ducked.

  “Damned if I want to be killed … I’ve been through too many fights,” he told Lieutenant Godfrey.

  But something was happening down at that village, and Reno didn’t know what. Lieutenant Varnum approached the major with an idea: maybe it was time to send out some scouts with a dispatch, assuming he could find some who’d go and try to locate Custer.

  “Good. Do it.”

  “Write what you want to write, sir, and make four copies.”

  Reno did, at once, addressing them to General Terry. He described his whereabouts and condition and casualties and the fact that he had lost contact with Custer. Varnum talked two Rees and two Crows into making the effort, but they didn’t go far beyond the defenses before returning. The country was still thick with Sioux.