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

as a “shadow seen passing southward over to the east.” It was Custer, some insisted. Others said it was Terry and Gibbon. No, one of the packers claimed, it was the Wyoming Column, come to their rescue. The packer jumped onto a horse and rode up and down the line shouting, “Don’t be discouraged, boys, it’s Crook!” They stood staring into the dark as behind them the village blazed with light. Finally, the soldiers were forced to admit that nothing was out there.
    The superstitious among them might have wondered whether they’d witnessed the departure of Custer’s battalion for the afterlife. But no one (with the exception of Thompson and Watson, who’d seen glimpses of the desperate fighting to the north) could imagine that Custer and his men were dead. The life force burned so vigorously within George Armstrong Custer that it was impossible to believe it could be extinguished. Despite all the circumstantial evidence—the captured guidons and bugles, the dust cloud they’d seen hovering over the hills—the officers and men of Reno and Benteen’s battalion remained convinced that Custer was alive and that, as Benteen had maintained from the start, he had forsaken them.

CHAPTER 14

    Grazing His Horses
    A t 2:30 a.m., a pair of rifle shots tore through the cool predawn air. It was time, the Lakota and Cheyenne had decided, to resume the battle.
    Benteen told the trumpeters to sound reveille. He wanted “to notify all concerned,” Lieutenant Gibson remembered, “including the Indians, that there were still men left on the hill.”
    It was then that the phantoms of the previous night became real. A large number of mounted troopers, their guidons waving in the soft morning breeze, appeared to the north. “Of course . . . ,” Trumpeter William Hardy remembered, “we thought it was Custer’s command.” The cavalrymen marched to within four hundred yards of the entrenchment and halted. Then they opened fire. They were Indians dressed in the clothes of the soldiers’ dead comrades.
    That morning the warriors unleashed what Private William Taylor remembered as a “perfect shower of bullets.” The fire was hot everywhere, but it was particularly bad for the soldiers of Benteen’s H Company, who were spread out around the irregular edge of a bluff that dominated the south end of the entrenchment. Since they occupied the highest ground, they were vulnerable from virtually every direction. Soon all the sagebrush on their hill had been clipped to the very roots. “My only wonder,” Lieutenant Gibson remembered, “is that every one of us wasn’t killed.”
    Benteen had insisted that he and Gibson remain awake all night to make sure the pickets did their duty. But once the sky began to brighten and the bullets began to fly, Benteen decided it was time to sleep. Even though the Indians’ fire was much heavier than the day before and his men were without rifle pits and barricades, he retreated from the line, lay down on the bald and dusty hill, and, using his rifle as a pillow, took a nap.
    The Indians quickly had his range, and a bullet cut the heel off his boot; another kicked up the earth under his armpit. But Benteen, who claimed, “I hadn’t the remotest idea of letting little things like that disturb me,” somehow managed to fall asleep.
    As their commander slept, the soldiers of H Company became the enemy’s favored targets. The trooper lying beside Private Windolph decided to take off the overcoat he’d put on the night before. He’d rolled over onto his side and thrown out his arm when he cried out in pain. He’d taken a bullet through the heart and was dead. Seconds later, another bullet tore through Windolph’s clothes and nicked him in the torso; yet another shattered the wooden butt of his carbine.
    With no way to protect themselves and with Benteen nowhere in sight, the soldiers of H Company began to seek refuge among the horses and mules at the corral in the hollow at the center of the entrenchment. Lieutenant Gibson, who’d been left in charge while his commander slept, feared the depleted ranks were about to be overrun. The Indians were gathering in the ravine that led up from the river. One of the soldiers said what was on all their minds: “Get the old man back here quick.”

    B enteen was not happy when awakened with the message that his lieutenant was having “a regular monkey and parrot time of it.” “To say that I felt like saying something naughty to that