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

S.O.B.”
    If Reno’s relations with the officers of the Seventh improved after this inauspicious start, it was because his ebullient wife, Mary, and their son, Robert, were there to save him from his own worst impulses. However, during the summer of 1874, while leading the escort on the Canadian border, Reno learned that Mary had died at her family home in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Heartbroken and desperate, Reno sent an urgent message to General Terry in St. Paul, requesting an immediate leave so that he could be reunited with his grieving ten-year-old son.
    Reno had recently served under Terry on the five-man munitions board that had selected the 1873 Springfield “trapdoor” carbine as the standard-issue weapon for the U.S. cavalry. Assuming the leave was forthcoming, he had already begun the more than fifteen-hundred-mile trip back to Harrisburg when he learned that Terry had denied his request. “While fully sympathizing with you in your affliction,” the telegram read, “the Department Commander feels it imperative to decline to grant you leave. You must return to your command.” Not until more than two months after his wife’s death was Reno able to return to Harrisburg.
    Reno applied for an eight-month extension of his leave, and in anticipation of a significant inheritance from his wife’s estate, he promptly left with Robert on a transatlantic steamer for Europe. They arrived in Paris in November, and over the course of the next year traveled as far as Moscow and St. Petersburg, not returning to Harrisburg until mid-October of 1875. Leaving Robert in the care of his wife’s family, Reno reported to Fort Lincoln on October 30.
    Custer and Libbie were already on leave in New York City, and Reno found himself temporarily in charge of a regiment he hardly knew. The following spring, with Custer stranded in Washington, D.C., he made no secret of his desire to lead the Seventh in the upcoming campaign, an ambition that was not appreciated by the Custer loyalists in the regiment. In April, Captain Thomas Weir refused to participate in a battalion drill. As Reno led his officers and men on the parade ground, Weir sat on the porch of one of the officers’ quarters, no doubt with a huge, mocking grin on his face. Reno charged Weir with insubordination, a charge that was dismissed by General Terry, who, if his earlier refusal to grant Reno a leave after his wife’s death is any indication, had no love for Marcus Reno.
    And yet, here he was, leading this scout up the Powder River. Besides demonstrating Terry’s frustrations with Custer, the decision to put Reno in charge of the scout also showed how low the expectations were for finding any Indians on the Powder and Tongue rivers. Assuming Reno obeyed his orders, he should be back at the Yellowstone in a week. As Terry soon learned, this was a big assumption.

    T he morning after Reno and the Right Wing headed south, Terry came to Custer’s tent and requested that he lead the rest of the column on the day’s march to the Yellowstone. Having already ridden down the Powder and back, he feared the country to the north might prove impassable for the wagons. Once again, Custer achieved wonders. Boldly veering east to avoid a maze of badlands, he found a sequence of high, surprisingly flat plateaus upon which the column marched all the way to the mouth of the Powder. It was a good thing, too, since after donating most of their provisions to Reno’s officers and men, they had only enough food to last them a single day.
    Grant Marsh and the Far West had been downriver at the original rendezvous point at Glendive Creek collecting the much-needed provisions. When they returned to the Powder River, what had once been a wide and lonely stretch of wilderness had become a bustling, noisy encampment, particularly when the sutler and his men set up a temporary trading post underneath two large tents. With a wall of canned goods separating the enlisted men from the officers, and with several employees collecting the money behind makeshift countertops, the tents were quickly overrun by hundreds of thirsty, trail-weary men. “The tent was black with soldiers buying liquor,” remembered the Arikara scout Red Star; “it looked like a swarm of flies.”
    At the beginning of the campaign, Custer had delayed paying the troopers their overdue wages until the first night on the Heart River, thus depriving them of their customary payday debauch in Bismarck. Now, at long last,