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

he sent a detail to investigate. As they’d done earlier in the day on Reno Hill, the blue-clad warriors fired on the approaching soldiers, who were “quickly undeceived as to their character.”
    As it was almost completely dark, Terry ordered the column to camp for the night. “Notwithstanding the disclosures of the day,” Terry’s staff remained confident “that there was not an Indian in our front and that the men seen were members of Custer’s command.” The Crow scouts knew better and had long since slipped away from the column and headed back to their reservation.
    On the morning of June 27, five days after Custer had first set forth up the Rosebud River, the Montana Column resumed its march along the west bank of the Little Bighorn. Two advance guards led them up the valley while Terry and Gibbon remained with the slower-moving infantry. After passing a large, heavily wooded bend in the river, they caught a glimpse of two Indian tepees “standing in the open valley.” While Bradley’s advance guard of mounted infantry crossed the river to scout the hills to the east, the rest of the column marched into the abandoned village: a three-mile swath of naked tepee poles, discarded kettles, and other implements. Each of the two standing lodges was encircled by a ring of dead ponies and contained the corpses of several warriors. Among the debris they found the bloody underwear of Lieutenant James Sturgis, son of the Seventh Cavalry’s highest-ranking officer, Colonel Samuel Sturgis. There was also the buckskin shirt owned by Lieutenant James Porter. Judging from the bullet hole in the shirt, Porter had been shot near the heart.
    Up ahead to the south, on the other side of the river, Gibbon could see what looked to be a crowd of people standing on a prominent hill. But were they soldiers or warriors? “The feeling of anxiety was overwhelming,” he wrote. By this time, Lieutenant Bradley had descended from the much closer hills almost directly across the river to the east. He rode up to Gibson and Terry. “I have a very sad report to make,” he said. “I have counted one hundred and ninety-seven dead bodies lying in the hills.”
    “White men?” someone asked.
    “Yes, white men.”
    “There could be no question now,” Gibbon wrote. “The Crows were right.”

    N ot long afterward, Terry and Gibbon learned from Lieutenants Hare and Wallace that Major Reno and seven companies of the Seventh Cavalry were the men they’d seen watching from the hills. As Gibbon looked for a place to camp in the valley, Terry and his staff followed Hare and Wallace to the bluff.
    Terry was openly weeping by the time he reached Reno’s battalion. Standing beside the major was Frederick Benteen. Almost immediately the captain asked whether Terry “knew where Custer had gone.”
    “To the best of my knowledge and belief,” Terry replied, “he lies on this ridge about 4 miles below here with all of his command killed.”
    “I can hardly believe it,” Benteen said. “I think he is somewhere down the Big Horn grazing his horses.” Benteen then launched into the refrain he’d been repeating ever since he arrived on Reno Hill: “At the Battle of the Washita he went off and left part of his command, and I think he would do it again.”
    Terry was well aware of the history between Custer and Benteen. “I think you are mistaken,” he responded, “and you will take your company and go down where the dead are lying and investigate for yourself.”

    P rivate Jacob Adams was the the one who found Custer. He called to Benteen, who dismounted and walked over to have a closer look.
    “By God,” he said, “that is him.”

CHAPTER 15

    The Last Stand
    D uring his inspection of the battlefield, Benteen decided that there was no pattern to how the more than two hundred bodies of Custer’s battalion were positioned. “I arrived at the conclusion then that I have now,” he testified two and a half years later, “that it was a rout, a panic, till the last man was killed. There was no line on the battlefield; you can take a handful of corn and scatter it over the floor and make just such lines.” Today many of the descendants of the warriors who fought in the battle believe the rout started at the river.
    According to these Native accounts, Custer’s portion of the battle began with a charge down Medicine Tail Coulee to the Little Bighorn. The troopers had started to cross the river when the warriors concealed on the