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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Hanley was in the middle of the no-man’s-land between the soldiers and the warriors, with bullets flying all around him, when, thankfully, Barnum decided to turn back. Two years later, Hanley was awarded the Medal of Honor for having “recaptured singlehandedly, and without orders, within the enemy lines and under a galling fire lasting some 20 minutes, a stampeded pack mule loaded with ammunition.”

  That evening a Lakota sharpshooter found the range on the soldiers of Captain French’s M Company. The first soldier to die was the fourth man to Sergeant John Ryan’s right. Soon after, the third man was hit, followed by the second. When the soldier lying beside him cried out in pain, Ryan “thought my turn was coming next.” But before the sharpshooter had a chance to reload and fire, Ryan, along with Captain French and six other soldiers, leapt to their feet and, spinning to their right, pumped a volley in the sharpshooter’s direction. “I think we put an end to that Indian,” Ryan remembered with considerable satisfaction.

  Over the course of the next few hours, a rhythm developed. The warriors blasted away for fifteen to thirty minutes, creating, Varnum remembered, “one ring of smoke from their guns around the entire range.” Then, with “a general ‘Ki-Yi’ all around,” the warriors mounted their horses and, leaning as far back as possible, charged the entrenchment as the soldiers rose to their knees and “let them have it and drove them back.” After another fifteen minutes or so of unrelenting fire, the warriors charged once again.

  It was when the soldiers were firing that they could see, however briefly, what they were up against. Gathered amid the surrounding hills and on the flats along the river were many more warriors than could fit along the firing line. As a consequence, most of the Indians were reduced to being spectators. “The hills were black with Indians looking on,” McDougall remembered, “while warriors were as thick as they could get within firing range.” The wonder was that the Indians didn’t overwhelm them with one deadly charge. Instead, they seemed content to test them with volley after halfhearted volley, knowing that time was on their side.

  Now that the soldiers’ carbines were being fired so regularly, the weapons started to jam on an almost constant basis. M Company developed a solution of sorts. Every time a carbine jammed, it was handed to Captain French, who, sitting tailor-style just behind the line, coolly extracted the casing with his knife, slipped in a new cartridge, and returned the weapon to the firing line.

  By 9:00 p.m. it was growing dark, and the Indians’ fire began to slacken. By 9:30 the firing had ceased altogether, and the officers and men stood up and began to mingle and talk. Private William Taylor of A Company wandered over to what became known as the corral, the roughly circular area where the horses and mules had been collected. There he found Sergeant Henry Fehler standing near Major Reno.

  “What are we going to do,” Taylor asked, “stay or try to move?” Although the question had been addressed to the sergeant, Reno responded: “I would like to know how in hell we are going to move away.” Given the tenor of the major’s remarks, Taylor thought it best to pretend, at least, that he was still speaking with Fehler. “If we are going to stay,” Taylor said, “we ought to be making some kind of barricade.” “Yes, Sergeant,” Reno said, “that is a good idea. Set all the men you can to work, right away.”

  By this point officers and men alike were so exhausted, hungry, and dehydrated that no one was thinking very clearly. Instead of dedicating a few hours to an activity that might save their lives, all they wanted to do was sleep. “Many of the men showed but little interest . . . ,” Taylor remembered, “officers less.” But an order was an order, and reluctantly the men began to build a breastwork made of hardtack boxes, saddles, and dead horses. They also dug shallow rifle pits in the cracked and flintlike earth with their forks, plates, and tin cups, heaping the excavated dirt into rounded, protective mounds.

  But there was one exception. Even though H Company occupied more territory than any other company and was situated on a prominent hill, Benteen chose to ignore Reno’s order. “I had an idea,” he later testified, “that the Indians would leave us.” Benteen’s premonitions usually served him well, but not in this instance. His refusal to take even the most rudimentary measures to defend his troop meant that in the horrifying, blood-soaked day to come, his men suffered twice the casualties of any other company.

  Benteen later claimed that Reno approached him that night with a proposition. The battalion should mount up and steal away under the cover of darkness. This required them to abandon the wounded, but in Reno’s estimation they had no choice.

  In the years to come, Benteen made much of this supposed conversation and how he “killed that proposition in the bud.” But all sorts of proposals were made that night. Godfrey and Weir believed that Custer “had been repulsed and was unable to join us . . . [and] that we ought to move that night and join him.” Since this also would have required them to leave anyone who could not mount a horse, it is unclear why Reno’s proposition—if, in fact, he ever made it—was the dark crime against humanity that Benteen made it out to be. In truth, the one undeniable crime committed by an officer that night was Benteen’s refusal to attend to the welfare of his own company. However, compared to some of his other actions that day, this was a relatively minor transgression.

  There was no one in the regiment who better understood both Benteen and the role he had been given to play that afternoon than Lieutenant James Bell. Bell had fought with the Seventh at the Washita but was away on leave during the Battle of the Little Bighorn. At the Washita, Bell had succeeded in doing what Custer had wanted Benteen to do: arrive just in the nick of time with the precious ammunition.

  At the Washita they had used wagons instead of mules to transport their equipment, and Bell had been in charge of the wagon carrying the ammunition. Just as was to occur eight years later with the pack train, the Seventh had advanced well ahead of the ammunition wagon during its approach to Black Kettle’s village. By the time Bell reached the encampment, the Cheyenne from the larger village to the east had Custer surrounded. Without extra ammunition, Custer was at the warriors’ mercy. But Bell courageously ran the wagon through enemy lines and came to his commander’s rescue.

  It will never be known what would have happened if Benteen had done everything in his power to reach Custer in a timely manner on the afternoon of June 25—if not with the ammunition packs, at least with his even more desperately needed battalion of soldiers. Given the size of Sitting Bull’s village and the mistakes Custer had already made, it might very well have resulted in the demise of the entire regiment. But that did not justify Benteen’s passive-aggressive refusal to “Come on,” and deep down he knew it.

  Benteen’s one overarching weakness, Bell told Walter Camp, was “vindictiveness.” He not only held a grudge against Custer for the death of Major Elliott at the Washita, he was galled by his low rank relative to what he’d achieved during the Civil War, especially when it required him to serve under inferior sorts like Custer and Reno. As a consequence, Benteen “never took the interest in his command that might have been expected of him.” He was “indifferent,” Bell claimed, “to minor matters of discipline and always had the poorest company in the regiment.” But if Benteen was “not a good company officer,” he was, Bell acknowledged, “a first rate fighter.” As the next day was about to prove, that was an understatement.

  Instead of plotting to abandon the wounded, Reno appears to have spent the night nursing his whiskey and complaining about Custer. At one point, Private Burkman overheard Reno say to another officer: “Well I wonder where the Murat of the American army is by this time!” Since Burkman, who was illiterate, didn’t know that Murat was Napoleon’s greatest cavalry officer, the remark didn’t mean much to him; he did know, however, that Reno had “a sneer in his laugh.”

  Later that night two civilian packers were searching for some food and blankets near the corral. The boxes and saddles that hadn’t made their way to the barricade had been tossed together
into a large, disorganized heap. Standing alone in the darkness with a bottle in his hand was Major Reno. “Are the mules tight?” Reno said. Assuming the major had misspoken, one of the packers asked if he meant to ask whether the mules were “tied.” “Tight, goddamn you,” Reno shouted as he lunged toward the man and showered him with whiskey.

  Lieutenant Edgerly also saw Reno near the horses and mules that night. When Reno asked what he’d been doing, Edgerly said that he’d been sleeping. “Great God,” Reno responded, “I don’t see how you can sleep.”

  That night Peter Thompson went to check on his horse. When he’d last seen the animal, it was one of five horses being held by Private John McGuire, who’d been so frightened by the terrific fire of the Indians that he’d scrunched down as low as was humanly possible and still hold five horses. When Thompson arrived several hours later, McGuire was in the exact same position, even though three of the horses were dead. Thompson asked McGuire whether he realized that he’d lost three of his charges. “He mournfully shook his head,” Thompson remembered. When he saw that one of the dead horses was his own, Thompson left “in disgust.”

  As had been true all afternoon and evening, the only thing anybody wanted to talk about was the whereabouts of Custer and his battalion. In the beginning Thompson attempted to tell his fellow soldiers what he’d witnessed. They were perfectly willing to believe that he had seen Custer on the river, but they refused to believe that Custer had gotten “the worst of the fight, that was bosh.” Instead of attempting to convince them of the truth, Thompson decided to “say nothing further about it as contradiction was a thing I could not stand, when I was right.”

  Thompson walked over to the edge of the bluffs and looked down into the valley. Large bonfires illuminated the village below, throwing long and quavering shadows across the hills. He could see the Indians dancing around the fires and hear the throb of the drums, the barking of the dogs, and the high-pitched howls of the women grieving for the dead. The sights and sounds “made the night hideous,” Thompson observed, but the Lakota and Cheyenne “seemed to enjoy it amazingly.”

  While he and the others stood gazing at the village, they heard the hoarse bleat of a bugle echoing across the valley. One of the buglers in the battalion sent out an answering call. But the response was yet another meaningless, discordant blast. The Indians were mocking them, they decided, with a captured bugle.

  Each company had stationed two pickets along the periphery of the entrenchment. In case of attack, the pickets were to provide at least a measure of advance warning that the enemy was approaching. But instead of warriors, the pickets thought they saw something else. A column of cavalry, they announced to those back in the entrenchment, was out there in the darkness.

  The men studied the gloom ahead for what was described as a “shadow seen passing southward over to the east.” It was Custer, some insisted. Others said it was Terry and Gibbon. No, one of the packers claimed, it was the Wyoming Column, come to their rescue. The packer jumped onto a horse and rode up and down the line shouting, “Don’t be discouraged, boys, it’s Crook!” They stood staring into the dark as behind them the village blazed with light. Finally, the soldiers were forced to admit that nothing was out there.

  The superstitious among them might have wondered whether they’d witnessed the departure of Custer’s battalion for the afterlife. But no one (with the exception of Thompson and Watson, who’d seen glimpses of the desperate fighting to the north) could imagine that Custer and his men were dead. The life force burned so vigorously within George Armstrong Custer that it was impossible to believe it could be extinguished. Despite all the circumstantial evidence—the captured guidons and bugles, the dust cloud they’d seen hovering over the hills—the officers and men of Reno and Benteen’s battalion remained convinced that Custer was alive and that, as Benteen had maintained from the start, he had forsaken them.

  CHAPTER 14

  Grazing His Horses

  At 2:30 a.m., a pair of rifle shots tore through the cool predawn air. It was time, the Lakota and Cheyenne had decided, to resume the battle.

  Benteen told the trumpeters to sound reveille. He wanted “to notify all concerned,” Lieutenant Gibson remembered, “including the Indians, that there were still men left on the hill.”

  It was then that the phantoms of the previous night became real. A large number of mounted troopers, their guidons waving in the soft morning breeze, appeared to the north. “Of course . . . ,” Trumpeter William Hardy remembered, “we thought it was Custer’s command.” The cavalrymen marched to within four hundred yards of the entrenchment and halted. Then they opened fire. They were Indians dressed in the clothes of the soldiers’ dead comrades.

  That morning the warriors unleashed what Private William Taylor remembered as a “perfect shower of bullets.” The fire was hot everywhere, but it was particularly bad for the soldiers of Benteen’s H Company, who were spread out around the irregular edge of a bluff that dominated the south end of the entrenchment. Since they occupied the highest ground, they were vulnerable from virtually every direction. Soon all the sagebrush on their hill had been clipped to the very roots. “My only wonder,” Lieutenant Gibson remembered, “is that every one of us wasn’t killed.”

  Benteen had insisted that he and Gibson remain awake all night to make sure the pickets did their duty. But once the sky began to brighten and the bullets began to fly, Benteen decided it was time to sleep. Even though the Indians’ fire was much heavier than the day before and his men were without rifle pits and barricades, he retreated from the line, lay down on the bald and dusty hill, and, using his rifle as a pillow, took a nap.

  The Indians quickly had his range, and a bullet cut the heel off his boot; another kicked up the earth under his armpit. But Benteen, who claimed, “I hadn’t the remotest idea of letting little things like that disturb me,” somehow managed to fall asleep.

  As their commander slept, the soldiers of H Company became the enemy’s favored targets. The trooper lying beside Private Windolph decided to take off the overcoat he’d put on the night before. He’d rolled over onto his side and thrown out his arm when he cried out in pain. He’d taken a bullet through the heart and was dead. Seconds later, another bullet tore through Windolph’s clothes and nicked him in the torso; yet another shattered the wooden butt of his carbine.

  With no way to protect themselves and with Benteen nowhere in sight, the soldiers of H Company began to seek refuge among the horses and mules at the corral in the hollow at the center of the entrenchment. Lieutenant Gibson, who’d been left in charge while his commander slept, feared the depleted ranks were about to be overrun. The Indians were gathering in the ravine that led up from the river. One of the soldiers said what was on all their minds: “Get the old man back here quick.”

  Benteen was not happy when awakened with the message that his lieutenant was having “a regular monkey and parrot time of it.” “To say that I felt like saying something naughty to that sergeant was putting it mildly,” he remembered. But as Benteen soon realized, his company was in deep trouble. The warriors were so close that they were pelting the soldiers with rocks and clods of dirt. Some were even throwing arrows at them. He must stop the retreat of soldiers to the corral and start building a breastwork.

  He found a group of H Company soldiers and civilian packers cowering among the horses and mules. “Where are you running to, men?” he asked. “Come on back, and we will drive them off. You might as well be killed out there as in here.” He soon had fifteen or sixteen men headed back up the hill, carrying an assortment of hardtack boxes and saddles.

  This was a help, but he needed more men and material with which to build a barricade. He must ask Reno for another company. He found the major lying in a pit with Captain Weir. It was an unexpected pairing. Earlier that spring, Reno had attempted to court-martial Weir for insubordination. Now they were sharing a hole in the ground, a partnership that was most likely inspired by their mutual love of the bottle.<
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  Benteen told Reno that his company was being “hard pressed” by the Indians and that he required some reinforcements. Reno said that his side of the entrenchment was just as hard pressed and that he couldn’t spare any men. Benteen pointed out that if the Indians were able to cut through his line, the entire battalion would be overrun. Finally, Reno agreed to give him French’s M Company. “There was some dissatisfaction at the order,” Private Morris remembered, “as the men believed that the necessity was due solely to the neglect of ‘H,’ in digging pits.”

  Benteen evoked a similar response from the men of Moylan’s A Company, who had spent the night constructing one of the better barricades in the battalion. From Benteen’s perspective it was better than they needed, and with Moylan’s consent, he supervised the relocation of a considerable portion of the barricade to his end of the entrenchment. Private William Taylor was one of those who reluctantly carried the material over to Benteen’s position on the hill. He was almost killed when the hardtack box on his shoulder was hit by a bullet, but Taylor could not help but admire Benteen’s courage under fire. “You could see the bullets throwing up dust as they struck all around him while he, calmly as if on parade, came down our lines and, after his errand, returned in the same manner carrying in his hand a carbine.”

  After ignoring Custer’s order to “Come on,” after refusing to dig rifle pits and build barricades, after sleeping while his men endured the worst fire of the battle, Benteen had finally decided to wake up and fight.

  Like Custer, Benteen had a theatrical streak. Unlike Custer, who was infatuated with the cavaliers of old, Benteen had a more contemporary source of inspiration: baseball.