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

Sioux!”
    Once he had entirely filled the space with dots, he turned his attention to the inner circle, which he once again began to cover with dots, this time shouting, “Absaroka! Absaroka!”
    Marsh had heard a Crow use that word before and suspected it meant “soldiers.” In actuality, Absaroka meant “Crow,” and Curley was attempting to reaffirm that he was a regimental scout. Curley jumped to his feet and began to slam his hands against his chest while making a weird and disturbing sound: “Poof! Poof! Poof!”
    It soon began to dawn on Marsh and the others that Curley was imitating the sounds of gunfire. With the help of pantomime and pencil and paper, he was telling them what he had seen a few days before from a hillside beside the Little Bighorn: the slaughter of Custer and his entire battalion.

    O n the morning of June 29, Marsh received orders from General Terry to prepare his vessel for the arrival of more than fifty wounded men. He immediately set to work transforming the Far West into a hospital ship. As some of his crew cleared away the provisions and equipment from the aft portion of the lower deck, others began harvesting grass from the marshlands near the Little Bighorn. By evening, an approximately eighty-foot section of the lower deck had been covered with a foot-and-a-half-thick blanket of fresh green grass. When topped by tarpaulins from the quartermaster’s stores, the lower deck became what Marsh described as “an immense mattress.” Chests of medicine and medical supplies were distributed along the edges of the carpeted deck, making it, a doctor aboard the Far West proclaimed, “the best field hospital he had ever seen.”
    Around midnight Marsh learned that the column was within three miles of the river mouth. It was a wet, cloudy night and the difficult terrain made it impossible for the soldiers to continue in the darkness. Already one of the mules had fallen into a ravine and pitched Private Madden, whose bullet-shattered leg had been amputated by Dr. Porter, into a bed of cactus. Without some assistance, the wounded would have to wait in the rain till daylight.
    In order to help the column find its way, Marsh directed his men to begin building a series of fires along the banks of the Little Bighorn. The troopers resumed the march, and by 2 a.m. the head of the column, “looming weirdly through the darkness in the flickering firelight,” had reached the riverboat. By dawn, fifty-two wounded men had been delivered to the hospital on the lower deck. Behind them, in the space between the Far West ’s two rudders, Marsh created a stall for Comanche, and “his care and welfare became the special duty of the whole boat’s company.”

    B y the morning of June 30, Marsh had prepared his vessel for the more than thirty-mile voyage down the Bighorn to the column’s base camp on the north side of the Yellowstone. Stacks of four-foot-long cordwood and sacks of grain had been positioned along the gunwales of the lower deck to protect the wounded from possible Indian attack. The thin walls of the pilot house had been armored with plates of boiler iron. All was in readiness, but before they began down the river, General Terry wanted to speak to the master of the Far West .
    As soon as Marsh reported to Terry’s cabin, the general closed the door. Terry’s long, solemn face was even more somber than usual. “Captain,” he said, “you have on board the most precious cargo a boat ever carried. Every soldier here who is suffering with wounds is the victim of a terrible blunder; a sad and terrible blunder.” Marsh had never seen Terry so deeply moved. “With equal feeling,” Marsh’s biographer Joseph Hanson wrote, “Marsh assured him that he would use his best efforts to complete the journey successfully.”
    But when he entered the pilothouse and grabbed the steering wheel, the normally unflappable Marsh experienced a sudden loss of confidence: “The thought that all their lives were depending on his skill alone, the sense of his fearful responsibility, flashed upon him and for a moment overwhelmed him.”
    There was no doubt that Marsh had an extraordinary challenge ahead of him. When the current was behind a steamboat, steerage often became a problem, especially on a river as fast flowing and narrow as the Bighorn. During their voyage up the river, a series of misunderstandings had caused them to steam past the mouth of the Little Bighorn, and it wasn’t until they’d