The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (68 page)

Mechling described his trip to get water and how Benteen’s extended drink from his canteen almost started a rush for the river, in Hardorff’s
Camp, Custer,
pp. 76–78. In the opinion of Private William Taylor, Benteen’s decision to organize a detail of water carriers was “foolish and uncalled for” since it took away men who were vitally needed to defend the entrenchment, in
With Custer,
p. 60. Thompson wasn’t the only one who heard someone shout curses at the soldiers in English. Private John Siversten claimed that warriors on the other side of the river said, “Come on over on this side, you sons of [bitches] and we will give it to you! Come over!” in Liddic and Harbaugh’s
Camp on Custer,
p. 110. Reno claimed the Seventh fought “all the desperadoes, renegades, and half-breeds and squawmen” in his July 5, 1876, report, reprinted in W. A. Graham,
RCI,
p. 277; see Walter Boyes’s “White Renegades Living with the Hostiles Go Up Against Custer,” pp. 11–19. William Taylor’s description of the “dirty and haggard” survivors watching the departing Indian village is in
With Custer,
p. 60. Edgerly’s comparison of the Indians’ pony herd to “a great brown carpet” is in the
Official Transcript
of the RCI, edited by Ronald Nichols, p. 780, and is cited by Stewart in
Custer’s Luck,
p. 428. Trumpeter Hardy described the departing Indian village “as a long black cloud at the foot hills across the bottom”; he also recounted Reno’s exclamation, “For God’s sake, Moylan, look what we have been standing off!” in a footnote in Hardorff’s
Camp, Custer,
p. 83. Ryan’s claim that he and French fired the last shots of the battle are in Barnard’s
Ten Years with Custer,
p. 301. Gerard’s account of overhearing the “cries of children . . . [and] the death chanting of the squaws” is in Hammer,
Custer in ’76,
p. 234. Edgerly told of how the horses skidded down the bluff to the river, adding, “Their rush for the river when they got near to it was very pathetic,” in Hammer,
Custer in ’76,
p. 58. Roy’s account of the horses plunging their heads into the water is also in Hammer,
Custer in ’76,
p. 116. McDougall’s nuanced description of Reno’s character is in W. A. Graham,
RCI,
pp. 196–97. Peter Thompson told how Benteen inspired the men in his
Account,
p. 42. The description of Benteen as the “savior of the Seventh” is cited by James Donovan in
A Terrible Glory,
p. 250.

Brisbin’s account of Terry’s “anxiety and impatience to get on” is in Brininstool, p. 281. All quotations from Lieutenant Bradley are from his “Journal,” pp. 219–24. Charles Roe’s account of horsemen “clothed in blue uniforms” is from his
Custer’s Last Battle,
p. 7. Gibbon’s account of the column’s arrivalI at the battle site is in his “Last Summer’s Expedition Against the Sioux and Its Great Catastrophe,” pp. 298–99. In his diary, edited by Barry Johnson, Dr. Paulding wrote, “I picked up a buckskin shirt . . . marked Porter,” “Dr. Paulding and His Remarkable Diary,” p. 62. Windolph described Terry as openly crying as he approached the survivors of the Seventh, in
I Fought with Custer,
p. 109. Roe told Walter Camp of Benteen’s insistence that Custer “is somewhere down the Big Horn grazing his horses,” in Hammer,
Custer in ’76,
p. 249. Benteen’s response to discovering Custer’s dead body is in Hardorff’s
Custer Battle Casualties,
pp. 19–20.

Chapter 15:
The Last Stand

In writing this chapter, I have relied primarily on Native accounts. This does not mean, however, that there is a monolithic “Indian view” of what transpired during the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Much of the oral testimony that has been recorded over the course of the last 130 years is contradictory—as is, it should be pointed out, the evidence associated with the army’s side of the battle. However, the issues associated with Native testimony are particularly complex. Since few of the Indian participants spoke English, an interpreter was required, and as Curley complained to Walter Camp, interpreters were often suspect; but so were the interrogators, many of whom had a preconceived agenda they hoped the Indians’ testimony would support. There were also the warriors’ legitimate concerns that they might suffer some form of retribution if they told their questioners, many of whom were soldiers and government officials, anything they didn’t want to hear. The accounts collected by the Cheyenne tribal historian John Stands in Timber, who knew many battle veterans and who could speak both Cheyenne and English, is of special interest, since the testimony was not filtered by an interpreter.

In the last decade or so, largely through the efforts of the superb researcher Richard Hardorff, immense amounts of previously unpublished Native testimony have made their way into print. In 1997, Gregory Michno published
Lakota Noon,
an account of the battle that relies almost exclusively on Native testimony. In 1999, Herman Viola published
Little Bighorn Remembered,
the culmination of two decades of collecting oral traditions of the battle from living descendants. More recently, the descendants of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull have participated in documentaries that reveal never-before-disclosed information about their famous ancestors. The Lakota author Joseph M. Marshall has also written several books about the battle that make excellent use of Native oral tradition.

Just as important as the oral testimony left by Native participants is the visual evidence. Pictographs by Red Horse, Amos Bad-Heart Bull, One Bull, Standing Bear, Wooden Leg, and many others are much more than pretty pictures; they are highly detailed and painstakingly crafted renderings of what happened along the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876. A warrior remembered in obsessive detail each one of his battle honors or coups, which like “kills” in twentieth-century aerial combat, were corroborated and confirmed by other warriors. With these drawings, the warrior recorded essential and extraordinarily precise information, and they are an immense help to anyone attempting to understand the battle. A good place to start in this regard is Sandra L. Brizée-Bowen’s
For All to See: The Little Bighorn Battle in Plains Indian Art.
However, as Castle McLaughlin cautions in a review of Brizée-Bowen’s book, Native pictographs are by no means a purely documentary source: “Rather than simply creating ‘literal’ visual records, Plains artists often used rhetorical gestures to convey aspects such as tense, perspective, distance, quantity, and the identity of subjects,” p. 60.

In addition to studying the Native testimony, I have looked to the relatively recent appearance of a new source of archaeological evidence. In 1983, fire swept across the battlefield, providing a team of archaeologists and volunteers with the chance to comb the site with metal detectors and analyze what they found. This happenstance has provided a most exciting and late-breaking avenue of research, but there are also problems associated with this form of evidence. The battlefield was by no means a virgin archaeological site in 1983. Soldiers had been buried, exhumed, and reburied; beginning with the victorious warriors, artifact hunters had been picking over the site for more than a century. In 1993, Richard Fox, one of the archaeologists on the team that examined the battlefield after the fire, wrote
Archaeology, History, and Custer’s Last Battle.
Combining the evidence found in the ground with Native testimony, Fox argued that Custer’s battalion pushed much farther north than had generally been believed. Although I find Fox’s insistence that there was no concerted “last stand” more a matter of semantics than a proven fact, I feel that his account does an excellent job of explaining the eventual fate of Custer’s battalion, and I have followed it closely in this chapter. In 1994 Douglas Scott and Peter Bleed conducted an archaeological examination of portions of the battlefield adjacent to the Little Bighorn National Monument (described in
A Good Walk Around the Boundary
) that corroborated the fact that Custer’s battalion pushed well north of Last Stand Hill and that the firing around the mouth of Medicine Tail Coulee was quite light. (What Scott and Bleed
did
find in the vicinity of Medicine Tail Coulee was archaeological evidence associated with the movie
Little Big Man
, which was filmed in this portion of the battlefield, p. 38.)

Another recent publication that I have found indispensable is
Where Custer Fell: Photographs of the Little Bighorn Battlefield Then and Now
by James Brust, Brian Pohanka, and Sandy Barnard. Combining historic photographs with the written evidence (much of it from the papers of Walter Camp), Brust et al. have done much to clarify the topographic subtleties of the battlefield. Yet another essential book in this vein is Michael Donahue’s
Drawing Battle Lines: The Map Testimony of Custer’s Last Fight.
Combining recorded oral and written testimony with the maps drawn by either the battle participant or the interviewer, Donahue’s book is especially helpful in trying to understand what happened during Custer’s thrust to the north.

One source that may seem noticeably absent from my account is David Miller’s
Custer’s Fall.
Although it is useful in providing a readable Native-based narrative of the battle, some of Miller’s informants, especially the Oglala White Cow Bull, seem too good to be true when it comes to witnessing certain key events. Not only does White Cow Bull claim that he saw Custer’s Cheyenne captive Monahsetah at the LBH with the son she bore after her relationship with Custer, but he insists that after he saw the action at Reno’s skirmish line he also managed to make it to the river in time to see Custer get shot as he led his soldiers across the ford. Given the testimony of several southern Cheyenne informants, especially that of Kate Bighead (who mentions Custer’s relationship with Monahsetah but does not claim she was at the battle), it seems highly unlikely that Monahsetah and her son were present that day.

Benteen testified that Custer’s battle “was a panic—rout,” in W. A. Graham,
RCI,
pp. 145–46. The testimony of the Cheyenne Sylvester Knows Gun appears in Royal Jackson’s
An Oral History of the Battle,
pp. 67–68. The Cheyenne Ted Rising Sun also learned from his grandparents “that Custer was wounded in the midstream of the LBH. And that some soldiers quickly rode up beside him and propped him up,” p. 67. In an interview, Sitting Bull’s great-grandson Ernie LaPointe also claimed that Custer was killed at the ford at Medicine Tail Coulee and that the battle was over twenty minutes later. In the documentary film
The Authorized Biography of Crazy Horse and His Family, Part 3: The Battle of the Little Bighorn,
descendants of the Crazy Horse family claim that it was Tom Custer who was wounded at the ford and eventually taken up to Last Stand Hill. In Sandy Barnard’s
Ten Years with Custer,
John Ryan wrote that Custer had “a Remington Sporting Rifle that used a brass shell” and that “five or six shells . . . were found under General Custer’s body. I picked up those shells and gave them to the captain of my company. They were afterwards sent to Mrs. Custer with a lock of the general’s hair,” p. 303. Richard Fox provides a useful summary of the scenario he developed in
Archaeology, History, and Custer’s Last Battle,
pp. 333–34. In this chapter I have relied on Fox and others in developing an overall scheme of the battle while using the warriors’ own accounts to drive the narrative.

Runs the Enemy’s account of first seeing Custer’s battalion and hearing Sitting Bull’s speech about the bird protecting its nest is in Joseph Dixon’s
The Vanishing Race
, p. 174. Sitting Bull admitted that “[w]e thought we were whipped” in the interview in W. A. Graham,
The Custer Myth,
p. 69. According to Red Horse, “A Sioux man came and said that a different party of soldiers had all the women and children prisoners. Like a whirlwind the word went around, and the Sioux all heard it and left the soldiers on the hill and went quickly to save the women and children,” in W. A. Graham,
The Custer Myth,
p. 61. John Henley recounted hearing the interchange among Yates and the other two officers after the skirmish in the Yellowstone campaign, in Liddic and Harbaugh’s
Camp on Custer,
p. 50. Curley told Camp about Boyer’s claim that “the other commands had been scared out” in Hammer,
Custer in ’76,
p. 158. Curley told Russell White Bear that Boyer pointed at Custer and said, “That man will stop at nothing,” in W. A. Graham,
The Custer Myth,
p. 18; White Bear also told how Boyer encouraged Curley to escape before it was too late, p. 19.

Wooden Leg’s account of the battle is in Marquis,
Wooden Leg,
pp. 226–70; Kate Bighead’s account, also told to Thomas Marquis and titled
She Watched Custer’s Last Battle,
is in
The Custer Reader,
edited by Paul Hutton, pp. 363–77. My description of the terrain is based, in part, on my own experience riding across the battlefield with the Crow tribal member Charlie Real Bird in June 2007. I also found discussions in July 2009 with author and seasonal ranger Michael Donahue of great value; Donahue directed me to Kill Eagle’s account of a buffalo trail that led from the vicinity of Last Stand Hill to the LBH River, in Donahue’s
Drawing Battle Lines
, pp. 139–43. Hanging Wolf’s description of the soldiers’ approach to the river is in John Stands in Timber’s description of the battle in
Cheyenne Memories
, pp. 194–210. See also Fox’s account of Custer’s northerly thrust in
Archaeology,
pp. 173–94. There is a striking similarity between Hanging Wolf’s account of the Left Wing’s approach to the north ford (often referred to as Ford D) and the account of Sylvester Knows Gun’s grandmother (and many others) of the Left Wing’s approach to the ford at Medicine Tail Coulee (Ford B). Both accounts describe a trooper in the lead getting wounded, if not killed, as he came to the river. Given the difficulty of pinpointing the exact location of an event during a battle, the possibility exists that these might be descriptions of the same event. Kellogg’s remains were identified by the distinctive shape of his boot heels. Also found with the body were thirty-seven narrow sheets of paper folded to fit neatly into Kellogg’s pocket. The reporter’s diary entries, it was later discovered, went only as far as June 9. See Sandy Barnard’s
I Go with Custer,
pp. 142–47. John Stands in Timber provides a surprisingly detailed account of how the Left Wing paused for twenty minutes at what is known today as Cemetery Ridge, then deployed in the vicinity of Last Stand Hill, in
Cheyenne Memories,
pp. 199–200. Runs the Enemy corroborated Wooden Leg’s and Kate Bighead’s claims that there was no firing as the warriors infiltrated the hills: “[W ]hile Custer was all surrounded there had been no firing from either side,” in Joseph Dixon’s
The Vanishing Race,
p. 175.