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

crescent-shaped grove of scrubby timber to the immediate right of the emerging skirmish line.
    The maneuver was executed with surprising crispness, one sergeant later testified, given the poor quality of the horsemanship throughout the battalion. There were, however, several soldiers, including poor Private Rutten, whose panicked mounts carried them to where Reno had refused to go. As he galloped wildly past the skirmish line, Rutten continued to yank the reins to the right and was finally able to turn his horse before becoming lost in the terrifying maze of tepees up ahead. Rutten saved himself, but two others were carried into the village and never seen alive again.
    The remaining ninety or so men, each separated by approximately five yards, formed a skirmish line and marched ahead on foot. After proceeding about a hundred yards, they halted. Each company’s flag bearer plunged the brass end of his nine-foot lance into the earth, and with the battalion’s three swallow-tailed guidons fluttering in the northerly breeze, the soldiers—some standing, some kneeling, others lying down—began firing their carbines. Ahead of them, about a quarter mile away, was the village of Sitting Bull.

    B y the time Reno’s battalion was halfway down the valley, many of the Hunkpapa at the southern end of the camp were aware that they were about to be attacked. They could see a battalion of soldiers approaching, the glittering barrels of their Springfield carbines looking to some of them like sabers. But the soldiers they were watching weren’t Reno’s; they were Custer’s, working their way north along the bluff on the eastern side of the river.
    Pretty White Buffalo Woman was packing up her tepee in the Hunkpapa circle for an anticipated move downriver when she saw Custer’s battalion, “more than a rifle-shot,” she remembered, “from the river.” In anticipation of an attack, warriors had already begun to rush for the horse herd to the west, confident that it would take the soldiers up there on the ridge at least another fifteen minutes to reach the fording place about a mile downriver from the Hunkpapa circle.
    Suddenly Pretty White Buffalo Woman heard firing—not from the east, but frighteningly near her to the south. Due to the same loop of timber that had hidden the village from Reno’s view, the Hunkpapa had not been able to see the soldiers charging toward them down the valley. Portions of the timber on the west side of the river had been set on fire, and the smoke had also helped screen Reno’s advance. “Like that,” she remembered, “the soldiers were upon us.”
    The shock of Reno’s unexpected advance had a devastating effect on the noncombatants in the village. “The camp was in the wildest commotion,” Pretty White Buffalo Woman remembered, “and women and children shrieked with terror. More than half the men were absent after the pony herd.” Now it was the Lakota’s turn to assume they’d fallen victim to an artfully laid trap. “Long Hair had planned cunningly,” Pretty White Buffalo Woman later insisted, “that Reno should attack in the rear while he rode down and gave battle from the front of the village looking on the river.”
    Terror swept through the six circles of the village like a great keening wave. “Women would call to children,” Little Soldier later told an interviewer, “and children would recognize mothers’ voices.” The Cheyenne Kate Bighead saw a mother “jumping up and down and screaming, because she could not find their little son.” The twelve-year-old Oglala Black Elk had been swimming in the Little Bighorn when he’d heard about the soldiers. “I could see the little ones all naked running from the river,” he remembered. The cumulative sounds of the village—the cries, the shrieks, the shouts—rose up into one wild, disembodied din. “It seemed that all the people’s voices were on top of the village,” Little Soldier reported.
    To Pretty White Buffalo Woman, it seemed as if this huge, rambling village was about to dissolve in a chaotic fury of panic and fear. If Reno’s battalion had “brought their horses and rode into camp . . . ,” she claimed, “the power of the Lakota nation might have been broken.” But then something miraculous happened. The soldiers to the south, she gradually realized, had stopped . Instead of charging into the village, Re-no’s troops, for reasons that Pretty White Buffalo Woman never fathomed, had formed into a