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

village. Black Bear, on the other hand, had no intention of turning back. “We did not go to warn the village,” he later remembered. “As we were not hostiles we continued on toward the agency.”
    As it turned out, both Black Bear’s band and Crawler and his son Deeds had been under close observation as they approached the divide. From their perch at the Crow’s Nest, Varnum and the scouts had watched in mounting alarm as the two groups of Lakota made their seemingly inevitable way toward the regiment. Varnum and Charley Reynolds had even set out to kill Crawler and his son but had been called back when the Crow scouts mistakenly thought the two hostiles had changed direction. Once back on the Crow’s Nest, Varnum had watched Black Bear’s party riding along the ridge, their horses backlit by the morning sun and looking “as large as elephants.”
    By the time Custer arrived at the Crow’s Nest, the two groups of Lakota had vanished. The regiment, Varnum and the Crow scouts knew, had been seen. Varnum told of these most recent and potentially devastating developments as Custer stared out into the distance through his field glasses. Custer refused to believe that the regiment had been discovered. According to Red Star, he even got into an argument with the Crow scouts, who insisted that, having lost the crucial element of surprise, he must attack at once. “This camp has not seen us . . . ,” Custer stubbornly maintained. “I want to wait until it is dark and then we will march, we will place our army around the Sioux camp.”
    There was yet another potential problem with Custer’s plan. If the village was really as big as the scouts seemed to think it was, there was no way a regiment of just 650 soldiers and scouts could effectively encircle it. As General Crook had noted after the Battle of the Rosebud, “It is rather difficult to surround three Indians with one soldier!”
    Custer might boast that his regiment could defeat all the Indians on the plains, but in his heart of hearts he knew better. At the Washita, there had been, in essence, several villages strung out along the river. By happening upon Black Kettle’s small and isolated camp, he’d been able to secure the captives that had made his ultimate victory—not to mention survival—possible. There is evidence that as he looked out from the Crow’s Nest that morning, Custer was looking for hopeful indications that between them and the unseen mass of Indians on the Little Bighorn was a smaller, more manageable camp on the order of Black Kettle’s.
    About eleven miles away were two tepees, one flattened, the other standing. Were these part of a smaller, intermediary village? The problem was that Custer couldn’t see well enough through his field glasses to tell for sure. In the hours since the Crows had first glimpsed the giant pony herd, a haze had filled the valley as the temperature steadily climbed with the sun.
    Unlike modern binoculars, which use mirrors to increase magnification to somewhere between 7 and 10 power, standard army field glasses in 1876 relied on straight-through optics and achieved a magnification of just 2.5 to 4 power. The Crow scouts had a small spyglass, but this, too, proved of little help to Custer in deciphering the supposed pony herd or, for that matter, the far closer cluster of tepees.
    In the early days of the Civil War, Custer had experienced a new and exciting innovation in military surveillance: the hot-air balloon. As an “aeronaut” aboard a balloon named Constitution he had enjoyed a truly panoramic view of the York and James rivers and had been one of the first to realize, at least according to his own account, that the Confederates were evacuating Yorktown. The possibility of a Native evacuation was what he feared more than anything else as he looked out from this peak in the Wolf Mountains. He urgently needed, if not a balloon, a decent pair of binoculars.
    Custer sat on the rocky outcropping, staring for several long and unsatisfactory minutes into the distance. “I have got mighty good eyes,” he finally said to Mitch Boyer, the Crow interpreter and scout, “and I can see no Indians.”
    “If you can’t find more Indians in that valley than you ever saw together before,” Boyer replied, “you can hang me.”
    Custer leapt to his feet. “It would do a damn sight of good to hang you, wouldn’t it?” It was only the second time in four years that Varnum had heard his commander