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

remembered how Major Reno turned to Captain Moylan and said, “For God’s sake, Moylan, look what we have been standing off!” The soldiers gave three spontaneous cheers as Captain French and Sergeant Ryan trained their long-range rifles on the distant Indians and fired a few halfhearted shots. Sergeant Ryan later claimed that he fired both the first and last shots of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
    Four men—the interpreter Fred Gerard, the scout Billy Jackson, Private Thomas O’Neill, and Lieutenant Charles DeRudio, all of them still hidden in the brush near the river—saw firsthand the human toll the battle had taken on the Lakota and Cheyenne. From his hiding place in the trees near Reno’s original fording place, Gerard could “plainly see wounded warriors on travois and dead warriors thrown across and tied to the backs of horses. Above all the noise and rattle and the hum of voices and cries of children, we could hear the death chanting of the squaws.”
    Up on the hill, Reno and his officers feared that this was simply a ruse and that come tomorrow the warriors would return. In preparation for what was regarded as the inevitable third day of the battle, Reno decided to move the entrenchment closer to the river and away from the stench of the dead horses. As night descended, the men dug new and larger rifle pits while others led the horses down to the river. Lieutenant Edgerly remembered how the horses sat down on their haunches as they tried to make their tentative yet urgent way down the steep bluff to the water. Once they reached the river, it was, Sergeant Stanislas Roy related, “a pitiful sight to see the poor animals plunge their heads into the water up to their eyes and drink.”
    Around 11 p.m., the spirits of the men received a boost when Gerard and Jackson wandered in, followed soon after by DeRudio and O’Neill, all of whom had spent two terrifying days and nights hiding from the Indians in the scrubby woods beside the river. Reno wrote out a message for Terry and Gibbon, who were presumably approaching from the Bighorn to the north, but the Crow and Arikara scouts said there were too many warriors in the vicinity to leave the entrenchment safely.
    On the morning of June 27 they looked down on what appeared to be a deserted Indian village. The site was littered with tepee poles and a few still-standing lodges, but there was not a living person to be seen. And then they looked down the river valley and saw the cloud of dust coming toward them from the north.
    At first they worried that this was the Indians come to renew the attack. But gradually they realized that the two approaching columns were soldiers. Some thought it was Crook; others said it was Terry and Gibbon, perhaps with Custer showing them the way. At last, the siege was over.

    F or two days, fewer than 400 soldiers, scouts, and packers had held off approximately 2,000 Lakota and Cheyenne warriors. Their commander, Marcus Reno, had not covered himself in glory, but he had not been the sniveling coward some later made him out to be. Whiskey had dulled his senses and made it impossible for him to lead by example, but a part of him may have realized that his second-in-command, Captain Benteen, was better equipped to inspire the battalion in a desperate siege. After two days of hard fighting, during which they had suffered casualties of 18 dead and 52 wounded, approximately 350 members of Reno’s battalion were still alive, and that, in the end, was all that mattered.
    At the court of inquiry that was later called to investigate Reno’s conduct, Captain McDougall gave a most perceptive assessment of his commander. “He could make as stubborn a fight as any man,” McDougall testified, “but I don’t think he could encourage men like others. . . . Men are different, some are dashing and others have a quiet way of going through. I think he did as well as anyone could do.”
    Benteen, on the other hand, had been everything Reno wasn’t. “Wherever Benteen went,” Peter Thompson remembered, “the soldiers’ faces lighted up with hope.” However, not until the second day of the siege did Benteen assume the role for which he was later remembered. On the night of June 25 he refused to build a barricade; the next morning, in the midst of a near-catastrophic Indian assault, he took a nap.
    Exhaustion, in fact, may have been for Benteen what whiskey was for Reno. By the morning of June 26, Benteen was suffering from three