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

burning the village.” But when Benteen saw what looked to be a dozen or so dismounted soldiers on the river bottom “being ridden down and shot by 800 to 900 Indian warriors,” he realized that something was terribly wrong.
    Benteen was well ahead of the rest of the column by the time he first saw Major Reno in his red bandanna, riding toward him. The major was breathing heavily and holding his hand in the air. “For God’s sake, Benteen,” he said, “halt your command and help me. I’ve lost half my men.”
    Benteen looked coolly toward Reno—an officer he’d never liked—and said, “Where is Custer?”

CHAPTER 12

    Still Point
    C uster had performed a vanishing act. He’d last been seen by Reno’s men about a half hour before on the bluffs bordering the river. After pausing to wave his hat, he’d disappeared behind the hill and was gone.
    When Trumpeter John Martin left Custer with his message for Benteen some five minutes later, at about 3:30 p.m., the battalion was within minutes of reaching the Little Bighorn. Reno had not yet fled the timber. Custer might have stormed across the river and into the village and provided Reno with the promised support. But something happened up there in the hills above the Little Bighorn.
    The gap between Reno’s retreat and Custer’s eventual attack was long enough that Sitting Bull, who was watching the battle unfold from the west side of the river, mistakenly believed that Custer’s and Reno’s troopers were one and the same. Not until Reno had retreated across the river, Sitting Bull maintained, did the troopers begin their final thrust to the north. This meant that Custer, the officer of seemingly perpetual motion, had paused—possibly for as long as forty-five minutes—at the most crucial stage in the battle.
    No one knows for sure what Custer was doing during this hiatus—unless, of course, you believe the three Crow scouts who claimed to have been there with him.

    I n the fall of 1907, the photographer and ethnographer Edward Curtis visited the Little Bighorn battlefield. Curtis was in the midst of creating The North American Indians, a twenty-volume compilation of text and photographs documenting the Native cultures of the United States and Canada. When it came to the Indians of the northern plains, there was no story more important than that of the Little Bighorn, and Curtis resolved to give the battle its due. By the time he visited the battlefield in 1907, he’d already spent the summer traveling to several Lakota reservations to conduct interviews. Once at the site of the battle, he secured the services of three of the Crow scouts who had accompanied Custer thirty-one years before: Goes Ahead, Hairy Moccasin, and White Man Runs Him, along with the interpreter Alexander Upshaw.
    With White Man Runs Him (who’d been named for an uncle who was once chased by a white trader) setting the pace, they followed Custer’s path from the divide to the ridge beside the Little Bighorn. Once they’d reached a high hill, the Crows told of how Custer and his staff had dismounted at this natural viewing platform and stopped to watch Reno’s battle unfold in the valley below. While Custer and his officers lingered on the hill, the Crows continued north to a hill overlooking the village, where they fired off a few rounds before returning to Custer. By then, Reno’s battle was raging, and White Man Runs Him “scolded” Custer for not immediately descending to the valley floor and assisting the struggling battalion. “No, let them fight,” Custer replied; “there will be plenty of fighting left for us to do.” As Reno’s battalion retreated in chaos, Custer waited. Only after he knew he had the huge village all to himself did he descend from the bluffs.
    Curtis found the story difficult to believe. To think that Custer had purposefully postponed his attack until he knew that Reno’s battalion had been defeated was, to paraphrase an officer Curtis later consulted about the Crows’ account, “too terrible to contemplate.” But after repeated questioning, Curtis became convinced that the Crows were telling the truth.
    To publish the Crows’ claims would surely incite a firestorm of outrage, most of it directed at him. But to conceal a version of the truth simply because it did not meet the public’s perception of an American hero was to perpetuate a blatant falsehood. In desperation, Curtis decided to send a detailed summary of the Crows’