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

and Pigford taking deliberate aim, killed him,” in Hammer, Custer in ’76, p. 144. Ryan wrote about retrieving the mortally wounded Tanner in a blanket; Ryan also described the death of Private Voight and how both Tanner and Voight were buried in the same grave, in Sandy Barnard’s Ten Years with Custer, p. 300. Newell told of Tanner’s final words in John Carroll’s Sunshine Magazine, p. 13. Peter Thompson told of how he draped an overcoat over Tanner and how he found another coat to make a pillow, in his Account, p. 41.
    Reno’s inability to see that the warriors were about to charge his position had much to do with how his men were positioned on the surrounding hills. Normal procedure during a siege was to set up the line of defense on the enemy side of the hill so that the defender had an open field of fire. On Reno Hill, however, about half the soldiers had elected to use the hill as a protective barrier, which severely limited their field of fire. As a consequence, the warriors in some instances could come to within thirty feet of the line without being fired on. See William Rector’s “Fields of Fire: The Reno-Benteen Defense Perimeter,” pp. 66–67. Peter Thompson wrote that Reno “would have pulled the hole in after him if he could,” in his Account, p. 41. Several officers testified to the interchange between Benteen and Reno and how Benteen called out, “Now charge and give them hell”; see in particular Edgerly in W. A. Graham, RCI, pp. 164–65. Varnum told of how he was injured during the charge, in Custer’s Chief of Scouts, pp. 93–94. Edgerly described the death of Private Patrick Golden, known as “Paddy,” in a July 4, 1876, letter to his wife, in Bailly, p. 179. Herendeen testified that warriors fired at such long range that “we could pick the balls up as they fell [italics in the original],” in Utley’s Reno Court of Inquiry, p. 242. An account of the packer J. C. Wagoner being hit in the head with a spent bullet is in a footnote in Hardorff’s On the Little Bighorn, p. 179; see also Nichols’s Men with Custer, pp. 342–43. Peter Thompson remembered seeing this same packer: “His bandaged head and blood-stained face made him look ‘tough,’ ” in his Account, p. 44.
    Herendeen told Camp that when his dead horse was hit by a warrior’s bullet he could “hear the hiss of escaping gas,” in Hammer, Custer in ’76, p. 225. In a July 4, 1876, letter to his parents, Varnum wrote, “[T]he men lay in the trench beside corpses with flies and maggots. . . . I will not attempt to describe the horror of the situation. We had no water, and the men became furious,” in W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, p. 343. Godfrey described the men’s “almost maddening” thirst and how they blew the hardtack from their mouths “like so much flour,” in W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, p. 145. The reference to soldiers drinking horse urine is in Royal Jackson’s An Oral History of the Battle of the Little Bighorn from the Perspective of the Northern Cheyenne Descendants, p. 55; my thanks to John Doerner for bringing this source to my attention. Porter’s account of the wounded men “crying and begging piteously for water” is in L. G. Walker’s Dr. Henry R. Porter, p. 66. Like his account of having seen Custer beside the Little Bighorn, Peter Thompson’s insistence that he went for water on his own initiative on the morning of June 26 has been viewed with skepticism by many historians. But as Camp learned from other troopers who were there, “Thompson is said to have been the first . . . to make the trip.” See Michael Wyman and Rocky Boyd’s “Coming to an Understanding,” which also cites the account from Young Two Moons (see below), p. 47. By the time Thompson ventured to the river a second time, Madden, the K Company saddler, was, as Mechling recounts, sitting at the mouth of the ravine. This sequencing is further proof that Thompson was the first to go for water. See also John McGuire’s letter to Camp in which he states, “Peter Thompson took two canteens and went to the river and filled [them] with water and returned to us safely except for a wound through the hand which he had previously received,” Camp Collection, box 1, folder 2, reel 1, BYU. Unless otherwise indicated, my account of Peter Thompson’s activities in this chapter comes from his Account, pp. 33–46. My description of the ravine down which Thompson went for water is based, in part, on my own