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

completely unmindful of his own personal safety, and Sheridan later ascribed Custer’s eventual defeat to, in part, “a superabundance of courage.” Reno, the widower, no longer had a wife, but he did have a young son who would be an orphan without him. He, along with all his officers and men, had everything to live for.
    But Reno had demons of his own. Ever since the death of his wife, he’d been beset by a corrosive, soul-consuming sadness that he tried to neutralize with whiskey. It also didn’t help that even sober he was without a jot of the charisma that made Custer and, in a very different way, Benteen so appealing. But Reno was not, as has been so often insisted, a coward. As he’d demonstrated during the scout on the Rosebud, he could combine pluck with a sensible amount of caution. The problem on the afternoon of June 25 was that he was drunk.
    Even before crossing the river, the major had made a most unorthodox offer to Dr. Henry Porter, one of the two surgeons accompanying the battalion. Reno asked if Porter wanted his carbine. His horse was giving him trouble, he said, and “the gun was in the way.” Porter didn’t say as much, but the implication was clear: Reno was not acting in a manner consistent with a sober, clear-thinking commander.
    As the battalion drew closer to the shadowy warriors in the dust cloud up ahead, many of the soldiers began to cheer—a laudable sentiment to be sure given the circumstances. But Reno wanted none of it. “Stop that noise,” he shouted peevishly, then gave the order, “Ch aaarrrrr ge!”
    Something about the way he said it—a sloppy slurring—caused Private William Taylor to glance over to his commanding officer. He saw Reno in the midst of drinking from a bottle of “amber colored liquid,” which he then passed to his adjutant, Lieutenant Benny Hodgson. Although Reno had expressed worries about his ability to manage his Springfield carbine while galloping on a horse, he apparently had no problems handling a bottle of whiskey.
    Drinking before and during a battle was not unusual in the nineteenth century. Many of Wellington’s officers and men indulged at the Battle of Waterloo. Fred Gerard had his own bottle of whiskey. Several of the Cheyenne warriors who fought in the battle later claimed that many of Custer’s soldiers had whiskey in their canteens. The hoped-for jolt of “Dutch courage” is proverbial, but in reality, alcohol is a depressant, a particularly powerful one when a person is hungry and dehydrated on a hot summer afternoon. If his conduct over the course of the next half hour is any indication, whiskey had a most deleterious effect on Reno, making him appear hesitant and fearful at a time when his officers and men needed a strong, decisive leader.
    On they galloped into the swirling cloud. Up ahead to the left, the Arikara were chasing after an inviting herd of horses. Reno later claimed that “the very earth seemed to grow Indians” as they approached the village, but the truth is that the mounted warriors they could see were still out of effective range of their Springfield carbines. Even now the village was not yet fully visible, although the tops of some of the tepees were just beginning to emerge over the timber to the right. Fearing a trap, fearing the size of the village up ahead, Reno decided that “I must defend myself and give up the attack mounted.”
    When the true size of the Indian village was later revealed, his decision to abort the attack seemed more than justified. But Reno didn’t know the size of the village when he gave the order to halt. That the reality ultimately justified his suspicions does not justify his conduct during the charge. According to Reno’s own testimony, he did not trust Custer’s judgment; as a result, he’d had qualms about the wisdom of the charge from the beginning—qualms that were amplified, it seems certain, by the insidious workings of alcohol.
    “Halt! Prepare to fight on foot—dismount!”
    The Number Ones, Twos, and Threes leapt off their horses while the Number Fours remained mounted to their left. On the side of each horse’s bridle was a leather strap with a buckle at one end and a snap hook at the other. Each of the three dismounted soldiers unhooked the link from his horse’s bridle and snapped it into the halter ring of the horse to the left. With the four horses linked together, the horse holder began to lead the three other horses toward the safety of a