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

the men.” He stood up and began walking back and forth, spouting instructions and encouragement. It was clear to everyone but Godfrey that his actions were drawing the Indians’ fire, not only on him but on those who lay at his feet, and Lieutenants Hare and Edgerly both told him repeatedly to get down.
    Godfrey was standing over Sergeant Dewitt Winney, “talking to somebody and giving orders,” when a bullet cut into the sergeant’s torso. “He gave a quick convulsive jerk,” Godfrey recounted in his diary, “said, ‘I am hit,’ and looked at me imploringly.” Soon Winney was dead. “This was the first time since 1861 that I had seen a man killed in battle,” Godfrey wrote, “yet I felt cool and unconcerned as to myself.” Those around him were anything but. Godfrey’s cook, Private Charles Burkhardt, begged him to “please lie down, Lieutenant, you will get hit. Please, sir, lie down.” Reluctantly, Godfrey retreated to the rear of the line. Only then did he realize that his actions had been “endangering others.” As Benteen later observed, Godfrey was always the last officer in the regiment to “see the nub of a joke.”

    E arly in the fighting, one of the regiment’s more cantankerous mules, Barnum, slipped through the soldiers’ line and headed for the Indians. Barnum had already survived a dramatic tumble during the march up the Rosebud, and he was now ambling toward the enemy with two ammunition boxes strapped to his back. The prospect of a thousand cartridges falling into the hands of the Indians was enough to inspire Sergeant Richard Hanley to set out in pursuit with his pistol drawn. If he was unable to catch up with Barnum, he planned to “shoot the mule down” before he reached the Indians.
    Hanley was in the middle of the no-man’s-land between the soldiers and the warriors, with bullets flying all around him, when, thankfully, Barnum decided to turn back. Two years later, Hanley was awarded the Medal of Honor for having “recaptured singlehandedly, and without orders, within the enemy lines and under a galling fire lasting some 20 minutes, a stampeded pack mule loaded with ammunition.”
    That evening a Lakota sharpshooter found the range on the soldiers of Captain French’s M Company. The first soldier to die was the fourth man to Sergeant John Ryan’s right. Soon after, the third man was hit, followed by the second. When the soldier lying beside him cried out in pain, Ryan “thought my turn was coming next.” But before the sharpshooter had a chance to reload and fire, Ryan, along with Captain French and six other soldiers, leapt to their feet and, spinning to their right, pumped a volley in the sharpshooter’s direction. “I think we put an end to that Indian,” Ryan remembered with considerable satisfaction.
    Over the course of the next few hours, a rhythm developed. The warriors blasted away for fifteen to thirty minutes, creating, Varnum remembered, “one ring of smoke from their guns around the entire range.” Then, with “a general ‘Ki-Yi’ all around,” the warriors mounted their horses and, leaning as far back as possible, charged the entrenchment as the soldiers rose to their knees and “let them have it and drove them back.” After another fifteen minutes or so of unrelenting fire, the warriors charged once again.
    It was when the soldiers were firing that they could see, however briefly, what they were up against. Gathered amid the surrounding hills and on the flats along the river were many more warriors than could fit along the firing line. As a consequence, most of the Indians were reduced to being spectators. “The hills were black with Indians looking on,” McDougall remembered, “while warriors were as thick as they could get within firing range.” The wonder was that the Indians didn’t overwhelm them with one deadly charge. Instead, they seemed content to test them with volley after halfhearted volley, knowing that time was on their side.
    Now that the soldiers’ carbines were being fired so regularly, the weapons started to jam on an almost constant basis. M Company developed a solution of sorts. Every time a carbine jammed, it was handed to Captain French, who, sitting tailor-style just behind the line, coolly extracted the casing with his knife, slipped in a new cartridge, and returned the weapon to the firing line.
    By 9:00 p.m. it was growing dark, and the Indians’ fire began to slacken. By 9:30 the firing had ceased