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

knives and cups or from using the saddles and boxes from the corral to build barricades.
    In a Jan. 6, 1892, letter to Goldin, Benteen told how Reno “recommended the abandonment of the wounded on the night of 25th . . . but I killed that proposition in the bud. The Court of Inquiry on Reno knew there was something kept back by me, but they didn’t know how to dig it out by questioning . . . and Reno’s attorney was ‘Posted’ thereon,” in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, p. 207. Godfrey testified concerning his and Weir’s conversation on the night of June 25 “that we ought to move that night and join [Custer] as we then had fewer casualties than we were likely to have later,” in W. A. Graham, RCI, p. 181. For an intriguing theory that it was Godfrey and Weir’s original conversation about going to join Custer that spawned the rumor about abandoning the wounded (which “with perverse delight” Benteen later attributed to Reno), see Larry Sklenar’s To Hell with Honor, pp. 314–15.
    Bell told Camp that “Benteen’s weakness was vindictiveness,” in Hardorff, On the Little Bighorn, p. 7. According to John Gray in Custer’s Last Campaign, “When it later developed that Custer’s battalion was wiped out, Benteen must have realized that his indiscretion [in not obeying Custer’s orders] had spared his battalion the same fate as Custer’s. This recognition apparently drove him to an indefensible cover-up, so simplistic as to be transparent and which scarred his conscience for the rest of his life,” p. 261. Burkman’s account of Reno’s snide reference to Custer as “the Murat of the American army” is in Wagner, p. 170. My account of Reno’s drunken encounter with the packers is based on their own testimony, in W. A. Graham, RCI, pp. 172–73, 186–87. Edgerly recounted Reno’s late-night remark, “Great God, I don’t see how you can sleep,” in W. A. Graham, RCI, p. 164. For a compilation of the evidence that Reno was, if not drunk, “utterly unfit,” in Camp’s words, “to wear a uniform in the service of his country,” see Hardorff’s On the Little Bighorn, p. 236. As Camp states elsewhere, “After giving all the array of testimony about Reno and his bottle . . . need there then be any doubt as to what was the matter with Reno[?] With me there is not,” p. 208. Peter Thompson told of Private McGuire and the dead horses in his Account, p. 32. He also described how the men speculated that “if Custer would only turn up, our present difficulties would soon vanish” and “the howling of the Indians,” p. 33. Godfrey wrote about the “supernatural aspect” of the Indians’ bonfires and “the long shadows of the hills”; he also told of the “phantasma of imaginations” that led one packer to shout, “Don’t be discouraged, boys, it’s Crook!” in “Custer’s Last Battle,” W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, p. 144. The sound of a warrior playing a bugle was described by many survivors, including John Ryan in Barnard’s Ten Years with Custer, p. 299, and William Taylor in With Custer, p. 54.

Chapter 14: Grazing His Horses
    Gibson recounted how after the warriors fired a pair of rifle shots at 2:30 a.m. on June 26, Benteen ordered the trumpeters to sound reveille, in Hammer, Custer in ’76, p. 81. Trumpeter Hardy’s account of “a large body of Indians [dressed] in the uniforms of Custer’s men” is in a footnote in Hardorff’s Camp, Custer, p. 83. Prior to fooling Reno’s battalion, the Indians dressed in soldiers’ clothes had also fooled their own village. According to the Cheyenne Two Moons: “The young people of the Indian camp must have robbed the dead of clothing for next day they appeared up the river above the camp mounted on captured horses, dressed in soldier clothing, which led the Indians to think other troops were coming, which alarmed the camp until it was discovered who these mounted persons were,” in Hardorff’s Indian Views, p. 112. William Taylor described the warriors’ fire on the morning of June 26 as “a perfect shower of bullets” in With Custer, p. 54. Sergeant Stanislas Roy told Camp, “They fired at us so heavy that [the bullets] cut down all of [the] sage brush in front of us,” in Hammer, Custer in ’76, p. 114. In a July 4, 1876, letter to his wife, Gibson wrote that “my only wonder is that every one of us wasn’t killed,” in Fougera’s With Custer’s Cavalry, p. 269. Unless otherwise indicated, all of