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

smarting under the rebuke of the President,” Terry responded, “and wants an independent command, and I wish to give him a chance to do something.” But as Brisbin’s continued questioning made clear, Terry’s decision was not simply motivated by an altruistic wish to let Custer redeem himself. He also believed that Custer was the better man for the job. “I have had but little experience in Indian fighting,” he told Brisbin, “and Custer has had much, and is sure he can whip anything he meets.”
    Ever since the Civil War, Terry had distinguished himself as both a negotiator and an administrator. He had no interest in leading troops in battle. He might claim he was trying to do Custer a favor, but it was his own fundamental lack of confidence, a constitutional inability to take the reins and lead his officers and men in the field, that led Terry to give the command to Custer. Later that summer, with Custer dead, Terry relied on Colonel Gibbon in the same way, “very much to the disgust” of Lieutenant Godfrey and the other surviving officers of the Seventh. “Something must be wrong about Genl Terry,” Godfrey recorded in his diary, “that he cannot hold control of Cavalry & Infty without having merely nominal command.”
    Hindsight has a way of corrupting people’s memories, inviting them to view a past event not as it actually occurred but as they wished it had occurred given the ultimate result. After the disaster, Terry, Gibbon, Brisbin, and Hughes all assured one another that the plan would have worked wonderfully well if Custer had simply obeyed his orders and followed the blue pencil line. If he had done this, he would have arrived at the Little Bighorn just as Terry and Gibbon approached from the north and victory would have been theirs.
    But this does not appear to be what was considered the most likely scenario even at the actual time of the meeting. One of the few contemporary accounts we have is provided by Gibbon’s chief of scouts, Lieutenant James Bradley. “It is understood,” he recorded in his diary, “that if Custer arrives first he is at liberty to attack at once if he deems prudent. We have little hope of being in at the death, as Custer will undoubtedly exert himself to the utmost to get there first and win all the laurels for himself and his regiment.”
    There is also the testimony of the interpreter Fred Gerard. Unlike the officers who attended the meeting on the Far West, Gerard had nothing to hide. Gerard said that he overheard Terry repeat the verbal instructions he had given Custer. “I told him,” Terry said, “if he found the Indians not to do as Reno did, but if he thought he could whip them to do so!”
    Finally there is the testimony of Custer’s friend the actor Lawrence Barrett. Barrett visited Terry and his staff in St. Paul several months after the battle. “[The] story of [Custer’s] disobedience of orders is false,” he wrote to his wife on October 3, 1876, “as he was told to act according to his own judgment at his final interview with Terry.”
    Terry, it seems clear, expected and wanted Custer to attack if he found a fresh Indian trail. The biggest concern on the evening of June 21 was not the size of the village (which was thought to contain as many as fifteen hundred warriors); it was that the village might scatter before one of the columns reached it. The stated, if not written, plan was for Custer and his fast-moving cavalry to make the initial attack from the south and east while Gibbon’s slower-moving column of infantry and cavalry blocked any Indians attempting to flee to the north.
    Custer knew he had to move quickly to accomplish his objective. That was why he ultimately declined the offer of the Gatling guns that had proven such a bother to Reno. Thinking his regiment powerful enough to handle anything it might encounter, he also declined the offer of four additional cavalry companies from the Montana Column.
    In the months after the disaster, Terry and his minions complained about how Custer had ruined everything. “Poor fellow!” Gibbon wrote Terry. “Knowing what we do now, and what an effect a fresh Indian trail seemed to have on him, perhaps we were expecting too much to anticipate a forbearance on his part which would have rendered cooperation of the two columns practicable.” In truth, Gibbon and everyone else present at the meeting knew perfectly well what Custer was going to do once Terry, in the words of Major Brisbin,