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

they could make up for that lost opportunity. The troopers’ canteens held three pints of liquor, and many of them were soon on their way to getting roaring drunk. The interpreter Frederic Gerard informed the Arikara scouts that Custer, despite his own abstemious ways, had said they could each buy a single drink. With the band playing beside the wide and beautiful river (“[M]y heart was glad to hear the band,” Red Star remembered), General Terry, Custer, and the Left Wing of the Seventh Cavalry settled in for a few days of rest and relaxation.
    Terry quickly reestablished his headquarters on the Far West , where he once again began to pore over his maps and papers. Back in February, before Custer’s problems with President Grant, Terry had begun planning the campaign. “I think my only plan will be,” he had written Sheridan on February 21, “to give Custer a secure base well up on the Yellowstone from which he can retire at any time if the Indians gather in too great numbers for the small force he will have.” Even though Gibbon’s men had sighted Indians on the Rosebud just a few weeks before, Terry refused to scrap his original plan. Using Reno’s fruitless reconnaissance of the Powder and Tongue to buy him an extra week, he was now where he had always wanted to be, on the Yellowstone, assembling his “secure base.”
    As Terry scrutinized his maps, Custer sat in his tent with his dogs, putting the finishing touches on his latest article for the Galaxy . “Tuck regularly comes when I am writing,” he wrote Libbie on June 12, “and lays her head on the desk, rooting up my hand with her long nose until I consent to stop and notice her. She and Swift, Lady and Kaiser sleep in my tent.” Custer was keeping himself busy, but as his letters to Libbie make clear, he was frustrated and depressed. He now knew Libbie was not going to join him by steamboat. It was also clear that even though they were just a few days’ march from where the Indians had last been seen on the Rosebud, he was going to have to wait in idleness as Reno led a scout that was just as likely to alert the Indians to the regiment’s presence as it was to gather any useful information.
    Terry was not alone in this oddly passive approach to pursuing Indians. All spring Colonel Gibbon had been choosing to focus on anything that might prevent him from the matter at hand—attacking Indians. He worried about how he was going to keep his men provisioned; he worried about how to best obey Terry’s clearly outdated orders; and when his scouts located an Indian village—first on the Tongue on May 17 and then on the Rosebud on May 27—the column remained rooted to the north bank of the Yellowstone.
    Even the regiment’s doctor was baffled and appalled by Gibbon’s listlessness. “A large camp was found on the Rosebud about 18 miles off,” Dr. Holmes Paulding wrote his mother on June 14, “but our genial C.O. did not deem it advisable to attack it. . . . After laying there for 10 days, with the Indians showing themselves every day as though they knew what a harmless command they were dealing with, he began to do something . . . go away. . . . Our C.O.’s excuse was that he had rec’d orders to guard this side of the Yellowstone. There’s literal obedience for you.” Something was going on here on the banks of the Yellowstone. A crippling hesitation and fear seemed to waft from these gurgling, sun-glinting waters, and as Dr. Paulding could sense, the Lakota and Cheyenne knew it .
    Frederick Benteen shared a tent with Lieutenant Francis Gibson, and on June 13 he wrote his wife, Frabbie, a letter that captured in telling and troubling detail the strange languor that had taken over the command. “I am now sitting in my undershirt & drawers—and slippers,” Benteen wrote. “Gibson is lying on his rubber blanket on floor of tent, puffing away quietly and calmly and regularly, like a high pressure engine. The mattresses and blankets are out on the sage brushes getting sunned, the horses and mules all dozing around, everything seeming as lazy as can well be imagined.”
    In the meantime, Marcus Reno was edging toward a momentous, potentially insubordinate decision. Instead of simply finding, as he later put it, “where the Indians are not, ” why not try to find where they are ? Contrary to nearly everyone’s expectations—especially General Terry’s—Reno decided to do the obvious: find the Indians’ trail and follow it.

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