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

ventured fifteen additional miles up the Bighorn that they’d realized their mistake and headed back down for the rendezvous point. Several times during that fifteen-mile run Marsh had temporarily lost control of the Far West, and the 190-foot vessel had been swept stern-first down the river in what Sergeant James Wilson described as “a whirling, revolving manner.” This was disconcerting to say the least, especially when the boat’s bow smashed into a large cottonwood tree, but Marsh had experienced these kinds of challenges before. What he hadn’t experienced before was General Terry’s almost preternatural ability to project his own insecurities onto the psyche of a subordinate. Just as Custer had emerged from his final meeting with Terry uncharacteristically hesitant and depressed, so had Marsh been unnerved by the general’s attempts to inspire him.
    Sitting on the bench behind Marsh were his mate and another pilot. “Boys,” Marsh said, “I can’t do it. I’ll smash her up.”
    “Oh, no, you won’t,” one of them said. “You’re excited. Cool off a minute and you’ll be all right.”
    Marsh paused for a few seconds and finally pulled the bell cord, the signal for the engineer to engage the paddle wheel.
    Before he could turn the Far West around and head down the river, he needed to clear a large island. It took some finagling to straighten her out once he’d made it past the obstruction, but they were soon on their way down the Bighorn.
    “Never again,” his biographer wrote, “does he want to experience such a sickening sensation of utter helplessness as gripped him that morning in the pilothouse of the Far West .”

    M any of the wounded were in desperate need of the kind of medical attention that was available only back at Fort Lincoln. It was also important that word of the battle be transmitted as quickly as possible to the authorities in the East. But instead of immediately sending the Far West down the Yellowstone, Terry insisted that Marsh remain at the encampment across from the mouth of the Bighorn for an additional three days. Not until 5 p.m. on July 3 did the Far West finally start down the river toward the Missouri.
    It was true that a riverboat was needed to ferry the troopers across the Yellowstone; but another steamer, they all knew, was on its way from Fort Lincoln. The real reason for the delay, Private William Nugent of A Company claimed, was that Terry and his staff needed all the time they could get to craft an official dispatch that put this botched campaign in the best possible light. “It was,” Nugent bitterly insisted, “a difficult problem to write a report that would suit the occasion.” In the end, Terry put his name to two dispatches: one for public distribution that made no attempt to find fault; the other, a more private communication to General Sheridan that blamed the catastrophe on Custer.
    By the time Marsh and the Far West set forth down the Yellowstone, fourteen of the fifty-two wounded soldiers had improved enough that they were left at the encampment, leaving a total of thirty-eight wounded aboard the riverboat. Terry provided Marsh with seventeen dismounted troopers from the Seventh Cavalry; also aboard was a member of Terry’s staff, Captain E. W. Smith, with the dispatches for General Sheridan in Chicago.
    Despite having held the steamer back for several days, Terry instructed Marsh “to reach Bismarck in the shortest possible time.” Over the course of the next two and a half days, the Far West broke all speed records on the Missouri and her tributaries, traveling, Marsh later calculated, 710 miles at an average rate of 13 1 ⁄7 miles an hour.
    It was an exhilarating, often frightening ride. “A steamboat moving as fast as a railway train in a narrow, winding stream is not a pleasure,” one passenger remembered. During the day, with the current speeding her along, the Far West frequently topped twenty miles an hour as her hull scraped over the sandbars and bounced off the rocky banks of the Yellowstone, “throwing the men to the deck like tenpins.”
    The biggest danger came at night, when it became almost impossible to read the surface of the water. Normal procedure, especially when running with the current, was to tie up to the embankment and wait for dawn. But Marsh insisted on continuing, even though the Yellowstone was still a relatively new river to him.
    If a pilot was to have any hope of seeing the river at night, there must