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

Cooke, Weir had once been part of Benteen’s H Company. And like Cooke, he was now one of Custer’s good friends.

    —BENTEEN’S SWING LEFT, June 25, 1876 —

    Weir was already on his horse at the head of the column. He pointed ahead and said, “They ought to be over there,” and without waiting for an order from Benteen, started down the trail with his troop.
    By that time the pack train had caught up to them, and mules were bolting for the morass. Whether or not Weir had shamed him into it, Benteen immediately gave the order to advance.
    Benteen had returned to the head of the column by the time they came upon Sergeant Kanipe, the messenger sent back by Custer after first glimpsing the village from the bluff. Since the orders were for McDougall and the pack train, Kanipe paused only briefly to speak to Benteen. “We’ve got them, boys!” he was overheard to say as he made his way toward the rear of the column. It was beginning to look as though they had already missed the action.
    After another couple of miles, they came upon yet another messenger, Trumpeter John Martin, with a written order for Benteen himself. By this time the captain was, according to Martin, “riding quite a distance in front of the troops, with his orderly trumpeter, at a fast trot.” After leaving Custer’s battalion, Martin had been fired on briefly by some warriors before coming upon Boston Custer. The youngest of the Custer brothers had returned to the pack train for a fresh horse and was now on his way to rejoin the battalion.
    “Where’s the general?” Boston asked Martin.
    “Right behind the next ridge you’ll find him.”
    By the time Martin reached the bluff with a view of the valley below, Reno’s battalion had engaged the Indians. “I did not have time to stop and watch the fight,” he remembered. A half hour or so later, Martin found Benteen and handed over the note telling him that it was a “Big Village” and to “Be Quick” and to “bring packs.” As Benteen noted in a subsequent letter to his wife, Cooke had apparently been so excited that he’d left out the k in packs when he repeated the word in the postscript.
    “Where’s the General now?” Benteen asked.
    Martin said that the Indians were running (Benteen claimed his exact word was “skedaddling”) and that he assumed Custer had already “charged through the village.”
    The written order had told Benteen, in no uncertain terms, to proceed as fast as possible, but instead of forging ahead, he continued his conversation with Martin.
    “What’s the matter with your horse?” Benteen asked.
    “Just tired out, I guess.”
    “Tired out? Look at his hip.”
    Martin saw that, unknown to him, his horse had been hit by a bullet.
    “You’re lucky it was the horse and not you,” Benteen said.
    By this time, Captain Weir and Lieutenant Edgerly had joined them, and Benteen handed Weir the note. Benteen claimed to be perplexed by the order. “Well! If he wants me in a hurry,” he asked rhetorically, “how does he expect that I can bring the packs? If I am going to be of service to him I think I had better not wait for the packs.” Besides, Benteen reasoned, if the village was indeed “skedaddling,” as Martin claimed, ammunition was less of a priority than personnel. Best if they forget about the packs for now and push on to Custer.
    As the column moved out at a fast trot, Martin found his place with his company. Although he’d made no mention of Major Reno’s battalion to Benteen (who’d seemed more interested in his horse), Martin began to regale the soldiers of H Company with an account of how the Indians had been “asleep in their tepees” and how “Reno had attacked the village and was killing Indians and squaws right and left.” Martin “seemed jubilant,” Lieutenant Edgerly remembered, “and I was afraid we would not get to the front till the fighting was over.”
    As they approached the Little Bighorn, the trail diverged in two directions. “Here we have the two horns of a dilemma,” Benteen said. There was a disagreement as to which of the trails to take. Finally the appearance of three of the regiment’s Crow scouts—who ominously repeated the phrase “Ottoe [too many] Sioux, ottoe Sioux”—confirmed that they should climb the bluff to the right.
    The first thing the soldiers saw in the valley below was the smoke. Lieutenant Godfrey assumed that given what the two messengers had said, Custer and his men “were