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

rounds on the skirmish line and that his gun barrel “was burning in my hand, and the breechblock commenced to jam.”
    According to Richard Hardorff, Custer’s battalion was sighted on the bluff by at least seven officers and men: Moylan, DeRudio, Varnum, Roy, O’Neill, Petring, and Newell, On the Little Bighorn, p. 43. DeRudio said he saw Custer and Cooke on a bluff. “I recognized [them] by their dress,” he testified. “They had on blue shirts and buckskin pants. They were the only ones who wore blue shirts and no jackets; and Lt. Cooke besides had an immense beard,” in W. A. Graham, RCI, p. 115.
    Little Soldier remembered that when Reno attacked, “older warriors were out hunting buffalo, for that reason boys 13 or 18 did the fighting. Old men sang death songs for warriors. Sweethearts, young Indian mothers, and children all wailing and crying,” in Hardorff’s Lakota Recollections, p. 175 . The account of Moving Robe Woman, also known as Mary Crawler, is in Hardorff’s Lakota Recollections, pp. 92–94. In Waterlily, a novel full of carefully observed factual details about Lakota life, Ella Deloria describes a woman drying her eyes, “fitting the base of her palm into her eye sockets as all women did,” p. 19. My thanks to Jennifer Edwards Weston for bringing this source to my attention. Rain in the Face’s memory of Moving Robe Woman being “pretty as a bird” is in Charles Eastman’s Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains , pp. 146–47. John Ryan described how the warriors “tried to cut through our skirmish line” in Barnard’s Ten Years with Custer, p. 293. Billy Jackson talked of how the dust cloud raised by the warriors’ charge “almost choked us,” in Schultz, p. 136. Nelson Miles, who spoke with several Native participants soon after the battle, described in his Personal Recollections how, after the first charge, the ever-growing number of warriors “assembled out on the mesa, some 500 yards from the LBH,” p. 286. Moylan testified that Jackson said, “No man can get through there alive,” in W. A. Graham, RCI, p. 80.
    Curley speculated that Boyer “probably told Custer Reno had been defeated, for Boyer did a whole lot of talking to Custer when he joined him and kept talking while they were riding side by side,” in Hammer, Custer in ’76, p. 166. Martin’s accounts of how he received his orders from Custer and Lieutenant Cooke are in W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, pp. 289–90, and in Hammer, Custer in ’76, pp. 100, 103. Libbie told of Custer’s tendency to rattle off his orders in Boots and Saddles, pp. 120–21. Benteen quoted Cooke’s note in a July 4, 1876, letter to his wife, in John Carroll’s Benteen-Goldin Letters, p. 152. Standing Bear spoke of how Crazy Horse took time to “invoke the spirits. . . . [H]e delayed so long that many of his warriors became impatient,” in Hammer, Custer in ’76, p. 214. Black Elk’s memory of the cry “Crazy Horse is coming!” is in DeMallie’s The Sixth Grandfather, p. 182. Billy Garnett told of Crazy Horse’s determination to “have nothing to do with affairs political or social” and how “the Indians were almost uncontrollable” after Reno’s attack until Crazy Horse spoke to them, in Ricker, Voices of the American West, vol. 1, pp. 117, 118. Chipps explained that Crazy Horse “did not paint as the Indians usually do. . . . [H]e made a zigzag streak with red earth” in Ricker’s Voices of the American West, vol. 1, p. 126. Hutchins in Boots and Saddles discusses the cartridge-extraction problem in the Springfield carbine; a contributing factor was the soldiers’ use of leather cartridge belts, which tended to coat the shells with verdigris; when fired, the verdigris “formed a cement which held the sides of the cartridge in the place against the action of the ejector,” pp. 33–35. Red Hawk told how prior to the charge Crazy Horse exhorted his warriors, “Do your best, and let us kill them all off today,” in Ricker’s Voices, vol. 1, p. 312.
    In a May 15, 1934, letter to Goldin, Fred Dustin described how the skirmish line pivoted to accommodate the growing threat to the left: “[W]hen the skirmish line changed positions, it simply pivoted on the right flank of McIntosh’s troop, and occupied the edge of the woods and brush, and facing about, French was on the right and McIntosh on the left at or near the edge of a depression, probably the old stream bed of the river,” in John Carroll,