The Real Custer

by James S Robbins

  Terry’s force arrived at the mouth of the Rosebud on June 21, meeting Gibbon with a battalion of troops, the rest encamped upstream. The two commanders and Custer held a meeting aboard the steamer Far West to plan their next steps. They came up with a plan for a two-pronged operation. Custer would leave June 22 and take the 7th Cavalry south up to the headwaters of the Rosebud, turn west to the upper reaches of the Little Bighorn valley, and move north downstream. Gibbon and Terry would meanwhile move to the mouth of the Bighorn and head upriver to the Little Bighorn. The idea was to catch the Indians in a pincer movement, assuming that the enemy was where they thought they were and that the timing worked. Terry wrote Sheridan that he hoped at least “one of the two columns will find the Indians.”25 Trooper McBlain believed “the plan would have worked admirably had both its parts been conducted as the commander had a right to expect they would be.”

  Custer was the wild card. Terry had wanted him to come on the expedition because of his knowledge of the area, his experience fighting Indians, and his tactical intuition. But Custer on the hunt was hard to restrain, and Terry complicated things by giving him a written order that allowed ample room for interpretation. “It is of course impossible to give you definite instructions as to your movements,” Terry wrote. “Even were it otherwise, the Officer in Command has too much confidence in your zeal, energy and skill to give you directions which might hamper your freedom of action when you have got into touch with the enemy.” He then gave Custer very definite instructions on his expected movements, but the damage was done. George assumed that Terry would let Custer be Custer.

  Later that evening General Terry went back to Custer’s tent to reinforce his intention that he should use his discretion if he encountered the Indians.

  “Custer, I do not know what to say for the last,” Terry said.

  “Say what you want to say,” George replied.

  “Use your own judgment, and do what you think best if you strike the trail,” Terry said. “And whatever you do, Custer, hold on to your wounded.”26

  Afterward, Custer emerged from his tent and saw Lieutenant Cooke and Lieutenant Edgerly sitting on a log smoking. “General, won’t we step high if we do get those fellows!” Edgerly said.

  “Won’t we!” George replied. But he said it depended on the junior officers. “We are going to have a hard ride, for I intend to catch those Indians even if we have to follow them to their agencies.”27

  Boston Custer wrote to his mother that he was “feeling first-rate” and they would set off the next day. He said Armstrong was going “with the full hope and belief of overhauling [the Indians]—which I think he probably will, with a little hard riding. They will be much entertained.”28 He hoped to bring back one or two Indian ponies “with a buffalo robe for Nev.”

  Back at Fort Lincoln on the morning of the twenty-second, Libbie wrote, “My own darling—I dreamed of you as I knew I should. . . . Oh Autie how I feel about your going away so long without our hearing. . . . Your safety is ever in my mind. My thoughts, my dreams, my prayers, are all for you. God bless and keep my darling.”29

  That same morning, George wrote to Libbie about the freedom of action he believed Terry had given him on his “scout,” quoting only the relevant portion of the order. “Do not be anxious about me,” he wrote. “You would be surprised how closely I obey your instructions about keeping with the column. I hope to have a good report to send you by the next mail.” He signed off, “Your devoted boy Autie.”30

  At noon the 7th Cavalry passed in review before Terry, Gibbon, and Custer as it made its way out of camp, heading for the Rosebud. The Indian scouts rode after, singing the traditional death songs that preceded a battle. They did so at George’s request; as scout Red Star noted approvingly, “Custer had a heart like an Indian.”31

  Custer left to join his command. “God bless you!” Terry shouted after him.

  “Now Custer, don’t be greedy!” Gibbon added. “Wait for us!”

  “No,” George replied. “I won’t.”32

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  A RIDGE TOO FAR

  Accounts of conflicts have been questioned since Cain slew Abel, but few battles have been as minutely analyzed as the Battle of the Little Bighorn. “The incidents of a battle are so numerous and changing,” Custer once wrote, “that the entire field may be regarded as an immense series of animated kaleidoscopes, the number of which is only limited by the number of observers, no two of the latter obtaining exactly the same view, and no individual probably obtaining the same view twice.” He noted that “marked and sometimes apparently irreconcilable discrepancies occur in the recorded testimony of those who were prominent actors in the same event.”1

  The Battle of Little Bighorn especially is a topic that raises passionate arguments—and no clear answers. It has inspired more people to spend more time getting into more arguments over more facets than almost any battle in American history, save maybe Gettysburg, where Custer also fought. While the final truth of Little Bighorn remains elusive, the fact that people keep trying to uncover it, or become ardently convinced that they have, says more about Custer and his story than anything regarding the battle itself.

  The force Custer led up the Rosebud included 31 officers, 566 men, 40-odd scouts, and around a dozen others. He left the available Gatling guns behind, in the interests of mobility, and refused the services of four companies of Gibbon’s cavalry. Custer “thought his regiment strong enough to cope with any body of hostiles that might be out,” Lieutenant McBlain said.2 Terry also made him leave behind his brass band.

  Custer set the pace hard from the start, seeking to overtake Sitting Bull’s village as he had Stone Forehead’s Cheyenne in 1869. On the second day, they came across some Sioux burial platforms that the scouts threw down, spilling corpses wrapped in buffalo skins. More important, they found the site of a major village. The encampment was huge; Lieutenant Edward S. Godfrey said that “one would naturally suppose these were the successive camping-places of the same village, when, in fact, they were the continuous camps of several bands.” At the center was a thirty-five-foot pole, around which were piled buffalo heads, evidence of a ceremonial sun dance. In the remains of a sweat lodge, the soldiers found pictures traced in sand that looked like a battle. Here Sitting Bull, in an induced trance, had seen soldiers falling upside down into the Sioux camp, later interpreted as a premonition of the approaching battle.

  They picked up a trail beyond the village, which continued upriver, and followed it into the late afternoon, to a point where it turned west up Davis Creek. The troops camped while scouts followed the trail into the hills. White Man Runs Him, Goes Ahead, and Hairy Moccasin reported back that the trail led over the Wolf Mountains to the Little Bighorn valley, where they assumed was a village.

  Custer was at a critical decision point. He knew that Terry had expected him to go further up the Rosebud before crossing over to the Little Bighorn. But he was faced with a fresh trail, and closely tracking the foe was critical in Indian warfare. If he continued south, the village might have moved on by the time he came back down the other valley, and the trail might have gone cold.

  George was troubled. Godfrey observed that Custer was subdued on the march, not his usual energetic self. “There was an indefinable something that was not Custer,” he recalled.3 After several hours’ rest, Custer ordered the regiment to keep up the pursuit. At midnight they began the ascent into the hills. They rode six more miles that night and made camp at two in the morning.

  On July 25 the scouts set out before sunrise, heading for a promontory on the high ground between the valleys known as the Crow’s Nest. “The scouts came in and reported a large village in our front—the General was highly pleased to hear it,” trooper Pat Coleman noted in his diary.4 Coleman said this was the critical period; the old Custer had reemerged. “From the hour we left the Rosebud . . . his old-time restless energy had returned, and he seemed to think of nothing but to reach and strike the Indians.” The
pursuit was on in earnest. Custer’s blood was up. “Every man [felt] that the next twenty-four hours would deside [sic] the fate of a good manney [sic] men and sure enough it did.”5

  Custer ordered the regiment to move forward cautiously, concealing the movement, while he rushed ahead to the Crow’s Nest to have a look for himself. The village was fifteen miles distant but detectable from smoke rising from the valley and the sizeable pony herd that looked like “worms crawling in the grass.”

  “We scouts thought there were too many Indians for Custer to fight,” White Man Runs Him recalled. “There were camps and camps and camps. . . . I would say there were between four thousand and five thousand warriors, maybe more, I do not know. It was the biggest Indian camp I have ever seen.” Another scout mentioned that there were probably more braves than they could handle in two or three days. “One day, perhaps,” George replied. The joke was lost on Bloody Knife, who signed to Custer, “You and I are both going home today by a road we do not know.”

  By 10:30 the regiment had moved up, concealed in a ravine. Custer’s plan at that point was to attack early in the morning of July 26, using the rolling terrain along the route to mask his movements, and then spring on the village at dawn. He hoped that by then Terry’s column would be moving in from the north, and the village would be trapped. Godfrey said on the twenty-fifth Custer wanted “ample time for the country to be studied, to locate the village, and to make plans for the attack on the 26th.”6

  But the attack plan hinged on their ability to take the Indians by surprise, and Custer soon received reports his troops had been spotted. On the night of June 24, a load of hard tack fell off a pack mule, and the next morning Sergeant William A. Curtis was sent with a team to find it. They came across some Indians breaking open the boxes, who rode off as the soldiers approached. The Indians later watched from high ground as they left. Some scouts reported other Indian sightings close to the camp.

  Custer believed he had lost the element of surprise. He called his officers and said they would attack that day. As Godfrey wrote, “Our discovery made it imperative to act at once, as delay would allow the village to scatter and escape.”7 As the column readied to move, Custer said to Dr. H. R. Porter, one of his surgeons, “Porter, there is a large camp of Indians ahead, and we are going to have a great killing.”8

  In fact, the Indians in the large village had not seen Custer. The hardtack looters had been from a separate band. Some Indian scouts from the village had reported to their chiefs that there were soldiers in the area, but not in great numbers. One Indian who saw a cloud of dust being kicked up by Custer’s approaching column assumed it was from a herd of buffalo. No whites had ever attacked a full gathering of Indians in the middle of the day or afternoon, so when the morning passed peacefully the Indians relaxed. Furthermore, their village was so large they never thought the whites would do something as useless and foolish as attack them. If anyone was surprised that day, it was the Indians.

  “Custer was mounted on his sorrel horse and it being a very hot day he was in his shirt sleeves,” Private Peter Thompson recalled, “his buckskin pants tucked into his boots; his 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 opportunity to sight his rifle while riding. His rifle lay horizontally in front of him; when riding he leaned slightly forward.” He was flying the personal standard Libbie had made him; the regimental banner was left furled in the pack. The 7th Cavalry may have been on the march, but this was Custer’s battle.

  Custer divided his command into three battalions. Marcus Reno and Frederick Benteen each led three troops, Custer led five, and B Troop under Captain Thomas M. McDougall guarded the mule train.9 Presumably he planned to strike the village from multiple points, the tactic he used to good effect at Washita. Custer and Reno advanced down Reno Creek toward the river, and Benteen was sent to the left to approach the river farther south. After patrolling a few miles in that direction and seeing no Indians ahead, Benteen angled back toward Reno Creek. It was “rather a senseless order,” Benteen recalled, “carried out, I would have been twenty miles away.”10 According to Lieutenant Edgerly in Benteen’s command, however, Custer may not have known exactly where the southern terminus of the village was, and Benteen’s men were ordered “to go over to the left and charge the Indians as soon as we saw them.”11 This supports the idea that the plan was to hit the village in three places, but there is no written order that details Custer’s attack plan.

  Around 2:00 p.m. the battalions on Reno Creek came across a lone teepee about five miles from the village. In it was the body of Old She Bear, a warrior killed fighting Crook on the Rosebud. The scouts lit the teepee afire, a characteristic act of contempt, which drew attention to their advance. Around that time Reno’s chief of scouts, Lieutenant Luther R. Hare, and Custer’s lead scout, Fred Gerard, reported Indians fleeing toward the river.

  “Here are your Indians, General, running like devils!” Gerard shouted. Private Thomas O’Neill, looking at the village, recalled, “We could see the Indians, they looked very much like an ants nest that was disturbed running this way and that, and about a thousand of them in sight.”12

  Custer probably believed the Indians were preparing to take what they could from their encampment and quickly depart, perhaps mounting a hasty defense to slow his advance. But he misestimated his foe; the Indians wanted to fight. Custer did not know they had met and turned back Crook. Since Custer was coming from roughly the same direction, the Indians probably concluded it was a smaller group from the same force. And if they beat them once they could beat them again.

  Custer divided his force and ordered Reno to pursue the fleeing Indians toward the river, cross it, then charge into the village, where he would be “supported by the whole outfit.” The Indian scouts would meanwhile secure or run off the pony herd.

  A half hour later, the column rode up over a ridge overlooking the river and the village, approximately three miles distant. “It is a lovely place,” Pat Coleman wrote. “The valley is 1½ miles broad and four miles long, the river winding like a snake and dotted with Islands thickly studded with timber, the water clear as christal [sic] as it comes rushing from the Mountains.” Cottonwood trees and underbrush hugged the banks, and the surrounding hills were covered with long grass.

  The village stretched over four and a half miles along the river. The six tribal circles included bands of Teton Sioux: Hunkpapa, Sans Arcs, Miniconjou, Oglala, Blackfoot, Two Kettle, and Brulé. The Yankton and Santee Sioux were there, along with 120 Cheyenne lodges. The Hunkpapa circle was closest, at the southern tip of the village; the Cheyenne at the northern end.

  Reno’s troops galloped into the valley in columns of twos around 3:00 p.m. Resistance was light at first, and the Indians seemed to be scattering. “Thirty days’ furlough to the man who gets the first scalp!” shouted Lieutenant Charles A. Varnum.13

  Myles Keogh and Lieutenant William W. Cooke had ridden with Reno to the ford to get a sense of things and quickly estimate how the plan would unfold. During the advance, Cooke had told Reno that scout Fred Gerard reported the Indian village “three miles ahead and moving. The General directs you to take your three companies and drive everything before you. Colonel Benteen will be on your left and will have the same instructions.”14

  Keogh and Cooke then returned to Custer’s battalion, which had peeled off onto the ridgeline. As Reno neared the village, he set up a dismounted skirmish line with the right flank anchored on a wooded section of dry riverbed. This was not part of the plan. Custer clearly had expected Reno to charge into the village mounted. Some say Custer waved his hat as he moved along the high ground, encouraging Reno or maybe urging him to keep moving. The story of the wave, like many details about the battle, is disputed. But if true it was the last Reno saw of Custer.15

  Reno explained he thought he was “being drawn into s
ome trap, as they would certainly fight harder and especially as we were nearing their village which was still standing.” Also he “could not see Custer or any other support, and at the time the very earth seemed to grow Indians.”16

  The Indians did not expect the attack. “The soldiers charged so quickly [the Sioux council] could not talk,” Chief Red Horse recalled. “We came out of the council lodge and talked in all directions. The Sioux mount horses, take guns, and go fight the soldiers. Women and children mount horses and go, meaning to get out of the way.”

  Crazy Horse led a growing number of Indians toward Reno’s line on foot and horseback. Reno’s men were firing on the village, with little effect at first. “It seemed to me that we were not within range,” trooper Thomas O’Neill said, “as all our bullets fell short, and though the Indians were firing at us I did not see anyone hit.”17 Cheyenne leader Two Moons, watching from a distance, recalled the chaos of the mêlée. “I saw the white soldiers fighting in a line. Indians covered the flat. They began to drive the soldiers all mixed up—Sioux, then soldiers, then more Sioux, and all shooting. The air was full of smoke and dust.”18

  Indians moved on Reno’s left, and some got close enough to engage hand-to-hand. Reno pulled back and pivoted counterclockwise 90 degrees, into a wooded bend in the river with his back to the water. It was a better position to deal with the growing threat he faced, but it was defensive; Reno was no longer able to press on the village. Fighting continued for another quarter hour, with Indians creeping through the underbrush up to Reno’s position. The horses had been led back into the brush and were in danger of being taken, so an order was given to get to them, causing some confusion on the firing line. “I was fighting odds of at least five to one,” Reno explained. “My only hope was to get out of the wood, where I would soon have been surrounded, and gain some higher ground.”19