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

blankets, and lay them side by side. . . . We took a blanket [basket?] from an Indian travois, turned it upside down, put it over the grave, and laid a row of stones around the edge to keep the wolves from digging them up,” in Hardorff’s The Custer Battle Casualties, p. 25. Herendeen, who accompanied the soldiers assigned to retrieve the officers’ remains the following year, claimed that “out of the grave where Custer was buried, not more than a double handful of small bones were picked up. The body had been dragged out and torn to pieces by coyotes and the bones scattered about,” in Hardorff’s The Custer Battle Casualties, p. 45.

Chapter 16: The River of Nightmares
    In a July 4, 1876, letter to Sheridan, Reno claimed that if Gibbon and Terry had attacked instead of bivouacked on the evening of June 26, the outcome of the battle might have been entirely different: “Had [Gibbon] done so the destruction of [the Indians] was certain and the expedition would not have been a failure. But the truth is he was scared . . . [;] he was stampeded beyond any thing you ever heard of. When we commenced to fall back to the boat at the mouth of ‘Big Horn’ I thought that all right but we did not stop until we put the Yellowstone between us and Custer’s battleground. We could have stayed [on the LBH] as long as there was anything to eat, not to take the offensive perhaps but could have remained in their country in spite of them and not have come skulking back here like a whipped dog with his tail between his legs,” in Sheridan Collection, LOC, cited in Nichols’s In Custer’s Shadow, p. 218. As Nichols points out, “Reno’s letter . . . was a serious breach of military protocol—the letter should have been sent to Terry. Perhaps Reno thought . . . a letter to Terry would not be well received and Sheridan would not have the benefit of Reno’s opinion as to why the battle went so poorly,” p. 236. Given Reno’s conduct in the battle, it’s quite incredible that he dared question the bravery of another officer.
    Peter Thompson described his dizzying ride on the night of June 28 in his Account, p. 52. In a July 8, 1876, letter to his mother, Dr. Paulding wrote, “We had a hard job carrying off the wounded . . . , carrying them in hand litters. This was slow and exhausting, and the next day . . . Doan of the Second went to work and made mule litters from timber frames with thongs of raw hide cut from some of the wounded horses we found in the camp & among the timber & which we killed & skinned for the purpose,” in “A Surgeon at the Little Big Horn,” edited by Thomas Buecker, p. 143. Private Adams’s account of finding Comanche is in Hammer, Custer in ’76, pp. 121–22; see also Elizabeth Lawrence’s His Very Silence Speaks, pp. 74–81. My account of Curley’s appearance on the Far West is based on Hanson’s The Conquest of the Missouri, pp. 247–80. Curley told Walter Camp that by repeating “Absaroka” (which means “Crow”) to Marsh and the others on the Far West, “He meant that he was a Crow and that the other scouts had run away and [the] soldiers [had been] killed,” in Hammer, Custer in ’76, p. 169. Hanson details how Marsh turned the riverboat into a hospital ship, p. 290; he also describes the column’s approach at night and how Marsh constructed a stall for Comanche, pp. 293, 295. McDougall told Camp that “on the night march to the steamer Mike Madden was dumped out of the litter and fell into a cactus bush,” in Hammer, Custer in ’76, p. 73. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations describing the Far West ’s voyage to Fort Lincoln are from Hanson, pp. 295–314. Wilson told how the riverboat pinwheeled down the Bighorn in his official report, in General Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn: The Federal View, edited by John Carroll, p. 67. James Sipes, a barber aboard the Far West, described how the lower deck was protected with “sacks of grain and four-foot cordwood stood on end” and how the pilot house was armored with boiler plate. He also described how the vessel struck a large cottonwood and “split her bow open,” in Hammer, Custer in ’76, p. 240.
    Private William Nugent’s claim that Terry delayed the departure of the Far West so that he had the time to draft “a report that would suit the occasion” is in L. G. Walker’s Dr. Henry R. Porter , pp. 59–60. In the confidential July 2, 1876, dispatch to Sheridan, Terry wrote, “I do not tell