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

the usual fashion, the flag bearer, who may not have had time to reload his carbine, was attempting to spear Yellow Nose with the brass ferule at the end of the staff. Thinking it was some kind of gun, Yellow Nose yanked the guidon out of the soldier’s hands.
    Custer’s brother Tom had been awarded two Medals of Honor for capturing the enemy’s flag during the Civil War. Yellow Nose not only accomplished this largely ceremonial feat, he gave it a decidedly Native twist by audaciously tapping the color-bearer with his own guidon. Of all the many acts of bravery during the Custer battle, none was more remarked upon by the Indians than when Yellow Nose counted coup with a Seventh Cavalry flagstaff.
    A billowing pall of black powder smoke followed the warriors’ advance. “A great roll of smoke seemed to go down the ravine,” Runs the Enemy remembered. Those soldiers who were not killed within this murderous cloud retreated back to Calhoun’s troop on the hill. Two days later, when the survivors of the siege on Reno Hill came to bury the dead, some of the first bodies they recognized were those of Sergeants Jeremiah Finley and George Finckle of C Company. Of the original forty soldiers of the company, just half made it back to Calhoun Hill.
    Several of the warriors commented on a mounted officer whom they regarded as “the bravest man they had ever seen.” “He alone saved his command a number of times,” Red Horse insisted, “by turning on his horse in the rear in the retreat. In speaking of him, the Indians call him, ‘The man who rode the horse with four white feet.’ ” Red Horse remembered this officer as having long yellow hair, but that detail may have been inspired by the belated realization that the famed Long Hair had led the attack. The Cheyenne Two Moons, on the other hand, claimed that this particular officer had “long black hair and a mustache.” C Company’s Lieutenant Harrington fit that description, and since his company was the first to be attacked that afternoon, he had more opportunities than any other officer to distinguish himself by courageously covering the retreat of his men.
    But as Harrington, whose body was never identified, and the other survivors of C Company soon learned, the refuge of Calhoun Hill was no refuge at all.

    I n 1983 fire ravaged the Little Bighorn Battlefield. This provided a team of archaeologists and volunteers with the chance to sweep the denuded site with metal detectors and analyze what they found. In addition to buttons, picket pins, bones, bits of clothing, and other assorted objects, the archaeologists found dozens upon dozens of shell casings.
    The casings were analyzed by weapons experts who determined that in addition to the Springfield carbines and Colt revolvers fired by the soldiers, there were forty-three additional types of weapons used by the Indians. Some of these were old-style muzzle loaders and single-shot rifles, but a startlingly large number of warriors, perhaps as many as three hundred, possessed modern repeating rifles manufactured by Henry and Winchester capable of firing seventeen rounds without reloading. One ridge just to the southwest of Calhoun Hill possessed so many cartridges from the Indians’ repeaters that the archaeologists dubbed the site Henryville. Custer’s battalion, with its single-shot carbines, was overwhelmingly outgunned.
    By all accounts, the rapidity of fire was extraordinary. “The shooting was quick, quick,” Two Moons told an interpreter. “Pop—pop—pop, very fast.” The Crow scout Curley, who had left the battalion by this point and was observing the battle from a distant hill to the east, likened the sound to “the snapping of the threads in the tearing of a blanket.” Answering as best they could with their carbines, Calhoun’s troopers, who were deployed in a semicircle with Calhoun and his second lieutenant, John Crittenden, exhorting them from behind, fired off round after round. “The soldiers stood in line,” Red Hawk remembered, “and made a very good fight. The soldiers delivered volley after volley into the dense ranks of the Indians without any perceptible effect on account of their great numbers.” When he inspected the hill two days later, Captain Moylan, who was married to Calhoun’s sister, reported finding as many as forty cartridge casings beside one dead soldier and twenty-eight beside another. It was, most probably, the firing at Calhoun Hill that attracted the