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

of them on foot, infiltrated the timber; still others crossed the river and began to work their way south along the eastern bank. Instead of a wall of defense, the skirmish line, which reached only 250 yards into the valley, was in danger of becoming surrounded.
    In the beginning, the momentum had all been on Reno’s side. He had been completely oblivious to it, but his sudden arrival had sent the village reeling. Just ten to fifteen minutes later, however, everything had changed. By hesitating, Reno had given the village’s warriors the time they needed to collect themselves for a decisive attack. The bolt of fear that had sizzled across the Hunkpapa circle like an electric shock had begun to flow back toward the soldiers as they came to realize the growing danger of their situation.
    Captain Myles Moylan of A Company turned to the Indian scout Billy Jackson. It was important they get a message to Custer, Moylan said; did Jackson think he could deliver it? Jackson looked behind them to the south. “No man can get through there alive,” he said.

    A t least some of Reno’s men had seen Custer on the ridge, waving his hat. Soon after, Custer descended from the hill and joined the rest of his battalion waiting behind the bluffs. Hidden from Reno’s battalion by the intervening bluff, Custer and his men proceeded north. Up ahead, the Crow scouts assured him, was a winding series of seasonal riverbeds, known as coulees, that would take them down to a ford at the north end of the village.
    Contrary to what Pretty White Buffalo Woman had assumed, Custer had had no concrete plan when he’d sent Reno’s battalion charging toward the village. It was only after seeing the encampment that he could begin to devise a strategy based on any solid information. Already he had sent back a messenger to McDougall and the pack train urging them to hurry up with the ammunition. But as he was soon to realize, his first glimpse of the village had been deceptive. Instead of seeing the entire encampment from the hill, he had seen only a portion of it. Once again, the bluffs had found a way to block his view.
    It may have been Mitch Boyer who revealed the truth to Custer. He along with the four Crow scouts had remained on the higher ground to Custer’s left, where, unlike Custer down in the coulee, they could see the valley below. As they worked north, they gradually came to realize that the village was close to twice the size they had originally thought. They also saw that instead of charging into the village, Reno had decided to throw out a skirmish line.
    Once he became apprised of the true dimensions of the village and the fact that Reno’s charge had stalled at its edge, Custer must have realized that he should have kept the two battalions together and led the charge himself. But there was nothing he could do about that now. He was separated from Reno’s battalion by a mile-wide stretch of valley, but if he had seen Reno from the bluff, Reno had also seen him. Surely the major must know by now that Custer intended to support him not from the rear, as originally planned, but from the right. As long as Reno kept the Indians occupied to the south, Custer still had a chance of doing some damage from the east.
    Given the size of the village, Custer knew he needed not only the pack train; he needed every fighting man he could get. He hated to admit it, but he needed Frederick Benteen.
    He called over the trumpeter John Martin. “Orderly,” Custer said, “I want you to take a message to Colonel Benteen. Ride as fast as you can and tell him to hurry. Tell him it’s a big village and I want him to be quick and to bring the ammunitions packs.” When excited, Custer had a tendency to talk too rapidly. “[He] rattled off his order so fast,” Libbie remembered, “that it was almost impossible for one unacquainted with his voice to understand.” Adding to the potential confusion was that John Martin, an Italian by birth, was still fairly new to the English language. Before Martin could gallop off, Custer’s adjutant, Lieutenant Cooke, said, “Wait, orderly, I’ll give you a message.”
    From his pocket, Cooke pulled out the same notebook upon which he and Custer had worked out the fateful division of the regiment into three different battalions. On a fresh piece of paper he wrote out the order with which Custer hoped to reunite the regiment. It read: “Benteen, Come on, Big Village, Be Quick, bring packs, W. W. Cooke. P.S. Bring