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

safely out of sight.

    A lmost as soon as the regiment crossed the divide, Custer was finding fault with Frederick Benteen. The captain, Custer complained, was “setting the pace too fast.” Custer took over the advance and after marching just a few miles, abruptly ordered the command to halt. As Benteen looked on from the head of the column, Custer and his adjutant, William Cooke, moved off beyond earshot and, with paper and pencil in hand, began to talk—about “what,” Benteen later wrote, “we knew not.”
    But he had his suspicions. Seven and a half years before, after the publication of Benteen’s letter about the abandonment of Major Elliott at the Battle of the Washita, Custer had banished him from the regiment’s headquarters at Fort Hays to the remote outpost of Fort Dodge, almost a hundred miles away. As it turned out, Benteen did not stay long at Fort Dodge. A fortuitous meeting with an old friend with connections at department headquarters soon brought his banishment to an end. He was riding back to Fort Hays across the plains of Kansas when he came upon a herd of buffalo. He’d just shot a cow and was in the process of cutting her throat when Lieutenant Cooke appeared on the crest of a nearby hill. When he saw Benteen bent over the dead buffalo with a knife in his hand, Cooke, the Custer loyalist, said, “At your old business, I see.”
    “Yes,” Benteen replied, “I can’t keep out of blood.”
    Now, after fifteen minutes of “talking and making notes on a scratch pad,” Cooke and Custer called for Benteen. Once again, he’d been banished. As Custer and the majority of the regiment continued to follow the wide Indian trail toward the Little Bighorn—about fifteen miles away and still hidden behind the hills ahead—Benteen was to lead a battalion of three companies toward a line of bluffs about two miles to the left. The supposed aim of the detour was to find a perch from which he could look into the Little Bighorn Valley and report what he saw. He was also to “pitch in” to any Indians he might come across. Not even a half hour after crossing the divide, Benteen was no longer in the advance.
    The real purpose of this order, Benteen’s friends later claimed, was to remove him from the head of the column. But Custer may have had other reasons for sending his senior captain off to the left. For the last two days, Custer had been obsessed with preventing any Indians from escaping in that direction. The night before, as they marched toward the divide in the dust and darkness, he had instructed the Crow and Arikara scouts to “follow the left-hand trail, no matter how small it might be—he didn’t want any of the Sioux to escape him.” By sending Benteen off at a forty-five-degree angle to the left, Custer was continuing to make sure no Indians escaped that way.
    The fact remained, however, that Custer was proposing to send approximately 20 percent of his attack force away from the apparent location of the village, a village that was, at least according to the scout Charley Reynolds, “the biggest bunch of Indians he’d ever seen.” And as any soldier knew, dividing your command in the face of a superior force was never a good idea.
    Benteen was speaking with Custer and Cooke when Private Charles Windolph approached with a question about his horse. Windolph was waiting to speak to his captain when he overheard Benteen say to Custer, “Hadn’t we better keep the regiment together, General? If this is as big a camp as they say, we’ll need every man we have.”
    “You have your orders” was Custer’s preemptory reply.
    But Benteen wasn’t finished with his commander. He was being sent out alone into the middle of an unknown country with just three companies. If there were any Indians over there, he’d need all the soldiers he could get, and he wasn’t happy with the small size of one of the companies he’d been assigned. Instead, he wanted D Company, the strongest company in the regiment as far as the number of men. D Company was commanded by Captain Thomas Weir, who, like Adjutant Cooke, had once served under Benteen. When Benteen insisted that he needed Weir’s troop, Custer was overheard to reply, “Well damn it to hell, take D Company.”
    Benteen had managed to make Custer, who’d long since vowed never to use profanity, swear for the second time in one day.

    C uster next turned his attention to his second-in-command. Ever since their departure from the Far