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

scratched face, but at least he was sitting upright by the time he started for the river.
    On the flats beyond the timber was another prairie dog village. This network of holes and tunnels made the footing difficult for the troopers’ horses, particularly once a cloud of dust and smoke had settled over the ground. Soon after leaving the timber, George Herendeen’s horse tripped and fell. Herendeen was nearly run over by about twenty mounted warriors but somehow scrambled to his feet and ran the 150 yards back to the timber. At that moment, Charley Reynolds was mounting his horse. “Charley, don’t try to ride out,” Herendeen warned. “We can’t get away from this timber.”
    Either the scout didn’t hear him or had decided he had no choice but to go with the others. At just about the same place Herendeen’s horse had gone down, Reynolds’s mount also fell. Reynolds was able to get off a few shots with his six-shooter but soon succumbed to the fire from the Lakota and Cheyenne.
    By then the African American interpreter Isaiah Dorman’s horse had also fallen. Dorman was down on one knee, firing his sporting rifle at the approaching Indians, when his good friend Private Roman Rutten, whose runaway horse had already carried him into the Hunkpapa village and back, rode past. “Goodbye Rutten!” Dorman called out as the private roared by on his still panicked horse.

    I n the timber that afternoon, Lieutenant Donald McIntosh, the commander of G Company, couldn’t find his horse. So he took the mount of Private Samuel McCormick, who watched in despair as his superior officer, normally known for what Frederick Benteen called “that slow poking way,” galloped off with his horse.
    McIntosh had been in such a rush that he hadn’t realized the horse was still attached by a hempen lariat to its picket pin. The fourteen-inch wrought-iron stake was quickly jerked out of the ground, but that did not prevent the pin from catching on clumps of sagebrush and grass as it bounced along the plain. This so troubled the horse that he refused to respond to McIntosh’s increasingly frantic attempts to steer away from the Indians on the right, and the leader of G Company was soon surrounded.
    Private Rutten, who had just said his final good-bye to the downed interpreter Isaiah Dorman, now found himself caught up in the swirling mass of twenty to thirty warriors closing in on Lieutenant McIntosh. Luckily for Rutten, his horse was still traveling at a scorching clip. “The horse tore right across the circle of Indians of which McIntosh was the center,” Rutten later told an interviewer, “and on [I] went.”
    By that point, Rutten had given up trying to control his horse. Fear of the Indians was what drove this animal, a fear Rutten enthusiastically endorsed. Best to let the horse do whatever he wanted. “Without any communication by bit or spur,” Rutten simply hung on as the horse veered suddenly away from the warriors and headed for the river. Up ahead was a tangle of downed trees. “These,” Rutten remembered, “were no obstacle to him.” Without so much as a pause, the horse leapt over the tree limbs and stumps and bounded toward the Little Bighorn.

    T here was a twelve- to fifteen-foot drop from the bank down to the river, and the slap of the horses’ bellies as they hit the water reminded the Oglala Brave Bear of “cannon going off.” But the way out on the eastern bank was even more difficult, a V-shaped cut that barely accommodated a single horse. As mounted soldiers leapt lemminglike into the river, the crossing quickly became jammed with a desperate mass of men and horses, all of them easy targets for the warriors gathered on either bank. “When I rode to the bank,” Brave Bear remembered, “the Indians were shooting the soldiers as they came up out of the water. I could see lots of blood in the water.”
    Many of the warriors followed the troopers into the river. “Indians mobbed the soldiers floundering afoot and on horseback crossing the river . . . ,” Wooden Leg remembered. “With my captured rifle as a club I knocked two of them from their horses.” Foremost in the killing was Crazy Horse. “He pulled them off their horses when they tried to get across the river where the bank was steep,” Flying Hawk told an interpreter. “Kicking Bear was right beside him and killed many, too, in the water.”
    Despite the steepness of the bank, Private Morris’s horse, Stumbling Bear, showed no