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

never officially identified. Several decapitated corpses were found near the river at the mouth of Deep Ravine, and one soldier later claimed he recognized Sturgis’s scorched head along with several others in a Lakota fire pit. Out of respect for Sturgis’s mother, who visited the battlefield several years later, a grave marker was placed in the vicinity of Last Stand Hill. The possibility exists, however, that the young lieutenant came as close as anyone in the Gray Horse Troop to reaching Sitting Bull’s village.

    B ack on Last Stand Hill, the relentless rifle and bow-and-arrow fire had winnowed the washichus to only a handful. By this point Custer may already have suffered his first of two gunshot wounds—a bullet just below the heart. The blast would have knocked him to the ground but not necessarily killed him. Alive but mortally wounded, America’s most famous Indian fighter could no longer fight.
    That evening on Last Stand Hill, as he lay on the ground with a gunshot wound to the chest, it may have been his brother Tom who came to his aid. Two days later the brothers were found within fifteen feet of each other, and the possibility exists that rather than see his wounded brother tortured to death, Tom shot Custer through the head. Whatever the case may be, Custer’s second bullet wound was through the left temple.
    Captain Yates and most of his Bandbox Troop were also found in the vicinity of Last Stand Hill, as was Custer’s adjutant, William Cooke. Tom Custer appears to have been one of the last to die. If the intense mutilation inflicted on Tom’s body is any indication, he fought with an unmatched fury, and it may have been the Cheyenne Yellow Nose who killed him.

    B y this late stage in the battle, Yellow Nose had lost his rifle. He was fighting with the old saber he’d been given by a Shoshone boy who, like him, had grown up as a captive among the Cheyenne. One of the soldiers in the final group was “so striking and gallant” that Yellow Nose decided that “to kill him would be a feat of more than ordinary prowess.” Already the soldier had fired at him at such close range that Yellow Nose’s face was scorched with black powder and his eyes were awash in blood.
    Once again Yellow Nose charged, and this time, the soldier’s revolver was out of bullets. The soldier was dressed in a buckskin jacket and had a red and yellow bandanna around his neck. There were tears in the soldier’s eyes, Yellow Nose remembered, “but no sign of fear.” The Cheyenne walloped the soldier on the back of his head with the broad side of the sword’s blade and he sank to the ground. When Tom’s body was discovered two days later, his skull had been pounded to the thickness of a man’s hand. If not for the tattoo marks on his arm, his eviscerated body would never have been identified.

    T om may have been attempting to occupy the warriors’ attention as two family members, his brother Boston and his nephew Autie Reed, fled toward the river. Boston’s and Autie’s bodies were later found a hundred yards to the west of Last Stand Hill, and the two relatives may have held out hope of joining the soldiers still fighting for their lives in Deep Ravine.
    Eight years before, during the weeks prior to the Washita campaign, Custer had written Libbie asking whether she might consider adopting Autie, who was then ten years old. Nothing had come of it, but now the nephew who might have become the son Custer never had lay dead beside Custer’s brother Boston.

    A lmost all Native accounts of the battle claim that there was one soldier who almost escaped. The details vary but the essential story is this: A soldier on a powerful horse suddenly bolts from the hill and miraculously breaks through the Indians and makes for open ground. Several warriors take off in pursuit, but the soldier’s horse is strong, and it begins to look as if he might actually get away. Then, just as the Indians give up the chase, the soldier pulls out his pistol and shoots himself in the head.
    The identity of this soldier will never be definitively known. However, some recent forensic analysis of a skull found in a remote portion of the battlefield offers evidence that the lone rider may have been Lieutenant Henry Harrington, the commander of C Company. If this is true, Harrington, who would have led the first charge from Calhoun Hill toward Greasy Grass Ridge and who may have been the officer several warriors heralded as “the bravest