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

Benteen’s quotations in this chapter are from his narrative in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, pp. 172–75. Windolph’s description of the death of the soldier beside him and the shattering of his rifle butt are in his I Fought with Custer, p. 103. Windolph told Camp about how “someone cried: ‘Get the old man back here quick,’ ” in Hardorff, On the Little Bighorn , p. 180. Besides Benteen, Edgerly also testified to seeing Reno “in a pit with Captain Weir,” in W. A. Graham, RCI, p. 181. As to Reno’s drinking on the twenty-sixth, Private Corcoran, who was with the wounded that morning, told Camp that Reno came into the hospital with “a quart bottle of whiskey and [Corcoran] saw him take a big drink out of it,” in Hammer, Custer in ’76, p. 150; Corcoran also told how Benteen called out to the men gathered in the corral, “Come on back, and we will drive them off. You might as well be killed out there as in here.” In a Sept. 21, 1904, letter, William Morris wrote that when Benteen ordered M Company “out of their pits to reinforce his troop . . . [t]here was some dissatisfaction . . . as the men believed that the necessity was due solely to the neglect of ‘H,’ in digging pits,” in Brady’s Indian Fights and Fighters, p. 404. Taylor described Benteen walking calmly as the bullets flew around him in With Custer, pp. 57–58.
    John Keegan gives credence to the statement that the Battle of Waterloo was “won on the playing-fields of Eton,” in The Face of Battle, p. 194; the same might be said of the survival of the Seventh at the battle of the LBH, but instead of cricket it was the baseball diamonds of the northern plains. In a collection of sketches about his experiences in the West, Benteen described how after a confrontation with a Cheyenne war party in the spring of 1868, “the baseball nine of my troop [gave] Troop K’s nine a sad trouncing at our national game (each captain, of course, being captain, and playing as one of the nine of his troop). To play the match, the surrounding country was strongly picketed to avoid being interrupted during progress of the game by wary Indians or by herds of buffaloes, as it was quite possible that one or the other of them might . . . attempt to interfere with our sport. Is there another case on record where baseball has been played under similar circumstances?” in Cavalry Scraps , edited by John Carroll, p. 5. For information about H Company’s baseball team, I have relied on Harry Anderson’s “The Benteen Base Ball Club,” pp. 82–87. Private George Glenn described how Benteen’s shirttail worked out of his pants as he exhorted the men, “[T]his is a groundhog case,” in Hammer, Custer in ’76, p. 136. Goldin wrote of Benteen’s claim that he was protected from the warriors’ bullets by the medicine sewn into his uniform, in an Apr. 5, 1933, letter to Albert Johnson, in Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, pp. 43–44. Although we will never know what his wife, Frabbie, had sewn into Benteen’s uniform for “medicine,” here is an educated guess: In their correspondence the Benteens exchanged, in addition to the occasional pornographic picture, what they poetically and punningly referred to as sprigs of “Wild Thyme,” which the biographer Charles Mills claims were strands of their pubic hair, in Harvest of Barren Regrets, p. 295. This may be what Benteen considered his powerful medicine. Windolph told how the warriors were “coming on foot, singing some kind of war cry,” in Hardorff’s On the Little Bighorn, p. 180. Windolph’s account of Benteen’s invitation to “stand up and see this,” is in Hardorff’s On the Little Bighorn, p. 78. Windolph claimed that Benteen led three different charges on the warriors that morning, but almost all other participants (including Benteen) speak of only one charge. Windolph remembered Benteen’s speech about telling “the Old Folks . . . how many Indians we had to fight today” was before the second charge when H Company was assisted by French’s M Company; I have assumed that this was the one that Benteen and the others referred to as the charge.
    For information on Long Road, I have depended on Hardorff’s Hokahey! pp. 87–91. Camp recorded Pigford’s account of how “the Indian killed near Co. H was the one who had charged up and stopped there. . . . Every little while this Indian would rise up and fire. Once when he rose up he exposed the upper half of his body,