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

surely be killed. The bullets were coming from three different directions and “all exposed places were pretty well riddled.” But he went anyway, running as fast as he could even as he was “seized with a tendency to shrink up”—a posture that his wife and children, for whom he later provided a demonstration, called “a squatty shuffle.” Instead of hitting him in the legs, as he’d expected, a bullet had torn off a knuckle on his right hand before it ricocheted from the barrel of his gun and ripped through his elbow. He’d been badly injured, but he had survived.
    Now he was faced with a similar dilemma. He knew that if he dared approach the river, the Indians would open fire. No one had ordered him to do this, but a promise was a promise, and besides, after two days on that sunbaked bluff, the prospect of dipping his face—not to mention his swollen, blood-caked hand—into the gurgling blue-green river made even the most perilous risk worth taking.
    Thompson reached the mouth of the ravine without incident and, leaving the two canteens behind, ran for the river with the kettle. But instead of rolling out of the trees on the other side of the river, a volley of gunfire erupted from the left, on his side. Despite his childhood fear of water, Thompson dove in.

    W atching from the bank of the river was the Cheyenne Young Two Moons. He and his fellow warriors saw a most unusual sight: a soldier in his undershirt running for the river with a large cup. The soldier “threw himself in [the] water,” Young Two Moons told an interpreter, and started filling the container. “Half the time [we] could not see him,” he remembered, “because of the water thrown up by the bullets.”

    W hen Thompson reached the safety of the ravine, he discovered that he’d succeeded “in getting plenty of sand, a little water,” but at least he had enough of that cool, sweet liquid to fill both canteens. After an exhausting trek back up the ravine, he was greeted by some troopers who asked him about the blood flowing down his forehead. Thompson insisted that his head was all right; it was his hand and elbow that were hurting him. But as was subsequently confirmed, Thompson had been grazed in the head by three different bullets, one of which had dug a sizable furrow (his daughter later described the scar as “a groove, long and quite depressed”) across his skull.
    He found Bennett still lying in the hospital. His friend was too weak to drink himself, so Thompson left one canteen in the care of another member of C Company, Private John Mahoney. The strongest loyalties a soldier felt were to the members of his own troop, and the soldiers of C Company were in an unusual position given that most of their members were with Custer’s battalion. They were a small, officerless group, and they must look out for themselves.
    Thompson found two more wounded members of C Company, Privates John McGuire and Alfred Whittaker, and gave them the other canteen. Once each of them had had a drink, Thompson took the canteen over to some of the other wounded. John McVay of G Company had been shot in the hips and had been particularly vociferous in his pleas for water. Once he’d drunk from Thompson’s canteen, McVay pulled a pistol from beneath his coat. Still clutching the canteen, he told Thompson “to skip or he would put a hole through me.”
    In retrospect, Thompson was glad he hadn’t been armed, because he was sure he would have responded by shooting the ingrate dead. “My action would have been justified by the law,” he insisted, “as it would have been an act of self defense.” But the G Company soldier was only one of many who were desperate for water. As Thompson pushed the pistol aside and indignantly reclaimed the canteen, others offered to pay him for a drink. “Ten dollars,” one soldier said; “fifteen for a canteen of water,” said another; “twenty dollars,” said a third. “And so the bidding went,” Thompson wrote, “as at an auction.” He decided he must make another, almost mile-long trip to the river and back.

    T hompson was not the only soldier to venture to the Little Bighorn on his own initiative. Henry Mechling and another soldier from Benteen’s H Company also headed down the ravine with their canteens. There they discovered Michael Madden, a saddler from Lieutenant Godfrey’s K Company, who had been shot in the right leg while attempting to get water, sitting beside a kettle at the