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

“Come on,” and deep down he knew it.
    Benteen’s one overarching weakness, Bell told Walter Camp, was “vindictiveness.” He not only held a grudge against Custer for the death of Major Elliott at the Washita, he was galled by his low rank relative to what he’d achieved during the Civil War, especially when it required him to serve under inferior sorts like Custer and Reno. As a consequence, Benteen “never took the interest in his command that might have been expected of him.” He was “indifferent,” Bell claimed, “to minor matters of discipline and always had the poorest company in the regiment.” But if Benteen was “not a good company officer,” he was, Bell acknowledged, “a first rate fighter.” As the next day was about to prove, that was an understatement.

    I nstead of plotting to abandon the wounded, Reno appears to have spent the night nursing his whiskey and complaining about Custer. At one point, Private Burkman overheard Reno say to another officer: “Well I wonder where the Murat of the American army is by this time!” Since Burkman, who was illiterate, didn’t know that Murat was Napoleon’s greatest cavalry officer, the remark didn’t mean much to him; he did know, however, that Reno had “a sneer in his laugh.”
    Later that night two civilian packers were searching for some food and blankets near the corral. The boxes and saddles that hadn’t made their way to the barricade had been tossed together into a large, disorganized heap. Standing alone in the darkness with a bottle in his hand was Major Reno. “Are the mules tight?” Reno said. Assuming the major had misspoken, one of the packers asked if he meant to ask whether the mules were “tied.” “Tight, goddamn you,” Reno shouted as he lunged toward the man and showered him with whiskey.
    Lieutenant Edgerly also saw Reno near the horses and mules that night. When Reno asked what he’d been doing, Edgerly said that he’d been sleeping. “Great God,” Reno responded, “I don’t see how you can sleep.”

    T hat night Peter Thompson went to check on his horse. When he’d last seen the animal, it was one of five horses being held by Private John McGuire, who’d been so frightened by the terrific fire of the Indians that he’d scrunched down as low as was humanly possible and still hold five horses. When Thompson arrived several hours later, McGuire was in the exact same position, even though three of the horses were dead. Thompson asked McGuire whether he realized that he’d lost three of his charges. “He mournfully shook his head,” Thompson remembered. When he saw that one of the dead horses was his own, Thompson left “in disgust.”
    As had been true all afternoon and evening, the only thing anybody wanted to talk about was the whereabouts of Custer and his battalion. In the beginning Thompson attempted to tell his fellow soldiers what he’d witnessed. They were perfectly willing to believe that he had seen Custer on the river, but they refused to believe that Custer had gotten “the worst of the fight, that was bosh.” Instead of attempting to convince them of the truth, Thompson decided to “say nothing further about it as contradiction was a thing I could not stand, when I was right.”
    Thompson walked over to the edge of the bluffs and looked down into the valley. Large bonfires illuminated the village below, throwing long and quavering shadows across the hills. He could see the Indians dancing around the fires and hear the throb of the drums, the barking of the dogs, and the high-pitched howls of the women grieving for the dead. The sights and sounds “made the night hideous,” Thompson observed, but the Lakota and Cheyenne “seemed to enjoy it amazingly.”
    While he and the others stood gazing at the village, they heard the hoarse bleat of a bugle echoing across the valley. One of the buglers in the battalion sent out an answering call. But the response was yet another meaningless, discordant blast. The Indians were mocking them, they decided, with a captured bugle.
    Each company had stationed two pickets along the periphery of the entrenchment. In case of attack, the pickets were to provide at least a measure of advance warning that the enemy was approaching. But instead of warriors, the pickets thought they saw something else. A column of cavalry, they announced to those back in the entrenchment, was out there in the darkness.
    The men studied the gloom ahead for what was described