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

attention of the officers and men of Reno’s battalion.
    Just as devastating as the Henry and Winchester repeating rifles were the Indians’ arrows. If half of the two thousand warriors fired ten arrows each during the engagement, that would have been a total of ten thousand arrows, or about forty arrows per soldier. When combined with the roar of guns and the acrid clouds of black powder smoke, this deadly rain of steel-tipped arrows did much to harry both the soldiers and the horses, many of which were gathered in a draw behind Calhoun Hill and were becoming increasingly difficult to manage.
    Since every fourth soldier was required to remain mounted and hold the horses for the other three, the company’s firepower was reduced by 25 percent. In order to better the odds against the daunting number of Indians, Keogh had apparently directed the horse holders to take on twice the usual number of horses so that additional soldiers could join the skirmish line. The Hunkpapa Moving Robe Woman, who was still intent on avenging the death of her brother Deeds, noticed that some of the mounted soldiers were “holding the reins of eight or ten horses.”
    The Hunkpapa warrior Gall had made the troopers’ horses his personal priority. Like Moving Robe Woman, he had already suffered a terrible personal loss when he learned of the deaths of his two wives and three children. By taking the soldiers’ horses, he was not only taking something of vital importance to the enemy but also securing something of great value to his tribe, especially since the saddlebags on each horse contained the soldiers’ reserves of ammunition.
    Gall and his warriors were working up a ravine toward Calhoun’s and Keogh’s troops when they came upon the mother lode: dozens of horses hidden in a ravine “without any other guard than the horse-holders.” As some of Gall’s warriors waved their blankets and others fired on the soldiers, the horses leapt and whinnied and, after yanking free from the holders, stampeded for the river. So many horses poured out of the hollow that many of the Indians to the west assumed they were being charged by the enemy. Only later did they realize that the horses they’d fired upon had been without any riders.
    After this catastrophic loss, Calhoun’s and Keogh’s troopers started to hold on jealously to what horses remained. “They held their horses’ reins on one arm while they were shooting,” Low Dog remembered, “but their horses were so frightened that they pulled the men all around, and a great many of their shots went up in the air.”
    As pressures mounted to the south, Crazy Horse struck to the north. Extending between Calhoun Hill and the flat-topped knob where Custer and the Left Wing had deployed was a hogback that came to be known as Battle Ridge. For Keogh’s Right Wing, this narrow ridge, which extended north like the sharp-edged spine of a gigantic and partially buried beast, was both a bulwark against the Indians and a potential pathway to Custer and the Left Wing. By riding his pony through a slight gap in the forty-yard-wide ridge, Crazy Horse managed singlehandedly to break the Right Wing in half. “Crazy Horse was the bravest man I ever saw . . . ,” marveled the Arapaho Waterman. “All the soldiers were shooting at him, but he was never hit.”
    While Crazy Horse smashed through the line of troopers, the Cheyenne leader Lame White Man, dressed in a newly acquired blue trooper’s coat, prepared to mount a fierce northern thrust along the western edge of Battle Ridge. To the north a group of young warriors that John Stands in Timber called “the Suicide Boys” also charged into the soldiers, purposely drawing their fire so that other warriors could attack the troopers as they struggled to reload. Stands in Timber went so far as to insist that if not for the reckless abandon of the Suicide Boys, who transformed what had been a largely long-distance fight into a hand-to-hand struggle, the battle might have degenerated into an unsatisfactory siege similar to what later occurred on Reno Hill.
    To the south the warriors realized that the time was right to charge Calhoun Hill. “The dust created from the stampeding horses and powder smoke made everything dark and black,” Moving Robe Woman remembered. “Flashes from carbines could be seen. . . . I never heard such whooping and shouting. ‘There is never a better time to die,’ shouted Red Horse.”
    With the cry of “Hi-Yi-Yi,”