The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (27 page)

Behind the site of the abandoned village was a bluff where Mitch Boyer and several of the Crows were taking turns peering at the valley through a telescope. As the scouts studied the valley, the interpreter Fred Gerard galloped to the top of a nearby knoll on his big black stallion.

Gerard was an interpreter with a chip on his shoulder. He was, at least to his own mind, a man of immense experience. He’d been in Indian country now for close to thirty years and was the only white man in the command who could claim to have met Sitting Bull. That winter, while Custer was in New York, Major Reno had dismissed Gerard for stealing from the government. On his return in the spring, Custer had promptly reinstated the interpreter, but Gerard still felt he had something to prove. Even though this campaign marked his first military experience on the plains, he’d taken it upon himself to advise both Custer and General Terry about what they could expect in the days ahead. Custer appears to have grown increasingly annoyed by the interpreter’s assumption that he was indispensable. Just a few hours before, when Gerard had insisted on joining officer’s call, Custer had stared icily at him and said, “Go where you belong, and stay there.”

Ever since leaving the divide, Gerard had chosen to accompany Custer instead of riding with the Arikara. This meant that the scouts were left without anyone to tell them what Lieutenant Varnum wanted them to do. In the ensuing confusion, they had abandoned Varnum and his orderly, who were well to the left of Sun Dance Creek, and ridden over to investigate what has come to be called the Lone Tepee, where they had enjoyed some of the meat and soup left for the dead warrior’s journey into the afterlife. When Gerard finally arrived at the Lone Tepee, the Arikara One Feather was fuming. “I scolded Gerard for not staying with us . . . to give us the orders,” he remembered.

But Gerard, whom the Arikara called “Fast Bull,” had decided he had more important things to do than interpret. Instead of stopping to speak with his charges, he rode his big black horse to the top of a knoll overlooking the Lone Tepee. There he saw what the Crow scouts had been observing for some time now: billowing clouds of dust rolling up the Little Bighorn Valley in the northerly breeze. Gerard turned his horse sideways and waving his hat in his hand shouted out to Custer, “Here are your Indians, running like devils!”

A
s his actions at the last officer’s call indicated, Custer knew better than to trust the grandstanding Gerard. In this instance, however, the interpreter had found a way to make his commander finally pay attention. Waving his hat as if he were Buffalo Bill Cody, Gerard had played directly to Custer’s worst fears. Not only had the relatively small village at the Lone Tepee disbanded; the much larger encampment on the Little Bighorn was, at least according to Gerard, also on the run.

Custer immediately began to rethink his strategy. If the village was rapidly disintegrating into fragments, its great size was no longer a concern. What mattered now was capturing as many of the fleeing Indians as possible. As it turned out, Benteen’s battalion to the left was well positioned to meet any Indians that might try to escape up the Little Bighorn to the southeast; Custer must now get himself and Reno down into the valley to the west and attack whatever Indians were left at the original encampment site, still hidden from view by an exasperating bluff. At the very least, they could drive the fleeing village down the valley toward the Montana Column to the north. According to the schedule outlined aboard the
Far West,
Terry and Gibbon should be arriving soon at the mouth of the Little Bighorn.

By now, Reno’s battalion, which had been left behind during Custer’s final sprint to the Lone Tepee, was just arriving on the left side of the creek. Custer motioned to his second-in-command with his hat. Reno crossed the creek to receive his orders, delivered to him by Adjutant Cooke. Half a dozen people later claimed to have heard Custer’s orders, and as a consequence there are half a dozen versions of what the adjutant said. This is the gist: “Mr. Gerard reports the Indians are two and a half miles ahead and running. Move forward at as fast a gait as you think prudent and charge as soon as you find them, and we will support you with the whole outfit.” Except for telling Reno to take the Indian scouts along with him, that was it.

The major turned to go with his three troops down the left bank of Sun Dance Creek. But there was a problem with the Arikara scouts. Instead of galloping ahead of Reno’s battalion, they remained clustered behind Custer and his staff. Custer turned to Gerard and told him to tell the scouts, “You have disobeyed me. Move to one side and let the soldiers pass you in the charge. If any man of you is not brave, I will take away his weapons and make a woman of him.” All of the Arikara knew what the real problem was. Gerard had been too busy pretending he was a member of Custer’s inner circle to explain to them what they were supposed to do. One of the scouts turned to the interpreter: “Tell him if he does the same to all his white soldiers, who are not so brave as we are, it will take him a long time indeed.” The scouts laughed and to assure the general of their bravery indicated in sign language that they were “hungry for battle.” Gerard later took credit for getting the Arikara back on track, but in actuality he was the cause of the problem in the first place.

Just prior to the departure of Reno’s battalion, Lieutenant Varnum arrived from scouting the left side of the creek. Still desperate for information, Custer asked him what he’d seen.

“I guess you could see about all I could see of the situation,” Varnum said.

“I don’t know,” Custer replied. “What did you see?”

“The whole valley in front is full of Indians.”

Custer knew that Varnum was exhausted. Over the course of the last twenty-four hours his scouting duties had required him to ride more than sixty miles, and he’d been without significant sleep for a day and a half. “Nothing but the excitement of going into action kept me in the saddle at all,” Varnum remembered. Custer told him that if he was up for it, he and Hare were both free to join the Arikara in the attack.

As Varnum prepared to gallop off, he turned to his good friend Lieutenant George Wallace. Wallace, the regiment’s topographical engineer, was in charge of keeping a record of the column’s daily movements and was riding next to Custer. The tall, skeletal Wallace, known as Nick to his friends, had been Varnum’s roommate at West Point; he’d also been the officer who three nights earlier had feared that Custer was doomed to die. “Come on, Nick, with the fighting men,” Varnum quipped. “Don’t stay back with the coffee coolers.”

Custer laughed and shook his fist at Varnum, then indicated to Wallace that he was free to go. As Varnum and now Wallace spurred their horses to catch up with Reno and the Arikara, Custer pulled off his hat and waved good-bye. “That was the last time either of us saw him alive,” Varnum later remembered.

R
eno and his battalion were not alone as they thundered down the left bank of Sun Dance Creek toward the Little Bighorn. Galloping beside him were Custer’s adjutant, William Cooke, and the senior officer in Custer’s battalion, Captain Myles Keogh. Cooke rode a horse so pale it was almost completely white. Despite his falling-out with Frederick Benteen, he was known for his charismatic charm and winning manner. “[H]is very breath [was] nothing but kindness,” the Arikara scout Soldier claimed. As Reno approached the eastern bank of the Little Bighorn, Cooke called out to him in what Reno later remembered as “his laughing, smiling way”: “We are all going with the advance and Myles Keogh is coming, too.” But as Reno’s horse jumped into the cool, fast-flowing waters of the Little Bighorn and paused to drink, Reno lost track of Custer’s adjutant and never saw him again.

L
ieutenant Charles DeRudio, the former European revolutionary and friend to Frederick Benteen, had a reputation as one of the poorest horsemen in the regiment’s officer corps; he was also unhappy with his current assignment. By all rights, he should have been the commander of the Gray Horse Troop, Company E. Instead, Custer (who had never returned DeRudio’s cherished field glasses) had given that plum position to Lieutenant Algernon Smith and placed DeRudio under the command of Captain Myles Moylan in A Company. Moylan had immediately made it clear he did not like the idiosyncratic officer, even refusing to share his meals with him.

A Company had been assigned to Reno’s battalion, and DeRudio was lagging well behind his troop when his horse, which always seemed slightly beyond his ability to control, plunged into the Little Bighorn. As it turned out, Major Reno was still in the middle of the river astride his horse. But the horse wasn’t the only one pausing for a drink. Reno was in the process of downing what appeared to be a considerable quantity of whiskey when the surge from DeRudio’s horse splashed the major with river water. “What are you trying to do?” Reno complained. “Drown me before I am killed?”

B
y the time Reno emerged from the river and made his way through the belt of brush and timber along the western bank, Fred Gerard was already on his way back. The Lakota up ahead were not behaving as he’d so melodramatically announced at the Lone Tepee. Instead of running away, they were “coming in large numbers to meet them.”

“Major,” Gerard said, “the Sioux are coming to give us battle.”

Earlier that year, Reno had unsuccessfully attempted to get Gerard fired. No matter how important the message might be, he refused to acknowledge the interpreter’s presence. He may also have begun to feel the effects of his recent slug of whiskey. He looked insensibly down the valley for a few seconds, then gave the order, “Forward, men!”

Having been so thoroughly rebuffed by Reno, Gerard felt he must inform Custer of this spectacular news himself. Once again, the Arikara scouts would have to do without the services of their interpreter.

Soon after recrossing the river, he came upon Adjutant Cooke on his way back to Custer’s battalion, which was concealed from view by a high grassy knoll.

“Well, Gerard,” Cooke said, “what is the matter now?”

“The Indians are coming to fight us, instead of running as we supposed.”

“All right,” Cooke responded, “you go back and I will report to General Custer.”

B
y the time Cooke returned with Gerard’s news, Custer had stopped at a small tributary to Sun Dance Creek to water the battalion’s horses. “Don’t let the horses drink too much,” Custer cautioned; “they have to travel a great deal today.” Soon a messenger from Reno arrived confirming the fact that instead of running, the Indians were coming up to meet Reno.

Custer was probably encouraged by the report that the Indians were advancing. In order to cover the retreat of the women, children, and old people, the village’s warriors typically engaged the enemy in a temporary rearguard action. Since it was just to provide their loved ones with enough time to escape, the warriors’ attack would not, in all probability, be especially fierce. However, if Reno could hold the Indians’ attention long enough, it might give Custer the opportunity to perform a clandestine end run.

On the east side of the tree-fringed river, the guide Mitch Boyer and the Crow scouts informed him, was a line of bluffs that rose several hundred feet above the valley. If he climbed up onto these bluffs and rode several miles downriver, he might be able to work his way around the village. As Reno attacked from the south, Custer would swoop down out of the hills, gallop across the river, and attack what was left of the dispersing village from the east.

But all this was simply conjecture. None of them had, as of yet, even
seen
the village, which still remained hidden behind the looming hills ahead—all the more reason to climb to the top of that bluff to the right and finally look down into the valley below.

Before continuing, Custer took off his buckskin jacket and tied it to the back of his saddle. One of Custer’s sergeants shouted out that there were Indians up there on the hill to the east. That decided it—they were not following Reno into the valley; they were swinging right.

A
t some point, Custer divided his battalion into two subsets: the Right Wing, composed of three companies under Captain Myles Keogh, and the two-company Left Wing, which included Lieutenant Algernon Smith’s distinctive Gray Horse Troop, commanded by Custer’s old friend Captain George Yates.

Yates, with thinning blond hair and a thick, carefully clipped mustache, shared Custer’s obsessive attention to cleanliness. Whereas Custer was known for frequently washing his hands and brushing his teeth, Yates ended each day by turning the pockets of his pants inside out and carefully scouring them with a brush. Yates was always so neat and precise that he looked, in the proverbial phrase of the day, “as if he’d just stepped out of a bandbox,” the cylindrical container of thin wood in which a gentleman’s hat and other crushable pieces of clothing were kept. Taking their cue from their meticulous leader, Yates’s F Company was known as the “Bandbox Troop.” About this time, Custer dispatched a squad of F Company soldiers as an advance guard. Whereas Benteen had been sent left, these troopers would swing far to the right in an effort to see whether anything of importance lay to the east of the bluffs.

As they mounted the hill, Custer and Tom paused to review the battalion. The companies had previously been marching in columns of two. In order to make the battalion less strung out during its potentially conspicuous dash along the bluffs, Custer ordered them to march in columns of four.

By the time they’d climbed out of the valley and onto the bluffs, the small group of Indians they’d seen had disappeared into the rolling green hills. They rode on until they were approaching the ridgeline and suddenly they saw it: the flat and seemingly endless expanse of the Little Bighorn Valley through which wandered the sparkling blue-green ribbon of the river. And there, two miles to the northwest, nestled into the wooded meanders of the Little Bighorn, was the largest Indian village any of them had ever seen: hundreds of gleaming white tepees beneath the soaring transparent canopy of the sky. Beyond the lodges to the west was a weirdly kaleidoscopic sight: a swirling sea of reddish brown that the soldiers only gradually realized was the village’s herd of fifteen thousand to twenty thousand ponies.