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

village not running; it was also not moving up to meet Reno, whose three companies were visible on the other side of the river about a mile to the west as they, too, rode north toward the village ahead.
    Custer had done it. He had somehow managed to catch Sitting Bull’s village by complete surprise in the middle of the day. That in itself was an extraordinary achievement—a stroke of Custer luck that not even he could have dared hope for. By all rights, the valley below should be much like the site of the freshly abandoned village beside the Lone Tepee: a hoof-pocked plain of debris and still-smoking lodge fires, devoid of Indians. Instead, here was a village, a huge village, intact and complete, its inhabitants apparently oblivious to their presence.
    The soldiers gave three cheers as they urged their tired horses north across the uneven hills. Some of the mounts, exhausted after a week of almost continual marching, began to lag behind; others, spurred on by their enthusiastic riders, began to edge past the regiment’s commander. “Boys, hold your horses,” Custer cautioned; “there are plenty of them down there for us all.”
    Up ahead was a prominent hill that looked as if it might provide the best view yet of the valley below. Custer ordered the battalion to halt at its base as he and his staff climbed to the top. With the help of DeRudio’s field glasses, he studied the village. According to the Italian trumpeter John Martin, who was destined to be the only surviving witness to Custer’s first careful inspection of the valley, he could see women, children, and dogs lounging tranquilly around the lodges, but nowhere could he see any warriors. Where were they? Were they asleep in their tepees? Some of Custer’s officers speculated that they must be off hunting buffalo.
    It was the Washita times ten, perhaps even times a hundred. As Reno galloped down the valley from the south, Custer would strike like a thunderbolt from the east and hundreds, if not thousands, of noncombatants would be theirs. When their husbands, fathers, and sons returned to the village, they’d have no choice but to surrender and follow the soldiers back to the reservation.
    Given the village’s immense size, Custer’s first priority was to bring up the pack train as quickly as possible. If he hadn’t done so already, it was at this point that he sent back a messenger to McDougall, telling him to hurry up with the ammunition.
    Custer pulled the binoculars from his eyes and turned toward the five companies waiting expectantly at the bottom of the hill. Beside him were his brother Tom and his adjutant, William Cooke, along with Martin, the trumpeter. If all went well, the Seventh was about to win its most stunning victory yet; and best of all, it looked like this battalion of Custer favorites was about to deliver the coup de grâce. Around 3:30 p.m. on June 25, Custer took off his wide gray hat and waved it exultantly in the clear blue air. “Hurrah, boys, we’ve got them!” he shouted. “We’ll finish them up and then go home to our station.”

CHAPTER 10

    Reno’s Charge
    A n hour or so earlier, as the Seventh Cavalry marched down out of the Wolf Mountains, Wooden Leg and his brother Yellow Hair had been lingering sleepily over the meal their mother had prepared for them. Like many other young people in Sitting Bull’s village, they’d enjoyed a long night of dancing and were not yet fully awake.
    There had been talk about the possibility of an attack, but on the morning of June 25 it was generally assumed the soldiers were still at least a day away. Once Wooden Leg and Yellow Hair had finished their meal, they decided to head to the river for a swim.
    The sun had already edged into the western portion of the sky by the time they began the walk from their family’s tepee at the north end of the village to the Little Bighorn to the east. The surrounding plain was relatively flat, but there were portions of the valley, particularly near the river, that dipped and rose in unexpected ways. Every spring, the rain-swollen river wandered in a new direction, and the accumulated loops and swirls of old riverbeds had carved the surrounding bottomland into a complex mosaic of alternating levels known as benches. This meant that anyone traveling up or down the valley must navigate the often sharply chiseled troughs left by these ancient waterways, some of which had created terracelike depressions as many as twenty feet below the