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

the war chiefs plunged ahead as their warriors whipped one another’s horses and followed them into the maelstrom. “The Indians kept coming like an increasing flood which could not be checked,” Red Hawk recalled. “The soldiers were swept off their feet; they could not stay; the Indians were overwhelming.”
    Gall remembered that the soldiers were “shot down in line where they stood.” Lieutenants Calhoun and Crittenden both died in the rear of their platoons, fighting back to back to the very end. Shell casings from Calhoun’s revolver were found around his body, which was identified by the distinctive fillings in his teeth. Crittenden was easier to identify. Eight months before his death, he’d lost his left eye in a hunting accident. On June 25, an arrow sliced into the upper portion of his face and shattered his glass eye.
    The survivors from Calhoun Hill fled north through what has since been called Horse Holders’ Ravine, toward Captain Keogh’s I Company. The collapse to the south came so suddenly that Keogh’s soldiers had little time to mount an effective defense. Inevitably adding to the panic and confusion was the immobilization of the company’s commander when a gunshot shattered Keogh’s left leg and severely injured his horse, Comanche. As the company’s sergeants gathered around their fallen leader, the warriors pounced, and I Company’s soldiers “were all,” Gall remembered, “killed in a bunch.”
    Today the cluster of a dozen and a half marble headstones, all of them grouped in a hollow on the eastern side of Battle Ridge, testifies to the terrifying swiftness of the slaughter. Included in that group was C Company’s First Sergeant Edwin Bobo, who had just survived two devastating Indian charges only to die with Keogh and his men in what was later described as a buffalo wallow. Unlike every other body in the group, Keogh’s was left untouched. Hanging from his neck was a medallion with the image of the Lamb of God known as an Agnus Dei. Some have speculated that it was out of respect for this sacred object that the warriors chose not to mutilate Keogh’s body.

    T he melee that resulted from the multipronged dissection of the Right Wing was unlike anything the warriors had ever experienced in their encounters with army soldiers. Two Moons told of how difficult it was to see amid the impenetrable black smoke and how the bullets made “a noise like bees.” Others spoke of the earsplitting shriek of the eagle-bone whistles. Each warrior depended on his own medicine for protection, and in the dizzying swirl of dust and noise a blanket could become bulletproof and a stuffed bird, often worn as a headdress, might start to sing. Gall claimed that “the Great Spirit was present riding over the field, mounted on a coal black pony and urging the braves on.”
    Many of the troopers were so confounded by the intensity of the fighting that they simply gave up. “These soldiers became foolish,” Red Horse remembered, “many throwing away their guns and raising their hands saying, ‘Sioux, pity us; take us prisoners. . . .’ None were left alive.” Many of the warriors became convinced that the soldiers must have been drunk, “firing into the ground, into the air, wildly in every way.” Shoots Walking, who was just sixteen during the battle, told of killing two soldiers who stood dumbly by with their carbines in their hands. “They did not know enough to shoot,” he said. For Standing Bear, there was little joy in killing such a helpless enemy. “When we rode into these soldiers,” he later told his son, “I really felt sorry for them, they looked so frightened. . . . Many of them lay on the ground, with their blue eyes open, waiting to be killed.”
    Inevitably, given the excitement and poor visibility, several warriors fell to friendly fire. “The Indians were knocking each other from their steeds,” Horned Horse remembered, “and it is an absolute fact that the young [warriors] in their . . . fury killed each other, several dead Indians being found killed by arrows.” Waterman’s Arapaho friend Left Hand mistakenly lanced a young Lakota warrior to death. Kate Bighead’s teenage cousin Noisy Walking was mortally wounded by a Lakota. Yet another Lakota killed the Cheyenne chief Lame White Man, perhaps because his new soldier’s coat fooled the warrior into thinking he was an Arikara scout.
    Yellow Nose watched as two mounted warriors smashed into each other. “Both