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

of the timber. “Suddenly,” he remembered, “the hidden soldiers came tearing out on horseback.” Fearing attack, Wooden Leg and all those near him turned their horses and tried to escape from the onrushing troopers. “But soon we discovered they were not following us,” Wooden Leg recalled. “They were running away from us.”

    E very man for himself!” someone cried as Major Reno put the spurs to his horse and galloped out of the timber. Captain Thomas French couldn’t believe it. Just one minute before, Reno had assured him “he was going to fight.” And then, without so much as a bugle call to inform the battalion of what he was doing, he had fled, leaving those behind in wild confusion, many of them still looking for their horses, many of them not yet even aware that their commander had just bolted from the timber. French later claimed he considered stopping his commander with a bullet. “Although the idea flashed through my mind,” he wrote, “yet I did not dare to resort to murder—the latter I now believe would have been justifiable.”
    French remembered being outraged by Reno’s behavior, but others saw the decision to flee from the woods as unavoidable. The Indians outnumbered them by more than five to one. The soldiers had already exhausted about half their ammunition. Where Custer and Benteen were at that moment was impossible to know. “Had Reno not made the move out of the river bottom when he did . . . ,” Private William Slaper insisted, “we could all have shared the fate of Custer and his men.”
    But the most compelling reason to get out of the timber had to do with Reno himself. “When an enlisted man sees his commanding officer lose his head entirely . . . ,” Private Taylor wrote, “it would . . . demoralize anyone taught to breathe, almost, at the word of command.” Given the weakness of their leader and the strength of the enemy, the only sensible option was to get to higher ground on the other side of the river.
    Even Captain French, despite his later claims, appears to have seen no other alternative at the time. Before the major’s unceremonious departure, Private Slaper remembered Reno turning to French and asking, “Well, Tom, what do you think of this?” According to Slaper, French responded, “I think we had better get out of here.”
    It was not the fact that Reno chose to quit the timber that was unjustifiable; it was the way he did it. Instead of retreating in an organized fashion, Reno followed the example of the battalion’s spooked horses and ran.

    O nly belatedly did Lieutenant Varnum realize that the battalion had begun to retreat. “For God’s sake men . . . ,” he shouted. “There are enough of us here to whip the whole Sioux nation.” Varnum reluctantly mounted his horse and tried to join the exodus but was quickly shunted aside by the mass of galloping soldiers into a narrow, winding path through the brush. By the time he emerged from the woods, he was almost a quarter mile behind the leaders. The dust that was to make it impossible to see more than fifty feet ahead had not yet risen from the ground, and up ahead he could see “a heavy column” of troopers in the lead. Behind this group, the soldiers were scattered in twos and single file as they galloped through a gauntlet of warriors with Henry and Winchester repeaters laid across the pommels of their saddles, “pumping them into us.”
    Varnum rode a Kentucky Thoroughbred, and even though both horse and rider had already covered a staggering number of miles over the last two days, Varnum was able to work his way to the front of the column. The original destination appeared to have been the first fording place, about two and a half miles up the Little Bighorn, but the large number of Indians pressing in on them from the right forced the column to the left.
    They were in the midst of every officer’s worst nightmare: the wild disorder of a battalion left to fend for itself. These were no longer soldiers; these were the frightened members of a desperate mob. Since no attempt had been made to cover the soldiers’ retreat, the Indians were free to hunt the men as if they were buffalo: riddling them with bullets, pummeling them with stone hammers, and shooting them with arrows. One soldier was hit in the back of the head with an arrow and kept riding with the feathered stick attached to his skull until another arrow hit him in the shoulder, and he finally fell from his horse.
    Making the