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

with fear, his eyes are rolling from fright at this news of the Sioux. When we have beaten the Sioux he will then be a man.”
    To speak of fear in regard to Tom was, Custer knew perfectly well, an absurdity. Just as the Indians valued counting coup as the ultimate test of bravery, a soldier in the Civil War had wanted nothing more than to capture the enemy’s flag. In the space of three days, Tom went to extraordinary lengths to capture two Confederate flags. The taking of the first, at Namozine Church on April 3, 1865, was spectacular enough to win him the Medal of Honor, but it was the second, taken at Sayler’s Creek, that almost got him killed.
    Tom had just spearheaded a charge that had broken the Confederate line. Up ahead was the color-bearer. Just as Tom seized the flag, the rebel soldier took up his pistol and fired point-blank into Tom’s face. The bullet tore through his cheek and exited behind his ear and knocked him backward on his horse. His ripped and powder-blackened face spouting blood, Tom somehow managed to pull himself upright, draw his own pistol, and shoot the color-bearer dead. With flag in hand, he rode back to his brother and crowed, “The damn rebels have shot me, but I’ve got the flag!” Understandably fearful for Tom’s life, Custer ordered him to report to a surgeon, but Tom refused to leave the field until the battle was won. He’d handed the flag to another soldier and was heading back out when Custer placed him under arrest. Soon after, Tom, all of twenty years old, became the only soldier in the Civil War to win two Medals of Honor.
    In his derisive remarks to Bloody Knife, Custer was picking up where he and the Arikara scout had left off three days before. The first night after leaving the Far West, a drunken Bloody Knife had tauntingly claimed that if Custer did happen to find the Indians “he would not dare to attack.” Custer was now using the supposed fears of his brother Tom as a way to show Bloody Knife that he had no qualms about attacking even a “tremendous village.”
    What Custer apparently didn’t fully appreciate was the extent to which the ever-growing size of the Indian trail had already changed his scout’s attitude toward what lay ahead. The evening before, during their last encampment on the Rosebud, Bloody Knife had said to a small group of fellow scouts, “Well, tomorrow we are going to have a big fight, a losing fight. Myself, I know what is to happen to me. . . . I am not to see the set of tomorrow’s sun.”
    That morning on the eastern slope of the Wolf Mountains, Custer leapt onto his horse Dandy and rode bareback throughout the column, spreading the news of the Crows’ discovery and ordering each troop commander to prepare to march at 8 a.m. There was at least one officer to whom he did not speak. “I noticed Custer passed me on horseback,” Benteen wrote. “[He] went on, saying nothing to me.”
    By the time Custer returned to his bivouac, he was in a more meditative mood. When Godfrey approached him just prior to their 8 a.m. departure, Custer “wore a serious expression and was apparently abstracted” as a nearby group of Arikara, including Bloody Knife, discussed the prospects for the day ahead. At one point Bloody Knife made a remark that caused Custer to look up and ask, “in his usual quick, brusque manner, ‘What’s that he says!’ ”
    “He says,” Gerard responded, “we’ll find enough Sioux to keep us fighting two or three days.”
    Custer laughed humorlessly. “I guess we’ll get through with them in one day,” he said.

    A t 8:00 sharp, Custer led the column due west on a gradual climb toward the divide. At 10:30, after a march of about four miles, he directed the regiment toward a narrow ravine less than two miles east of the divide. As Custer, Red Star, and Gerard continued on to the Crow’s Nest, the soldiers were to hide themselves here until nightfall.
    The officers and men climbed down into the cool depths of this subterranean pocket of sagebrush, buffalo grass, and brush. After three days and a night of marching, it was a great relief to be free, if only temporarily, from the dust and sun. Several officers, including Godfrey, Tom Custer, Custer’s aide-de-camp Lieutenant Cooke, Lieutenant Jim Calhoun, and Lieutenant Winfield Scott Edgerly smoked companion-ably in the ravine. They now knew that the day of the fight was finally at hand. Edgerly, the youngest of the group, later remembered how Cooke