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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Thompson found two more wounded members of C Company, Privates John McGuire and Alfred Whittaker, and gave them the other canteen. Once each of them had had a drink, Thompson took the canteen over to some of the other wounded. John McVay of G Company had been shot in the hips and had been particularly vociferous in his pleas for water. Once he’d drunk from Thompson’s canteen, McVay pulled a pistol from beneath his coat. Still clutching the canteen, he told Thompson “to skip or he would put a hole through me.”

  In retrospect, Thompson was glad he hadn’t been armed, because he was sure he would have responded by shooting the ingrate dead. “My action would have been justified by the law,” he insisted, “as it would have been an act of self defense.” But the G Company soldier was only one of many who were desperate for water. As Thompson pushed the pistol aside and indignantly reclaimed the canteen, others offered to pay him for a drink. “Ten dollars,” one soldier said; “fifteen for a canteen of water,” said another; “twenty dollars,” said a third. “And so the bidding went,” Thompson wrote, “as at an auction.” He decided he must make another, almost mile-long trip to the river and back.

  Thompson was not the only soldier to venture to the Little Bighorn on his own initiative. Henry Mechling and another soldier from Benteen’s H Company also headed down the ravine with their canteens. There they discovered Michael Madden, a saddler from Lieutenant Godfrey’s K Company, who had been shot in the right leg while attempting to get water, sitting beside a kettle at the ravine’s mouth. Madden had suffered a double fracture beneath the knee and rather than endure the torture of being lugged back up to the top of bluff, had requested to remain beside the river.

  Mechling’s partner took Madden’s kettle and ran for the river. When he returned, there was a fresh bullet hole about three inches from the top of the kettle, but he’d managed to collect a good amount of water. Mechling filled several canteens, strapped them around his shoulders, and climbed to the top of the bluff, where he found his captain and offered him a drink. In no time, Benteen had drunk almost half the contents of the canteen.

  Extreme thirst is one of the most powerful urges a human being can experience, and the sight of their leader greedily downing a canteen of water was more than Benteen’s men could bear. “The whole line [was] about to start to the river for water,” Mechling remembered, “and Benteen had to make threats to prevent them from leaving the line and making a break for the river.” By hastily succumbing to his own craving for water, Benteen had endangered the safety of the entire battalion. If he didn’t act responsibly now, any remaining order in his company might rapidly degenerate into a collective madness for water.

  Benteen asked Mechling if he and a detail of three soldiers could provide some covering fire for another, larger detail of men sent down to the river for water. Soon Mechling and his band of “German boys,” all of them from H Company, were positioned on a narrow bluff overlooking the Little Bighorn, where they could cover the movements of twelve water carriers. It was dangerous for the water carriers, but the four sharpshooters were just as exposed. “The Indians off to the north had the range on us,” Mechling remembered, “and when the fire got too hot we had to get to the south slope of the hill, when the Indians to the south would crack away at us and then we would run over to the north slope, and in this way kept repeating the performance.” All four sharpshooters, including Private Charles Windolph, later received Medals of Honor, as did fifteen water carriers, including Peter Thompson, who made at least three trips to the river that day.

  Around 2 p.m., the warriors unleashed one of the stiffest fusillades yet, and the soldiers, many of whom had been milling about the entrenchment, were driven back to the barricade. By this time Thompson had moved to the western side of the entrenchment overlooking the river. From behind the bluff, he heard someone shout in excellent English, “Come down here you white livered son of a bitch, and I will cut your heart out and drink your blood.”

  During their panicked flight from the banks of the Little Bighorn, Thompson and Watson had been fired on by a man who Thompson claimed was white. Whether or not this was another one of his mistaken or potentially delusional sightings, others in the battalion heard English spoken by the enemy that day. Several soldiers claimed that at least one of the sharpshooters firing on the entrenchment from the hill to the north was white, and Reno later insisted that the Lakota and Cheyenne had been supplemented by “all the [territory’s] desperadoes, renegades, and half-breeds and squawmen.” True to his oddly original nature, Thompson responded to the enemy’s expletive-laden taunt by bleating like a sheep.

  By 3 p.m., the Indians’ fire once again began to slacken. By 4 p.m. it had stopped almost entirely. By 5 p.m. thick clouds of smoke began to billow up from fires along the river. The soldiers had long since left their positions along the line and were gathered in small groups as they looked down on the valley below. “I doubt if a dirtier, more haggard looking lot of men ever wore the Army Blue,” Private William Taylor wrote. They watched as the red ball of the sun sank into the smoky air, when suddenly the wispy clouds started to lift. Below them was a sight that was never seen again: a village of eight thousand Lakota and Cheyenne and twenty thousand horses moving as one.

  The train of people and horses was between a half and a full mile wide and went on for almost three miles. It was, Lieutenant Edgerly, testified, “the largest number of quadrupeds I’d ever seen in my life.” Edgerly compared the herd to “a great brown carpet . . . being dragged over the ground.” To Trumpeter William Hardy, it looked like “a long black cloud . . . moving away.” Hardy remembered how Major Reno turned to Captain Moylan and said, “For God’s sake, Moylan, look what we have been standing off!” The soldiers gave three spontaneous cheers as Captain French and Sergeant Ryan trained their long-range rifles on the distant Indians and fired a few halfhearted shots. Sergeant Ryan later claimed that he fired both the first and last shots of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

  Four men—the interpreter Fred Gerard, the scout Billy Jackson, Private Thomas O’Neill, and Lieutenant Charles DeRudio, all of them still hidden in the brush near the river—saw firsthand the human toll the battle had taken on the Lakota and Cheyenne. From his hiding place in the trees near Reno’s original fording place, Gerard could “plainly see wounded warriors on travois and dead warriors thrown across and tied to the backs of horses. Above all the noise and rattle and the hum of voices and cries of children, we could hear the death chanting of the squaws.”

  Up on the hill, Reno and his officers feared that this was simply a ruse and that come tomorrow the warriors would return. In preparation for what was regarded as the inevitable third day of the battle, Reno decided to move the entrenchment closer to the river and away from the stench of the dead horses. As night descended, the men dug new and larger rifle pits while others led the horses down to the river. Lieutenant Edgerly remembered how the horses sat down on their haunches as they tried to make their tentative yet urgent way down the steep bluff to the water. Once they reached the river, it was, Sergeant Stanislas Roy related, “a pitiful sight to see the poor animals plunge their heads into the water up to their eyes and drink.”

  Around 11 p.m., the spirits of the men received a boost when Gerard and Jackson wandered in, followed soon after by DeRudio and O’Neill, all of whom had spent two terrifying days and nights hiding from the Indians in the scrubby woods beside the river. Reno wrote out a message for Terry and Gibbon, who were presumably approaching from the Bighorn to the north, but the Crow and Arikara scouts said there were too many warriors in the vicinity to leave the entrenchment safely.

  On the morning of June 27 they looked down on what appeared to be a deserted Indian village. The site was littered with tepee poles and a few still-standing lodges, but there was not a living person to be seen. And then they looked down the river valley and saw the cloud of dust coming toward them from the north.

  At first they worried that this was the Indians come to renew the attack. Bu
t gradually they realized that the two approaching columns were soldiers. Some thought it was Crook; others said it was Terry and Gibbon, perhaps with Custer showing them the way. At last, the siege was over.

  For two days, fewer than 400 soldiers, scouts, and packers had held off approximately 2,000 Lakota and Cheyenne warriors. Their commander, Marcus Reno, had not covered himself in glory, but he had not been the sniveling coward some later made him out to be. Whiskey had dulled his senses and made it impossible for him to lead by example, but a part of him may have realized that his second-in-command, Captain Benteen, was better equipped to inspire the battalion in a desperate siege. After two days of hard fighting, during which they had suffered casualties of 18 dead and 52 wounded, approximately 350 members of Reno’s battalion were still alive, and that, in the end, was all that mattered.

  At the court of inquiry that was later called to investigate Reno’s conduct, Captain McDougall gave a most perceptive assessment of his commander. “He could make as stubborn a fight as any man,” McDougall testified, “but I don’t think he could encourage men like others. . . . Men are different, some are dashing and others have a quiet way of going through. I think he did as well as anyone could do.”

  Benteen, on the other hand, had been everything Reno wasn’t. “Wherever Benteen went,” Peter Thompson remembered, “the soldiers’ faces lighted up with hope.” However, not until the second day of the siege did Benteen assume the role for which he was later remembered. On the night of June 25 he refused to build a barricade; the next morning, in the midst of a near-catastrophic Indian assault, he took a nap.

  Exhaustion, in fact, may have been for Benteen what whiskey was for Reno. By the morning of June 26, Benteen was suffering from three successive nights with almost no sleep, and in his own narrative of the hilltop fight, he refers repeatedly to how tired he felt. The judgment of everyone on Reno Hill was impaired by a powerful combination of fatigue, dehydration, and fear, but it’s safe to say that no one was as exhausted by that morning as Frederick Benteen.

  Only when he awoke to find himself in the midst of the imminent collapse of both his company and the battalion did Benteen become “the savior of the Seventh.” By then, he had a special incentive. Custer was still out there, he believed, and if he and Reno could only get through this day alive, the whole world would soon learn how their commander had callously deserted them. Of course, Custer had done the same thing eight years before at the Battle of the Washita and gotten away with it. But not this time. There were too many witnesses. By surviving this two-day siege, he and Reno had surely earned themselves the most satisfying victory of all: the court-martial and professional demise of George Armstrong Custer.

  General Terry had promised Custer that he’d be at the Little Bighorn by the morning of June 26. But it had taken longer than expected to ferry the soldiers across the Yellowstone on the Far West. “I shall never forget Terry’s anxiety and impatience to get on,” Major Brisbin wrote.

  As the riverboat proceeded up the Bighorn toward the Little Bighorn, Terry and the Montana Column marched along the Bighorn’s eastern bank over some of the roughest country any of them had ever seen. On the night of June 25, in a cold and miserable rain, they lost their way in the moonless dark and nearly fell into the river. “The head of the column came plump on the brink of a precipice at whose foot swept the roaring waters of the Bighorn,” wrote Lieutenant James Bradley, who was in charge of the Crow scouts. “The water gleamed in front a hundred and fifty feet below. . . . For several minutes we sat [on] our horses looking by turn at the water and into the black ravines.”

  At Bradley’s suggestion, the Crow scout Little Face was placed at the head of the column, and in a few hours’ time, they were camped about a mile and a half from the Little Bighorn. At daylight on June 26, Lieutenant Bradley and his Crow scouts were sent out to investigate the trail ahead. They found evidence that four unshod Indian ponies had recently passed by on their way to the Bighorn. They soon discovered that the ponies belonged to three of Custer’s Crow scouts, White Man Runs Him, Hairy Moccasin, and Goes Ahead, who had already crossed over to the west bank of the Bighorn. After communicating with the scouts, Little Face rode back to Bradley.

  For awhile he could not speak [Bradley wrote], but at last composed himself and told his story in a choking voice, broken with frequent sobs. As he proceeded, the Crows one by one broke off from the group of listeners and going aside a little distance sat down alone, weeping and chanting that dreadful mourning song, and rocking their bodies to and fro. They were the first listeners to the horrid story of the Custer massacre, and outside of the relatives and personal friends of the fallen, there were none in this whole horrified nation of forty millions of people to whom the tidings brought greater grief.

  This was the first word of the disaster to reach anyone associated with the Montana Column. Bradley personally delivered the message to Terry and his staff. “The story was sneered at,” Bradley wrote; “such a catastrophe it was asserted was wholly improbable, nay impossible.” Terry, Bradley noticed, “took no part in these criticisms, but sat on his horse silent and thoughtful, biting his lower lip.”

  They proceeded and were soon in the valley of the Little Bighorn. About fifteen to twenty miles to the southeast was a cloud of dense smoke.

  —THE MARCH OF THE MONTANA COLUMN TO THE LITTLE BIGHNORN, June 21-27, 1876—

  As the majority of the column marched up the valley, Lieutenant Charles Roe led several cavalry companies to the bluffs paralleling the river to the right. From his elevated position Roe could see “a long line of moving dark objects defiling across the prairie from the Little Bighorn . . . as if the village were in motion, retreating before us.” Roe also saw some horsemen “clothed in blue uniforms . . . breaking into column and otherwise maneuvering like a body of cavalry.” Thinking they were from Custer’s regiment, he sent a detail to investigate. As they’d done earlier in the day on Reno Hill, the blue-clad warriors fired on the approaching soldiers, who were “quickly undeceived as to their character.”

  As it was almost completely dark, Terry ordered the column to camp for the night. “Notwithstanding the disclosures of the day,” Terry’s staff remained confident “that there was not an Indian in our front and that the men seen were members of Custer’s command.” The Crow scouts knew better and had long since slipped away from the column and headed back to their reservation.

  On the morning of June 27, five days after Custer had first set forth up the Rosebud River, the Montana Column resumed its march along the west bank of the Little Bighorn. Two advance guards led them up the valley while Terry and Gibbon remained with the slower-moving infantry. After passing a large, heavily wooded bend in the river, they caught a glimpse of two Indian tepees “standing in the open valley.” While Bradley’s advance guard of mounted infantry crossed the river to scout the hills to the east, the rest of the column marched into the abandoned village: a three-mile swath of naked tepee poles, discarded kettles, and other implements. Each of the two standing lodges was encircled by a ring of dead ponies and contained the corpses of several warriors. Among the debris they found the bloody underwear of Lieutenant James Sturgis, son of the Seventh Cavalry’s highest-ranking officer, Colonel Samuel Sturgis. There was also the buckskin shirt owned by Lieutenant James Porter. Judging from the bullet hole in the shirt, Porter had been shot near the heart.

  Up ahead to the south, on the other side of the river, Gibbon could see what looked to be a crowd of people standing on a prominent hill. But were they soldiers or warriors? “The feeling of anxiety was overwhelming,” he wrote. By this time, Lieutenant Bradley had descended from the much closer hills almost directly across the river to the east. He rode up to Gibson and Terry. “I have a very sad report to make,” he said. “I have counted one hundred and ninety-seven dead bodies lying in the hills.”

  “White men?” someone asked.

  “Yes, white men.”

  “There could be no question now,” Gib
bon wrote. “The Crows were right.”

  Not long afterward, Terry and Gibbon learned from Lieutenants Hare and Wallace that Major Reno and seven companies of the Seventh Cavalry were the men they’d seen watching from the hills. As Gibbon looked for a place to camp in the valley, Terry and his staff followed Hare and Wallace to the bluff.

  Terry was openly weeping by the time he reached Reno’s battalion. Standing beside the major was Frederick Benteen. Almost immediately the captain asked whether Terry “knew where Custer had gone.”

  “To the best of my knowledge and belief,” Terry replied, “he lies on this ridge about 4 miles below here with all of his command killed.”

  “I can hardly believe it,” Benteen said. “I think he is somewhere down the Big Horn grazing his horses.” Benteen then launched into the refrain he’d been repeating ever since he arrived on Reno Hill: “At the Battle of the Washita he went off and left part of his command, and I think he would do it again.”

  Terry was well aware of the history between Custer and Benteen. “I think you are mistaken,” he responded, “and you will take your company and go down where the dead are lying and investigate for yourself.”

  Private Jacob Adams was the the one who found Custer. He called to Benteen, who dismounted and walked over to have a closer look.

  “By God,” he said, “that is him.”