The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (28 page)

Gerard, it turned out, could not have been more wrong. Not only was the village not running; it was also not moving up to meet Reno, whose three companies were visible on the other side of the river about a mile to the west as they, too, rode north toward the village ahead.

Custer had done it. He had somehow managed to catch Sitting Bull’s village by complete surprise in the middle of the day. That in itself was an extraordinary achievement—a stroke of Custer luck that not even he could have dared hope for. By all rights, the valley below should be much like the site of the freshly abandoned village beside the Lone Tepee: a hoof-pocked plain of debris and still-smoking lodge fires, devoid of Indians. Instead, here was a village, a
huge
village, intact and complete, its inhabitants apparently oblivious to their presence.

The soldiers gave three cheers as they urged their tired horses north across the uneven hills. Some of the mounts, exhausted after a week of almost continual marching, began to lag behind; others, spurred on by their enthusiastic riders, began to edge past the regiment’s commander. “Boys, hold your horses,” Custer cautioned; “there are plenty of them down there for us all.”

Up ahead was a prominent hill that looked as if it might provide the best view yet of the valley below. Custer ordered the battalion to halt at its base as he and his staff climbed to the top. With the help of DeRudio’s field glasses, he studied the village. According to the Italian trumpeter John Martin, who was destined to be the only surviving witness to Custer’s first careful inspection of the valley, he could see women, children, and dogs lounging tranquilly around the lodges, but nowhere could he see any warriors. Where were they? Were they asleep in their tepees? Some of Custer’s officers speculated that they must be off hunting buffalo.

It was the Washita times ten, perhaps even times a hundred. As Reno galloped down the valley from the south, Custer would strike like a thunderbolt from the east and hundreds, if not thousands, of noncombatants would be theirs. When their husbands, fathers, and sons returned to the village, they’d have no choice but to surrender and follow the soldiers back to the reservation.

Given the village’s immense size, Custer’s first priority was to bring up the pack train as quickly as possible. If he hadn’t done so already, it was at this point that he sent back a messenger to McDougall, telling him to hurry up with the ammunition.

Custer pulled the binoculars from his eyes and turned toward the five companies waiting expectantly at the bottom of the hill. Beside him were his brother Tom and his adjutant, William Cooke, along with Martin, the trumpeter. If all went well, the Seventh was about to win its most stunning victory yet; and best of all, it looked like this battalion of Custer favorites was about to deliver the coup de grâce. Around 3:30 p.m. on June 25, Custer took off his wide gray hat and waved it exultantly in the clear blue air. “Hurrah, boys, we’ve got them!” he shouted. “We’ll finish them up and then go home to our station.”

CHAPTER 10

Reno’s Charge

A
n hour or so earlier, as the Seventh Cavalry marched down out of the Wolf Mountains, Wooden Leg and his brother Yellow Hair had been lingering sleepily over the meal their mother had prepared for them. Like many other young people in Sitting Bull’s village, they’d enjoyed a long night of dancing and were not yet fully awake.

There had been talk about the possibility of an attack, but on the morning of June 25 it was generally assumed the soldiers were still at least a day away. Once Wooden Leg and Yellow Hair had finished their meal, they decided to head to the river for a swim.

The sun had already edged into the western portion of the sky by the time they began the walk from their family’s tepee at the north end of the village to the Little Bighorn to the east. The surrounding plain was relatively flat, but there were portions of the valley, particularly near the river, that dipped and rose in unexpected ways. Every spring, the rain-swollen river wandered in a new direction, and the accumulated loops and swirls of old riverbeds had carved the surrounding bottomland into a complex mosaic of alternating levels known as benches. This meant that anyone traveling up or down the valley must navigate the often sharply chiseled troughs left by these ancient waterways, some of which had created terracelike depressions as many as twenty feet below the surface of the valley.

To Wooden Leg’s right, on the flats beyond these desiccated riverbeds, boys raced horses and played games. Among the outlying hills on either side of the river, groups of women, children, and old men dug wild turnips with ash sticks.

That afternoon the river was alive with splashing swimmers; others sat fishing in the shade of the cottonwood trees. One of these was the famed Santee chief Inkpaduta, over sixty years old and nearly blind. More than twenty years before, he had led his people in a bloody uprising in Minnesota before fleeing west to join the Lakota. Inkpaduta had been there with Sitting Bull at Killdeer Mountain when the soldiers had first attacked the Hunkpapa. After years of self-imposed exile in Canada, he was back with Sitting Bull’s people, fishing beside the crystal waters of the Little Bighorn with his grandsons.

A village of this size—almost two miles long and more than a quarter mile wide with as many as eight thousand people living in approximately a thousand lodges—could exist only beside a water source like the Little Bighorn. In addition to the village’s human occupants, the seemingly numberless pony herd needed vast quantities of water, as did the herds of buffalo, antelope, and other game on which the Lakota and Cheyenne depended.

Water provided the Indians with the essentials of life, but it was also the source of great spiritual power. Crazy Horse had experienced his life-changing vision beside a lake. Roman Nose, the greatest warrior of Wooden Leg’s youth, had once built a raft of logs and floated out into the middle of Medicine Water Lake in northern Wyoming. After four days and four nights of fasting and exposure to the sun, during which his raft was pummeled by a series of horrendous storms, Roman Nose finally returned to shore. His prayers, he said, had protected him. “The water had been angry, crazy . . . ,” Wooden Leg recalled, “but not a drop of it had touched him.”

That afternoon on the Little Bighorn, Wooden Leg and his brother enjoyed a brief swim. “The sun was high,” he remembered, “the weather was hot. The cool water felt good to my skin.” The boys climbed up onto the grassy bank and talked about their adventures at the dances the night before. The conversation petered out until both of them closed their eyes and gradually drifted off to sleep.

S
ome three miles to the south, Major Marcus Reno and his battalion of about 150 soldiers and scouts had just crossed the Little Bighorn. Ahead of them extended a narrow plain covered with three to four inches of ashlike dust. A group of about fifty or so Indians—refugees from the abandoned village at the Lone Tepee—had already churned the valley into tawny billows as they rode toward the encampment ahead. To the right was the weaving timberline of the river’s western bank; beyond that, on the other side of the river, rose the crumbling, clifflike bluffs over which Custer’s battalion was beginning to march. To the left was a series of low foothills. Still out of sight, incredibly enough, was Sitting Bull’s village. About two and a half miles downriver, the Little Bighorn looped dramatically to the west, and the accompanying fringe of trees and brush screened the encampment from Reno’s view.

As his earlier words to DeRudio might suggest, Reno had had misgivings about his assignment from the start. Despite having pretended to ignore Gerard’s warning, he’d already sent back one messenger telling Custer the Indians were “all in front of me . . . and were strong.” Another messenger was soon to follow.

Reno’s three companies paused for at least ten minutes to prepare for the attack. They cinched the dark blue woolen webbing of their saddle girths, checked their Colt .45 six-shooters and single-shot Springfield carbines, and took their proper places. Before leaving the divide, the men in each company had counted off by fours. When it came time to fire their weapons, common procedure was for the Number Ones, Twos, and Threes to dismount and form a skirmish line while the Number Fours remained mounted in the rear with the other men’s horses.

The soldiers swung into their saddles, and with the orders “Left front into line! Forward guide right!” they were soon moving down the valley at a slow gallop. Already well ahead of them were Custer’s favorite Indian scout, Bloody Knife, and about twenty-five fellow Arikara. There were also two Crow scouts, Half Yellow Face and White Swan. Their instructions were simple. Instead of fighting the Lakota, they were to cripple the enemy’s warriors by stealing their horses.

For Bloody Knife, who wore the black handkerchief with blue stars that Custer had brought back with him from Washington, this was a very personal battle. His mother was an Arikara, but his father was a Hunkpapa, and Bloody Knife had grown up with Gall, Sitting Bull, and many of the other warriors gathered here today on the Little Bighorn. Whether it was because of his Arikara parentage or his sullen personality, Bloody Knife had been tormented by the other Hunkpapa boys, with Gall—barrel-chested, outgoing, and easy to like—leading in the abuse. Bloody Knife eventually left to live with his mother’s people, but in 1860, at the age of twenty, he returned to visit his father on the mouth of the Rosebud, only to be once again beaten up and humiliated by his old nemesis, Gall.

Finally in 1868, when Gall came to trade at Fort Berthold on the Missouri River, Bloody Knife saw his chance for revenge. He led some soldiers to his enemy’s tepee, and in the melee that followed, Gall was stabbed three times with a bayonet and left for dead. Just to make sure, Bloody Knife was about to finish him off with a shotgun blast to the head when one of the soldiers pushed the barrel aside and led the infuriated scout away.

As Bloody Knife had suspected, Gall had somehow survived his encounter with the soldiers and eventually managed to escape. When Father DeSmet visited the Hunkpapa later that year, Gall proudly showed him his scars and claimed to have already killed seven white people in revenge.

That afternoon on the Little Bighorn, Bloody Knife knew that in any Lakota village the Hunkpapa (which means “people of the end”) always camped last. This meant that there was at least a fifty-fifty chance that the first tepee circle they encountered would be that of his old tormentors, the Hunkpapa.

Custer had told them to steal the Lakota’s horses, but Bloody Knife and the other Indian scouts were alert to additional possibilities. Already the Crows accompanying Custer’s battalion had come upon the ten-year-old boy Deeds, whom they’d first seen that morning near the divide with his father, Crawler. Deeds and his father had spent the last few hours on the run, desperately trying to stay ahead of the galloping soldiers and their scouts. Finally, in the timber on the east side of the Little Bighorn, at least one of the Crows had caught up with the boy and killed him. His father, however, had escaped and was now on his way to warn the village.

In the meantime, the Arikara had infiltrated the timber along the river; some had even recrossed the Little Bighorn, and in the flats to the east they discovered not only a herd of horses but a group of Hunkpapa women and children digging turnips. There are conflicting accounts of what happened next, but this much is certain: Six women and four children were killed early in the battle, most probably before any of the soldiers had fired a shot. Among this group were Gall’s two wives and three children.

F
or many of the soldiers in Reno’s battalion, this was their first time in combat. Their horsemanship skills were rudimentary at best. They were fine sitting on a walking or even trotting horse, but galloping among 130 mounted troopers over uneven, deceptive ground was a new experience.

Horses are extremely sensitive animals, and like humans, they can panic. Fueled by adrenaline and fear, a horse can become dangerously intoxicated with its own speed. Not until astride a runaway horse, it has been said, does a rider become aware of the creature’s true physical power.

Private Roman Rutten’s horse had started acting up at the fording place on the Little Bighorn. By the time the battalion had begun galloping down the plain, Rutten’s horse had become completely unmanageable and had rocketed ahead in a crazed rush. A trooper typically attempted to slow or stop his horse by tugging on the reins, which were attached to the metal bit in the horse’s mouth. The bit was placed into the gap between a horse’s front and back teeth. A horse that didn’t want to be restrained might pop the bit up with its tongue and clench the bit with its teeth, hence the phrase “take the bit between your teeth.”

Unable to stop or even slow his horse, Rutten apparently did what another trooper in the Seventh had done three years earlier when his horse bolted in an engagement during the Yellowstone campaign. “I, in desperation, wound the [reins] in one hand as far ahead as I could reach,” the trooper remembered, “and pulled with all my might and pulled his head around . . . and got him turned.” Rutten’s horse kept running, but at least he was now running in a circle. Over the course of the next two and a half miles, Rutten’s horse literally ran circles around the troopers, circumnavigating the battalion no fewer than three times.