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

reversed direction. By 10 p.m., they’d returned to the site of the original battle (where the bodies of Black Kettle and his wife still floated in the frigid waters of the Washita). By 2 a.m., the troopers had put sufficient distance between themselves and the Cheyenne that Custer deemed it safe to bivouac for the night.
    Several days later they returned to their base camp, where General Sheridan declared the operation a complete success. There was one nagging question, however. What had become of Elliott and his men? Already Benteen had begun to question the scouts concerning what Custer had known about the major’s disappearance. One of the officers told how, before galloping off to the east, Elliott had waved his hand and melodramatically cried, “Here goes for a brevet or a coffin!” Elliott had clearly left Black Kettle’s village on what Benteen termed “his own hook.” To hold Custer accountable for the officer’s death seemed, to many, unfair—but not to Frederick Benteen.
    Custer’s lust for glory had, Benteen was convinced, put the entire regiment at risk. In his typically brash and impulsive way, Custer had attacked the village without proper preparation and forethought. “From being a participant in the Battle of the Washita,” Benteen wrote, “I formed an opinion that at some day a big portion of his command would be ‘scooped,’ if such faulty measures . . . persisted.”
    But as others pointed out, the mobility of an Indian village did not allow for the luxury of reconnaissance. By the time a regiment had scouted out the location and size of the village, the encampment was more than likely beginning to disperse. One of Custer’s biggest tactical defenders later became, somewhat ironically, Lieutenant Edward Godfrey, the very officer who’d asked him about Major Elliott. “[The] attack must be made with celerity and generally without knowledge of the numbers of the opposing force . . . ,” Godfrey wrote, “and successful surprise . . . depend[s] upon luck.” Or as another noted expert in plains warfare asserted, Indians “had to be grabbed.”
    But Benteen refused to see it that way. Custer, he maintained, had needlessly left one of their own to die—an inexcusable transgression that the regiment must never forget.
    Several weeks after the battle, the cavalrymen returned to the Washita. When Custer and Sheridan rode into Black Kettle’s village, a vast cloud of crows leapt up cawing from the scorched earth. A wolf loped away to a nearby hill, where it sat down on its haunches and watched intently as they inspected the site. About two miles away, amid a patch of tall grass, they found Elliott and his men—“sixteen naked corpses,” a newspaper correspondent wrote, “frozen as solidly as stone.” The bodies had been so horribly mutilated that it was at first impossible to determine which one was Elliott’s.
    Soon after, Benteen wrote the letter that was subsequently published in a St. Louis newspaper. “Who can describe the feeling of that brave band,” he wrote, “as with anxious beating hearts, they strained their yearning eyes in the direction whence help should come? What must have been the despair that, when all hopes of succor died out, nerved their stout arms to do and die?”
    If Custer had committed one certain crime at the Washita, it involved not Major Elliott but the fifty or so Cheyenne captives who accompanied the regiment during the long march back to the base camp. According to Ben Clark, “many of the squaws captured at the Washita were used by the officers.” Clark claimed that the scout known as Romero (jokingly referred to as Romeo by Custer) acted as the regiment’s pimp. “Romero would send squaws around to the officers’ tents every night,” he said, adding that “Custer picked out a fine looking one [named Monahsetah] and had her in his tent every night.” Benteen corroborated Clark’s story, relating how the regiment’s surgeon reported seeing Custer not only “sleeping with that Indian girl all winter long, but . . . many times in the very act of copulating with her!”
    There was a saying among the soldiers of the western frontier, a saying Custer and his officers could heartily endorse: “Indian women rape easy.”

    S ometime between 2:30 and 3:00 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Varnum awoke on the divide between the Rosebud and Little Bighorn rivers. He was lying in what he described as a “peculiar