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

of boards and brush, and gradually the slender-wheeled wagons made it across, but the going was agonizingly slow. And then there was the mud—glutinous, clinging, and slippery, so slippery that even when pushed by hand the sunken wagon wheels spun uselessly and the men and horses, exhausted and cold, wallowed and slithered in the dark gray alkaline slime of a wet spring in North Dakota. “Everybody is more or less disgusted except me . . . ,” Custer wrote Libbie. “The elements seem against us.”
    There were occasional days of sun, when blue and green replaced the gray, when, blinking and with a squint, they gazed upon a world of transcendent beauty. On May 24, flowers suddenly appeared all around them. “During this march we encountered . . . a species of primrose,” wrote Lieutenant Edward Maguire, head of the column’s engineer corps. “The flowers were very beautiful, and as they were crushed under the horses’ feet they gave forth a protest of the most delicate and welcome odor.”
    Most welcome, indeed.
    The smells associated with this column of approximately twelve hundred men and sixteen hundred horses and mules were pungent and inescapable—an eye-watering combination of horsehair and sweaty human reek. The stench was particularly bad at night, when all of them were contained within a half-mile-wide parallelogram of carefully arranged tents, picketed horses, and freshly dug latrines. If it was too wet to light a fire, the men lived on hardtack and cold sowbelly doused with vinegar and salt. Since wet boots shrank when they dried, it was necessary to wear them at night as the troopers, swaddled like mummies in their damp blankets, lay side by side in their five-and-a-half-foot-wide tents, “all the time getting,” remembered one cavalryman, “the full benefit of the aroma that arrives from the sweat of your horse’s sides and back, as it creeps up out of the blanket.”
    On May 27, after the column had been groping aimlessly through a cold, claustrophobic fog, the sun finally dispersed the mist, and they were presented with a sight that awed all of them: the badlands of the Little Missouri River. “I cannot attempt any description of ‘the bad lands,’ ” General Terry wrote his sister in St. Paul. “They are so utterly unlike anything which you have ever seen that no description of them could convey to you any ideas of what they are like. Horribly bare and desolate in general & yet picturesque at times to the extreme. Naked hills of mud, clay & partially formed stone broken into the most fantastic forms, & of all hues from dull grey to an almost fiery red. Sometimes with easy slopes & sometimes almost perpendicular, but water worn & fissured walls.”
    Sitting Bull was supposed to be here, on the Little Missouri River, but so far they had found almost no recent sign of Indians. The Lakota leader was probably long gone, but just to make sure, Terry resolved to send Custer on a reconnaissance expedition up the Little Missouri. At 5 a.m. on May 30, Custer and a select group of troopers and scouts left the encampment on the east bank of the river and headed south.

    B y all accounts, Custer looked good on a horse. “[He] sat his charger,” remembered one officer, “as if ‘to the manor born.’ ” He was five feet eleven inches tall and wore a 38 jacket and 9C boots. His weight fluctuated from a low of 143 pounds at the end of the grueling Kansas campaign back in 1869 to a muscle-packed high of 170. On that morning in late May, he was dressed in a fringed white buckskin suit, with a light gray, wide-brimmed hat set firmly on his head. The famed “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s iconic western outfit was an almost perfect match to Custer’s buckskin suit, which had been specially made for him by an Irish sergeant in the Seventh Cavalry who had once been a tailor.
    But for Custer’s striker, John Burkman, there was something missing. Custer was known for his long hair, but in 1876 he, like many men approaching forty, was beginning to go bald. Before leaving Fort Lincoln, he and another officer with thinning hair, Lieutenant Charles Varnum, “had the clippers run over their heads.” This meant that the former “boy general” of the Civil War with the famously flowing locks now looked decidedly middle-aged. “He looked so unnatural after that,” Burkman remembered.
    But even if, Samson-like, he had lost his blond curls, Custer (who could leap to a stand from flat on his back) showed no