The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (25 page)

Eight years earlier, in 1868, the Catholic priest Father Pierre-Jean DeSmet had ridden all the way from Fort Rice on the Missouri River to the confluence of the Powder and Yellowstone rivers to meet with the Hunkpapa. He had come unarmed, and rising from the bed of his wagon had been a giant flag decorated with a picture of the Virgin Mary. He spoke with several Hunkpapa leaders, including Sitting Bull (who eight years later still wore the crucifix DeSmet had given him), about ending the conflict with the whites. Soon after, Gall traveled to Fort Rice and signed the treaty that established the Great Sioux Reservation.

On the morning of June 25, many of the Lakota gathered in Sitting Bull’s village were hoping for a peaceful resolution to their current difficulties with the washichus. Years later, several Indians told the cavalryman Hugh Scott that “if Custer had come close and asked for a council instead of attack he could have led them all into the agency without a fight.”

As crier of the Silent Eaters, Crawler knew the thoughts of Sitting Bull and his circle of advisers, and when he saw the cloud of dust rising into the sky that morning, he wondered whether this could be a repeat of DeSmet’s peace mission of 1868. “We thought they were Holy Men,” he remembered. But as Crawler and his young son quickly discovered, these were not men of God.

T
he second group of Lakota approaching the divide that morning was led by an Oglala named Black Bear. Black Bear lived at the Red Cloud Agency, and earlier that spring someone had stolen his horses. When he realized that they’d been taken by some Indians on their way to Sitting Bull, he put together a small party and headed out to the hostile camp to retrieve what was his. He’d finally succeeded in finding his horses, and on the morning of June 25 he was headed back to the agency along with six men and one woman. Like Kill Eagle’s band of Blackfeet, who were still being detained at the village against their will by the Hunkpapa police, Black Bear appears to have resented Sitting Bull’s strong-arm tactics and was relieved to be on his way back to the reservation.

Black Bear and his companions were riding along the ridge in single file when they stumbled upon the approaching column. “We ran into the high hills and watched them,” he remembered, “holding bunches of grass in front of our heads as a disguise.” While concealed behind the grass, they were approached by yet another group of Indians—a party of Cheyenne under the noted chief Little Wolf. Little Wolf’s band, which was on its way to Sitting Bull’s village, had seen the soldiers the night before on the Rosebud; in fact, earlier that morning three of the Cheyenne had come across a box of hardtack that had spilled from a pack mule. They’d been trying to open the container when some soldiers had appeared and shot at them. The Cheyenne would continue to follow the soldiers all the way to the village. Black Bear, on the other hand, had no intention of turning back. “We did not go to warn the village,” he later remembered. “As we were not hostiles we continued on toward the agency.”

As it turned out, both Black Bear’s band and Crawler and his son Deeds had been under close observation as they approached the divide. From their perch at the Crow’s Nest, Varnum and the scouts had watched in mounting alarm as the two groups of Lakota made their seemingly inevitable way toward the regiment. Varnum and Charley Reynolds had even set out to kill Crawler and his son but had been called back when the Crow scouts mistakenly thought the two hostiles had changed direction. Once back on the Crow’s Nest, Varnum had watched Black Bear’s party riding along the ridge, their horses backlit by the morning sun and looking “as large as elephants.”

By the time Custer arrived at the Crow’s Nest, the two groups of Lakota had vanished. The regiment, Varnum and the Crow scouts knew, had been seen. Varnum told of these most recent and potentially devastating developments as Custer stared out into the distance through his field glasses. Custer refused to believe that the regiment had been discovered. According to Red Star, he even got into an argument with the Crow scouts, who insisted that, having lost the crucial element of surprise, he must attack at once. “This camp has not seen us . . . ,” Custer stubbornly maintained. “I want to wait until it is dark and then we will march, we will place our army around the Sioux camp.”

There was yet another potential problem with Custer’s plan. If the village was really as big as the scouts seemed to think it was, there was no way a regiment of just 650 soldiers and scouts could effectively encircle it. As General Crook had noted after the Battle of the Rosebud, “It is rather difficult to surround three Indians with one soldier!”

Custer might boast that his regiment could defeat all the Indians on the plains, but in his heart of hearts he knew better. At the Washita, there had been, in essence, several villages strung out along the river. By happening upon Black Kettle’s small and isolated camp, he’d been able to secure the captives that had made his ultimate victory—not to mention survival—possible. There is evidence that as he looked out from the Crow’s Nest that morning, Custer was looking for hopeful indications that between them and the unseen mass of Indians on the Little Bighorn was a smaller, more manageable camp on the order of Black Kettle’s.

About eleven miles away were two tepees, one flattened, the other standing. Were these part of a smaller, intermediary village? The problem was that Custer couldn’t see well enough through his field glasses to tell for sure. In the hours since the Crows had first glimpsed the giant pony herd, a haze had filled the valley as the temperature steadily climbed with the sun.

Unlike modern binoculars, which use mirrors to increase magnification to somewhere between 7 and 10 power, standard army field glasses in 1876 relied on straight-through optics and achieved a magnification of just 2.5 to 4 power. The Crow scouts had a small spyglass, but this, too, proved of little help to Custer in deciphering the supposed pony herd or, for that matter, the far closer cluster of tepees.

In the early days of the Civil War, Custer had experienced a new and exciting innovation in military surveillance: the hot-air balloon. As an “aeronaut” aboard a balloon named
Constitution
he had enjoyed a truly panoramic view of the York and James rivers and had been one of the first to realize, at least according to his own account, that the Confederates were evacuating Yorktown. The possibility of a Native evacuation was what he feared more than anything else as he looked out from this peak in the Wolf Mountains. He urgently needed, if not a balloon, a decent pair of binoculars.

Custer sat on the rocky outcropping, staring for several long and unsatisfactory minutes into the distance. “I have got mighty good eyes,” he finally said to Mitch Boyer, the Crow interpreter and scout, “and I can see no Indians.”

“If you can’t find more Indians in that valley than you ever saw together before,” Boyer replied, “you can hang me.”

Custer leapt to his feet. “It would do a damn sight of good to hang you, wouldn’t it?” It was only the second time in four years that Varnum had heard his commander swear.

They started back down the eastern side of the divide toward the regiment, which Custer assumed was still hidden in the ravine almost two miles away. They were about a half mile from the ravine when they saw the column marching toward them. “Confound it!” Gerard overheard Custer mutter to himself. “Who moved out that command?”

Soon after, they were met by Custer’s brother. “Tom,” Custer snapped, “who moved out the command?”

Tom wasn’t sure. “Orders came for us to march,” he said lamely, “and we marched.”

Custer called his officers together and told them about his inability to see the large village. He, for one, was beginning to think that the scouts had never really seen it either. About this time, Lieutenant Cooke learned that Charles DeRudio had a pair of Austrian binoculars that were much more powerful than the army-issue field glasses. After some prodding from Cooke, DeRudio agreed to lend them to Custer. As the column continued on toward the divide, Custer, the binoculars in hand, rode Dandy back up to the ridgeline for another look into the valley below.

W
hen Custer returned to the column, which had advanced to within a half mile of the divide, he no longer doubted that there were large numbers of Indians in the valley. With the help of DeRudio’s glasses, he’d seen the distant “cloudlike objects” that the scouts had said were the pony herds. But he also appears to have seen something else: a much smaller, and closer, Indian village.

Private Daniel Newell overheard Custer telling his company commander, Captain Thomas French, that the village contained only “ten or twelve tepees.” It was too late, of course, for a dawn attack, but he still held out hopes for a positive result. Just as the seizure of Black Kettle’s village had made possible his success at the Battle of the Washita, so might this even smaller village assure him another victory. “It will be all over in a couple of hours,” Custer told French.

Tom approached with some bad news, this time from Captain Keogh. Sergeant William Curtiss had inadvertently left behind a bag of his personal belongings during the regiment’s hasty departure after breakfast. He’d returned to the bivouac site with a small detail of men and discovered the three Cheyenne from Little Wolf’s band trying to open a box of hardtack with a tomahawk. “I knew well enough that they had scouts ahead of us,” Charley Reynolds said, “but I didn’t think that others would be trailing along to pick up stuff dropped by our careless packers.” Custer could no longer cling to the hope that the regiment had escaped detection. They must attack as soon as possible.

In addition to the six Crows, Colonel Gibbon had given Custer a white scout named George Herendeen. An experienced frontiersman who had fought the Lakota several times in the last two years, Herendeen was to act as a messenger between Custer and Terry. Stretching to the northwest from the Wolf Mountains was a tributary called Tullock’s Creek. According to Terry’s orders, Herendeen was to scout the creek and then report to Gibbon’s column, which should be starting up the Bighorn River about now, and tell them whether or not there were any Indians in this portion of the country.

Soon after Tom informed Custer about the Indians and the hardtack box, Herendeen asked if it was time for him to head down Tullock’s Creek, now visible from the divide. “Rather impatiently,” Herendeen remembered, Custer told him, “[T]here are no Indians in that direction—they are all in our front, and besides they have discovered us. . . . The only thing to do is to push ahead and attack the camp as soon as possible.” Herendeen had to agree with Custer’s logic—“there was really no use in scouting Tullock’s [Creek].” But as both of them knew, Gibbon and especially Terry were expecting some kind of word from Custer.

Now that Custer had violated his written orders by venturing away from the Rosebud, he apparently felt that the less Terry and Gibbon knew about his whereabouts, the better. “Custer wished to fight the Indians with the Seventh alone,” Herendeen remembered, “and he was clearly making every effort to do this.”

Custer ordered his bugler, the twenty-three-year-old Italian immigrant Giovanni Martini (known to the regiment as John Martin), to sound officer’s call. It was the first trumpet call in two days. By midday on June 25, there was no longer any need for silence.

A
s if to insist that the tension of the last few hours had failed to trouble him, Custer was lying casually on the grass as the officers gathered around him. He began by recounting Keogh’s report about the Indians finding the lost hardtack box as well as the two other instances in which Lakota scouts had been seen. He had hoped to postpone the attack till the next morning, “but our discovery,” Godfrey wrote, “made it imperative to act at once, as delay would allow the village to scatter and escape.” The other possibility was that the Indians might choose to attack them. In that case, Custer said, “I would rather attack than be attacked.”

Custer ended the meeting by ordering each company commander to detail one noncommissioned officer and six men to the pack train. The commanders were also to inspect their troops and report to him as soon as all was ready. “The troops would take their places in the column of march,” he announced, “in the order in which reports of readiness were received.”

The last officer Custer expected to hear from first was Frederick Benteen. The night before on the Rosebud, Benteen had been so slow getting his boots back on that he hadn’t even made it to officer’s call. But Benteen, who knew that the first troop in the column was the most likely to see action, had a trick up his sleeve. As it so happened, his men were positioned next to where Custer had convened the meeting. He had no more than started back to his company when, after a nod from his second-in-command, Lieutenant Francis Gibson, he about-faced and reported to Custer’s adjutant, Lieutenant Cooke, that H Company was ready.

Ever since their last night on the Yellowstone, when he had complained about Custer’s lack of support at the Battle of the Washita, Benteen had done his best to antagonize his commander. And now, as the regiment prepared to march into the valley of the Little Bighorn, he’d managed to place himself exactly where Custer did not want him to be.

Obviously taken aback, Custer stammered, “Colonel Benteen, you have the advance, sir.”

CHAPTER 9