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

below were still very much alive. At one point a soldier suggested that Reno send a detail to rescue the wounded. Reno responded by saying that the soldier could rescue the wounded himself. “This had a discouraging effect on the men,” Sergeant White remembered.
    Almost half his battalion was dead, wounded, or missing. McIntosh’s G Company had been particularly hard hit. Lieutenant Wallace, who when he wasn’t serving as the regiment’s engineering officer had been McIntosh’s second lieutenant, inherited a troop with only, as far as he could tell, three functional members.
    Like the captain of a sinking ship, the commanding officer of a retreating cavalry battalion was expected to attend to the evacuation of his men. Instead of being the first to safety, the commander should be one of the last. But Reno had led all the way, and in just half an hour, forty of his men—three officers, thirty-two soldiers, two civilians, and three Indian scouts—had been or were about to be killed.
    There was only one way Reno could justify his behavior that afternoon. Instead of having led the regiment in a retreat, he had led them in an attack. It was patently ridiculous, of course, but it was the story Reno stuck to for the rest of his life.
    One of the dead included Dr. James Madison DeWolf, whose body lay within sight of the bluff. Dr. Henry Porter was the only surgeon left to attend to more than a dozen wounded men.
    “Major,” Dr. Porter said, “the men were pretty demoralized.”
    As if answering the unseen accusers in his head, Reno replied, “That was a charge, sir!”

    A bout two hours before, Custer had ordered Frederick Benteen and his battalion to swing left from the Indian trail in search of a glimpse into the Little Bighorn Valley—a duty that the captain later described as “valley hunting ad infinitum.”
    Benteen prided himself on his skills at poker, and like any good gambler, he’d come to rely on his premonitions about the future. While he was riding futilely through the hills, a voice told him: “Old man, that crowd ahead is going to strike a snag . . . so you’d better get back to that trail, and you will find work.”
    About this time, Lieutenant Gibson, who was riding well ahead of the battalion, reported seeing the much-sought-after valley. As it later turned out, Gibson had glimpsed not the Little Bighorn but a southern tributary to Sun Dance Creek. In any event, the valley contained no Indians; time to quit this wild-goose chase and return to the main column.
    With the order “Right Oblique,” Benteen led the battalion on a diagonal course back to the trail on Sun Dance Creek. They could see the dust of the slow-moving pack train to the right. Even though they had spent close to two hours searching for an illusive valley, they were still ahead of Captain McDougall and the mules when they rejoined the trail.
    But Benteen was in no rush. After crossing the divide, Custer had berated him for leading the regiment at too fast a pace, and he wasn’t about to set any speed records now. “We continued our march very leisurely,” Lieutenant Godfrey recorded in his journal.
    They came to a soggy mud hole, a morass that had a sufficient puddle of water sitting in it for the horses to drink. So they stopped and watered the horses, who’d been without a drink since the evening before.
    Watering the horses was perfectly understandable, but what Benteen decided to do with his own horse—a horse with a reputation for being as sly and ornery as his owner—was anything but. “Old Dick” had a habit of running away when the bit was taken out of his mouth. “You could not hold him by the strap of the halter,” Benteen explained, “no one could, and away he would go.” Even though a horse is capable of drinking with the bit in its mouth and gunshots were just beginning to be heard to the northwest, Benteen tied his horse to an ironwood stump with a lariat and removed the bit. After drinking his fill, Dick pulled the lariat taut and looked to his master, “as if to say,” Benteen wrote, “‘Well, I didn’t much care to go off this time anyway.’”
    It was a strange time to be playing mind games with a horse, and several of Benteen’s officers began to wonder why they were lingering at the morass. Firing could be heard in the distance. They should be moving on. Captain Thomas Weir of D Company, the troop Benteen had specifically requested, was getting particularly impatient. Like Adjutant