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

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

Titel: The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Big Horn Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Nathaniel Philbrick
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trying to get him to surrender, but the young Cheyenne would have none of it. Three times he fired, narrowly missing Benteen’s head and wounding his horse before Benteen reluctantly shot the boy dead.
    Benteen claimed that his company did most of the hard fighting that day and “broke up the village before a trooper of any of the other companies of the Seventh got in.” He also took credit for rounding up the fifty or more Cheyenne women captives and for driving in the Indians’ pony herd of approximately eight hundred horses. “I know that Custer had respect for me,” he later wrote, “for at the Washita I taught him to have it.”
    Lieutenant Godfrey returned from pursuing Indians to the east with some disturbing news. Several miles down the river was another, much bigger village, and hundreds, if not thousands, of warriors were then galloping in their direction. Custer also learned that Major Elliott had chased another group of Indians in that direction but had not yet returned. Godfrey had heard gunfire during his foray east—might it have been Elliott? Custer, Godfrey remembered, “pondered this a bit,” then said he didn’t think so, claiming that another officer had also been fighting in that vicinity and would have known if Elliott had been in trouble. And besides, they had other pressing concerns. They must destroy the Cheyenne’s most precious possession: the pony herd.
    —THE BATTLE OF THE WASHITA, November 27, 1868 —

    As the surrounding hills filled up with warriors from the village to the east, the troopers turned their rifles on the ponies. It took an agonizingly long time to kill more than seven hundred horses. One of the captive Cheyenne women later remembered the very “human” cries of the ponies, many of which were disabled but not killed by the gunfire. When the regiment returned to the frozen battle site several weeks later, Private Dennis Lynch noticed that some of the wounded ponies “had eaten all the grass within reach of them” before they finally died.
    Custer then ordered his men to burn the village. The tepees and all their contents, including the Indians’ bags of gunpowder, were piled onto a huge bonfire. Each time a powder bag exploded, a billowing cloud of black smoke rolled up into the sky. All the while, warriors continued to gather in the hills around them.
    Black Kettle’s village contained exactly fifty-one lodges with about 150 warriors, giving the regiment a five-to-one advantage. But now, with warriors from what appeared to be a huge village to the east threatening to engulf them, the soldiers were, whether or not Custer chose to admit it, in serious trouble.
    The scout Ben Clark estimated that the village to the east was so big that the odds had been reversed; the Cheyenne now outnumbered the troopers by five to one. But Custer wanted to hear none of it. They were going to attack the village to the east.
    Clark vehemently disagreed. They were short of ammunition. Night was coming on. Victory was no longer the issue. If they were to get out of this alive, they must be both very smart and very lucky.
    In My Life on the Plains, Custer took full credit for successfully extracting the regiment from danger. Ben Clark had a different view, claiming that he was the one who devised the plan. The truth is probably somewhere in between: Once Clark had convinced Custer that attacking the other village was tantamount to suicide, Custer embraced the notion of trying to outwit the Cheyenne.
    It was a maxim in war, Custer wrote, to do what the enemy neither “expects nor desires you to do.” The Seventh Cavalry appeared to be hopelessly outnumbered, but why should that prevent it from at least pretending to go on the offensive? A feint toward the big village to the east might cause the warriors to rush back to defend their women and children. This would give the troopers the opportunity to reverse their field under the cover of night and escape to safety.
    With flags flying and the band playing “Ain’t I Glad to Get Out of the Wilderness,” Custer marched the regiment toward the huge village. Even before setting out, he’d positioned the Cheyenne captives along the flanks of the column. Sergeant John Ryan later remembered how the panicked cries of the hostages immediately caused the warriors to stop firing their weapons.
    On they marched into the deepening darkness. Without warning, Custer halted the regiment, extinguished all lights, and surreptitiously

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