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

Tongue River.
    The officers of the Seventh Cavalry didn’t know how to interpret this stunning bit of information. “It has been a subject of conversation among the officers why Genl Custer was not in command,” Lieutenant Edward Godfrey recorded in his journal, “but no solution yet has been arrived at.” For his part, Custer quickly did his best to make it sound as if he had never wanted to lead the mission in the first place. Mark Kellogg was a forty-three-year-old newspaper correspondent traveling with the Seventh Cavalry. “General Custer declined to take command of the scout . . . ,” Kellogg reported, “not believing that any Indians would be met with. . . . His opinion is that they are in bulk in the vicinity of the Rosebud range.”
    In all probability, Custer had thought the scout was a fine idea when he saw it as a way to break free of Terry with the entire Right Wing of the Seventh Cavalry and find Sitting Bull. The Right Wing contained his six favorite companies in the regiment. With this group of loyal officers and their well-trained men, he could have done wonders. But now he must hand them over to Reno, who in his dutiful obedience to Terry’s misguided orders would only exhaust and discourage them.

    R eno and the approximately three hundred officers and men of the Right Wing headed out that afternoon. Instead of wagons, each company was equipped with eleven pack mules to help transport twelve days of rations and forage. The sure-footed mules could travel over country that was inaccessible by wagon. Unfortunately, the only mules the regiment had at its disposal were the ones that had pulled the wagons from Fort Lincoln. For the last two days, the troopers had attempted to convince these recalcitrant animals that lugging a heavily loaded aparejo, a specially designed saddle equipped with large side bags, was in their best interests. When not bucking and braying until the contents of the aparejos had been scattered in every conceivable direction, the mules demonstrated a remarkable talent for locking their knees and refusing to budge. To no one’s surprise, the pack mules proved to be a problem throughout the scout.
    Adding to Reno’s logistical challenges was a different kind of burden: a precursor to the modern machine gun known as the Gatling gun. This six-barreled, cannon-sized, rapid-firing behemoth was mounted on a two-wheel carriage and pulled by two cavalry horses that were judged unfit for regular service. Since its invention during the Civil War, the Gatling gun had been used only sparingly in actual battle, but there was no denying it was, potentially at least, an awesome weapon. In the years ahead, the Gatling would be used to curb labor riots, defeat the Spanish in Cuba (Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders swore by the Gatling), and provide a dramatic and deafening conclusion to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Military traditionalists liked to claim the gun was unreliable, but in actuality the Gatling functioned surprisingly well. The biggest problem with the gun was transporting it to where it might be of some use. In the week ahead, the Gatling, not the mules, proved to be the biggest hindrance to the expedition.
    The scout was led by a man who was a cipher to most of his officers. After a commendable but unspectacular Civil War career, Marcus Reno, a West Point graduate, joined the Seventh in 1870, just around the time the regiment was being scattered across the South for Reconstruction duty. This meant that he had missed the defining moment of the regiment, the Battle of the Washita. His subsequent assignments—fighting the Ku Klux Klan in Spartanburg, South Carolina; serving on a munitions board in New York; and escorting a survey of the U.S.-Canada border—prevented him from participating in the other two most significant events in the life of the regiment: the Yellowstone Campaign of 1873 and the Black Hills Expedition of 1874.
    Dark-haired and dark-eyed—the Arikara scouts called him “the man with the dark face”—Reno was the quintessential outsider. Whether or not it was because he’d lost both his parents by fifteen, something always seemed to be smoldering inside him, and his reticent, stubborn manner won him few friends. He was bullnecked and sleek as a seal, and almost as soon as he joined the Seventh back in 1870, he made the mistake of insulting blue-eyed and graying Frederick Benteen, who slapped him across the face and called him a “dirty