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

Lakota and Cheyenne warriors who’d spent the night riding up the Rosebud had arrived.
    Crook’s troopers were still dismounted and unprepared for a charge—some of them had even erected tents. This meant that the initial fighting was left to the Crow and Shoshone scouts. On a high plateau above the Rosebud, they bravely met the Lakota onslaught. “The coming together of the Sioux, Crows and Shoshones . . . ,” Grouard remembered, “was the prettiest sight in the way of a fight that I have ever seen.” For twenty minutes, the fighting remained hand to hand until, finally, the troopers began to appear, and the Lakota reluctantly fell back. “I believe if it had not been for the Crows,” Grouard recalled, “the Sioux would have killed half of our command before the soldiers were in a position to meet the attack.”
    Captain Anson Mills was part of the charge to relieve the Crows and Shoshone. It had been every officer’s assumption that once the full force of the cavalry was brought to bear on the Indians, they would retreat in a panicked rout. But this did not turn out to be the case. “The Indians proved then and there that they were the best cavalry soldiers on earth,” Mills later wrote. “In charging up toward us they exposed little of their person, hanging on with one arm around the neck and one leg over the horse, firing and lancing from underneath the horse’s necks, so that there was no part of the Indian at which to aim.” Mills and the others were able to drive back the Lakota and Cheyenne, but soon groups of warriors came barreling in from other directions. “The Indians came not in a line but in flocks or herds like the buffalo, and they piled in upon us.”

    —THE BATTLE OF THE ROSEBUD, June 17 , 1876 —

    Crook became convinced that the warriors must be protecting a village a few miles down the Rosebud. So he sent Captain Mills and eight companies of cavalry (about a third of his total force) down the river. Soon enough, several companies on the other side of the battlefield found themselves virtually surrounded by the hostiles. Crook called back Mills, whose men were able to come to the besieged companies’ rescue just in the nick of time.
    After six hours of fierce fighting, the Lakota and Cheyenne decided that they’d had enough for the day. Crook later claimed that since he was still on the field at the conclusion of the battle, the victory was technically his. His subsequent actions proved otherwise.
    He decided he didn’t have sufficient ammunition or supplies to keep up the chase. So he turned back, and after a day’s march south made camp at Goose Creek near modern Sheridan, Wyoming.
    Never before in the history of the West had the Indians been known to seek out and attack a large column of soldiers on the open field. The hard part was usually finding the Indians, let alone convincing them to make a stand, but this time the Indians had swooped out of the hilltops like infuriated birds of prey and fallen on them . Crook was convinced that the Indians had outnumbered his army by a factor of three to one when in actuality, his army was probably the larger force. Crook also claimed that the Indians were better armed than his soldiers. It was true that many of them possessed repeating rifles compared to the soldiers’ single-shot 1873 Springfield carbines and rifles (the weapons selected by General Terry’s munitions board), but this had not prevented the troopers, infantrymen, and scouts from firing off an astounding number of rounds—25,000 cartridges by one estimate, or about 250 rounds per Native casualty.
    What had really happened was that the Lakota and Cheyenne had succeeded in putting a deep and enduring fright into George Crook and his army. “Their shouting and personal appearance was so hideous that it terrified the horses . . . and rendered them almost uncontrollable,” recalled Captain Mills. For his part, Crook never forgot the sound of that battle, in particular “the war whoop that caused the hair to raise on end.”
    Crook dispatched a messenger to Fort Fetterman, where word of the battle was relayed by telegraph to General Sheridan in Chicago. Sheridan had every reason to expect that Crook would dust himself off and continue after the hostiles. That was the way he’d subdued the Apache to the south. But once Crook had ensconced himself and his column at Goose Creek (where he remained for six long weeks), he tried to forget about the humiliating