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

insisted) and everything to do with being exhausted. “I was so tired,” he wrote, “and [the Indians] wouldn’t let me sleep.”
    One of the favorite soldiers of French’s M Company, Private James Tanner, was wounded during the charge. Seeing that Tanner was hit, Sergeant Ryan went back for a blanket, rolled him onto it, and with the help of three others carried him back to Dr. Porter’s hospital. “Poor old Tanner,” Private Newell said, “they got you.” “No,” Tanner gasped, “but they will in a few minutes.” The soldiers did everything they could to make him comfortable, even laying a coat over him as he grew cold beneath the searing summer sun, and soon he was dead.
    About that time, Captain French’s horse was shot in the head and began to stagger among the other animals. Private Henry Voight grabbed the horse’s bridle and started to lead him away when Voight, too, was shot in the head and killed. The next day, the soldiers buried Tanner and Voight in the same rifle pit. For a headstone they used the lid of a hardtack box with the dead men’s names written across it in pencil.

    B enteen had no sooner completed the charge and returned to his newly fortified breastwork when he realized that the Indians were now massing on Reno’s end of the entrenchment. With a hill between them and the warriors, the soldiers to the north were unaware of the threat. They were also unaware that these same warriors were firing on the rear of Benteen’s line. Once again, he must speak to Reno.

    —THE SIEGE, DAY 2, June 26, 1876 —

    Reno was still in his hole with Captain Weir, and he had no interest in leaving. “No doubt,” Peter Thompson wrote, “[Reno] would have pulled the hole in after him if he could.” Several times Benteen demanded that Reno lead a charge. Only after Benteen pointed out that Reno’s position was now in more peril than his own did Reno, who finally sat up enough to lean on his elbow, say, “All right, give the command.”
    “Ready boys,” Benteen shouted, “now charge and give them hell!”
    To his credit, Reno leapt up and led his men over the barricade. Lieutenant Varnum was running toward the puffs of gray smoke coming from the warriors’ line when he felt a sudden pain in his legs. “I thought I’d lost them,” he remembered. He later discovered that one bullet had punctured his calf while another had skimmed the length of the other leg, neatly cutting off the yellow cavalry stripe from his trousers before it smashed into his leather boot top. The concussion against his ankle-bone was “like a blow of a hammer,” he remembered, and after collapsing to the ground, he limped back to the barricade.
    By that time, the entire battalion had been called back. They had gone only forty or fifty yards, but the charge had served its purpose. The Indians had scattered. Miraculously, not a man had been lost during the charge. However, there was one soldier, Private Patrick Golden, who had elected to stay behind. The night before, he’d become convinced that he was fated to die the next day, and he remained weeping in the pit as his comrades ran bravely into the Indians’ fire. On their return, Lieutenant Edgerly and another soldier joined Golden in his pit. A few seconds later, the heaped earth in front of the pit exploded in a dusty cloud and Golden fell over with a bullet in the head.
    Once back behind the line, Varnum attempted to check the wound on his ankle, which was bothering him much more than the bullet through the calf. But every time he rolled on his back and tried to get his boot off, an Indian marksman nearly picked him off and sent him scurrying for cover. A young private from B Company lying next to him found all of this quite funny and began to laugh. Varnum was about to say something when a bullet slammed into the soldier’s head and killed him instantly.
    Many of the Indians were firing at such long range that the bullets landed harmlessly along the soldiers’ line. “We could pick the balls up as they fell,” Herendeen remembered. A spent bullet hit the regiment’s chief packer, John Wagoner, in the head. Instead of killing him, it merely knocked him unconscious. Once he’d been revived, his bloody head was wrapped in a bandage, and Wagoner lived for many years afterward with the bullet still lodged against his skull.
    By noon the temperature was approaching a hundred degrees, and the stench from the dead horses along the barricade had become