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

matter now?”
    “The Indians are coming to fight us, instead of running as we supposed.”
    “All right,” Cooke responded, “you go back and I will report to General Custer.”

    B y the time Cooke returned with Gerard’s news, Custer had stopped at a small tributary to Sun Dance Creek to water the battalion’s horses. “Don’t let the horses drink too much,” Custer cautioned; “they have to travel a great deal today.” Soon a messenger from Reno arrived confirming the fact that instead of running, the Indians were coming up to meet Reno.
    Custer was probably encouraged by the report that the Indians were advancing. In order to cover the retreat of the women, children, and old people, the village’s warriors typically engaged the enemy in a temporary rearguard action. Since it was just to provide their loved ones with enough time to escape, the warriors’ attack would not, in all probability, be especially fierce. However, if Reno could hold the Indians’ attention long enough, it might give Custer the opportunity to perform a clandestine end run.
    On the east side of the tree-fringed river, the guide Mitch Boyer and the Crow scouts informed him, was a line of bluffs that rose several hundred feet above the valley. If he climbed up onto these bluffs and rode several miles downriver, he might be able to work his way around the village. As Reno attacked from the south, Custer would swoop down out of the hills, gallop across the river, and attack what was left of the dispersing village from the east.
    But all this was simply conjecture. None of them had, as of yet, even seen the village, which still remained hidden behind the looming hills ahead—all the more reason to climb to the top of that bluff to the right and finally look down into the valley below.
    Before continuing, Custer took off his buckskin jacket and tied it to the back of his saddle. One of Custer’s sergeants shouted out that there were Indians up there on the hill to the east. That decided it—they were not following Reno into the valley; they were swinging right.

    A t some point, Custer divided his battalion into two subsets: the Right Wing, composed of three companies under Captain Myles Keogh, and the two-company Left Wing, which included Lieutenant Algernon Smith’s distinctive Gray Horse Troop, commanded by Custer’s old friend Captain George Yates.
    Yates, with thinning blond hair and a thick, carefully clipped mustache, shared Custer’s obsessive attention to cleanliness. Whereas Custer was known for frequently washing his hands and brushing his teeth, Yates ended each day by turning the pockets of his pants inside out and carefully scouring them with a brush. Yates was always so neat and precise that he looked, in the proverbial phrase of the day, “as if he’d just stepped out of a bandbox,” the cylindrical container of thin wood in which a gentleman’s hat and other crushable pieces of clothing were kept. Taking their cue from their meticulous leader, Yates’s F Company was known as the “Bandbox Troop.” About this time, Custer dispatched a squad of F Company soldiers as an advance guard. Whereas Benteen had been sent left, these troopers would swing far to the right in an effort to see whether anything of importance lay to the east of the bluffs.
    As they mounted the hill, Custer and Tom paused to review the battalion. The companies had previously been marching in columns of two. In order to make the battalion less strung out during its potentially conspicuous dash along the bluffs, Custer ordered them to march in columns of four.
    By the time they’d climbed out of the valley and onto the bluffs, the small group of Indians they’d seen had disappeared into the rolling green hills. They rode on until they were approaching the ridgeline and suddenly they saw it: the flat and seemingly endless expanse of the Little Bighorn Valley through which wandered the sparkling blue-green ribbon of the river. And there, two miles to the northwest, nestled into the wooded meanders of the Little Bighorn, was the largest Indian village any of them had ever seen: hundreds of gleaming white tepees beneath the soaring transparent canopy of the sky. Beyond the lodges to the west was a weirdly kaleidoscopic sight: a swirling sea of reddish brown that the soldiers only gradually realized was the village’s herd of fifteen thousand to twenty thousand ponies.
    Gerard, it turned out, could not have been more wrong. Not only was the