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

Wolverines!” With Custer in the lead, the Michiganders started out at a trot but were soon galloping, “every man yelling like a demon.”
    When Custer’s and Stuart’s forces collided on what is now called East Cavalry Field, the sound reminded one of the participants of the thunderous crash of a giant falling tree. “Many of the horses were turned end over end and crushed their riders beneath them,” a cavalryman remembered. The bodies of some of the combatants were later found “pinned to each other by tightly-clenched sabers driven through their bodies.” Custer’s horse was shot out from underneath him, but he quickly found another mount and was back in the fray. Soon the Federals had the enemy on the run. As one Union officer later commented, it had been “the most gallant charge of the war.” But for Custer, it was just the beginning of a long string of spectacular victories that ultimately prompted General Philip Sheridan to award Libbie the table on which Grant and Lee signed the surrender at Appomattox. Included with the gift was a note: “permit me to say, Madam, that there is scarcely an individual in our service who has contributed more to bring this desirable result than your gallant husband.”

    O nce Custer had completed his frenetic search for a trail across the badlands to the Powder River, he returned to ask Corporal French about the spring he’d been sent to find. French claimed the spring didn’t exist. “You are a liar,” Custer shouted. “If you had gone where I told you, you would have found it.”
    The men had become accustomed to the often embarrassing eruptions of Custer’s temper. A week earlier near the Little Missouri, Custer had berated his black interpreter, Isaiah Dorman, for not directing the column in the way he had instructed. Red Star, one of the Arikara scouts, had seen Isaiah “on his knees before Custer, who was cursing him furiously, while [the interpreter] was crying and begging for mercy. The next day as punishment Isaiah had to go on foot all day.” Two years before, during the Black Hills Expedition, Custer became infuriated with Bloody Knife. A wagon had become stuck, and Custer felt the Arikara scout was somehow responsible. Custer took out a revolver and fired several times over Bloody Knife’s head. Once Custer had returned the pistol to its holster, Bloody Knife walked up to him and said, “It is not a good thing you have done to me; if I had been possessed of madness, too, you would not see another day.”
    Custer was unable to reach the Powder River by 3:00, as he’d promised Terry the night before, but he did make it by 3:30. When the river first came into view, he turned to Lieutenant Winfield Edgerly and said, “You and I are probably the first white men to see the Powder River at this point of its course.” Terry and the head of the column arrived at 6:55, while the rear of the column rumbled in at 9:00. “We marched,” Terry wrote, “through an extremely difficult country & over a ridge which must be more than a thousand feet above both our starting point and the valley of the Powder. For the first time, we met pine covered hills—long ridges wooded to their tops. We had at times literally to dig & ‘pick’ our way through.”
    Terry was deeply appreciative of Custer’s efforts. “Nobody but General Custer,” he said, “could have brought us through such a country.” For his part, Custer appears to have hoped that his performance that day had convinced Terry to defer to his judgment in the future. “I do hope this campaign will be a success,” Custer’s brother Boston wrote to his mother the following day, “and if Armstrong could have his way I think it would be, but unfortunately there are men along whose campaign experience is very limited, but, having an exalted opinion of themselves, feel that their advice would be valuable in the field. But I think before this trip is over they will be thoroughly understood by those who should know.”

    T he next day, Terry and two companies of the Seventh Cavalry rode from the column’s encampment approximately twenty miles down the Powder to the river’s confluence with the Yellowstone. Terry was delighted to find the Far West tied up to the bank, her thirty-man crew collecting firewood. The next morning, Terry directed Captain Grant Marsh to take him upriver to a rendezvous with Colonel Gibbon and the Montana Column, reported to be about thirty miles to the west.
    After a