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

front of him; when riding he leaned slightly forward. . . . This was the appearance of Custer . . . just one half hour before the fight commenced between him and the Sioux.
    Whether or not Thompson imagined it or mistook someone else for his commander or really did see Custer, the image was encoded in his brain: Custer, leaning forward on his horse, frozen like the figures on the Grecian urn described by the poet Keats, in the still, airless atmosphere of eternity.

    B y the time Thompson and Watson reached the mouth of Medicine Tail Coulee, Custer was long gone. They couldn’t tell if he’d recrossed the river or exited into the hills to the right, but they could see that both banks of the river were “wet with splashing made by the animals going to and from the village.” Still hopeful that the soldiers had established control of the almost empty village, they decided, once again, to cross the river.
    But first Watson agreed to ride out into the middle of the rushing stream to check the river’s depth. Ever since Thompson was ten years old, when he’d fallen off the immigrant ship that was carrying his family from Scotland to America, he’d been terrified of water. “Much over knee high in swift water was high enough for him all his life afterward,” his daughter Susan wrote. “Animals could swim across swift water, if necessary, but not Peter Thompson.”
    As Watson started on his horse, Thompson paused at the riverbank for a drink. Watson was in the midst of the Little Bighorn when Thompson realized that three Indians had appeared on the opposite bank, and he shouted out a warning.
    “What in thunder is the matter?” Watson asked.
    “If you don’t get off your horse at once,” Thompson replied, “you will get shot.”
    Watson obediently dove into the river as Thompson scrambled up the slippery red mud banks to higher ground, where he loaded his carbine and fired at the Indians. He began to reload for a second shot only to discover that, just as had happened to several of the troopers on Re-no’s skirmish line, the cartridge casing had jammed in the barrel. Finally, after extracting the spent shell with his thumbnail, he fired once again and succeeded in hitting one of the Indians.
    By that time Watson had made it back to the east side of the river, and the two troopers started down the bank on foot in search of Custer’s command. As they scurried to the north, they noticed that the village on the other side of the river had begun, in Thompson’s words, “to teem with life.” With the defeat of Reno, warriors had started to arrive in large numbers. “Ponies were dashing here and there with their riders urging them on,” he remembered; “the dust would rise and mingle with the smoke of the burning grass and brush.”
    A little ways up ahead, the river looped to the west, creating a small peninsula on the eastern bank where Thompson and Watson decided to hide themselves in a clump of red berry bushes. A driftwood log lay amid the brush and made, Thompson commented, “quite a comfortable seat for us.” It was very much like a duck blind against the clifflike bank of the river, and concealed behind the leaves and berries, they watched as warriors continued to return to the village from the south.
    Suddenly, around 4:25 p.m., a “heavy volley of rifle shots” erupted from the bluffs downriver. Thompson stood up and, using the barrel of his carbine to part the brush, “the stalks being covered with long sharp thorns,” took a look.
    Custer’s battalion had finally engaged the enemy.

CHAPTER 13

    The Forsaken
    S omewhere to the south of Thompson and Watson’s lair, George Herendeen and a dozen or so soldiers were also doing their best to conceal themselves in the timber and brush. They, too, heard the beginning of Custer’s battle—what Herendeen remembered as two earthshaking volleys followed by the crackling pop of uncoordinated fire. More than two miles farther south, Captain Thomas McDougall, who was still marching north with the pack train, also heard volleys: “a dull sound,” he later remembered, “that resonated through the hills.” On the bluff occupied by Reno’s and Benteen’s battalions, which had just been reunited after Benteen’s “valley hunting” expedition to the south, the volleys were so distinct that Lieutenant Varnum shouted “Jesus Christ! What does that mean?” Even Lieutenant Godfrey, who, like Peter Thompson, was deaf in one ear, heard the volleys.