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

Terry but had just decided to go with Custer; otherwise, he feared, “he might miss something if he did not accompany the column.” Brisbin secured the reporter a mule and some canvas saddlebags, along with some provisions from the riverboat’s stores. “We fixed poor Mark up,” Brisbin later remembered, “for his ride to death.”
    Also on the fence about going with Custer were his younger brother Boston, to whom Grant Marsh had offered a cabin on the Far West, and his nephew Autie Reed. In the end, both went with the Seventh. The scout Charley Reynolds had a serious infection on his hand, and one of the regiment’s surgeons, Dr. Henry Porter, had advised him to remain on the boat, as did Marsh. “Captain,” Reynolds said, “I’ve been waiting and getting ready for this expedition for two years and I would sooner be dead than miss it.”
    That night the main cabin of the Far West was the scene of a high-stakes poker game that was, according to Marsh, “the stiffest ever played on the river.” At the table were Marsh, Custer’s brother Tom, his brother-in-law James Calhoun, and Captain William Crowell of the Sixth Infantry. By the end of the night, Captain Crowell had won several thousand dollars, leaving Tom Custer and Jim Calhoun not only exhausted and hung over but broke.
    As Tom Custer and Calhoun lost at cards, Marcus Reno sang. That afternoon he’d purchased a straw hat from the sutler and at least one half-gallon keg of whiskey. He appears to have spent much of the evening getting drunk, and that night he and several officers stood arm in arm on the deck of the Far West singing sentimental songs. Custer’s tent was beside the riverboat, and one can only wonder whether the major’s slurred harmonizing contributed to the anger his abstemious commander directed toward him that night in his anonymous dispatch.
    Burkman watched the cabin light on the Far West finally go out. “All got still,” he remembered. “Here and there was blotches where men was laying asleep on the ground. You couldn’t hear nothing except horses munching their feed or nickering soft to one another.” At some point Custer’s dog Tuck sat down on his haunches and with his muzzle pointed skyward started to howl. “It sounded like the death howl . . . ,” Burkman remembered. “I tried to shut him up.”
    When streaks of light began to appear in the sky, Burkman knew he must awaken his commander. He found Custer “hunched over on the cot, just his coat and boots off, and the pen still in his hand.” As he’d done every night for the last month and a half, Custer had spent the night filling up the darkness with words. The pen was his talisman, his way to whatever future might exist beyond the next few days, and he’d fallen asleep clutching it like a rosary. “I hated to rouse him,” Burkman remembered, “he looked so peaked and tired.”
    Once awake, Custer asked, “What’s the day like outside?”
    “Clear and shiny,” Burkman said.

    T hey departed at noon on June 22. There was a cold wind blowing out of the north, and as the Seventh Cavalry approached Terry and Gibbon, who waited at the head of the camp along with Brisbin, the regiment’s colorful flags, known as guidons, could be seen, Gibbon wrote, “gaily fluttering in the breeze.” “Together we sat on our horses,” he continued, “and witnessed the approach of the command as it threaded its way through the rank sage brush which covered the valley.” Once the advance had started, Custer rode up to join Terry and the others, where they were accompanied by the regiment’s buglers, who gave as rousing a version of “Garry Owen” as was possible without Vinatieri’s band. “General Custer appeared to be in good spirits,” Gibbon wrote, “chatted freely with us, and was evidently proud of the appearance of his command.” The horses, Gibbon noted, were of unusually high quality for the U.S. cavalry, and Custer claimed that despite the many days of hard marching they’d already seen, “there was not a single sore-backed horse amongst them.”
    Once the pack mules had passed, followed by the rear guard, Custer shook hands with the assembled officers and started after his regiment. Gibbon claimed that it was then that he called out, “Now, Custer, don’t be greedy, but wait for us.” Over the course of the last month, Gibbon had passed up two matchless opportunities to attack the Indians. That he now had the audacity to ask Custer to save