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

stationary skirmish line. Even though almost all the women and children were running for the hills to the west and many of the warriors were away retrieving their horses, the soldiers had chosen not to attack the village. Reno, she later contended, “had the camp at his mercy, and could have killed us all or driven us away naked on the prairie.”
    Sitting Bull appears to have interpreted Reno’s sudden pause as the prelude to possible negotiations. “I don’t want my children fighting until I tell them to,” he said. “That army may be com[ing] to make peace, or be officials bringing rations to us.” He turned to his nephew One Bull, who stood beside him with his friend Good Bear Boy. Taking the gun out of One Bull’s hand, Sitting Bull gave his nephew one of his most cherished possessions, his shield. Sitting Bull’s father had made it out of the thick rawhide from a buffalo’s hump. On its front he’d reproduced the vision he’d seen in a dream: a birdlike human figure in red with a blue-green background and yellow border. A Lakota shield provided physical protection, but it was the shield’s spiritual power that made it special. In fact, this was the same shield Sitting Bull had held when he’d killed the Crow chief twenty years ago.
    Sitting Bull uttered a brief prayer “to keep me from doing something rash,” One Bull remembered, then said, “You and Good Bear Boy go up and make peace.”
    They mounted their horses and began to approach the skirmish line. They’d gotten to within thirty feet of the soldiers when a bullet smashed through both of Good Bear Boy’s legs. “I got so angry at the soldiers,” One Bull remembered, “that I couldn’t make peace.” One Bull took his lariat and looped it around Good Bear Boy’s chest and pulled him to safety. “I could hear his bones rubbing together,” he remembered.
    By this time, Sitting Bull had mounted his favorite horse, a handsome gray that is depicted in doting detail in the sequence of drawings he created for his adopted brother Jumping Bull. When two bullets felled his beloved horse, the Hunkpapa leader quickly abandoned all hopes for peace. “Now my best horse is shot,” he shouted. “It is like they have shot me; attack them.”

    R eno’s soldiers were lined up along the edges of a large prairie dog village, and some of the men tried to use these honeycombed mounds as a breastwork. The Indians were still far enough away that the troopers did not feel particularly threatened. “The men were in good spirits, talking and laughing,” Private Thomas O’Neill remembered, “and not apprehensive . . . the Sioux toward the village were riding around kicking up a big dust but keeping well out of range.”
    Some of the officers used the lull to follow their leader’s example. Soon after the deployment of the skirmish line, Sergeant Charles White watched in disgust as several officers passed around a bottle. “With my own eyes, I saw these officers . . . drinking enough to make any ordinary man drunk. I then witnessed the greatest excitement among intoxicated officers I ever saw.”
    Left without adequate supervision, the soldiers on the skirmish line began blasting eagerly away—what Captain Myles Moylan described as a “wild and random” fire. Lieutenant Varnum even reported seeing “a good many men shooting right up in the air.” Since a Springfield carbine was accurate to within about 250 yards and the Indians were all well beyond that, there really was no reason to be firing. Each trooper had been given a total of a hundred rounds of carbine ammunition—half of which he carried with him, often in the loops of a waist belt, the other half in his saddlebags. With only fifty rounds on his person and an ever-growing number of warriors ahead, it was essential that each soldier make every bullet count. Since it was possible to fire as many as seventeen rounds a minute, it could take only a few minutes for an overenthusiastic soldier to blast away every available round.
    Although the Springfield carbine’s accuracy was limited to about 250 yards, it was capable of hurling a bullet as many as 1,000 yards, and as the Hunkpapa were already aware, some of the soldiers’ bullets had managed to splinter the tops of their tepee poles and had wounded at least one noncombatant. There were two members of M Company who had rifles with a much longer range than the shorter-barreled carbines. Captain French had the infantry version of the