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

and the Right Wing. For now General Terry remained on the Far West, which would meet them the following day on the mouth of the Tongue.
    They had left behind about 150 men at the supply camp on the Powder. Most of them were infantrymen assigned to guard the provisions, but there were also the teamsters and their wagons, the unmounted troopers, and the members of Felix Vinatieri’s band, who had donated their pure white horses to the troopers in need of fresh mounts. For Custer, this was a stinging loss. The band had been an almost omnipresent part of his storied life in the West. Even in the subfreezing temperatures encountered at the Battle of the Washita, the band had played “Garry Owen” before the troopers charged into the village. It had been so cold that morning back in 1868 that what was supposed to have been a dramatic crescendo of horns had turned into a few strangled squawks and squeaks when the musicians’ spittle froze almost instantly in their instruments—but no matter. The band with all its gaiety and swagger had been there on the snowy plains. That morning the band members climbed up onto a hill beside the Yellowstone and played “Garry Owen” one last time. “It was something you’d never forget,” Private Windolph remembered.
    In addition to the band, the troopers also left behind their sabers. In contrast to the Civil War, when sabers had been useful in hand-to-hand fighting, the cavalry in the West rarely found an opportunity to use these weapons against the Indians, who generally refused to engage them closely. Since the sabers were quite heavy, it was decided to leave them boxed on the Powder. It only made sense, but to be without a saber left many of the officers feeling naked and vulnerable. For a cavalryman, his meticulously crafted sword was what a coup stick was for a Lakota—a handheld object with tremendous symbolic power. At least one officer, Lieutenant Charles Camilus DeRudio, born in Belluno, Italy, could not bear to leave his saber behind (it was useful, he claimed, in killing rattlesnakes) and surreptitiously brought the weapon along in spite of the order.
    That afternoon, after a dusty march over a low, grassless plain of sagebrush and cactus, they came upon the remains of a Lakota camp from the previous winter. The reporter Mark Kellogg judged the village to have been two miles long, with between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred tepees. Being a winter encampment, this was as close to a permanent settlement as was known among the nomadic Lakota. To protect their ponies during the brutal winter months, they had constructed shelters for the animals out of driftwood from the river.
    Custer was at the head of the column, and soon after entering the abandoned village he came upon a human skull amid the charred remnants of a fire. “I halted to examine it,” he wrote Libbie, “and lying near by I found the uniform of a soldier. Evidently it was a cavalry uniform, as the buttons of the overcoat had ‘C’ on them, and the dress coat had the yellow cord of the cavalry uniform running through it. The skull was weather-beaten, and had evidently been there several months. All the circumstances went to show that the skull was that of some poor mortal who had been a prisoner in the hands of the savages, and who doubtless had been tortured to death, probably burned.” The Arikara scout Red Star watched Custer as he “stood still for some time” and stared down at the skull and scattered bones of the soldier. “All about [the soldier] were clubs and sticks,” Red Star remembered, “as though he had been beaten to death.”
    The column next came upon the remains of a large Lakota burial ground. Some of the bodies had been tied to the branches of trees, others laid out on burial scaffolds. After having witnessed the grisly evidence of the unknown trooper’s torture and death, Custer appears to have been in the mood for revenge. They still had a few miles to go before reaching the Tongue, but it was here, at the Lakota burial ground beside the Yellowstone, that he decided to bivouac for the night.
    That afternoon, Custer and his troopers systematically desecrated the graves. One of the scaffolds had been painted red and black, an indication, Red Star claimed, “of a brave man.” Custer ordered the African American interpreter, Isaiah Dorman, to take the wrappings off the warrior’s body. “As they turned the body about,” Red Star remembered, “they saw a wound partly