The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Big Horn
to his departure from the Powder River encampment, Reno had been assigned the man who knew perhaps more than anyone else about the territory over which they were now moving. His name was Mitch Boyer, and he was living proof of just how complex the culture of the northern plains had become in recent decades. Half Lakota and half French, he was married to Magpie Outside, a Crow. The Crows had long since decided to align themselves with the United States, not because they had any great love for the Americans but because they saw the alliance as a way to keep from losing their lands to the Lakota. Even though Boyer’s mother was a Lakota, he remained loyal to his wife’s people and willingly took up arms against his kindred.
There is a photograph of Boyer wearing a fur hat decorated with what appear to be two stuffed blue jays. The birds are poised as if to peck opposite sides of his skull. It is the perfect piece of headgear for a man caught between two warring peoples. “If the Sioux kill me,” he once said, “I have the satisfaction of knowing I popped many of them over, and they can’t get even now, if they do get me.”
Boyer had so impressed Colonel Gibbon over the course of the last few months that Gibbon had offered him to General Terry when the two had met aboard the Far West . By June 13, Boyer had led Reno up the Powder River to the Mizpah Creek, about ten miles to the west. Attempting to follow the course of a river was bad enough, but the most difficult terrain was inevitably encountered when marching over the jagged ridge of hills, known as a divide, that separated each north-flowing tributary from the other. When atop the bare, rugged divide between the Powder and the Mizpah, they had been able to see far to the north. Terry’s orders had instructed them to continue down the Mizpah Valley, but they could see perfectly well that there were no Indian villages along that creek. They decided to skip the Mizpah and continue west to Pumpkin Creek and then to the Tongue, where the LakotaCheyenne village had first been sighted on May 17.
Two days later, they were on the banks of the Tongue. Compared to the cloudy and shallow Powder, the Tongue was a paradise—clear, cool, and about two feet deep—and the men took turns swimming. Terry’s orders had been quite specific. Reno was to continue down the Tongue to the river’s confluence with the Yellowstone, where he was to meet up with Terry, Custer, and the Left Wing. Under no circumstances was he to go as far west as the Rosebud, even though that was where the hostiles had last been seen on May 27. That river was to be left to Custer. Once Reno had proven there were no Indians east of the Tongue, Custer and nine companies of the Seventh were to march back up the Tongue a considerable distance, then cross over to the Rosebud, where, it was assumed, the Indians still were. As Gibbon marched up the Rosebud from the Yellowstone, Custer would proceed down the river, and if all went according to plan, they’d crush Sitting Bull’s village between them.
But as Boyer undoubtedly told Reno, the likelihood that the Indians were still anywhere near where they’d found them back in May was nil. A village of that size had to move every few days as the pony herd consumed the surrounding grass and the hunters ranged the country for game. Since almost three weeks had passed since the hostiles had been last sighted, and an Indian village could move as many as fifty miles a day, the hostile camp might be several hundred miles away by now.
Reno was, and still is, derided for his lack of experience fighting Indians. In actuality, he’d been chasing Indians since before Custer had even graduated from West Point. In 1860, he’d been assigned to Fort Walla Walla in the Oregon Territory, where he’d been ordered to investigate the whereabouts of a missing pioneer family. He found their mutilated bodies “pierced by numerous arrows” and set out in search of the Indians responsible for the attack. He and his men succeeded in surprising a nearby Native encampment, and in hand-to-hand combat he captured the two Snake warriors who were reputed to have killed the family. He’d done it more than a decade and a half before, but the fact remained that Reno knew how to pursue and find Indians.
—RENO’S SCOUT, June 10-18, 1876 —
Now that Reno was on the Tongue, it only made sense to cross the divide between them and the Rosebud, locate the May 27 village site, and,
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