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

when his horse bolted in an engagement during the Yellowstone campaign. “I, in desperation, wound the [reins] in one hand as far ahead as I could reach,” the trooper remembered, “and pulled with all my might and pulled his head around . . . and got him turned.” Rutten’s horse kept running, but at least he was now running in a circle. Over the course of the next two and a half miles, Rutten’s horse literally ran circles around the troopers, circumnavigating the battalion no fewer than three times.
    They were charging through an ever-thickening cloud of dust. Ahead of them the ghostlike figures of mounted warriors could only dimly be perceived, “running back and forth across the prairie . . . in every direction,” Lieutenant Varnum remembered, “apparently trying to kick up all the dust they could.” Since the encampment was still hidden behind the river, there was nothing tangible for Reno and his men to see: only that dizzying cloud of dust filled with the distant specters of warriors and horses. Ironically, it was Custer’s battalion—separated from them by more than a mile of impassable terrain—that now had the best view of the village, even if, unknown to Custer, not even he had yet seen all of it.
    Reno peered into the swirling enigmatic haze and saw the makings of an ambush. “I soon saw,” he wrote, “that I was being drawn into some trap.” Eight years earlier, Reno’s predecessor Major Joel Elliott had followed some fleeing Cheyenne warriors and never returned. There was also the example of Captain William Fetterman, who ten years before had died with all eighty of his officers and men after being lured beyond the safety of Fort Phil Kearny by a small decoy party that included Crazy Horse. Earlier that year in New York, Custer had ominously said, “It will take another Phil Kearny massacre to bring Congress up to a generous support of the army.” Reno was not about to fall victim to such a debacle, especially since Custer—the originator of this dubious scheme—was nowhere to be seen.
    Not far from Reno was Captain Thomas French, the commander of M Company. French had a high squeaky voice, an expansive gut, and an inordinate love of booze. In the years to come his demons would make a mess of his life, but when in battle he was, according to Private William Slaper, “cool as a cucumber.” Amidst the chaos that was to come, Slaper would look to French for some assurance. “I searched his face carefully for any sign of fear,” he remembered; “it was not there.”
    French looked into the dusty cloud and saw not an ambush, but a cavalry officer’s dream. “Military life consists simply in waiting for opportunities . . . ,” he later wrote. “Sometimes one minute is of far more value than years afterward. . . . I thought that we were to charge headlong through them all—that was the only chance.”
    Reno was well aware that this was, potentially at least, an unmatched chance for advancement. “Never in my life,” he later testified, “did I feel more interested in the success of an engagement . . . because it was essentially my own regiment.” By leaving him out here without the promised support, Custer almost seemed to be taunting him with one last chance to seize the glory he had elected not to pursue during his first scout up the Rosebud.
    A cavalry charge, especially a charge involving a tiny battalion and what is presumed to be a vast Indian village, makes no logical sense. But cavalry charges are not about logic; they are about audacity, about using panic and fear to convince the enemy that you are stronger than they are, even if that is not even close to being the case.
    Between 1868 and 1878, there were eighteen cavalry attacks on Indian villages of two hundred tepees or fewer, and every one of these attacks proved successful. No U.S. cavalry officer before or since had what Reno now faced: the chance to see if a mounted battalion could push the collective psyche of a thousand-tepee village past the breaking point and transform this giant seething organism of men, women, children, horses, and dogs into a stampeding mob. The question was who, besides possibly Captain Thomas French, wanted to be the guinea pig in this particular experiment.
    General Sheridan had observed that Custer was the only married cavalry officer he knew who had not been “spoiled” by having a wife. As Sheridan’s remark suggests, it was not normal for a happily married man to be