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

sergeant was putting it mildly,” he remembered. But as Benteen soon realized, his company was in deep trouble. The warriors were so close that they were pelting the soldiers with rocks and clods of dirt. Some were even throwing arrows at them. He must stop the retreat of soldiers to the corral and start building a breastwork.
    He found a group of H Company soldiers and civilian packers cowering among the horses and mules. “Where are you running to, men?” he asked. “Come on back, and we will drive them off. You might as well be killed out there as in here.” He soon had fifteen or sixteen men headed back up the hill, carrying an assortment of hardtack boxes and saddles.
    This was a help, but he needed more men and material with which to build a barricade. He must ask Reno for another company. He found the major lying in a pit with Captain Weir. It was an unexpected pairing. Earlier that spring, Reno had attempted to court-martial Weir for insubordination. Now they were sharing a hole in the ground, a partnership that was most likely inspired by their mutual love of the bottle.
    Benteen told Reno that his company was being “hard pressed” by the Indians and that he required some reinforcements. Reno said that his side of the entrenchment was just as hard pressed and that he couldn’t spare any men. Benteen pointed out that if the Indians were able to cut through his line, the entire battalion would be overrun. Finally, Reno agreed to give him French’s M Company. “There was some dissatisfaction at the order,” Private Morris remembered, “as the men believed that the necessity was due solely to the neglect of ‘H,’ in digging pits.”
    Benteen evoked a similar response from the men of Moylan’s A Company, who had spent the night constructing one of the better barricades in the battalion. From Benteen’s perspective it was better than they needed, and with Moylan’s consent, he supervised the relocation of a considerable portion of the barricade to his end of the entrenchment. Private William Taylor was one of those who reluctantly carried the material over to Benteen’s position on the hill. He was almost killed when the hardtack box on his shoulder was hit by a bullet, but Taylor could not help but admire Benteen’s courage under fire. “You could see the bullets throwing up dust as they struck all around him while he, calmly as if on parade, came down our lines and, after his errand, returned in the same manner carrying in his hand a carbine.”
    After ignoring Custer’s order to “Come on,” after refusing to dig rifle pits and build barricades, after sleeping while his men endured the worst fire of the battle, Benteen had finally decided to wake up and fight.

    L ike Custer, Benteen had a theatrical streak. Unlike Custer, who was infatuated with the cavaliers of old, Benteen had a more contemporary source of inspiration: baseball.
    Benteen loved the sport. Back in Kansas, he’d organized a pickup game in the midst of the wide and rolling prairie and proudly speculated that it was probably the first time baseball had been played in such a remote part of the American West. Late in life his hands began to give him problems, a condition he blamed on years of playing baseball.
    In 1873 H Company organized “Benteen’s Base Ball Club.” Over the last three years, the Benteens had played throughout the Dakota Territory, even staging a game in the Black Hills, where they defeated a team of “citizen teamsters” 25–11. With the help of baseball, H Company had developed a cohesiveness and camaraderie that no other troop in the regiment could match. They might lack the fastidious attention to cleanliness that typified Yates’s “Bandbox Troop” (and thus earned Lieutenant Bell’s scorn as the regiment’s “poorest company”), but as they were about to prove, they were willing to follow their captain just about anywhere.
    The best player on Benteen’s Base Ball Club was First Sergeant Joseph McCurry, a pitcher with professional ambitions who was described as the “stay and prop of the club.” During the hilltop fight, McCurry’s possible future as a pro was placed in jeopardy when he suffered a gunshot wound to the left shoulder. Including McCurry, four members of Benteen’s Base Ball Club were wounded during the battle.
    That morning, Benteen prowled the top of his hill like a curmudgeonly baseball manager. When his shirttail worked out of his pants, he made no effort to tuck