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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Boyer had been philosophical about his chances of surviving the campaign. Even if he was destined to die, he said, he could take consolation in knowing that he’d already killed so many Lakota that they could never even the score. Apparently, not even Boyer had anticipated this terrible a result. After the Battle of the Little Bighorn, his debt in Lakota lives had been paid in full.

  Lieutenant Sturgis’s body was never officially identified. Several decapitated corpses were found near the river at the mouth of Deep Ravine, and one soldier later claimed he recognized Sturgis’s scorched head along with several others in a Lakota fire pit. Out of respect for Sturgis’s mother, who visited the battlefield several years later, a grave marker was placed in the vicinity of Last Stand Hill. The possibility exists, however, that the young lieutenant came as close as anyone in the Gray Horse Troop to reaching Sitting Bull’s village.

  Back on Last Stand Hill, the relentless rifle and bow-and-arrow fire had winnowed the washichus to only a handful. By this point Custer may already have suffered his first of two gunshot wounds—a bullet just below the heart. The blast would have knocked him to the ground but not necessarily killed him. Alive but mortally wounded, America’s most famous Indian fighter could no longer fight.

  That evening on Last Stand Hill, as he lay on the ground with a gunshot wound to the chest, it may have been his brother Tom who came to his aid. Two days later the brothers were found within fifteen feet of each other, and the possibility exists that rather than see his wounded brother tortured to death, Tom shot Custer through the head. Whatever the case may be, Custer’s second bullet wound was through the left temple.

  Captain Yates and most of his Bandbox Troop were also found in the vicinity of Last Stand Hill, as was Custer’s adjutant, William Cooke. Tom Custer appears to have been one of the last to die. If the intense mutilation inflicted on Tom’s body is any indication, he fought with an unmatched fury, and it may have been the Cheyenne Yellow Nose who killed him.

  By this late stage in the battle, Yellow Nose had lost his rifle. He was fighting with the old saber he’d been given by a Shoshone boy who, like him, had grown up as a captive among the Cheyenne. One of the soldiers in the final group was “so striking and gallant” that Yellow Nose decided that “to kill him would be a feat of more than ordinary prowess.” Already the soldier had fired at him at such close range that Yellow Nose’s face was scorched with black powder and his eyes were awash in blood.

  Once again Yellow Nose charged, and this time, the soldier’s revolver was out of bullets. The soldier was dressed in a buckskin jacket and had a red and yellow bandanna around his neck. There were tears in the soldier’s eyes, Yellow Nose remembered, “but no sign of fear.” The Cheyenne walloped the soldier on the back of his head with the broad side of the sword’s blade and he sank to the ground. When Tom’s body was discovered two days later, his skull had been pounded to the thickness of a man’s hand. If not for the tattoo marks on his arm, his eviscerated body would never have been identified.

  Tom may have been attempting to occupy the warriors’ attention as two family members, his brother Boston and his nephew Autie Reed, fled toward the river. Boston’s and Autie’s bodies were later found a hundred yards to the west of Last Stand Hill, and the two relatives may have held out hope of joining the soldiers still fighting for their lives in Deep Ravine.

  Eight years before, during the weeks prior to the Washita campaign, Custer had written Libbie asking whether she might consider adopting Autie, who was then ten years old. Nothing had come of it, but now the nephew who might have become the son Custer never had lay dead beside Custer’s brother Boston.

  Almost all Native accounts of the battle claim that there was one soldier who almost escaped. The details vary but the essential story is this: A soldier on a powerful horse suddenly bolts from the hill and miraculously breaks through the Indians and makes for open ground. Several warriors take off in pursuit, but the soldier’s horse is strong, and it begins to look as if he might actually get away. Then, just as the Indians give up the chase, the soldier pulls out his pistol and shoots himself in the head.

  The identity of this soldier will never be definitively known. However, some recent forensic analysis of a skull found in a remote portion of the battlefield offers evidence that the lone rider may have been Lieutenant Henry Harrington, the commander of C Company. If this is true, Harrington, who would have led the first charge from Calhoun Hill toward Greasy Grass Ridge and who may have been the officer several warriors heralded as “the bravest man,” had survived several overwhelming warrior onslaughts only to die, possibly by his own hand, at the very end of the battle.

  Once the soldiers’ fire had dwindled to nothing, a warrior cried out, “All of the white men are dead.” This unleashed a mad scramble for the hilltop. “The air was full of dust and smoke . . . ,” Wooden Leg remembered. “It looked like thousands of dogs might look if all of them were mixed together in a fight.”

  Instead of fighting the soldiers, the warriors were fighting with one another over plunder. “There was lots of fussing and quarreling . . . over the horses and guns that were captured,” Brave Bear remembered. “Indians were saying to each other: ‘I got some tobacco.’ ‘I got coffee.’ ‘I got two horses.’ ‘I got a soldier saddle.’ ‘I got a good gun.’ ”

  As the warriors fought over plunder, the women, many of whom had lost loved ones that day, took a leading role in mutilating the dead. “The women used sheath-knives and hatchets,” remembered Wooden Leg, who used his own knife to scalp one of Lieutenant Cooke’s shaggy sideburns.

  Twelve years before, a village of 125 lodges of Cheyenne and Arapaho had been attacked by 675 soldiers under the command of Colonel John Chivington. Chivington’s soldiers had mercilessly killed and mutilated the women and children and later displayed their lurid trophies of war at a parade in Denver. For the Native women who’d survived what was known as the Battle of Sand Creek, the mutilation of Custer’s troops provided at least a modicum of revenge.

  In Sitting Bull’s sun dance vision of the falling soldiers, a voice had announced that the Lakota and Cheyenne must not touch the bodies of their enemies or take the spoils. As the smoke and dust cloud over the battlefield thinned in the northerly breeze, Sitting Bull could see that the warriors were ignoring the pronouncement. “The dead soldiers were quite plain,” remembered the Brulé woman Julia Face, who was also watching from a distance, “as the Indians would strip them and their skins would shine in the sunlight.”

  Ever since he’d been named the leader of the northern Lakota, Sitting Bull had instructed his people to have as little to do with the washichus as possible. To become dependent on the white man’s material goods was to abandon their old ways without any alternative prospect for the future.

  Sitting Bull, One Bull claimed, insisted that the Hunkpapa stay away from the dead on Last Stand Hill. One Bull also said his uncle predicted that for failure to comply with the wishes of the Great Spirit Wakan Tanka, the Lakota would forever “covet white people’s belongings” and ultimately “starve at [the] white man’s door.” This victory, great as it was, had simply been the prelude to a crushing and irresistible defeat.

  The Cheyenne had recognized what Custer was up to in his final push to the north. Just as he’d done at the Washita, he was trying to secure female captives. Beaver Heart told John Stands in Timber that when the Crow scouts warned Custer about the size of the encampment, he laughed and said, “When we get to the village I’m going to find the Sioux girl with the most elk teeth on her dress and take her along with me.” Beaver Heart joked that after identifying the ford to the north, Custer spent the subsequent twenty-minute pause scanning the group of noncombatants on the other side of the river for just such a girl.

  In the story of the White Buffalo Calf Woman, the Lakota told of the young man whose lustful thoughts unleashed a dark and enveloping cloud that reduced him to a gleaming skeleton. Custer had also succumbed to the perils of ruinous temptat
ion. Whether it was the Cheyenne captive Monahsetah, military glory, or gold in the Black Hills, Custer had been, like the country he represented, unabashed in his greed.

  Kate Bighead claimed that after the battle, two southern Cheyenne women recognized Custer. Since they knew the white general was still beloved by their relative Monahsetah, they told the Lakota warriors not to mutilate the body. But this did not prevent the two women from performing mutilations of their own. Custer, they knew, had ignored his earlier promise never to attack their tribe. So they took out an awl and pierced his eardrums so that he might hear better in the afterlife.

  Yet another mutilation, it turns out, was performed that day, a mutilation that was revealed only recently when an interview with Custer’s former lieutenant Edward Godfrey came to light. Out of respect for his widow, the soldiers who viewed Custer’s remains had neglected to mention that an arrow had been jammed up the general’s penis.

  Two and a half days after the battle, a detail of troopers buried Custer and his brother Tom in the same grave. To protect the bodies from predators, the troopers placed the basket from an Indian travois over them and held it down with rocks. A year later, a party led by General Sheridan’s brother Michael traveled to the battlefield to retrieve the officers’ bodies. They discovered that coyotes had managed to get at the grave of the Custer brothers and spread their bones across the grassy hill.

  CHAPTER 16

  The River of Nightmares

  By the evening of June 28, three days after the defeat of Custer’s command and a day and a half after General Terry’s reinforcements had joined Reno, the dead had all been buried by the survivors of the Seventh. There appears to have been no thought on Terry’s part of pursuing Sitting Bull. Even though there were only a few hours left before dark, he decided it was time they start down the Little Bighorn toward their rendezvous with the Far West.

  Many of the fifty or so of Reno’s wounded were carried in stretchers, but not Peter Thompson. Stubborn as always, he insisted on riding a horse. But after only a few minutes in the saddle, he was already regretting the decision. Overcome with nausea, he laid his head down on his horse’s neck and, grasping the mane, held on for dear life. Finally, around midnight, Terry ordered the column to halt. “Glad . . . I was when we moved into camp,” Thompson remembered.

  Lugging the wounded by hand had proven both exhausting and unbearably slow. It had taken them six hours to travel just four and a half miles. Terry decided they must construct horse-drawn litters similar to the Indians’ travois if they were to have any hope of covering the twenty miles to the Bighorn in the next few days.

  They had plenty of tepee poles from the abandoned village, but they needed a supply of rawhide to knit the poles together. Dozens of dead horses still lay scattered across the battleground, but after three days in the sun, the animals’ bodies were badly decomposed. There were, however, quite a few wounded horses and mules still lingering about the encampment. According to a surgeon with Gibbon’s Montana Column, the soldiers executed many of the animals and stripped off their skin to make rawhide thongs for the litters.

  There was at least one injured horse that the soldiers refused to kill. Despite having been hit by seven different bullets and arrows, including the gunshot blast that shattered his master’s leg, Comanche, the fourteen-year-old bay gelding ridden by Captain Myles Keogh, was kept alive. He was found, Private Jacob Adams of H Company said, sitting on his haunches near Battle Ridge, “the only living thing,” it was later claimed, near Last Stand Hill. Comanche whinnied when Adams and the other soldiers approached, and once they’d dismounted and carefully helped the wounded animal to a stand, he began eating grass. The next day he was strong enough to follow the column in its slow march down the river.

  At 6 p.m. on June 29, the column resumed its march. The soldiers had proceeded just a short way with their newly constructed travois when two mounted couriers appeared on a bluff. The messengers had good news. The Far West was waiting for them at the mouth of the Little Bighorn.

  Grant Marsh, the master and pilot of the Far West, first learned of the Custer tragedy from the Crow scout Curley, who appeared on the riverbank not long after the steamboat’s arrival at the confluence of the Bighorn and Little Bighorn. Up until that point, Marsh and his compatriots had heard nothing about the battle, and they were eager for news about Custer’s much-anticipated victory.

  Once on deck, Curley collapsed onto a chest and began to rock back and forth, weeping and moaning. Try as he might, Marsh was unable to penetrate the Indian’s bewildering outpouring of fear and sorrow. Eventually, however, Curley accepted a pencil and a piece of paper.

  He lay down on the deck and began to draw. As the others looked on, he drew two circles, one inside the other. In the space between the inner and outer circles, he began to make dot after furious dot, each time shouting out in despair, “Sioux! Sioux!”

  Once he had entirely filled the space with dots, he turned his attention to the inner circle, which he once again began to cover with dots, this time shouting, “Absaroka! Absaroka!”

  Marsh had heard a Crow use that word before and suspected it meant “soldiers.” In actuality, Absaroka meant “Crow,” and Curley was attempting to reaffirm that he was a regimental scout. Curley jumped to his feet and began to slam his hands against his chest while making a weird and disturbing sound: “Poof! Poof! Poof!”

  It soon began to dawn on Marsh and the others that Curley was imitating the sounds of gunfire. With the help of pantomime and pencil and paper, he was telling them what he had seen a few days before from a hillside beside the Little Bighorn: the slaughter of Custer and his entire battalion.

  On the morning of June 29, Marsh received orders from General Terry to prepare his vessel for the arrival of more than fifty wounded men. He immediately set to work transforming the Far West into a hospital ship. As some of his crew cleared away the provisions and equipment from the aft portion of the lower deck, others began harvesting grass from the marshlands near the Little Bighorn. By evening, an approximately eighty-foot section of the lower deck had been covered with a foot-and-a-half-thick blanket of fresh green grass. When topped by tarpaulins from the quartermaster’s stores, the lower deck became what Marsh described as “an immense mattress.” Chests of medicine and medical supplies were distributed along the edges of the carpeted deck, making it, a doctor aboard the Far West proclaimed, “the best field hospital he had ever seen.”

  Around midnight Marsh learned that the column was within three miles of the river mouth. It was a wet, cloudy night and the difficult terrain made it impossible for the soldiers to continue in the darkness. Already one of the mules had fallen into a ravine and pitched Private Madden, whose bullet-shattered leg had been amputated by Dr. Porter, into a bed of cactus. Without some assistance, the wounded would have to wait in the rain till daylight.

  In order to help the column find its way, Marsh directed his men to begin building a series of fires along the banks of the Little Bighorn. The troopers resumed the march, and by 2 a.m. the head of the column, “looming weirdly through the darkness in the flickering firelight,” had reached the riverboat. By dawn, fifty-two wounded men had been delivered to the hospital on the lower deck. Behind them, in the space between the Far West’s two rudders, Marsh created a stall for Comanche, and “his care and welfare became the special duty of the whole boat’s company.”

  By the morning of June 30, Marsh had prepared his vessel for the more than thirty-mile voyage down the Bighorn to the column’s base camp on the north side of the Yellowstone. Stacks of four-foot-long cordwood and sacks of grain had been positioned along the gunwales of the lower deck to protect the wounded from possible Indian attack. The thin walls of the pilot house had been armored with plates of boiler iron. All was in readiness, but before they began down the river, General Terry wanted to speak to the master of the Far West.

  As soon as Marsh reported to Terry’s cabin, the general closed the door. Terry’s long, solemn
face was even more somber than usual. “Captain,” he said, “you have on board the most precious cargo a boat ever carried. Every soldier here who is suffering with wounds is the victim of a terrible blunder; a sad and terrible blunder.” Marsh had never seen Terry so deeply moved. “With equal feeling,” Marsh’s biographer Joseph Hanson wrote, “Marsh assured him that he would use his best efforts to complete the journey successfully.”

  But when he entered the pilothouse and grabbed the steering wheel, the normally unflappable Marsh experienced a sudden loss of confidence: “The thought that all their lives were depending on his skill alone, the sense of his fearful responsibility, flashed upon him and for a moment overwhelmed him.”

  There was no doubt that Marsh had an extraordinary challenge ahead of him. When the current was behind a steamboat, steerage often became a problem, especially on a river as fast flowing and narrow as the Bighorn. During their voyage up the river, a series of misunderstandings had caused them to steam past the mouth of the Little Bighorn, and it wasn’t until they’d ventured fifteen additional miles up the Bighorn that they’d realized their mistake and headed back down for the rendezvous point. Several times during that fifteen-mile run Marsh had temporarily lost control of the Far West, and the 190-foot vessel had been swept stern-first down the river in what Sergeant James Wilson described as “a whirling, revolving manner.” This was disconcerting to say the least, especially when the boat’s bow smashed into a large cottonwood tree, but Marsh had experienced these kinds of challenges before. What he hadn’t experienced before was General Terry’s almost preternatural ability to project his own insecurities onto the psyche of a subordinate. Just as Custer had emerged from his final meeting with Terry uncharacteristically hesitant and depressed, so had Marsh been unnerved by the general’s attempts to inspire him.