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

ravine’s mouth. Madden had suffered a double fracture beneath the knee and rather than endure the torture of being lugged back up to the top of bluff, had requested to remain beside the river.
    Mechling’s partner took Madden’s kettle and ran for the river. When he returned, there was a fresh bullet hole about three inches from the top of the kettle, but he’d managed to collect a good amount of water. Mechling filled several canteens, strapped them around his shoulders, and climbed to the top of the bluff, where he found his captain and offered him a drink. In no time, Benteen had drunk almost half the contents of the canteen.
    Extreme thirst is one of the most powerful urges a human being can experience, and the sight of their leader greedily downing a canteen of water was more than Benteen’s men could bear. “The whole line [was] about to start to the river for water,” Mechling remembered, “and Benteen had to make threats to prevent them from leaving the line and making a break for the river.” By hastily succumbing to his own craving for water, Benteen had endangered the safety of the entire battalion. If he didn’t act responsibly now, any remaining order in his company might rapidly degenerate into a collective madness for water.
    Benteen asked Mechling if he and a detail of three soldiers could provide some covering fire for another, larger detail of men sent down to the river for water. Soon Mechling and his band of “German boys,” all of them from H Company, were positioned on a narrow bluff overlooking the Little Bighorn, where they could cover the movements of twelve water carriers. It was dangerous for the water carriers, but the four sharpshooters were just as exposed. “The Indians off to the north had the range on us,” Mechling remembered, “and when the fire got too hot we had to get to the south slope of the hill, when the Indians to the south would crack away at us and then we would run over to the north slope, and in this way kept repeating the performance.” All four sharpshooters, including Private Charles Windolph, later received Medals of Honor, as did fifteen water carriers, including Peter Thompson, who made at least three trips to the river that day.

    A round 2 p.m., the warriors unleashed one of the stiffest fusillades yet, and the soldiers, many of whom had been milling about the entrenchment, were driven back to the barricade. By this time Thompson had moved to the western side of the entrenchment overlooking the river. From behind the bluff, he heard someone shout in excellent English, “Come down here you white livered son of a bitch, and I will cut your heart out and drink your blood.”
    During their panicked flight from the banks of the Little Bighorn, Thompson and Watson had been fired on by a man who Thompson claimed was white. Whether or not this was another one of his mistaken or potentially delusional sightings, others in the battalion heard English spoken by the enemy that day. Several soldiers claimed that at least one of the sharpshooters firing on the entrenchment from the hill to the north was white, and Reno later insisted that the Lakota and Cheyenne had been supplemented by “all the [territory’s] desperadoes, renegades, and half-breeds and squawmen.” True to his oddly original nature, Thompson responded to the enemy’s expletive-laden taunt by bleating like a sheep.
    By 3 p.m., the Indians’ fire once again began to slacken. By 4 p.m. it had stopped almost entirely. By 5 p.m. thick clouds of smoke began to billow up from fires along the river. The soldiers had long since left their positions along the line and were gathered in small groups as they looked down on the valley below. “I doubt if a dirtier, more haggard looking lot of men ever wore the Army Blue,” Private William Taylor wrote. They watched as the red ball of the sun sank into the smoky air, when suddenly the wispy clouds started to lift. Below them was a sight that was never seen again: a village of eight thousand Lakota and Cheyenne and twenty thousand horses moving as one.
    The train of people and horses was between a half and a full mile wide and went on for almost three miles. It was, Lieutenant Edgerly, testified, “the largest number of quadrupeds I’d ever seen in my life.” Edgerly compared the herd to “a great brown carpet . . . being dragged over the ground.” To Trumpeter William Hardy, it looked like “a long black cloud . . . moving away.” Hardy