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

the two wings were close enough to be consolidated, if necessary, without eliminating entirely the possibility of a final push to the north.
    Years later Wolf’s Tooth described how one portion of the Left Wing (probably Yates’s troop) positioned itself with the horses in a basin on the river side of the flat-topped hill while another group of troopers, probably Lieutenant Algernon Smith’s E Company, moved on foot to a ridge to the north. As had been occurring down to the south around Calhoun Hill, warriors had been streaming across the river and working their way up into the hills, and it was now necessary to address the growing threat to the north. Even now, at this late stage, the enemy fire was more of a nuisance than a threat. But that was about to change.

    M uch as Yates had just done with the Left Wing, Keogh had kept his own I Company, as well as Lieutenant Henry Harrington’s C Company, in reserve in a section of low ground where the horses could be protected from potential attack. He positioned the company of Custer’s brother-in-law Lieutenant James Calhoun around the shallow basin at the top of the rise known today as Calhoun Hill.
    It had been an excruciating hour of waiting. They knew the Indians were out there; they just couldn’t see them as the warriors wriggled and squirmed their way through the grassy coulees and ravines. The troopers’ biggest concern was to the southwest. A prominent ridge that overlooked the eastern banks of the Little Bighorn, known today as Greasy Grass Ridge, was brimming with hundreds of warriors, who were beginning to spill over in their direction. Keogh directed Lieutenant Harrington and C Company to charge these Indians and drive them back to the river.
    Wooden Leg watched as the forty or so soldiers galloped about five hundred yards toward a group of warriors assembled on a low ridge. As Keogh had hoped, the warriors fled for the safety of a nearby gulch and C Company took the ridge. Initially, the soldiers remained mounted. But as they came to realize that the Indians were, in the words of the Cheyenne Yellow Nose, “not intimidated,” the troopers got off their horses and formed a skirmish line. Some of the warriors later told Sitting Bull how the troopers’ legs trembled when they dismounted from their horses. “They could not stand firmly on their feet,” Sitting Bull told a reporter. “They swayed to and fro . . . like the limbs of cypresses in a great wind. Some of them staggered under the weight of their guns.” The soldiers were certainly exhausted, but they were also trembling with fear.
    They soon realized that the warriors who’d fled from the ridge were not the only Indians in the vicinity. “The soldiers evidently supposed [the warriors] were few in number . . . ,” Yellow Nose recalled. “Their mistake was soon apparent as the Indians seemed really to be springing from the ground.” One of the older warriors in the battle was the thirty-seven-year-old Cheyenne Lame White Man. He’d been in a sweat lodge beside the Little Bighorn when Reno’s battalion first attacked. He had not had time to properly dress before he took after Custer’s battalion in the hills to the east. He now sat astride his pony with his loose hair unbraided and just a blanket wrapped around his waist, exhorting the young warriors “to come back and fight.”
    “All around,” Wooden Leg remembered, “the Indians began jumping up, running forward, dodging down, jumping up again, down again, all the time going toward the soldiers.” “There were hundreds of warriors,” Kate Bighead recalled, “many more than one might have thought could hide themselves in those small gullies.” The troopers of C Company suddenly realized that they were outnumbered by more than twenty to one.
    Lame White Man was one of the warriors leading the charge against C Company, but there was also the diminutive Cheyenne Yellow Nose. Actually, Yellow Nose was a Ute who’d been captured along with his mother when he was just four years old, and that afternoon he distinguished himself as one of the bravest warriors in the battle. Three times he attempted to convince the young warriors to follow him after the soldiers. It was only on the fourth attempt that he was successful, and as he and Lame White Man and their hundreds of followers rushed toward the skirmish line of C Company, he saw a soldier riding toward him with a flagstaff in his hand. Instead of holding the guidon upright in