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

swear.
    They started back down the eastern side of the divide toward the regiment, which Custer assumed was still hidden in the ravine almost two miles away. They were about a half mile from the ravine when they saw the column marching toward them. “Confound it!” Gerard overheard Custer mutter to himself. “Who moved out that command?”
    Soon after, they were met by Custer’s brother. “Tom,” Custer snapped, “who moved out the command?”
    Tom wasn’t sure. “Orders came for us to march,” he said lamely, “and we marched.”
    Custer called his officers together and told them about his inability to see the large village. He, for one, was beginning to think that the scouts had never really seen it either. About this time, Lieutenant Cooke learned that Charles DeRudio had a pair of Austrian binoculars that were much more powerful than the army-issue field glasses. After some prodding from Cooke, DeRudio agreed to lend them to Custer. As the column continued on toward the divide, Custer, the binoculars in hand, rode Dandy back up to the ridgeline for another look into the valley below.

    W hen Custer returned to the column, which had advanced to within a half mile of the divide, he no longer doubted that there were large numbers of Indians in the valley. With the help of DeRudio’s glasses, he’d seen the distant “cloudlike objects” that the scouts had said were the pony herds. But he also appears to have seen something else: a much smaller, and closer, Indian village.
    Private Daniel Newell overheard Custer telling his company commander, Captain Thomas French, that the village contained only “ten or twelve tepees.” It was too late, of course, for a dawn attack, but he still held out hopes for a positive result. Just as the seizure of Black Kettle’s village had made possible his success at the Battle of the Washita, so might this even smaller village assure him another victory. “It will be all over in a couple of hours,” Custer told French.
    Tom approached with some bad news, this time from Captain Keogh. Sergeant William Curtiss had inadvertently left behind a bag of his personal belongings during the regiment’s hasty departure after breakfast. He’d returned to the bivouac site with a small detail of men and discovered the three Cheyenne from Little Wolf’s band trying to open a box of hardtack with a tomahawk. “I knew well enough that they had scouts ahead of us,” Charley Reynolds said, “but I didn’t think that others would be trailing along to pick up stuff dropped by our careless packers.” Custer could no longer cling to the hope that the regiment had escaped detection. They must attack as soon as possible.
    In addition to the six Crows, Colonel Gibbon had given Custer a white scout named George Herendeen. An experienced frontiersman who had fought the Lakota several times in the last two years, Herendeen was to act as a messenger between Custer and Terry. Stretching to the northwest from the Wolf Mountains was a tributary called Tullock’s Creek. According to Terry’s orders, Herendeen was to scout the creek and then report to Gibbon’s column, which should be starting up the Bighorn River about now, and tell them whether or not there were any Indians in this portion of the country.
    Soon after Tom informed Custer about the Indians and the hardtack box, Herendeen asked if it was time for him to head down Tullock’s Creek, now visible from the divide. “Rather impatiently,” Herendeen remembered, Custer told him, “[T]here are no Indians in that direction—they are all in our front, and besides they have discovered us. . . . The only thing to do is to push ahead and attack the camp as soon as possible.” Herendeen had to agree with Custer’s logic—“there was really no use in scouting Tullock’s [Creek].” But as both of them knew, Gibbon and especially Terry were expecting some kind of word from Custer.
    Now that Custer had violated his written orders by venturing away from the Rosebud, he apparently felt that the less Terry and Gibbon knew about his whereabouts, the better. “Custer wished to fight the Indians with the Seventh alone,” Herendeen remembered, “and he was clearly making every effort to do this.”
    Custer ordered his bugler, the twenty-three-year-old Italian immigrant Giovanni Martini (known to the regiment as John Martin), to sound officer’s call. It was the first trumpet call in two days. By midday on June 25, there was no longer