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

Springfield, known as a “Long Tom,” while Sergeant John Ryan, who claimed to be the first soldier in Reno’s battalion to fire his weapon that day, was the proud owner of a fifteen-pound Sharps rifle equipped with a telescopic sight. These two members of M Company managed to score several “hits,” including, it seems, Good Bear Boy and Sitting Bull’s favorite horse.
    At some point, one of the soldiers looked to the bluff on the other side of the river. “There goes Custer,” he said. “He is up to something, for he is waving his hat.” Several other officers and men, including Lieutenants Varnum and DeRudio, also claimed to have seen Custer’s battalion on the ridge that afternoon.
    Reno later insisted that he never saw any sign of Custer and that no one in his command reported his presence on the ridge. The mutual fogs of war and alcohol had apparently made it impossible for him to focus on anything beyond the building bedlam ahead.

    A s Custer’s officers had suspected, many of the village’s warriors were away hunting. Of the warriors in the Hunkpapa circle who had not gone after buffalo, almost half were now retrieving their horses in the flats to the west. Only the boys who had been racing their ponies prior to the attack were mounted and ready to fight. “Warriors,” Sitting Bull exhorted, “we have everything to fight for, and if we are defeated we shall have nothing to live for; therefore let us fight like brave men.” Little Soldier was just fourteen years old that day. “Old men sang death songs for [us],” he remembered. “Sweethearts, young Indian mothers, and children all wailing and crying.”
    The twenty-three-year-old Hunkpapa Moving Robe Woman had been digging turnips when she, like Pretty White Buffalo Woman, had seen Custer’s soldiers stirring up an ominous cloud of dust above the hills to the east. She immediately ran to her parents’ tepee, where her mother informed her that her ten-year-old brother Deeds was dead. Like Gall, who soon learned that he’d lost his wives and children, Moving Robe Woman was immediately filled with a volatile mixture of sorrow and anger. “My heart was bad,” she remembered. “Revenge!”
    She dried her eyes the way all Lakota women did, placing the lower portion of her palms into the sockets of her eyes and wiping away the tears. She braided her hair and painted her face bright red. “I was a woman,” she remembered, “but I was not afraid.” Her father, Crawler, appeared outside the family tepee with her black horse. Crawler had been one of the first, if not the very first, Lakota to see Custer’s regiment that morning on the divide. He’d already lost his son, and now he and his daughter were preparing to avenge the boy’s death. Moving Robe Woman mounted her horse, and together father and daughter joined the warriors galloping toward the skirmish line. The warrior Rain in the Face later remembered that Moving Robe Woman looked as “pretty as a bird” as she leaned forward on her pony. “Always when there is a woman in the charge,” he added, “it causes the warriors to vie with one another in displaying their valor.”
    The warriors charged into Reno’s soldiers. Sergeant Ryan estimated there were about five hundred Indians in the first wave, which emerged from a ravinelike section of benchland about midway between the skirmish line and the village’s edge. “They tried to cut through our skirmish line,” Ryan wrote. “We poured volleys into them, repulsing their charge . . . and emptying a number of saddles.”
    Those warriors who survived the first onslaught swung to the right toward the foothills to the west, “lying low upon their horses and firing rapidly,” remembered the scout Billy Jackson. A choking cloud of dust followed in the warriors’ wake and rolled over the skirmish line. “It drifted upon us like a thick fog,” Jackson remembered, “and obscured the sun.” More than half a dozen warriors had been killed or wounded in the charge. Included in the dead that day was Young Black Moon, son of the elder who had announced Sitting Bull’s sun dance vision.
    After the repulse, the warriors paused beside a hill near a dry creek just beyond the carbines’ range. By this time, many of the older warriors had retrieved their horses. Some joined the nucleus of impetuous young warriors gathered on the hill; others worked their way around the end of the skirmish line to the south. To the east, warriors, many