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

intolerable. No one appreciated this more than George Herendeen. His horse had died the day before, and the carcass was swarming with maggots and flies. Even worse, whenever an enemy bullet struck the horse, Herendeen could hear the slow, appalling hiss of gas leaking from the animal’s bloated corpse.
    Many of the soldiers had not had a drink of water in two days. Their mouths were so dry they could no longer speak. In hopes of promoting the secretion of saliva, some of them tried chewing on hardtack. But it was no use, and rather than gag on the bread, they were forced, Lieutenant Godfrey wrote, to “blow it out of their mouths like so much flour.” Some of the soldiers grew so desperate for a drink that they reverted, the Cheyenne claimed, to collecting urine from the horses.
    The soldiers were all suffering from dehydration, but for the more than forty wounded men, most of whom had lost significant amounts of blood, the torment—technically known as volumetric thirst—was beyond imagining. “It was awful . . . ,” remembered Dr. Porter, who lacked the water even to clean the soldiers’ wounds, “the groans of the men . . . crying and begging piteously for water to moisten their parched lips, which were soon to close and stiffen in death.”
    Peter Thompson had been wounded in the arm and hand before he could join Benteen’s charge. He staggered over to Porter’s hospital and, feeling light-headed from loss of blood, collapsed. When he came to, he discovered that another soldier had stolen his carbine. By that time, a considerable number of soldiers had made their way back to the corral, and as Thompson lay on the ground, “meditating on the meanness of human nature,” Benteen arrived shouting, “Get out of here! Do your duty!” and drove the skulkers back to the lines.
    The heat had become so oppressive that Dr. Porter decided to try to shade the wounded with a piece of canvas held up by a few pieces of wood. The canvas was so low that it inevitably trapped the smothering heat, but at least they were no longer frying in the sun. Lying beside Thompson was his good friend James Bennett, who’d been hit in the spine and was now paralyzed from the waist down. Thompson asked if there was anything he could do to help. “Water, Thompson,” he said. “Water, for God’s sake.”
    “I’ll get it,” Thompson replied, “if I live.” Bennett let go of Thompson’s hand and “seemed satisfied.” It was only then, Thompson wrote, that “I began to realize what the promise I had made meant.”

    B y the late morning, the fire from the Indians had begun to slacken. Thompson took up a coffee kettle and two canteens and headed down the ravine for the river. On his way, he passed some troopers examining the body of Long Road. The group included two soldiers from his own troop, C Company: Sergeant Daniel Kanipe, who’d greeted him when he first joined Reno’s battalion on the bluff, and Private John Jordan. Kanipe told him he was foolish to try to get water, particularly given his badly wounded right hand, which made it impossible to carry a carbine. But Thompson, stubborn as always, would not be deterred, and after Jordan gave him a handkerchief with which to make a sling, he started down the ravine, wounded and unarmed.
    H Company’s charge had flushed the bluff of Indians, but this did not mean there weren’t a few warriors waiting to ambush anyone attempting to approach the river. “As I went down the ravine,” Thompson wrote, “I found it got narrower and deeper, and became more lonesome and naturally more depressing.” The bottom of the ravine was chopped up with hoof prints from the warriors’ ponies. It was clear to Thompson that “the Indians had made a desperate effort to make an opening through our place of defense by this route.” With his hand in a sling and the kettle and canteens in his arms, he moved cautiously down the ever-constricting corridor of grass until the ravine began to bend toward the river.
    Ahead of him the ravine opened up enough that it offered no protection from the Lakota snipers who were surely lurking in the dense stand of cottonwoods on the opposite bank of the river. After about a hundred yards, the topography once again provided some cover until the ravine eventually ended about twenty yards from the edge of the Little Bighorn.
    Not long before, Thompson had been convinced that if he did as Benteen ordered and ran up the hill to the H Company line, he would