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

Washita. During that battle, he had marched boldly toward the enemy’s village with the band playing. This time, Captain George Yates and the two companies of the battalion’s Left Wing marched down Medicine Tail Coulee with, at least one warrior claimed, their bugles blaring. In both instances, Custer was attempting to attract the enemy’s attention.
    Many believe that Custer was trying to draw the Indians away from Reno even as the three companies of the battalion’s Right Wing, under the command of Captain Keogh, remained on the bluffs, waiting for the imminent arrival of Benteen. Custer’s brother Boston had joined the battalion soon after Trumpeter Martin’s departure and would have reported that Benteen was less than a half hour away. Given the immense size of the village, it only made sense to wait for reinforcements before initiating the attack.
    In the meantime, the feint down Medicine Tail Coulee would not only draw the enemy away from Reno; it might also provide Custer with the chance to perform some much-needed reconnaissance. As Yates and the Left Wing made a great show at the bank of the river, Custer would dash south on his fast and relatively fresh horse toward the scene of Reno’s engagement.
    It was a strange and outrageously risky thing for the commander of a cavalry regiment to do, but Custer had done this type of thing before. “Everyone was used to Custer’s unpredictable actions,” Thompson told his daughter Susan, “and thought nothing of it.” During the column’s approach to the Powder River, Custer and his brother Tom had impulsively left the regiment to scout out a trail across the badlands. Seven years before, while pursuing the Cheyenne in the months after the Battle of the Washita, Custer and Lieutenant Cooke had taken what others viewed as an unnecessary, even suicidal gamble by leaving the rest of the regiment behind and entering an Indian camp alone—a story Custer had taken great relish in describing in My Life on the Plains . Also recounted in that book was the event that helped introduce him to the West: his “rashly imprudent” decision to stray from the column and chase the giant buffalo.
    While pursuing his first buffalo, Custer had made an already precarious situation worse by accidentally shooting his horse in the head. Almost a decade later on the Little Bighorn he’d placed himself at a similar disadvantage by prematurely scattering his command into four distant fragments. If Peter Thompson is to be believed, Custer was once again alone in the midst of excessive and exhilarating danger, attempting to extricate himself from a mess of his own devising. It was exactly where a deep and ungovernable part of him liked to be.
    According to Thompson, once Custer had finished communicating with the Indian scout, he turned his horse around and headed back downriver. As he passed Thompson and Watson, who were no doubt staring openmouthed at the man they took to be their commander, he “slightly checked his horse and waved his right hand twice for us to follow him.” Without uttering a word, he pointed downstream and, putting his spurs to his horse, disappeared around the bend of the Little Bighorn.
    In the years to come, as the controversy over Custer and the battle raged on, it became difficult even for those who had been present that day to separate their own memories from the confusing welter of conflicting accounts. One veteran, Private William Taylor, confessed to a retired army officer “that after hearing all the stories he doubts that he was there and only dreamed that he was there.” Thompson’s memories were like the memories of all battle veterans, infuriatingly confused and incomplete. Unlike just about every other Little Bighorn survivor, he had written many of those memories down back in 1876. He was more than a little odd and obstinate, but he always stuck to the same story—no matter how incredulous his audience.
    On the afternoon of June 25, Thompson insisted, he saw Custer—all by himself—riding along the banks of the Little Bighorn.
It being a very hot day, [Thompson wrote,] [Custer] was in his shirt sleeves; his buckskin pants tucked into his boots; buckskin shirt fastened to the rear of his saddle and a broad brimmed cream colored hat on his head, the brim of which was turned up on the right side and fastened by a small hook and eye to its crown. This gave him the opportunity to sight his rifle while riding. His rifle lay horizontally in