The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Big Horn
it back in. He had more important things to worry about. “Men . . . ,” he said, “it is live or die with us. We must fight it out with them.”
Besides baseball, Benteen’s other passion was his wife, Frabbie. Benteen had fallen in love with her during the Civil War; they had had five children together, only one of whom, their nine-year-old son, Fred, was still alive. When a particularly frightful barrage of bullets seemed sure to kill his commander, one of Benteen’s soldiers asked, “Why don’t you keep down, Captain?” “Oh I am all right,” Benteen insisted with a laugh; “mother sewed some good medicine in my blouse before I left home, so they won’t get me.” Whatever the couple had decided to use as “medicine,” they were following the example of the Lakota and Cheyenne, who relied on a diverse range of sacred objects—from bear claws, to bird skins, to stones and even dirt—to protect them in battle. Thanks to Frabbie, Benteen was invulnerable.
The Indians had infiltrated a ravine that began just south of Benteen’s hilltop and led down to the river. Most of the warriors were hidden from view, but the troopers could hear them “singing,” a soldier remembered, “some kind of war cry.” As Benteen stood on his hill amid a shower of bullets, he was suddenly taken with the sheer number of Indians gathered not only in the ravine but all around their little saucer of grass. One of his favorite soldiers in H Company was Private Windolph. “Windolph,” he said, “stand up and see this.” Fearing for his life, Windolph asked, “Do I have to?” “If you do,” Benteen replied, “and ever get out of here alive, which I sincerely doubt, you will be able to write and tell the Old Folks back in Germany how many Indians we had to fight today.”
“It took a man, ” Windolph later marveled, “to stand in that exposed position.”
L ong Road’s Sans Arc relatives were worried about him. His older brother had been killed the week before at the Battle of the Rosebud, and Long Road no longer wanted to live. As the warriors in the ravine crept constantly closer to the soldiers of Benteen’s H Company, Long Road—a cartridge belt looped over his shoulder, a knife between his teeth, and a pistol in each hand—was at the head of the pack.
The ravine opened up onto the bluff in a welter of grassy crevices and gulches that provided the young Sans Arc with just the cover he needed. Moving quickly among this complex system of dry streams and creeks, he paused, rose, fired, ducked, and moved on.
Private Pigford had been watching Long Road’s gradual but sure progress up the ravine. “Every little while this Indian would rise up and fire,” Pigford remembered. At one point, Long Road grew bold enough to reveal the entire upper half of his body. “Taking deliberate aim,” Pigford fired his carbine and killed the Sans Arc, who was less than seventy-five feet from the soldiers’ line—so close that his fellow warriors were unable to retrieve his body. Some of Benteen’s soldiers later claimed that the warrior had ventured near enough to touch the body of a fallen trooper, a practice known as counting coup, before he died. Whether or not this was true, Long Road had joined his brother in the afterlife.
H is men remembered him for his courage, but Benteen’s most distinct memory of that day was being “so confoundedly mad and sleepy.” More than anything else, Benteen wanted to take a nap, but the Indians had made that impossible. He told his men he “was getting mad, and I wanted them to charge down the ravine with me when I gave the yell.”
Given the topography, it was impossible to see how many warriors were massed in the ravine below, but this also meant that the warriors could not see them. With Benteen in the lead and with every man screaming at the top of his lungs, the soldiers poured over the barricade toward the unsuspecting warriors. “To say that ’twas a surprise to them,” Benteen wrote, “is [putting it mildly], for they somersaulted and vaulted as so many trained acrobats, having no order in getting down those ravines.” The charge continued for close to a hundred yards and effectively rid the ravine of warriors.
Before turning back, Benteen raised his carbine and shot one of the fleeing warriors in the spine. The “exquisite satisfaction” Benteen admitted to feeling had nothing to do with bloodlust (“I’m rather fond of Indians than otherwise,” he
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