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

might be obliterated before Custer was even aware that there was a problem. It might be in violation of Custer’s original orders, but something must be done.
    Benteen sent a bugler galloping to the front of the pack train with orders to halt. Once the mules had been gathered into a single group, Benteen placed one of his companies in advance of the train, another on the right flank—so that the troopers were between the mules and the hills—and the third company at the rear. Once again, Benteen, the self-appointed leader of the “anti-Custer faction,” had in his own eyes saved the day.
    It was nearly dark by the time the pack train finally came into camp after a march of thirty-five miles. Custer’s adjutant, Lieutenant Cooke, directed Benteen to where his company should camp for the night. Until he had been lured away by the siren song of Custer, Cooke had served in Benteen’s company. Cooke was debonair and well liked—the Arikara scouts called him “the Handsome Man”—and his decision to transfer to another, more Custer-friendly company still rankled Benteen, especially since Cooke had “never said good-by even.” Now, as Custer’s trusted adjutant, Cooke was in a position to wield a most exasperating power over his former company commander.
    That evening, Benteen asked Cooke to inform Custer of his experience with the pack train and how he had rearranged his battalion for better protection from possible attack. “No, I will not tell General Custer anything about it,” Cooke announced. “If you want him to know it, you must tell him of it yourself.” The next morning Benteen did exactly as Cooke suggested. But instead of being offended by what Benteen assumed would be construed as a challenge to his authority, Custer expressed his thanks and promised to “turn over the same order of march for the rear guard to the officer who relieves you.” For Benteen, who had spent the last day and night steeling himself for another epic confrontation, it must have been almost disappointing.

    O n the morning of June 24, they once again departed promptly at 5 a.m. It was a beautiful day with a brisk headwind blowing out of the south. With each mile the valley became more confined as the dark sandstone hills moved toward them like curious beasts.
    By now the entire river valley seemed to be, at least to Lieutenant Varnum, “one continuous village.” Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of travois poles had scribbled their weird hieroglyphics across the bottomlands. The scouts studied the scratches and gouges in the earth, the pony dung, and maggot-filled pieces of buffalo meat and tried to calculate how close they were to the hostiles up ahead.
    What they were seeing were the signs of two different migrations. First, there had been the gradual, majestic march of Sitting Bull’s village of about 450 lodges up the Rosebud. Then there was the more recent, and inevitably more confusing, evidence left by the agency Indians. Just as Custer and his men were now following the trail left by the main village, so had the agency Indians made their way to the Rosebud and headed south in search of Sitting Bull.
    The previous day, Custer had clearly been impressed by the size of the trail. At some point, he and his orderly, John Burkman, were riding together well ahead of the regiment. “There’s a lot of them,” Custer said, “more than we figured.”
    For the last two days, Custer had been, in Burkman’s words, “unusually quiet and stern.” There was none of the buffoonery with his brothers that had typified the march from Fort Lincoln. To have the normally brazen Custer suggesting that the Indians might be in greater numbers than he’d anticipated was troubling. “Not too many to lick, though,” Burkman worriedly responded.
    Custer smiled and instantly became, much to his orderly’s relief, the swaggering braggart of old. “What the Seventh can’t lick,” he said, “the whole U.S. army couldn’t lick.”
    But by June 24, with the increased number of fresh trails coming in from the east, a new concern began to enter Custer’s mind. From the start, his primary worry had been that the hostile village might scatter before he had the chance to attack it. The village they’d been following up the Rosebud was large, and they all knew large villages could last only as long as the buffalo, grass, and firewood allowed. Even though the scouts realized that the trails had been made by Indians coming from the