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

successive nights with almost no sleep, and in his own narrative of the hilltop fight, he refers repeatedly to how tired he felt. The judgment of everyone on Reno Hill was impaired by a powerful combination of fatigue, dehydration, and fear, but it’s safe to say that no one was as exhausted by that morning as Frederick Benteen.
    Only when he awoke to find himself in the midst of the imminent collapse of both his company and the battalion did Benteen become “the savior of the Seventh.” By then, he had a special incentive. Custer was still out there, he believed, and if he and Reno could only get through this day alive, the whole world would soon learn how their commander had callously deserted them. Of course, Custer had done the same thing eight years before at the Battle of the Washita and gotten away with it. But not this time. There were too many witnesses. By surviving this two-day siege, he and Reno had surely earned themselves the most satisfying victory of all: the court-martial and professional demise of George Armstrong Custer.

    G eneral Terry had promised Custer that he’d be at the Little Bighorn by the morning of June 26. But it had taken longer than expected to ferry the soldiers across the Yellowstone on the Far West . “I shall never forget Terry’s anxiety and impatience to get on,” Major Brisbin wrote.
    As the riverboat proceeded up the Bighorn toward the Little Bighorn, Terry and the Montana Column marched along the Bighorn’s eastern bank over some of the roughest country any of them had ever seen. On the night of June 25, in a cold and miserable rain, they lost their way in the moonless dark and nearly fell into the river. “The head of the column came plump on the brink of a precipice at whose foot swept the roaring waters of the Bighorn,” wrote Lieutenant James Bradley, who was in charge of the Crow scouts. “The water gleamed in front a hundred and fifty feet below. . . . For several minutes we sat [on] our horses looking by turn at the water and into the black ravines.”
    At Bradley’s suggestion, the Crow scout Little Face was placed at the head of the column, and in a few hours’ time, they were camped about a mile and a half from the Little Bighorn. At daylight on June 26, Lieutenant Bradley and his Crow scouts were sent out to investigate the trail ahead. They found evidence that four unshod Indian ponies had recently passed by on their way to the Bighorn. They soon discovered that the ponies belonged to three of Custer’s Crow scouts, White Man Runs Him, Hairy Moccasin, and Goes Ahead, who had already crossed over to the west bank of the Bighorn. After communicating with the scouts, Little Face rode back to Bradley.
For awhile he could not speak [Bradley wrote], but at last composed himself and told his story in a choking voice, broken with frequent sobs. As he proceeded, the Crows one by one broke off from the group of listeners and going aside a little distance sat down alone, weeping and chanting that dreadful mourning song, and rocking their bodies to and fro. They were the first listeners to the horrid story of the Custer massacre, and outside of the relatives and personal friends of the fallen, there were none in this whole horrified nation of forty millions of people to whom the tidings brought greater grief.
    This was the first word of the disaster to reach anyone associated with the Montana Column. Bradley personally delivered the message to Terry and his staff. “The story was sneered at,” Bradley wrote; “such a catastrophe it was asserted was wholly improbable, nay impossible.” Terry, Bradley noticed, “took no part in these criticisms, but sat on his horse silent and thoughtful, biting his lower lip.”
    They proceeded and were soon in the valley of the Little Bighorn. About fifteen to twenty miles to the southeast was a cloud of dense smoke.

    —THE MARCH OF THE MONTANA COLUMN TO THE LITTLE BIGHNORN, June 21-27, 1876 —

    As the majority of the column marched up the valley, Lieutenant Charles Roe led several cavalry companies to the bluffs paralleling the river to the right. From his elevated position Roe could see “a long line of moving dark objects defiling across the prairie from the Little Bighorn . . . as if the village were in motion, retreating before us.” Roe also saw some horsemen “clothed in blue uniforms . . . breaking into column and otherwise maneuvering like a body of cavalry.” Thinking they were from Custer’s regiment,