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

were,” he said, “making preparations.” Five or six dead horses were later found on the hill’s thirty-foot-wide plateau as part of an apparent attempt to provide the survivors with a barricade. Adjutant Cooke may have busied himself with scribbling several messages that were never delivered. Dr. George Lord, who had been so ill that morning that Custer had attempted to persuade him to let Dr. Porter go in his stead, probably tended to the wounded. Carbines and pistols were reloaded, and plans were made for the soldiers of E Company, who at some point abandoned their skirmish line to the north and temporarily reunited with the rest of the battalion, to make one last run for the river.
    The body of the troop’s commander, Lieutenant Algernon Smith, was later found on Last Stand Hill. This would suggest that he was either wounded or already dead before the company’s final charge toward the river. Two Moons spoke of a wounded officer dressed in buckskin seen staggering from the vicinity of E Company’s skirmish line toward Last Stand Hill. If this was Lieutenant Smith, leadership of the Gray Horse Troop then went to Smith’s second lieutenant, James Sturgis, son of the Seventh Cavalry’s putative commander, Colonel Samuel Sturgis. At twenty-two, Lieutenant Sturgis was the youngest officer in the regiment. His father and Custer had always had a prickly relationship, and the young lieutenant was now about to lead his company in Custer’s final attempt to break through to the Little Bighorn. Custer appears to have given Sturgis the assistance of the interpreter and scout Mitch Boyer.
    When the fighting resumed, it was, once again, at long range. Kate Bighead was watching from the sidelines along with a large audience of old men and boys and could see that the warriors were following the same stratagem that had proven so successful against the Right Wing. There were, Kate remembered, “hundreds of warriors for every white soldier left alive,” and the Indians were “creeping closer and closer.”
    Suddenly, a large number of riderless horses, most of them grays, bolted from the hill. “They are gone!” the Indians shouted. It seems to have been an attempt on the soldiers’ part at a diversion. As the warriors scrambled to catch the horses, about forty troopers, most of them on foot, bounded down from the hill and charged for the river. Once again the warriors cried out, “They are gone!”
    “When this band of soldiers charged,” Red Horse remembered, “the Sioux fell back and the Sioux and the soldiers stood . . . facing each other.” But not for long. “Then all the Sioux became brave and charged the soldiers.” One of the warriors was Iron Hawk, who drew back his bow and shot an arrow through a soldier’s rib cage. “I heard him scream,” he remembered. Soon Iron Hawk was on top of another soldier and pounding him over the head with his wooden bow. “I was very mad,” he told an interpreter, “because the women and children had run away scared and I was thinking about this when I did this killing.”
    It’s about three-quarters of a mile from Last Stand Hill to the river, and those soldiers who hadn’t already been killed realized they’d never make it to the Little Bighorn. So they swerved to the left toward a steep-sided gulch known as Deep Ravine. Close to thirty of them dove into this dark and bushy cleft in the ground only to be shot with rifles and arrows and battered to death with stone clubs. Two days later, the walls of the ravine were still etched by the soldiers’ frantic attempts to climb out; a year later, Lieutenant John Bourke looked down into this grassy pocket and saw seven skulls, four of them clustered together like eggs in a nest.
    After the fire of 1983, archaeologists discovered some facial bones near Deep Ravine. The bones were later determined to be from a man in his midthirties whose teeth displayed the wear pattern of a pipe smoker. Since it was also established that the man was of French-Lakota ancestry, this could only have been Mitch Boyer.
    Boyer had been philosophical about his chances of surviving the campaign. Even if he was destined to die, he said, he could take consolation in knowing that he’d already killed so many Lakota that they could never even the score. Apparently, not even Boyer had anticipated this terrible a result. After the Battle of the Little Bighorn, his debt in Lakota lives had been paid in full.
    Lieutenant Sturgis’s body was