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

West, Major Marcus Reno had been left without a direct command responsibility. “I was not consulted about anything,” he later complained. Custer decided it was now time for him to lead a battalion of his own. Reno and three companies were to continue down the left bank of Sun Dance Creek as Custer and the remaining five companies of the regiment marched parallel to them on the right bank.
    By 1 p.m., all three battalions were off, Benteen trotting glumly toward a seemingly irrelevant bluff to the left as Custer and Reno followed the dusty Indian trail down Sun Dance Creek. The convolutions of the creek, combined with the irregular nature of the Indian trail, meant that Custer and Reno were sometimes virtually side by side and sometimes farther apart, but always over the course of the next half hour or so they remained in proximity.
    Custer was dressed in a wide gray hat and white buckskin suit, his distinctive red tie—a holdover from the Civil War—fluttering over his shoulder. Reno wore a blue cavalry uniform with yellow cords running down the sides of his legs. Instead of the standard-issue felt campaign hat, which could be folded up front and back to make an officer look like a backwoods Napoleon, he wore the straw hat he’d purchased from the sutler on the Yellowstone River. Inside his jacket pocket sloshed a flask of whiskey.
    Given that Custer had demonstrated nothing but disdain for his subordinate since their confrontation on the Tongue River back on June 19, one wonders why he chose to keep Reno so close to him during the regiment’s final approach toward the Indian village. Perhaps he was taking one final measure of the man he had anonymously pilloried in his last dispatch to the New York Herald . All we know for sure is that Reno more than reciprocated his commander’s lack of respect. “I had known General Custer . . . for a long time,” he later recounted under oath, “and I had no confidence in his ability as a soldier.”

    —INTO THE VALLEY, June 25, 1876 —

    O n the afternoon of June 25, as their husbands galloped toward the valley of the Little Bighorn, the officers’ wives of the Seventh Cavalry gathered in the living room of the Custer residence at Fort Lincoln. They were all, Libbie remembered, “borne down with one common weight of anxiety.” It was a Sunday, and to distract themselves from their worries, they began to sing some of the old hymns they’d learned as children. But instead of soothing them, the songs only intensified their fears. “I remember the grief with which one fair young wife threw herself on the carpet,” Libbie wrote, “and pillowed her head in the lap of a tender friend.”
    It was not the first time they had sought one another’s company in a time of desperation and dread. One spring morning two years ago, the keeper of the regiment’s mule herd had ridden up to the Custer house and announced that “the Indians were running off the herd.” In just minutes, Custer and almost all his officers and men were galloping furiously out of the garrison in pursuit of the Indians and the regiment’s mules. Only after their husbands had disappeared over the horizon did the wives come to realize that they’d been “almost deserted.” In the “mad haste of the morning,” just a single officer and a handful of soldiers had been left to defend the fort.
    “We knew that only a portion of the Indians had produced the stampede,” Libbie wrote, “and we feared that the remainder were waiting to continue the depredations.” The wives gathered at the Custer residence, where they took turns scanning the surrounding hills from the roof of the house’s porch. Not until evening, after a “day of anxiety and terror,” did their husbands finally return.
    Custer, Libbie knew, could be impulsive. He had little concern for the consequences of his actions because always, it seemed, things turned out just fine in the end. He loved his family dearly, but there was no one—not even his brothers Tom and Boston, his brother-in-law Jim Calhoun, his young nephew Autie Reed, and yes, not even Libbie—whom he loved as much as the chase. As General Sheridan had marveled in the weeks after Libbie and Custer’s marriage during the Civil War, “Custer, you are the only man whom matrimony has not spoiled for a charge.”

    E xcept for the Crow scouts’ early-morning glimpse of a huge pony herd, no one had so far seen the supposedly vast Indian village along the Little