The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  By June 16, the village had moved four times since Sitting Bull’s sun dance. After gradually working their way farther and farther up the Rosebud, they had turned west, crossing the divide between the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn. They were now encamped on a tributary to the Little Bighorn called Sun Dance Creek.

  The camp was divided into six circles, with the Cheyenne in the front and the Hunkpapa in the rear. Groups of Indians had been regularly streaming in from the agencies to the east, but many, if not most, of them were still in transit, drawn in by the gravitational pull of Sitting Bull’s ever-growing camp.

  Little Hawk and his scouts arrived just at daybreak. As they approached the village, they began to howl like wolves, a sign that they had seen the enemy. Heralds quickly began to ride throughout the six camp circles, which extended for almost a mile, announcing Little Hawk’s news. The women started packing up their possessions in preparation for a possible move as the young warriors talked of riding out to attack the soldiers.

  Later that day, the chiefs met in the large council tent. Many of the foremost Lakota and Cheyenne warriors, including Crazy Horse, were already present in the village. But Sitting Bull remained firm. There were still many more men of fighting age coming from the agencies. The longer they waited, the stronger they would be. Let the washichus attack first. And besides, in his dream he had seen the soldiers coming from the east, not the south. “Young men,” the heralds reported, “leave the soldiers alone unless they attack us.”

  But as night approached, more and more of the young men slipped away from the village. By midnight, perhaps as many as a thousand warriors had departed for the upper portion of the Rosebud to the south. Reluctantly Sitting Bull, his arms still scabbed and swollen, joined them for the night ride across the divide to the soldiers. As was so often the case, the young warriors had no ears.

  George Custer might fancy himself America’s premier Indian fighter, but it was George Crook, the commander of the Wyoming Column, who had achieved the actual results. In many ways he was the anti-Custer. Instead of dressing up like a buckskinned dandy, he affected a grubby anonymity; in fact, he looked so ordinary in his dirty shirt and shapeless black hat that at least one new recruit had mistaken him for an enlisted man—much to Crook’s amusement. But once you studied his face—two piercing eyes above a biblical beard tied into two sloppy braids—you detected a troubling, oddly Zen-like zealotry.

  Crook had spent the last few years in the Southwest hunting the Apache. He’d been so successful that it had been Crook, not Custer, who’d been elevated two grades from lieutenant colonel to brigadier general. (Custer’s Civil War rank of major general had been only a brevet, or honorary, rank.) Crook was the one who’d pioneered the technique of using pack mules instead of wagons to transport his regiment’s supplies, the technique that the Seventh Cavalry was now belatedly learning. Traveling light and fast, he had gained a reputation for relentless pursuit.

  But his real secret was in his use of Indian scouts—not just scouts from rival tribes, but scouts from the very people he was pursuing. “To polish a diamond,” he later told a reporter, “there is nothing like its own dust. It is the same with these fellows. Nothing breaks them up like turning their own people against them. They don’t fear the white soldiers, whom they easily surpass in the peculiar style of warfare which they force upon us, but put upon their trail an enemy of their own blood, an enemy as tireless, as foxy, and as stealthy and familiar with the country as they themselves, and it breaks them all up. It is not merely a question of catching them better with Indians, but of a broader and more enduring aim—their disintegration.”

  Crook was confident that he’d found the key to subduing Indians, and he came to the northern plains with the expectation of doing unto the Lakota and Cheyenne what he’d done to the Apache. In the middle of May he traveled to the Red Cloud Agency with the intention of recruiting at least three hundred Lakota scouts.

  But when he met with Red Cloud, he encountered some unexpected resistance. The Oglala chief lived on a government agency, but this did not mean he approved of the government’s war. His own teenage son Jack was on his way to Sitting Bull’s village. “They are brave and ready to fight for their country,” Red Cloud warned the general and his staff. “They are not afraid of the soldiers nor of their chief. . . . Every lodge will send its young men, and they all will say of the Great Father’s dogs, ‘Let them come!’ ” Crook left the agency without recruiting a single Oglala scout.

  In the weeks ahead, Crook had to settle for some Crows and Shoshone. He also had the services of Frank Grouard, the Kanaka scout who had found the Cheyenne village back in March. By the morning of June 17, when Crook called a halt within a wide, rolling amphitheater of grass, he was still supremely confident that he had the manpower—more than eleven hundred soldiers—required to handle anything the Indians could throw at him. He had no idea where the Dakota and Montana columns commanded by General Terry were at that moment, but all the better. The victory would be his and his alone.

  Crook was so confident, in fact, that he’d dispensed with the pack train that had made his earlier successes possible. The Lakota, he predicted, “would never stand punishment as the Apaches had done.” This was going to be a quick and decisive battle, and there was no need for a pack train. As they waited beside the Rosebud for word from the Crow scouts, Crook and his staff played a hand of cards.

  They began to hear sounds of shooting to the north, but Crook, who was a man of exceedingly few words, appeared unconcerned. Some Crow scouts rode down out of the hills and breathlessly reported that a large number of Lakota were headed their way. Then they heard what Grouard called “the Sioux war-cry.” Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and the seven hundred Lakota and Cheyenne warriors who’d spent the night riding up the Rosebud had arrived.

  Crook’s troopers were still dismounted and unprepared for a charge—some of them had even erected tents. This meant that the initial fighting was left to the Crow and Shoshone scouts. On a high plateau above the Rosebud, they bravely met the Lakota onslaught. “The coming together of the Sioux, Crows and Shoshones . . . ,” Grouard remembered, “was the prettiest sight in the way of a fight that I have ever seen.” For twenty minutes, the fighting remained hand to hand until, finally, the troopers began to appear, and the Lakota reluctantly fell back. “I believe if it had not been for the Crows,” Grouard recalled, “the Sioux would have killed half of our command before the soldiers were in a position to meet the attack.”

  Captain Anson Mills was part of the charge to relieve the Crows and Shoshone. It had been every officer’s assumption that once the full force of the cavalry was brought to bear on the Indians, they would retreat in a panicked rout. But this did not turn out to be the case. “The Indians proved then and there that they were the best cavalry soldiers on earth,” Mills later wrote. “In charging up toward us they exposed little of their person, hanging on with one arm around the neck and one leg over the horse, firing and lancing from underneath the horse’s necks, so that there was no part of the Indian at which to aim.” Mills and the others were able to drive back the Lakota and Cheyenne, but soon groups of warriors came barreling in from other directions. “The Indians came not in a line but in flocks or herds like the buffalo, and they piled in upon us.”

  —THE BATTLE OF THE ROSEBUD, June 17, 1876—

  Crook became convinced that the warriors must be protecting a village a few miles down the Rosebud. So he sent Captain Mills and eight companies of cavalry (about a third of his total force) down the river. Soon enough, several companies on the other side of the battlefield found themselves virtually surrounded by the hostiles. Crook called back Mills, whose men were able to come to the besieged companies’ rescue just in the nick of time.

  After six hours of fierce fighting, the Lakota and Cheyenne decided that they’d had enough for the day. Crook later claimed that since he was still on the field at the conclusion of the battle, the victory was technically his. His subs
equent actions proved otherwise.

  He decided he didn’t have sufficient ammunition or supplies to keep up the chase. So he turned back, and after a day’s march south made camp at Goose Creek near modern Sheridan, Wyoming.

  Never before in the history of the West had the Indians been known to seek out and attack a large column of soldiers on the open field. The hard part was usually finding the Indians, let alone convincing them to make a stand, but this time the Indians had swooped out of the hilltops like infuriated birds of prey and fallen on them. Crook was convinced that the Indians had outnumbered his army by a factor of three to one when in actuality, his army was probably the larger force. Crook also claimed that the Indians were better armed than his soldiers. It was true that many of them possessed repeating rifles compared to the soldiers’ single-shot 1873 Springfield carbines and rifles (the weapons selected by General Terry’s munitions board), but this had not prevented the troopers, infantrymen, and scouts from firing off an astounding number of rounds—25,000 cartridges by one estimate, or about 250 rounds per Native casualty.

  What had really happened was that the Lakota and Cheyenne had succeeded in putting a deep and enduring fright into George Crook and his army. “Their shouting and personal appearance was so hideous that it terrified the horses . . . and rendered them almost uncontrollable,” recalled Captain Mills. For his part, Crook never forgot the sound of that battle, in particular “the war whoop that caused the hair to raise on end.”

  Crook dispatched a messenger to Fort Fetterman, where word of the battle was relayed by telegraph to General Sheridan in Chicago. Sheridan had every reason to expect that Crook would dust himself off and continue after the hostiles. That was the way he’d subdued the Apache to the south. But once Crook had ensconced himself and his column at Goose Creek (where he remained for six long weeks), he tried to forget about the humiliating encounter with the Lakota and Cheyenne by fishing for trout and shooting, on one memorable day, a cinnamon bear. On June 19, he penned a report to General Sheridan, sent via Fort Fetterman to the south, but not once did he attempt to communicate with the man who might have profited most from his most recent experience: General Terry.

  By June 22, word of Crook’s battle had reached Fort Lincoln. “The Indians were very bold,” Libbie worriedly wrote Custer. “They don’t seem afraid of anything.” But her husband, several hundred miles from the nearest telegraph station, never learned of the battle. Not until July 9—more than two weeks after the Battle of the Little Bighorn—did news of Crook’s encounter finally reach General Terry.

  On Monday, June 19, General Terry, who was about 125 miles to the north of Crook and the Wyoming Column, received a dispatch from the long-awaited Major Marcus Reno. He and the Right Wing were bivouacked on the Yellowstone between the Rosebud and Tongue rivers. Unapologetic about having disobeyed his orders, Reno was also strangely reticent as to the very real and substantial intelligence he had collected during the scout. Terry was furious. “Reno . . . informed me,” he wrote his sisters, “that he had flagrantly disobeyed my orders, and he had been on the Rosebud, in the belief that there were Indians on that stream and that he could make a successful attack on them which would cover up his disobedience. . . . He had not the supplies to go far and he returned without justification for his conduct unless wearied horses and broken down mules would be that justification. Of course, this performance made a change in my plans necessary.”

  The extremity of Terry’s anger is curious. He might have recognized that Reno’s balanced combination of gumption and caution had saved him from an embarrassing gaffe. Without tipping off the hostiles, Reno had succeeded in determining that the Indians had long since left the lower portion of the Rosebud. Otherwise, Terry would have wasted at least another week attempting to entrap a nonexistent village. Instead of being grateful, he seemed to resent the fact that he must now scrap his original plan. For the meticulous and bookish Terry, whose personal motto, “Blinder Eifer schadet nur,” translated from the German into “Zeal without discretion only does harm,” the plan was what mattered, and Reno’s daring and insubordinate initiative had made a mockery of his plan.

  Custer was just as angry, but for an entirely different reason. Reno, the coward, had failed to attack! In an anonymous dispatch to the New York Herald, Custer went so far as to insist that Reno deserved a court-martial for his “gross and inexcusable blunder,” claiming that “had Reno, after first violating his orders, pursued and overtaken the Indians, his original disobedience of orders would have been overlooked.”

  As it turned out, Custer’s dispatch did not appear until well after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Not only did the article make shockingly clear Custer’s feelings toward his second-in-command, it also demonstrated that Custer, like Benteen before him, had no qualms about using the press for his own self-serving ends even if it might prove destructive to the morale of the regiment. But most of all, the dispatch laid bare Custer’s frame of mind in the days before his final battle. “Faint heart never won fair lady,” he wrote; “neither did it ever pursue and overtake an Indian village.”

  On the morning of Tuesday, June 20, Custer and the Left Wing crossed the Tongue and marched up the Yellowstone toward Reno and the Right Wing. In the meantime, the Far West also moved up the Yellowstone, and at 12:30 p.m. Grant Marsh delivered General Terry to Re-no’s camp. Custer had gotten there about an hour ahead of him and appears to have already made his feelings known to Reno. “General Custer upbraided him very bitterly,” Private Peter Thompson wrote, “for not finding out the exact number and the direction the Indians were taking instead of supposing and guessing. There were some sharp questions and short answers; but General Terry interposed and smoothed the matter over.”

  It was now time for Terry to do what Terry did best, devise another plan. He retreated to his cabin on the Far West and, surrounded by his staff, set to work. As far as the reporter Mark Kellogg was concerned, it was as if a benevolent, omniscient god—“large brained, sagacious, far reaching, cool”—had set up shop aboard the riverboat, and whatever plan he came up with “must be successful.”

  Prior to the Civil War, when he had been clerk of the superior court in New Haven, Connecticut, Terry had been an amateur student of military history. He had even spent a year in Europe, traveling to famous battlefields and forts. His subsequent experience in actual warfare had done little to change his assumption that battle plans were to be drawn up on the European model, in which two well-ordered armies confronted each other on the open field. As had been true with his earlier, aborted plan, Terry based his strategy on using two columns in a pincer movement designed to ensnare the Indian village. Unfortunately, the mobility of the Indians meant that attempting to trap a village between two columns of cavalry was like trying to catch a glob of mercury between two sticks. From the start, the likelihood of successfully coordinating the movements of two different regiments over a vast and largely unknown territory was remote at best.

  On the afternoon of June 21, Terry unveiled his plan in the cabin of the Far West. In attendance were Terry; his aide-de-camp, Colonel Robert Hughes; Custer; Gibbon; and Gibbon’s commander of cavalry, James Brisbin. Even though he was the source of their latest and best information about the Indians, Marcus Reno was not invited to the meeting.

  They spread out the map on the table. The map was based on a partial survey conducted before the Civil War. Hostile Indians had prevented the surveyors from reaching many of the areas on the map. For example, the surveyors had not even seen the Little Bighorn River. That and portions of other rivers, including much of the Rosebud, were represented by dotted lines that could only be described as educated guesses.

  Based on Reno’s scout and a recent report from the Crows, Terry believed the Indians were somewhere to the southwest between the Rosebud and Bighorn rivers, probably in the vicinity of the Little Bighorn. As Custer led the Seventh up the Rosebud, Terry and the Montana Column would work their way up the Bighorn to the west. Sinc
e Custer had considerably less distance to cover before he reached the projected location of the Indian village, Terry ordered him to continue south up the Rosebud even if the Indians’ trail headed west. Only after he had marched almost to the Wyoming border should he begin to sweep west. Not only would this postpone Custer’s arrival at the Little Bighorn until about the time Terry and the Montana Column were in the vicinity, it might prevent the Indians from escaping to the south.

  Terry used stick pins to indicate Custer’s line of march. The pins pierced the thick parchment of the map and dug into the table underneath. Terry, who was nearsighted, asked Major Brisbin to use a blue pencil to mark Custer’s projected route.

  There was one glaring problem with this plan. As the blue pencil line clearly showed, Terry was ordering Custer to march away from where the village was supposed to be. Custer had recently rebuked Reno for not having the courage to follow the trail to its source even though Reno was in violation of Terry’s orders. Did Terry really expect Custer to postpone his own attack and wait for the Montana Column to arrive?

  There was an unwritten code in the military: Violating an order was accepted—in fact, encouraged—as long as it resulted in victory. At Gettysburg, Custer’s superior, General Alfred Pleasanton, had ordered him to join forces with General Judson Kilpatrick, an officer Custer disliked. Instead, he had chosen to remain with General David Gregg and had, it could be argued, won the Battle of Gettysburg for the Union. Custer, they all knew, was not going to let a blue pencil line prevent him from becoming a hero once again.