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

Thompson. Despite the more than ninety-degree heat, they were wrapped in government-supplied blankets stamped with the letters I.D., for Indian Department. The black mosquitoes were particularly fierce along the river, and the blankets provided the Indians with some protection as they talked among themselves “in a very earnest manner.” Thompson decided he must warn Watson of what lay ahead of him.
    He jumped off the trail and cut diagonally across the hillside to his right. He came to a deep ravine and, unable to stop himself, fell several feet, kicking up the dried flakes of alkaline mud into a dusty gray cloud as he tumbled down the hill, finally arriving at the riverbank just ahead of Watson. Thompson breathlessly asked where he was going. “To our scouts, of course,” Watson replied without betraying the least bit of surprise at the sudden appearance of a trooper from his own company. Thompson explained that the Indians gathered along the river up ahead were not Arikara; they were hostiles. “I told him,” Thompson wrote, “that I.D. stood for Immediately Dead if he went over [there].” But where to go next?
    As far as they could tell, there were few, if any, warriors in the village. The bluffs on their side of the river, however, were infested with them. The safest thing to do was to cross the river and enter the village, where they could see a guidon from one of Reno’s companies stuck into the ground beside a tepee. The flag gave them confidence that the encampment was now occupied by their own troops, even though there were no soldiers presently in sight.
    They started toward the river, Watson leading the way, with Thompson hanging on to the tail of his horse, when they saw something unusual. Up ahead was, Thompson maintained, the Crow scout Curley leading a bound and struggling Lakota woman by a rawhide rope.
    Making this already bizarre scene even more fantastic was the sudden appearance of none other than General George Armstrong Custer, all alone on his horse Vic. Custer rode upriver to the Crow scout, and the two began to converse. Soon after, Curley released the woman, who, after waving what Thompson thought was a knife in his and Watson’s direction, crossed the river and disappeared back into the village while Curley proceeded up the river toward Reno.
    —PETER THOMPSON’S WALKABOUT, June 25, 1876 —

    Whether or not the heat, exhaustion, and intense fear had caused Thompson to hallucinate, he remained convinced that this dreamlike interlude was real. Yes, he insisted for the rest of his life, he’d seen Curley with a captured Lakota woman talking to Custer on the banks of the Little Bighorn. But is this as absurd as it at first might seem? As Theodore Roosevelt allowed, “odd things happen in a battle.”
    We know that a group of Arikara scouts killed six women and four children on the flats to the east of the Little Bighorn, not far from where Thompson saw the Indian scout and the Lakota woman. We also know that it was common practice among the warriors of the northern plains to take wives from rival tribes. Given Thompson’s tendency to confuse the identities of the people he saw during the battle, the possibility exists that the scout he saw was an Arikara, not a Crow, who’d decided to take a Lakota wife.
    There is also the possibility that Thompson was mistaken about Custer. The question is, whom did Thompson really see? Perhaps a light-haired and mustachioed soldier or scout from Reno’s battalion (Charley Reynolds looked quite Custer-like) rode downriver in an unsuccessful attempt to get a message to the other battalion and stumbled on the two privates from C Company. Then there is the possibility that Thompson really did see Custer alone on the banks of the Little Bighorn.
    The Cheyenne and Lakota reported that a portion of Custer’s battalion made it to the banks of the Little Bighorn at the mouth of a dry watercourse leading down from the bluffs called Medicine Tail Coulee. Since most of the warriors were either fighting Reno or retrieving their horses, there were only a handful of Lakota and Cheyenne on the west bank of the ford to oppose the troopers’ advance. And yet, after only scattering fire, the soldiers eventually retreated back up into the hills to rejoin their comrades on the bluff.
    As several historians have suggested, this was probably a feint—a diversionary tactic similar to the one Custer had used with such spectacular success at the Battle of the