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

healed just below the right shoulder. On the scaffold were little rawhide bags with horn spoons in them, partly made moccasins, etc.” Dorman ultimately hurled the body into the river, and since he was next seen fishing on the riverbank, Red Star surmised that he had used a portion of the warrior’s remains for bait.
    Lieutenant Donald McIntosh’s G Company took a leading role in the desecration. McIntosh’s father had worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company in Quebec, Canada; his mother, Charlotte, was a direct descendant of Red Jacket, a famous Iroquois chief. His ancestry apparently did not prevent him from joining in the pillage. As McIntosh and his men pilfered trinkets from the bodies before throwing them in the river, at least one soldier cautioned the lieutenant “that G troop might be sorry for this.”
    Foremost in the desecration, however, was the Custer clan, aided by Custer’s regimental adjutant, Lieutenant William Cooke. “Armstrong, Tom and I pulled down an Indian grave the other day,” Custer’s brother Boston happily reported to his mother. “Autie Reed got the bow with six arrows and a nice pair of moccasins which he intends taking home.”
    Lieutenant Edward Godfrey was careful not to name names, but he was clearly shocked by the Custers’ behavior. “Several persons rode about exhibiting their trinkets with as much gusto as if they were trophies of their valor,” Godfrey wrote, “and showed no more concern for their desecration than if they had won them at a raffle. Ten days later I saw the bodies of these same persons dead, naked, and mutilated.” For his part, the interpreter Fred Gerard became convinced that the ultimate demise of the three Custer brothers, Autie Reed, and Lieutenant Cooke was “the vengeance of God that had overtaken them for this deed.”
    That night the Custers were too busy being the Custer brothers to betray any concern about the possible consequences of their actions. “We all slept in the open air around the fire,” Custer wrote Libbie, “Tom and I under a [tent] fly, Bos and Autie Reed on the opposite side. Tom pelted Bos with sticks and clods of earth after he retired. I don’t know what we would do without Bos to tease.”

    A pproximately fifty-five miles to the southwest, Major Reno and the Right Wing had just made camp. All that day and until 11:30 that night, they had been carefully feeling their way across the divide to the Rosebud. They awoke the morning of June 17 to find themselves on the banks of a slender sliver of brown water beside what could only be described as a Native highway: an irregular road of furrowed dirt several hundred yards wide.
    When moving from camp to camp, each Lakota and Cheyenne family loaded its goods onto a horse-drawn sledge known as a travois. The front ends of two tepee poles were lashed to either side of the horse, leaving the rear tips of the poles to drag along the ground behind. Tied between the poles was a rawhide hammock that could accommodate several hundred pounds of goods or an injured warrior or several small children and their puppies. Because of the flexibility of the slender poles, the travois provided a surprisingly smooth ride as it jounced easily over the uneven earth.
    Given how much weight they were supporting, the rear tips of the travois poles inevitably dug deep into the ground. The trail left by this village of more than three thousand people had virtually scoured the Rosebud Valley of grass. “The trail was wide and so turned up by tepee poles,” Private Peter Thompson remembered, “that we found it a difficult matter to secure a good camping place.”
    That morning they marched only six and a half miles up the river before halting at 10 a.m. Reno must have been in a state of extreme excitement. He had not just ignored Terry’s orders, he had flagrantly disobeyed them, and now he was marching in the direction of a hostile Indian camp that, if the trail they were following was any indication, seemed to be growing by the minute.
    The Right Wing’s three hundred horses, sixty-six mules, and that godforsaken Gatling gun kicked up an easily detectable cloud of dust. Reno decided it was best to let Boyer and the Arikara range down the trail on their own, looking for some recent signs as to the village’s location.
    They waited for six hours until the scouts finally returned. The scouts had ventured close to twenty additional miles up the Rosebud. All they could say with any certainty was