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

when an interview with Custer’s former lieutenant Edward Godfrey came to light. Out of respect for his widow, the soldiers who viewed Custer’s remains had neglected to mention that an arrow had been jammed up the general’s penis.

    T wo and a half days after the battle, a detail of troopers buried Custer and his brother Tom in the same grave. To protect the bodies from predators, the troopers placed the basket from an Indian travois over them and held it down with rocks. A year later, a party led by General Sheridan’s brother Michael traveled to the battlefield to retrieve the officers’ bodies. They discovered that coyotes had managed to get at the grave of the Custer brothers and spread their bones across the grassy hill.

CHAPTER 16

    The River of Nightmares
    B y the evening of June 28, three days after the defeat of Custer’s command and a day and a half after General Terry’s reinforcements had joined Reno, the dead had all been buried by the survivors of the Seventh. There appears to have been no thought on Terry’s part of pursuing Sitting Bull. Even though there were only a few hours left before dark, he decided it was time they start down the Little Bighorn toward their rendezvous with the Far West .
    Many of the fifty or so of Reno’s wounded were carried in stretchers, but not Peter Thompson. Stubborn as always, he insisted on riding a horse. But after only a few minutes in the saddle, he was already regretting the decision. Overcome with nausea, he laid his head down on his horse’s neck and, grasping the mane, held on for dear life. Finally, around midnight, Terry ordered the column to halt. “Glad . . . I was when we moved into camp,” Thompson remembered.
    Lugging the wounded by hand had proven both exhausting and unbearably slow. It had taken them six hours to travel just four and a half miles. Terry decided they must construct horse-drawn litters similar to the Indians’ travois if they were to have any hope of covering the twenty miles to the Bighorn in the next few days.
    They had plenty of tepee poles from the abandoned village, but they needed a supply of rawhide to knit the poles together. Dozens of dead horses still lay scattered across the battleground, but after three days in the sun, the animals’ bodies were badly decomposed. There were, however, quite a few wounded horses and mules still lingering about the encampment. According to a surgeon with Gibbon’s Montana Column, the soldiers executed many of the animals and stripped off their skin to make rawhide thongs for the litters.
    There was at least one injured horse that the soldiers refused to kill. Despite having been hit by seven different bullets and arrows, including the gunshot blast that shattered his master’s leg, Comanche, the fourteen-year-old bay gelding ridden by Captain Myles Keogh, was kept alive. He was found, Private Jacob Adams of H Company said, sitting on his haunches near Battle Ridge, “the only living thing,” it was later claimed, near Last Stand Hill. Comanche whinnied when Adams and the other soldiers approached, and once they’d dismounted and carefully helped the wounded animal to a stand, he began eating grass. The next day he was strong enough to follow the column in its slow march down the river.
    At 6 p.m. on June 29, the column resumed its march. The soldiers had proceeded just a short way with their newly constructed travois when two mounted couriers appeared on a bluff. The messengers had good news. The Far West was waiting for them at the mouth of the Little Bighorn.

    G rant Marsh, the master and pilot of the Far West, first learned of the Custer tragedy from the Crow scout Curley, who appeared on the riverbank not long after the steamboat’s arrival at the confluence of the Bighorn and Little Bighorn. Up until that point, Marsh and his compatriots had heard nothing about the battle, and they were eager for news about Custer’s much-anticipated victory.
    Once on deck, Curley collapsed onto a chest and began to rock back and forth, weeping and moaning. Try as he might, Marsh was unable to penetrate the Indian’s bewildering outpouring of fear and sorrow. Eventually, however, Curley accepted a pencil and a piece of paper.
    He lay down on the deck and began to draw. As the others looked on, he drew two circles, one inside the other. In the space between the inner and outer circles, he began to make dot after furious dot, each time shouting out in despair, “Sioux!