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

that the village was somewhere to the south. Given the age of the pony droppings and other signs, Boyer estimated that the encampment could be no more than a two-day ride away.
    This was Reno’s chance. They still had several days’ worth of provisions. He could lead them south, find the village, and attack. He, not that poseur George Custer, would be the hero of the campaign.
    Reno asked the Arikara scout Forked Horn what he thought about the situation, especially given the immense size of the trail. “If the Dakotas see us,” Forked Horn replied, “the sun will not move very far before we are all killed. But you are the leader, and we will go on if you say so.”
    That was enough for Reno. At 4 p.m., he ordered the Right Wing to turn around and head back north, toward the Yellowstone. He had violated his orders, but he had also secured some vital intelligence: The Indians were no longer where Terry had assumed they’d be.
    What he didn’t know was that farther up the Rosebud, less than sixty miles to the south, General George Crook and his army of more than a thousand men had found the Indians.
    Actually, the Indians had found them.

CHAPTER 6

    The Blue Pencil Line
    T he Cheyenne warrior Little Hawk had been given an important responsibility. Soldiers had been spotted to the south, and he and five other warriors were to find out where the army was headed. But instead of soldiers, they found a herd of buffalo. They killed a cow, and as his friend Crooked Nose stayed to cook the meat, Little Hawk and the rest of the warriors rode off to continue the hunt. They hadn’t gotten far when they noticed that Crooked Nose was gesturing urgently for them to come back.
    He had seen two Indians on the top of a nearby hill. They might be scouts for the soldiers, but Little Hawk had his doubts. He knew that their allies, the Lakota, had also sent out scouting parties to look for the soldiers.
    Little Hawk enjoyed a good joke, especially if it was at someone else’s expense. One of his favorites was to shoot a surreptitious arrow into a woman’s water bag and watch her reaction as the water gushed out. Despite the seriousness of the mission, Little Hawk decided to have some fun with his Lakota counterparts. He proposed that they creep up to the brow of the hill and “pretend to attack them.”
    They started up the hill, but before they reached the top, Little Hawk jumped off his horse and crawled to the hill’s edge. It was a good thing, too, because when he lifted his head and peeked into the valley below, he realized that he’d been mistaken. Instead of a few friendly Lakota, it was as if, he later remembered, “the whole earth were black with soldiers.” They must leave immediately and warn the village.

    B y June 16, the village had moved four times since Sitting Bull’s sun dance. After gradually working their way farther and farther up the Rosebud, they had turned west, crossing the divide between the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn. They were now encamped on a tributary to the Little Bighorn called Sun Dance Creek.
    The camp was divided into six circles, with the Cheyenne in the front and the Hunkpapa in the rear. Groups of Indians had been regularly streaming in from the agencies to the east, but many, if not most, of them were still in transit, drawn in by the gravitational pull of Sitting Bull’s ever-growing camp.
    Little Hawk and his scouts arrived just at daybreak. As they approached the village, they began to howl like wolves, a sign that they had seen the enemy. Heralds quickly began to ride throughout the six camp circles, which extended for almost a mile, announcing Little Hawk’s news. The women started packing up their possessions in preparation for a possible move as the young warriors talked of riding out to attack the soldiers.
    Later that day, the chiefs met in the large council tent. Many of the foremost Lakota and Cheyenne warriors, including Crazy Horse, were already present in the village. But Sitting Bull remained firm. There were still many more men of fighting age coming from the agencies. The longer they waited, the stronger they would be. Let the washichus attack first. And besides, in his dream he had seen the soldiers coming from the east, not the south. “Young men,” the heralds reported, “leave the soldiers alone unless they attack us.”
    But as night approached, more and more of the young men slipped away from the village. By midnight, perhaps as many as a thousand