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

Indians, he could now see, were upon them.
    Behind him, Weir and the troops of D Company had mounted their horses and begun to retreat. It was already past the time to join them. Unfortunately, his horse had started to panic and was plunging wildly up and down. A vanguard of mounted warriors had ventured to within fifteen feet of his position.
    For reasons that were not apparent to Edgerly, Sergeant Thomas Harrison of Sligo, Ireland, was smiling. Harrison, a veteran of the Battle of the Washita, later explained that the Indians’ poor marksmanship was what amused him that afternoon on Weir Peak. In the meantime, Edgerly, who was referred to by his men as “Big Feet,” still hadn’t managed to climb onto his horse. In an attempt to calm the lieutenant’s mount, Harrison brought his own horse alongside, and with one last desperate lunge Edgerly vaulted into the saddle. The two troopers threw their reins behind their backs and with six-shooters in hand “cut through” the warriors between them and the rest of their troop.
    Up ahead, D Company was retreating along the ridge in columns of two as the warriors raked them with what Corporal George Wylie remembered as a “hot fire” from the high ground of Weir Peak. A bullet punctured Wylie’s canteen; another splintered the staff of the guidon he was holding and the flag fell to the ground. Nearby, Vincent Charley, the company’s farrier, or blacksmith, was blasted off his horse by a shot through the hips. By the time Edgerly and Harrison arrived, Charley was “half crawling on his feet and one hand,” and he begged Edgerly not to leave him. The lieutenant paused and promised he’d return with a rescue party. Until then, Charley should crawl into a nearby ravine and wait.
    It may have been a well-intentioned promise, but it was an unrealistic one given the proximity of the warriors. When Edgerly subsequently asked Weir to mount a rescue effort, the captain sadly insisted that they must continue the retreat. Edgerly later referred to Weir’s refusal with bitterness, but it had been Edgerly who’d declined to dismount and save Charley when a rescue might still have been possible. Inevitably contributing to Edgerly’s feelings about the incident were the circumstances of the farrier’s death. Charley was later found with a stick—perhaps the broken piece of Corporal Wylie’s flagstaff—jammed down his throat.

    T he retreat to Reno Hill did not go as well as Benteen had hoped. Even before Weir’s company rode past “in hot haste,” Captain French’s M Company was also on the run. That left only Lieutenant Godfrey’s K Company between the battalion and the onrushing warriors.
    By that time, Benteen had conferred with Reno about the necessity of taking up a defensive position before the Indians had worked their way completely around the command. Not only were the warriors riding toward them along the bluffs; even more of them were returning south along the west bank of the river. The battalion needed to find a place where the steepness of the bluff facing the Little Bighorn protected at least one side of their entrenchment from attack. The location Benteen eventually chose was certainly not perfect, but it was as good as they were going to find under the circumstances: a shallow crater of grass and sagebrush beside the bluff with a hill to the south overlooking both the depression and a ravine down to the river to the west.
    When Benteen realized that French’s company had, in his words, “flunked” its test against the warriors, he sent word to Godfrey “to hold his vantage point, and everything would soon be O.K.” He then turned to Lieutenant Wallace of G Company. “Wallace,” he shouted, “put your troops here!” Wallace had inherited the leadership of his decimated company from Lieutenant McIntosh. “I have no troop,” Wallace said, “only three men.”
    “Well, then,” Benteen replied, “put yourself and your three men here and don’t let any of them get away. I will look out for you.” It was a pathetic, even absurd way to begin what was about to become one of the greatest sieges in the history of the American West, but Wallace’s three men would have to do. With G Company serving as what Benteen called “the nucleus,” he assigned each company a position as he strung the men along in the arc of an irregular circle. Five of the seven companies were concentrated on the northern half of the entrenchment, with Moylan’s A