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

as a child. When combined with his hardheaded refusal to admit to any personal fault whatsoever, it is no wonder no one believed him.
    But, as Camp clearly realized, to reject all of Thompson’s testimony out of hand was to risk ignoring an important, possibly revelatory window into the battle. Thompson’s account wasn’t published until 1914, but he began recording his impressions of the battle as early as September 1876, “when,” he wrote Camp, “everything was a moving panorama in my mind.”
    Thompson may have sometimes had the identity of the participants and the order of events mixed up, but the essence of what he remembered— the scene burned into his dendrites—proved remarkably trustworthy when it was possible to compare his account to those of others. “It may be as a preacher told me once,” Thompson wrote in a letter to Camp, “‘Thompson, your memory is too good.’”

    P eter Thompson had been a member of C Troop, one of the five companies in the battalion under Custer’s command. They’d been galloping north along the edge of the bluffs, the valley to their left, when Thompson’s horse began to tire. As he lagged farther and farther behind the battalion, he stopped to put on his spurs. But his trembling fingers refused to work. “[H]e was shaking so badly and was in such a hurry,” remembered his daughter Susan, who listened to her father recount his experiences and later wrote a fascinating unpublished commentary on her father’s narrative, “that he simply could not fasten those . . . spurs.” Thompson was eventually forced to give up on trying to ride his horse, “for I was afraid he would fall down under me, so stumbling and staggering was his gait.” He was, he realized, in “a terrible predicament . . . : alone in enemy’s country, leading a horse practically useless.”
    The appearance of a group of Lakota warriors prompted him to abandon his horse and seek refuge in a ravine full of wild cherry bushes. After taking stock of how much ammunition he had left (five cartridges for his pistol, seventeen for his carbine), he started on foot down the bluff toward the Little Bighorn. Custer, he reasoned, was probably in the village by now, and it was his duty to join him.
    He’d just started down a narrow, badly washed-out trail when a mounted warrior started racing after him. Thompson ran for his life, plummeting down the steep hillside in a desperate dash for the river, “going,” he told his daughter, “like a bat out of hell with his wings on fire.” Before the Indian could run him down, Thompson stopped, shouldered his carbine, and prepared to catch the warrior by surprise. But as soon as the warrior saw that he had stopped and raised his gun, the Indian “wheeled around and galloped back . . . as fast as he could go.”
    Thompson continued down the trail. Ahead of him in the valley below was Sitting Bull’s village. It seemed almost deserted, “so quiet and deathlike was the stillness.” It is one of the more surreal aspects of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. As Reno’s Valley Fight was reaching its terrible crescendo of dust, smoke, and deafening gunfire, the troopers to the north found themselves in another, almost hermetically sealed world. Not only did the broken hills and cottonwood trees cut off their view of Reno’s battle; they acted as an acoustic shield.
    But there were other factors contributing to Thompson’s eerie sense of isolation. The most important, perhaps, was the fact that he was totally deaf in the left ear, the ear facing Reno’s portion of the battle. The inevitable fear and disorientation of battle also had the effect of dramatically shrinking a soldier’s frame of reference. “When men are fighting . . . ,” the veteran F. E. Server recalled, “they do not know what is going on around them six feet away. . . . They see only that closely in front.” A prisoner of his own necessarily myopic perspective, Thompson was wandering aimlessly through a terrifying and unknown terrain in search of his battalion.
    Down below, at the foot of the bluff near the river’s edge, he saw a trooper on a horse. It was Private James Watson, also from C Company, “riding in a slow, leisurely way” along the same trail Thompson was following. Like Thompson, Watson had become separated from the battalion as his horse started to give out. At that moment, Watson turned to the left and began riding upriver toward a group of Indians gathered just below