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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  In 1983 fire ravaged the Little Bighorn Battlefield. This provided a team of archaeologists and volunteers with the chance to sweep the denuded site with metal detectors and analyze what they found. In addition to buttons, picket pins, bones, bits of clothing, and other assorted objects, the archaeologists found dozens upon dozens of shell casings.

  The casings were analyzed by weapons experts who determined that in addition to the Springfield carbines and Colt revolvers fired by the soldiers, there were forty-three additional types of weapons used by the Indians. Some of these were old-style muzzle loaders and single-shot rifles, but a startlingly large number of warriors, perhaps as many as three hundred, possessed modern repeating rifles manufactured by Henry and Winchester capable of firing seventeen rounds without reloading. One ridge just to the southwest of Calhoun Hill possessed so many cartridges from the Indians’ repeaters that the archaeologists dubbed the site Henryville. Custer’s battalion, with its single-shot carbines, was overwhelmingly outgunned.

  By all accounts, the rapidity of fire was extraordinary. “The shooting was quick, quick,” Two Moons told an interpreter. “Pop—pop—pop, very fast.” The Crow scout Curley, who had left the battalion by this point and was observing the battle from a distant hill to the east, likened the sound to “the snapping of the threads in the tearing of a blanket.” Answering as best they could with their carbines, Calhoun’s troopers, who were deployed in a semicircle with Calhoun and his second lieutenant, John Crittenden, exhorting them from behind, fired off round after round. “The soldiers stood in line,” Red Hawk remembered, “and made a very good fight. The soldiers delivered volley after volley into the dense ranks of the Indians without any perceptible effect on account of their great numbers.” When he inspected the hill two days later, Captain Moylan, who was married to Calhoun’s sister, reported finding as many as forty cartridge casings beside one dead soldier and twenty-eight beside another. It was, most probably, the firing at Calhoun Hill that attracted the attention of the officers and men of Reno’s battalion.

  Just as devastating as the Henry and Winchester repeating rifles were the Indians’ arrows. If half of the two thousand warriors fired ten arrows each during the engagement, that would have been a total of ten thousand arrows, or about forty arrows per soldier. When combined with the roar of guns and the acrid clouds of black powder smoke, this deadly rain of steel-tipped arrows did much to harry both the soldiers and the horses, many of which were gathered in a draw behind Calhoun Hill and were becoming increasingly difficult to manage.

  Since every fourth soldier was required to remain mounted and hold the horses for the other three, the company’s firepower was reduced by 25 percent. In order to better the odds against the daunting number of Indians, Keogh had apparently directed the horse holders to take on twice the usual number of horses so that additional soldiers could join the skirmish line. The Hunkpapa Moving Robe Woman, who was still intent on avenging the death of her brother Deeds, noticed that some of the mounted soldiers were “holding the reins of eight or ten horses.”

  The Hunkpapa warrior Gall had made the troopers’ horses his personal priority. Like Moving Robe Woman, he had already suffered a terrible personal loss when he learned of the deaths of his two wives and three children. By taking the soldiers’ horses, he was not only taking something of vital importance to the enemy but also securing something of great value to his tribe, especially since the saddlebags on each horse contained the soldiers’ reserves of ammunition.

  Gall and his warriors were working up a ravine toward Calhoun’s and Keogh’s troops when they came upon the mother lode: dozens of horses hidden in a ravine “without any other guard than the horse-holders.” As some of Gall’s warriors waved their blankets and others fired on the soldiers, the horses leapt and whinnied and, after yanking free from the holders, stampeded for the river. So many horses poured out of the hollow that many of the Indians to the west assumed they were being charged by the enemy. Only later did they realize that the horses they’d fired upon had been without any riders.

  After this catastrophic loss, Calhoun’s and Keogh’s troopers started to hold on jealously to what horses remained. “They held their horses’ reins on one arm while they were shooting,” Low Dog remembered, “but their horses were so frightened that they pulled the men all around, and a great many of their shots went up in the air.”

  As pressures mounted to the south, Crazy Horse struck to the north. Extending between Calhoun Hill and the flat-topped knob where Custer and the Left Wing had deployed was a hogback that came to be known as Battle Ridge. For Keogh’s Right Wing, this narrow ridge, which extended north like the sharp-edged spine of a gigantic and partially buried beast, was both a bulwark against the Indians and a potential pathway to Custer and the Left Wing. By riding his pony through a slight gap in the forty-yard-wide ridge, Crazy Horse managed singlehandedly to break the Right Wing in half. “Crazy Horse was the bravest man I ever saw . . . ,” marveled the Arapaho Waterman. “All the soldiers were shooting at him, but he was never hit.”

  While Crazy Horse smashed through the line of troopers, the Cheyenne leader Lame White Man, dressed in a newly acquired blue trooper’s coat, prepared to mount a fierce northern thrust along the western edge of Battle Ridge. To the north a group of young warriors that John Stands in Timber called “the Suicide Boys” also charged into the soldiers, purposely drawing their fire so that other warriors could attack the troopers as they struggled to reload. Stands in Timber went so far as to insist that if not for the reckless abandon of the Suicide Boys, who transformed what had been a largely long-distance fight into a hand-to-hand struggle, the battle might have degenerated into an unsatisfactory siege similar to what later occurred on Reno Hill.

  To the south the warriors realized that the time was right to charge Calhoun Hill. “The dust created from the stampeding horses and powder smoke made everything dark and black,” Moving Robe Woman remembered. “Flashes from carbines could be seen. . . . I never heard such whooping and shouting. ‘There is never a better time to die,’ shouted Red Horse.”

  With the cry of “Hi-Yi-Yi,” the war chiefs plunged ahead as their warriors whipped one another’s horses and followed them into the maelstrom. “The Indians kept coming like an increasing flood which could not be checked,” Red Hawk recalled. “The soldiers were swept off their feet; they could not stay; the Indians were overwhelming.”

  Gall remembered that the soldiers were “shot down in line where they stood.” Lieutenants Calhoun and Crittenden both died in the rear of their platoons, fighting back to back to the very end. Shell casings from Calhoun’s revolver were found around his body, which was identified by the distinctive fillings in his teeth. Crittenden was easier to identify. Eight months before his death, he’d lost his left eye in a hunting accident. On June 25, an arrow sliced into the upper portion of his face and shattered his glass eye.

  The survivors from Calhoun Hill fled north through what has since been called Horse Holders’ Ravine, toward Captain Keogh’s I Company. The collapse to the south came so suddenly that Keogh’s soldiers had little time to mount an effective defense. Inevitably adding to the panic and confusion was the immobilization of the company’s commander when a gunshot shattered Keogh’s left leg and severely injured his horse, Comanche. As the company’s sergeants gathered around their fallen leader, the warriors pounced, and I Company’s soldiers “were all,” Gall remembered, “killed in a bunch.”

  Today the cluster of a dozen and a half marble headstones, all of them grouped in a hollow on the eastern side of Battle Ridge, testifies to the terrifying swiftness of the slaughter. Included in that group was C Company’s First Sergeant Edwin Bobo, who had just survived two devastating Indian charges only to die with Keogh and his men in what was later described as a buffalo wallow. Unlike every other body in the group, Keogh’s was left untouched. Hanging from his neck was a medallion with the image of the Lamb of God known as an Agnus Dei. Some have speculated that it wa
s out of respect for this sacred object that the warriors chose not to mutilate Keogh’s body.

  The melee that resulted from the multipronged dissection of the Right Wing was unlike anything the warriors had ever experienced in their encounters with army soldiers. Two Moons told of how difficult it was to see amid the impenetrable black smoke and how the bullets made “a noise like bees.” Others spoke of the earsplitting shriek of the eagle-bone whistles. Each warrior depended on his own medicine for protection, and in the dizzying swirl of dust and noise a blanket could become bulletproof and a stuffed bird, often worn as a headdress, might start to sing. Gall claimed that “the Great Spirit was present riding over the field, mounted on a coal black pony and urging the braves on.”

  Many of the troopers were so confounded by the intensity of the fighting that they simply gave up. “These soldiers became foolish,” Red Horse remembered, “many throwing away their guns and raising their hands saying, ‘Sioux, pity us; take us prisoners. . . .’ None were left alive.” Many of the warriors became convinced that the soldiers must have been drunk, “firing into the ground, into the air, wildly in every way.” Shoots Walking, who was just sixteen during the battle, told of killing two soldiers who stood dumbly by with their carbines in their hands. “They did not know enough to shoot,” he said. For Standing Bear, there was little joy in killing such a helpless enemy. “When we rode into these soldiers,” he later told his son, “I really felt sorry for them, they looked so frightened. . . . Many of them lay on the ground, with their blue eyes open, waiting to be killed.”

  Inevitably, given the excitement and poor visibility, several warriors fell to friendly fire. “The Indians were knocking each other from their steeds,” Horned Horse remembered, “and it is an absolute fact that the young [warriors] in their . . . fury killed each other, several dead Indians being found killed by arrows.” Waterman’s Arapaho friend Left Hand mistakenly lanced a young Lakota warrior to death. Kate Bighead’s teenage cousin Noisy Walking was mortally wounded by a Lakota. Yet another Lakota killed the Cheyenne chief Lame White Man, perhaps because his new soldier’s coat fooled the warrior into thinking he was an Arikara scout.

  Yellow Nose watched as two mounted warriors smashed into each other. “Both fell down and rolled,” he told an interpreter, “and he nearly ran into them himself.” Wooden Leg saw a warrior stagger, fall, then woozily rise to a stand. When the cloud of smoke and dust parted slightly, he realized that the warrior’s entire lower jaw had been shot away. Wooden Leg turned and vomited into a nearby clump of sagebrush.

  There was at least one warrior who found the terrible chaos of that day to his liking. White Bull enjoyed a good-natured rivalry with Crazy Horse, and he later claimed that his bravery run had been what had inspired the Oglala warrior to cut the Right Wing in half. Whatever the case may be, White Bull plunged into the resultant pandemonium with a will. He accumulated seven coups that day, but his most memorable encounter occurred on the west side of Battle Ridge soon after his horse was shot out from underneath him. Ahead was a soldier with his carbine raised. Unlike so many troopers that day, this soldier wanted to fight. When White Bull charged at him, the trooper threw aside his weapon and wrestled White Bull to the ground.

  The Lakota warrior soon found himself in the midst of a death struggle. The soldier tried to rip the rifle out of his hands, and when that didn’t work, punched White Bull in the face and shoulders, then grabbing him by his braids, pulled his face toward him, and attempted to bite off his nose. “Hey, hey, come over and help me!” White Bull cried out to the other warriors. But when Crow Boy and Bear Lice began punching and kicking, it was White Bull who received most of the abuse. In desperation, he screamed into the trooper’s face at the top of his lungs. When the trooper’s grip relaxed, White Bull pulled out his revolver and finally managed to pistol whip the soldier to death.

  “It was a glorious battle,” he recalled. “I enjoyed it.”

  As the Right Wing collapsed, the surviving soldiers attempted to make their way north along the narrow ridge toward Custer and the Left Wing. “The men on horses did not stop to fight,” Foolish Elk remembered, “but went ahead as fast as they could go. The men on foot, however, were shooting as they passed along.” Of the approximately 115 troopers of Keogh’s Right Wing, only about 20 made it to Custer and the Left Wing.

  At the northern extreme of Battle Ridge was a flat-topped hill. Here Custer, his staff, and Yates’s F Company welcomed the refugees from the Right Wing. To their north, the soldiers of Smith’s E Company remained deployed in a skirmish line. All around these two groups of soldiers the ever-growing sea of Indians was moving in, “swirling,” Two Moons remembered, “like water round a stone.”

  Two miles away, on the flats beside the low hills to the west of the river, Sitting Bull watched with the women and children. One Bull remembered that his uncle was dressed in buckskin, with a shirt decorated with green quillwork. Instead of a war bonnet, he wore a single feather and was without war paint.

  During the sun dance on the Rosebud, he had foreseen exactly what was happening now. The soldiers were, as he predicted, falling into their camp. Whereas Custer had frantically divided his regiment—first in an effort to surround a supposedly dispersing village, then in an increasingly desperate attempt to maintain the offensive by securing hostages—Sitting Bull had sought to consolidate his forces from the start. Rather than seek out the enemy (as the young warriors had forced him to do at the Rosebud Fight), his intention all along had been to let the soldiers come to him. In the face of Custer’s hyperactive need to do too much, it had proven a brilliant strategy.

  As a child, Sitting Bull had been known as “Slow” because of his unusually methodical manner. At the Battle of the Little Bighorn, this lifelong habit of carefully studying a situation before he acted had contributed to one of his people’s greatest victories.

  As the battle reached its terrible climax, the fighting moved north to the knoll where just the night before he and One Bull had appealed to Wakan Tanka. The hill was at the edge of a huge cloud of smoke and dust, similar to the one he had seen in his first vision of the soldiers. But instead of lightning, the immense and brooding cloud was filled with flashes from the muzzles of hundreds of blazing guns.

  Two Moons claimed that as Custer and the Left Wing assembled around what came to be known as Last Stand Hill, “not a shot was fired.” “They were,” he said, “making preparations.” Five or six dead horses were later found on the hill’s thirty-foot-wide plateau as part of an apparent attempt to provide the survivors with a barricade. Adjutant Cooke may have busied himself with scribbling several messages that were never delivered. Dr. George Lord, who had been so ill that morning that Custer had attempted to persuade him to let Dr. Porter go in his stead, probably tended to the wounded. Carbines and pistols were reloaded, and plans were made for the soldiers of E Company, who at some point abandoned their skirmish line to the north and temporarily reunited with the rest of the battalion, to make one last run for the river.

  The body of the troop’s commander, Lieutenant Algernon Smith, was later found on Last Stand Hill. This would suggest that he was either wounded or already dead before the company’s final charge toward the river. Two Moons spoke of a wounded officer dressed in buckskin seen staggering from the vicinity of E Company’s skirmish line toward Last Stand Hill. If this was Lieutenant Smith, leadership of the Gray Horse Troop then went to Smith’s second lieutenant, James Sturgis, son of the Seventh Cavalry’s putative commander, Colonel Samuel Sturgis. At twenty-two, Lieutenant Sturgis was the youngest officer in the regiment. His father and Custer had always had a prickly relationship, and the young lieutenant was now about to lead his company in Custer’s final attempt to break through to the Little Bighorn. Custer appears to have given Sturgis the assistance of the interpreter and scout Mitch Boyer.

  When the fighting resumed, it was, once again, at long range. Kate Bighead was watching from the sidelines along with a large audience of old
men and boys and could see that the warriors were following the same stratagem that had proven so successful against the Right Wing. There were, Kate remembered, “hundreds of warriors for every white soldier left alive,” and the Indians were “creeping closer and closer.”

  Suddenly, a large number of riderless horses, most of them grays, bolted from the hill. “They are gone!” the Indians shouted. It seems to have been an attempt on the soldiers’ part at a diversion. As the warriors scrambled to catch the horses, about forty troopers, most of them on foot, bounded down from the hill and charged for the river. Once again the warriors cried out, “They are gone!”

  “When this band of soldiers charged,” Red Horse remembered, “the Sioux fell back and the Sioux and the soldiers stood . . . facing each other.” But not for long. “Then all the Sioux became brave and charged the soldiers.” One of the warriors was Iron Hawk, who drew back his bow and shot an arrow through a soldier’s rib cage. “I heard him scream,” he remembered. Soon Iron Hawk was on top of another soldier and pounding him over the head with his wooden bow. “I was very mad,” he told an interpreter, “because the women and children had run away scared and I was thinking about this when I did this killing.”

  It’s about three-quarters of a mile from Last Stand Hill to the river, and those soldiers who hadn’t already been killed realized they’d never make it to the Little Bighorn. So they swerved to the left toward a steep-sided gulch known as Deep Ravine. Close to thirty of them dove into this dark and bushy cleft in the ground only to be shot with rifles and arrows and battered to death with stone clubs. Two days later, the walls of the ravine were still etched by the soldiers’ frantic attempts to climb out; a year later, Lieutenant John Bourke looked down into this grassy pocket and saw seven skulls, four of them clustered together like eggs in a nest.

  After the fire of 1983, archaeologists discovered some facial bones near Deep Ravine. The bones were later determined to be from a man in his midthirties whose teeth displayed the wear pattern of a pipe smoker. Since it was also established that the man was of French-Lakota ancestry, this could only have been Mitch Boyer.