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

at the very least, identify in which direction the Lakota had headed next. Otherwise Terry’s subsequent move against the Indians was likely to come up with nothing. And besides, if they did happen to find the Indians, it could prove to be the opportunity of a lifetime. Back in 1860 he had taken an Indian village with a handful of men. Now he had more than three hundred of the cream of the Seventh Cavalry, and a Gatling gun to boot. It was a clear violation of Terry’s orders, but it was a violation that might make Reno’s career.
    With Mitch Boyer leading the way, they crossed the Tongue River and headed west, toward the Rosebud.

    O n June 12, Grant Marsh and the Far West left the encampment on the mouth of the Powder and steamed down the Yellowstone to secure additional provisions at the depot on Glendive Creek, eighty-six miles to the east. Marsh offered to take along the reporter Mark Kellogg. It turned out to be the steamboat ride of Kellogg’s life. Over the last few days, the current on the river had, if anything, increased. “The Yellowstone is looming high,” Kellogg wrote in the New York Herald, “and its current is so swift, eddying and whirling as to create a seething sound like that of soft wind rustling in the tall grass.”
    With a full head of steam and the current behind her, the Far West averaged an astonishing twenty-eight miles an hour during the three-hour trip to Glendive. “I think this proves the Far West a clipper to ‘go along,’ ” Kellogg wrote.
    Marsh had brought a mailbag stuffed with the regiment’s personal and official correspondence. Sergeant Henry Fox of the Sixth Infantry and two of his men and one civilian were to take the mail in a small rowboat to Fort Buford near the Yellowstone’s confluence with the Missouri, a voyage of 126 miles. Fox was a twenty-two-year veteran of the army and the father of six children. He had just returned from Washington, D.C., where he’d filed his application for ordnance sergeant, considered to be “the crowning ambition of the most faithful old soldiers.”
    His men brought the boat alongside the Far West, and with the heavy bag of mail draped on one arm, Fox stepped into the rowboat. The boiling waters of the Yellowstone pinned the little boat to the steamboat’s side, and it proved difficult for the soldiers to push away. As they struggled to separate the two craft, the rowboat began to tip, and before anyone could help them, the force of the river had capsized the boat, pitching all four of them into the Yellowstone.
    The three younger men were experienced swimmers and were quickly rescued, but Sergeant Fox sank below the surface and was never seen again. There was much more death to come in the days ahead, but for Grant Marsh and the crew of the Far West, the tragedy began on June 12 with the drowning of Sergeant Fox, his lifeless body left to tumble and twist in watery freefall down the rushing river.
    Soon after Fox’s disappearance, the mailbag was spotted floating between the Far West and shore. Before they could reach it, the bag had sunk once again, but with the aid of a boat hook, they were able to retrieve the sodden bag of letters. That night Marsh and Kellogg sat by the Far West ’s stove, laboriously drying each piece of correspondence. The envelopes had become unsealed and the stamps had fallen off, but by the next morning, they’d succeeded in preserving these river-soaked, flame-crisped palimpsests of blurred ink. Custer was particularly appreciative of the lengths to which Kellogg had gone to save not only his letters to Libbie but also his Galaxy article, describing how the reporter had taken “special pains in drying it.”
    Sure enough, about a week later, Custer’s letters had made their way down the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers to Libbie. In their hurried attempts to dry the contents of the mailbag, Marsh and Kellogg had apparently come close to destroying some of the correspondence they were attempting to save. Libbie’s earlier premonitions of doom had left her agonizingly sensitive to anything even remotely associated with her husband. In a missive Custer never got the chance to read, she reported, “All your letters are scorched.”

    A t 6 a.m. on Thursday, June 15, Custer and the Left Wing of the Seventh Cavalry crossed the Powder and headed up the south bank of the Yellowstone. About thirty miles to the west was the Tongue River, where they were to rendezvous in the next day or so with Reno