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

requested leave, a request Custer denied. Tensions appear to have been particularly high between the two of them at the onset of the campaign. Lieutenant Edgerly later felt compelled to assure his wife that Custer “gave Keogh command strictly in accordance with his rank on the morning of the fight.”
    Part of Custer’s problem with Keogh may have been the Irishman’s good looks. He was an inch or two taller than Custer, had high cheekbones, dark hair and eyes, and a look of sad yet raffish intelligence. He was, without question, the handsomest man in the regiment. In a photograph taken at an 1875 picnic, Keogh and Custer stand on either side of Libbie. Keogh, dressed all in black, leans suggestively on the back of Libbie’s chair while Custer, dressed in his white buckskin suit, looks away from the two of them, his arms awkwardly crossed.
    Weeks after the captain’s death at the Little Bighorn, Benteen found himself dreaming about the man beside whom he spent his last night before the battle. “I had a queer dream of Col. Keogh . . . ,” he wrote to his wife; “ ’twas that he would insist upon undressing in the room in which you were. I had to give him a ‘dressing’ to cure him of the fancy. I rarely ever thought of the man—and ’tis queer I should have dreamt of him.”
    That night after supper, Keogh sat down beside Benteen, who had just taken off his boots and was reclining beneath a bullberry bush, listening to Lieutenant Charles DeRudio regale a group of officers about his adventures in Europe. Before serving in the Civil War, the Italian-born DeRudio, a small man with an elfish face, had been involved in a botched attempt to assassinate France’s Napoleon III. His sentence of death by guillotine had been commuted to life at the notorious Devil’s Island in French Guiana, from which he had managed to escape to England. The stories of DeRudio, known as “Count No Account,” always seemed to change with each telling, and Benteen was not about to lose a night’s rest to another one of the officer’s endless yarns.
    “See here, fellows,” he said, “you want to be collecting all the sleep you can, and be doing it soon, for I have a ‘Pre’ [for premonition] that we are not going to stay in this camp tonight, but we are going to march all night, so, good-night.”
    They’d traveled almost thirty miles that day and were now camped near where the Indians’ trail, which had suddenly become even larger and fresher, veered away from the Rosebud toward the rugged divide to the west, known as the Wolf Mountains. On the other side of the divide was the Little Bighorn.
    “I had scarcely gotten the words from my lips,” Benteen wrote, “before the orderly trumpeter notified us that we would meet at the commanding officer’s headquarters at once.”

    T here was no moon that night, and with a ban on fires and lanterns, the officers had a difficult time finding Custer’s tent. “We groped our way through horse herds, over sleeping men, and through thickets of bushes,” remembered Lieutenant Godfrey. Finally, Godfrey came upon “a solitary candle” flickering beside the general’s tent. Once most of the officers had assembled, Custer explained that the Crow scouts, who’d marched to the verge of the divide that afternoon, claimed the trail led into the valley beyond. However, due to glare from the setting sun, they were unable to see any sign of a village. The Crows, along with Lieutenant Varnum, the scout Charley Reynolds, and some Arikara, were now on their way back up to the divide, where they hoped to catch a glimpse of the village “in the early morning when the camp fires started.”
    In the meantime, Custer wanted to get the column as close as possible to the divide, some fifteen miles away. His plan was to march all that night, and after concealing the regiment beneath the eastern brow of the Wolf Mountains, spend the next day scouting out the location of Sitting Bull’s village. If all went according to plan, they’d march for the village on the night of June 25 and attack at dawn of the twenty-sixth. As Godfrey and the other officers undoubtedly realized, this was almost precisely the strategy Custer had used at the Battle of the Washita in 1868.

    T hat summer the newspaper correspondent John Finerty accompanied General Crook’s Wyoming Column. Of all his experiences during that eventful time, nothing compared to the thrilling mystery of a night march. “You are conscious