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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Ever since the Civil War, Terry had distinguished himself as both a negotiator and an administrator. He had no interest in leading troops in battle. He might claim he was trying to do Custer a favor, but it was his own fundamental lack of confidence, a constitutional inability to take the reins and lead his officers and men in the field, that led Terry to give the command to Custer. Later that summer, with Custer dead, Terry relied on Colonel Gibbon in the same way, “very much to the disgust” of Lieutenant Godfrey and the other surviving officers of the Seventh. “Something must be wrong about Genl Terry,” Godfrey recorded in his diary, “that he cannot hold control of Cavalry & Infty without having merely nominal command.”

  Hindsight has a way of corrupting people’s memories, inviting them to view a past event not as it actually occurred but as they wished it had occurred given the ultimate result. After the disaster, Terry, Gibbon, Brisbin, and Hughes all assured one another that the plan would have worked wonderfully well if Custer had simply obeyed his orders and followed the blue pencil line. If he had done this, he would have arrived at the Little Bighorn just as Terry and Gibbon approached from the north and victory would have been theirs.

  But this does not appear to be what was considered the most likely scenario even at the actual time of the meeting. One of the few contemporary accounts we have is provided by Gibbon’s chief of scouts, Lieutenant James Bradley. “It is understood,” he recorded in his diary, “that if Custer arrives first he is at liberty to attack at once if he deems prudent. We have little hope of being in at the death, as Custer will undoubtedly exert himself to the utmost to get there first and win all the laurels for himself and his regiment.”

  There is also the testimony of the interpreter Fred Gerard. Unlike the officers who attended the meeting on the Far West, Gerard had nothing to hide. Gerard said that he overheard Terry repeat the verbal instructions he had given Custer. “I told him,” Terry said, “if he found the Indians not to do as Reno did, but if he thought he could whip them to do so!”

  Finally there is the testimony of Custer’s friend the actor Lawrence Barrett. Barrett visited Terry and his staff in St. Paul several months after the battle. “[The] story of [Custer’s] disobedience of orders is false,” he wrote to his wife on October 3, 1876, “as he was told to act according to his own judgment at his final interview with Terry.”

  Terry, it seems clear, expected and wanted Custer to attack if he found a fresh Indian trail. The biggest concern on the evening of June 21 was not the size of the village (which was thought to contain as many as fifteen hundred warriors); it was that the village might scatter before one of the columns reached it. The stated, if not written, plan was for Custer and his fast-moving cavalry to make the initial attack from the south and east while Gibbon’s slower-moving column of infantry and cavalry blocked any Indians attempting to flee to the north.

  Custer knew he had to move quickly to accomplish his objective. That was why he ultimately declined the offer of the Gatling guns that had proven such a bother to Reno. Thinking his regiment powerful enough to handle anything it might encounter, he also declined the offer of four additional cavalry companies from the Montana Column.

  In the months after the disaster, Terry and his minions complained about how Custer had ruined everything. “Poor fellow!” Gibbon wrote Terry. “Knowing what we do now, and what an effect a fresh Indian trail seemed to have on him, perhaps we were expecting too much to anticipate a forbearance on his part which would have rendered cooperation of the two columns practicable.” In truth, Gibbon and everyone else present at the meeting knew perfectly well what Custer was going to do once Terry, in the words of Major Brisbin, “turned his wild man loose.”

  —GENERAL TERRY’S PLAN, June 20, 1876—

  Terry was six feet two inches tall. He had a bushy black beard that concealed a long and thoughtful face. It was impossible not to like General Terry, but behind his air of forthright magnanimity lurked something unexpected: a crafty and calculating intelligence that seems to have caught Custer, who emerged from the meeting on the Far West strangely shaken and depressed, almost completely off guard.

  Terry was that most egotistical of egotists: the humble man. Unlike Custer, who compulsively needed to tell anyone who would listen how great he was, Terry was patient and smart enough to let others do the praising for him. He was modest, but he was also, as he admitted in a letter to his sister, “day-velish sly.”

  Before Custer became the mythic figure we know today, he was a lieutenant colonel desperate to find a way to salvage his reputation after his run-in with President Grant. Custer did not stride through history doing what he wanted; he, like any military man, spent most of his time following orders.

  It is often said that the road to the Little Bighorn began with Custer’s Black Hills Expedition of 1874. But Custer was not the prime mover in his own career. That expedition would not, in all likelihood, have happened without Alfred Terry’s prior approval. Terry had helped draft the Treaty of 1868, and only after he had assured Sheridan that it was legal “to make surveys and explorations” in land that had been granted in perpetuity to the Lakota did Sheridan go through with the expedition. It’s true that Terry subsequently objected to granting land claims to the miners who then flooded into the Black Hills, but by then it was too late—the process that had begun with his legal opinion could no longer be reversed.

  Terry had a lawyer’s talent for crafting documents that appeared to say one thing but were couched in language that could allow for an entirely different interpretation should circumstances require it. The written orders Custer received on the morning of June 22 are a case in point. On their surface they seem to say that Custer has been granted free rein. But lurking beneath the orders’ sometimes fulsome surface are hidden qualifiers.

  It is of course impossible to give you any definite instructions in regard to this movement [Terry’s orders read], and, were it not impossible to do so, the Dept. Commander places too much confidence in your zeal, energy and ability to impose on you precise orders which might hamper your action when nearly in contact with the enemy [italics mine].

  As Terry’s aide, Colonel Hughes, later pointed out, whatever latitude Terry had granted Custer applied only, thanks to that final clause, to the moments just prior to the attack. Anything he did before encountering the Indians must conform to the letter of Terry’s orders, which carefully directed him to continue up the Rosebud even if the Indian trail “be found (and it appears to be almost certain that it will be found) to turn toward the Little [Big] Horn.” With these orders, Terry had managed to protect his reputation no matter what the outcome. If Custer bolted for the village and claimed a great victory, it was because Terry had had the wisdom to give him an independent command. If Custer did so and failed, it was because he had disobeyed Terry’s written orders.

  Left unsaid, or at least unrecorded, during the meeting aboard the Far West was the possibility that instead of attacking the Indian village, Custer might do what he had done after the Battle of the Washita and attempt to bring the Indians in peacefully. Given that Terry had taken a leading role in the government’s negotiations with the Lakota, it might be assumed that he would have been inclined to at least discuss the option.

  There is a tantalizing reference in a May 23 letter written by one of the Seventh Cavalry’s medical staff, Dr. James DeWolf. “General Terry, I learn, wishes to try first to bring the Indians into the Reservation & if they won’t come, to fight them. He, I believe, is not in favor of the treatment they have received for some time past.” If Terry did, in fact, express this sentiment, he did not choose to share that view with the press. A week earlier he had told the reporter Mark Kellogg “that there was to be no child’s play as regards the Indians. They must be taught that the Government was not to be trifled with, and such measures would be taken as would learn the Indians to feel and recognize that there existed in the land an arm and power which they must obey.” Terry was an intelligent and empathetic m
an, but he was unwilling to let his own sense of right and wrong interfere with the wishes of his superiors. Custer was to attack the village.

  As Terry would have wanted it given the ultimate outcome of the battle, Custer has become the focal point, the one we obsess about when it comes to both the Black Hills Expedition and the Little Bighorn. But, in many ways, it was Terry who was moving the chess pieces. Even though his legal opinion launched the Black Hills gold rush and his battle plan resulted in one of the most notorious military disasters in U.S. history, Terry has slunk back into the shadows of history, letting Custer take center stage in a cumulative tragedy for which Terry was, perhaps more than any other single person, responsible.

  It was dark by the time Terry, Gibbon, and Custer left the Far West and made their way to Custer’s tent. Custer’s orderly, John Burkman, was with Custer’s dogs Tuck and Bleucher inside the tent and heard Terry say, “Goodbye and good luck.” Custer laughed and said, “Thanks. We may be needing a lot of luck.”

  When Custer entered the tent, he was dejected and preoccupied. “He stood for a minute,” Burkman remembered, “just staring straight ahead, frowning, not seeing me or Tuck or Bleuch.” After a minute or so, he turned and left for officer’s call.

  At the meeting that followed, Custer was, according to Lieutenant Godfrey, “unusually emphatic.” He announced that the regiment would no longer be divided into two wings; all company commanders were to report to him. Each man was to carry fifteen days of rations and bring twelve pounds of oats for his horse. Custer recommended taking along some extra forage for the pack mules. Godfrey and Captain Myles Moylan pointed out that many of the mules were already “badly used up.” The extra weight might cause them to break down completely. “Well, gentlemen,” Custer snapped, “you may carry what supplies you please; you will be held responsible for your companies. The extra forage was only a suggestion, but this fact bear in mind, we will follow the trail for fifteen days unless we catch them before that time expires, no matter how far it may take us from our base of supplies.” Custer ended the meeting with the words, “You had better carry along an extra supply of salt; we may have to live on horse meat before we get through.”

  That night, Custer also met with the six Crow scouts who had been assigned to his command along with Mitch Boyer. Once again, the overriding theme was indefatigable pursuit. “[The Crows] have formally given themselves to me, after the usual talk,” he wrote Libbie. “In their speech they said they had heard that I never abandoned a trail; that when my food gave out I ate mule. That was the kind of a man they wanted to fight under; they were willing to eat mule too.”

  At some point Custer fell into informal discussions with some of his officers. “General,” enthused Lieutenant Edgerly, “won’t we step high if we do get those fellows!” Custer replied, “Won’t we!” adding, “It all depends on you young officers. We can’t get Indians without hard riding and plenty of it.” Custer’s reference to “young officers” was significant. He had had enough of the regiment’s two senior officers, Reno and Frederick Benteen. In fact, later that night he fell into an argument with Benteen about, of all things, the Battle of the Washita. Benteen complained about the lack of support he’d received from Custer during that battle. Custer responded by recalling how Benteen had shot to death a Cheyenne boy during the fighting. Benteen angrily defended his actions, claiming it was his life or the boy’s. “It was plain . . . ,” recalled an infantry officer who witnessed the exchange, “that Benteen hated Custer.”

  It was midnight by the time Custer returned to his tent. “Knowing him so well,” Burkman remembered, “I seen he was pretty much worked up over something. He didn’t joke none with me. He didn’t pay no attention to the dogs, even when Tuck tried to worm his way up onto his lap. He set on the edge of his cot, frowning, staring ahead. I don’t think he went to bed at all that night.”

  Before the Battle of the Washita, Sheridan had told him, “Custer, I rely on you in everything, and shall send you on this expedition without orders, leaving you to act entirely on your own judgment.” Terry, in his affable way, had pretty much said the same thing; but it was also clear he wanted the others present at the meeting to see that blue pencil line, which would undoubtedly be reflected in the written orders Custer would receive the next morning.

  As was becoming increasingly clear to Custer, Terry had boxed him into a corner. To do as ordered, to continue marching south just as he drew within reach of the village, risked being detected by the Lakota scouts before he had a chance to attack. There was also General Crook to consider. Somewhere to the south was the Wyoming Column, and if Custer was to extend his own march in that direction, he increased the odds of blundering into Crook, who outranked him. Since Custer, like virtually every other cavalry officer in the army, wanted all the glory for his own regiment, this was unacceptable. And then there were Gibbon and the Montana Column, who would be somewhere to the northwest. Even if it meant risking another, career-killing court-martial, Custer must follow the trail to the village.

  Custer had always lived life at a frenetic pace. He thrived on sensation. Whether it was courting Libbie in the midst of the Civil War, learning taxidermy during his first expedition in the northern plains, or writing his articles while surrounded by his dogs and listening to his band, he needed to be in the midst of an often self-created uproar. But by the night of June 21, at the age of thirty-six, Custer was finding it difficult to marshal the old enthusiasm.

  He’d spent the winter and spring frantically staving off financial catastrophe. He’d battled the president of the United States to a draw. And, now, thousands of miles from Washington and New York, on the banks of the Yellowstone River, Grant’s deceptively benign emissary, Alfred Terry, was busily spinning his invisible and cunning web. Custer was about to embark on what was in all likelihood the last Indian campaign of his career. But as was about to become increasingly clear to his officers, the burden of being Custer had finally caught up with him.

  Custer appears to have spent much of the night writing the anonymous dispatch for the New York Herald in which he blasts Reno for not having followed the Indian trail. Reno, sullen and unapologetic to the last, was the perfect target as Custer prepared himself to do what his subordinate should have done. “Few officers,” he wrote, “have ever had so fine an opportunity to make a successful and telling strike and few ever so completely failed to improve their opportunity.” For Custer, there would be no turning back.

  Burkman had guard duty that night, and with Custer’s dog Tuck beside him, he marched back and forth in front of his commander’s tent. In the distance he could hear the steady beat of drums from the tents of the Arikara and Crow scouts. Many of the officers and soldiers were in the process of getting very drunk, “the liquor tasting good to the innards,” Burkman remembered, “after so much alkali water.” Others were writing letters and making wills; “they seemed to have a presentiment of their fate,” Lieutenant Godfrey wrote.

  If the Battle of the Little Bighorn had resulted in victory for Custer, it’s doubtful that these “presentiments” would have been remembered. But as is the way with most great disasters, the survivors later saw the catastrophe as preordained.

  Back in 1867, Custer’s regimental adjutant, the tall and elegantly whiskered Lieutenant William Cooke, had survived a terrifying encounter with the Cheyenne during which he and about fifty other men were attacked by an estimated five hundred warriors. They were able to hold off the Indians for three hours until reinforcements arrived and the Cheyenne fled. Nine years later on the Yellowstone, Custer’s adjutant was convinced his luck had run out and asked Lieutenant Gibson to witness his will.

  “What, getting cold feet, Cookie,” Gibson taunted, “after all these years with the savages?”

  “No,” Cooke responded, “but I have a feeling that the next fight will be my last.”

  Onboard the Far West, Mark Kellogg sat writing his dispatches for the New York Herald. It was after midnight by the time h
e joined Major Brisbin, who was smoking a cigar on the riverboat’s deck. Kellogg had originally planned to follow Gibbon and Terry but had just decided to go with Custer; otherwise, he feared, “he might miss something if he did not accompany the column.” Brisbin secured the reporter a mule and some canvas saddlebags, along with some provisions from the riverboat’s stores. “We fixed poor Mark up,” Brisbin later remembered, “for his ride to death.”

  Also on the fence about going with Custer were his younger brother Boston, to whom Grant Marsh had offered a cabin on the Far West, and his nephew Autie Reed. In the end, both went with the Seventh. The scout Charley Reynolds had a serious infection on his hand, and one of the regiment’s surgeons, Dr. Henry Porter, had advised him to remain on the boat, as did Marsh. “Captain,” Reynolds said, “I’ve been waiting and getting ready for this expedition for two years and I would sooner be dead than miss it.”

  That night the main cabin of the Far West was the scene of a high-stakes poker game that was, according to Marsh, “the stiffest ever played on the river.” At the table were Marsh, Custer’s brother Tom, his brother-in-law James Calhoun, and Captain William Crowell of the Sixth Infantry. By the end of the night, Captain Crowell had won several thousand dollars, leaving Tom Custer and Jim Calhoun not only exhausted and hung over but broke.

  As Tom Custer and Calhoun lost at cards, Marcus Reno sang. That afternoon he’d purchased a straw hat from the sutler and at least one half-gallon keg of whiskey. He appears to have spent much of the evening getting drunk, and that night he and several officers stood arm in arm on the deck of the Far West singing sentimental songs. Custer’s tent was beside the riverboat, and one can only wonder whether the major’s slurred harmonizing contributed to the anger his abstemious commander directed toward him that night in his anonymous dispatch.