The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (17 page)

Crook became convinced that the warriors must be protecting a village a few miles down the Rosebud. So he sent Captain Mills and eight companies of cavalry (about a third of his total force) down the river. Soon enough, several companies on the other side of the battlefield found themselves virtually surrounded by the hostiles. Crook called back Mills, whose men were able to come to the besieged companies’ rescue just in the nick of time.

After six hours of fierce fighting, the Lakota and Cheyenne decided that they’d had enough for the day. Crook later claimed that since he was still on the field at the conclusion of the battle, the victory was technically his. His subsequent actions proved otherwise.

He decided he didn’t have sufficient ammunition or supplies to keep up the chase. So he turned back, and after a day’s march south made camp at Goose Creek near modern Sheridan, Wyoming.

Never before in the history of the West had the Indians been known to seek out and attack a large column of soldiers on the open field. The hard part was usually
finding
the Indians, let alone convincing them to make a stand, but this time the Indians had swooped out of the hilltops like infuriated birds of prey and fallen on
them
. Crook was convinced that the Indians had outnumbered his army by a factor of three to one when in actuality,
his
army was probably the larger force. Crook also claimed that the Indians were better armed than his soldiers. It was true that many of them possessed repeating rifles compared to the soldiers’ single-shot 1873 Springfield carbines and rifles (the weapons selected by General Terry’s munitions board), but this had not prevented the troopers, infantrymen, and scouts from firing off an astounding number of rounds—25,000 cartridges by one estimate, or about 250 rounds per Native casualty.

What had really happened was that the Lakota and Cheyenne had succeeded in putting a deep and enduring fright into George Crook and his army. “Their shouting and personal appearance was so hideous that it terrified the horses . . . and rendered them almost uncontrollable,” recalled Captain Mills. For his part, Crook never forgot the
sound
of that battle, in particular “the war whoop that caused the hair to raise on end.”

Crook dispatched a messenger to Fort Fetterman, where word of the battle was relayed by telegraph to General Sheridan in Chicago. Sheridan had every reason to expect that Crook would dust himself off and continue after the hostiles. That was the way he’d subdued the Apache to the south. But once Crook had ensconced himself and his column at Goose Creek (where he remained for six long weeks), he tried to forget about the humiliating encounter with the Lakota and Cheyenne by fishing for trout and shooting, on one memorable day, a cinnamon bear. On June 19, he penned a report to General Sheridan, sent via Fort Fetterman to the south, but not once did he attempt to communicate with the man who might have profited most from his most recent experience: General Terry.

By June 22, word of Crook’s battle had reached Fort Lincoln. “The Indians were very bold,” Libbie worriedly wrote Custer. “They don’t seem afraid of anything.” But her husband, several hundred miles from the nearest telegraph station, never learned of the battle. Not until July 9—more than two weeks after the Battle of the Little Bighorn—did news of Crook’s encounter finally reach General Terry.

O
n Monday, June 19, General Terry, who was about 125 miles to the north of Crook and the Wyoming Column, received a dispatch from the long-awaited Major Marcus Reno. He and the Right Wing were bivouacked on the Yellowstone between the Rosebud and Tongue rivers. Unapologetic about having disobeyed his orders, Reno was also strangely reticent as to the very real and substantial intelligence he had collected during the scout. Terry was furious. “Reno . . . informed me,” he wrote his sisters, “that he had flagrantly disobeyed my orders, and he had been on the Rosebud, in the belief that there were Indians on that stream and that he could make a successful attack on them which would cover up his disobedience. . . . He had not the supplies to go far and he returned without justification for his conduct unless wearied horses and broken down mules would be that justification. Of course, this performance made a change in my plans necessary.”

The extremity of Terry’s anger is curious. He might have recognized that Reno’s balanced combination of gumption and caution had saved him from an embarrassing gaffe. Without tipping off the hostiles, Reno had succeeded in determining that the Indians had long since left the lower portion of the Rosebud. Otherwise, Terry would have wasted at least another week attempting to entrap a nonexistent village. Instead of being grateful, he seemed to resent the fact that he must now scrap his original plan. For the meticulous and bookish Terry, whose personal motto, “Blinder Eifer schadet nur,” translated from the German into “Zeal without discretion only does harm,” the plan was what mattered, and Reno’s daring and insubordinate initiative had made a mockery of his plan.

Custer was just as angry, but for an entirely different reason. Reno, the coward, had failed to attack! In an anonymous dispatch to the
New York Herald,
Custer went so far as to insist that Reno deserved a court-martial for his “gross and inexcusable blunder,” claiming that “had Reno, after first violating his orders, pursued and overtaken the Indians, his original disobedience of orders would have been overlooked.”

As it turned out, Custer’s dispatch did not appear until well after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Not only did the article make shockingly clear Custer’s feelings toward his second-in-command, it also demonstrated that Custer, like Benteen before him, had no qualms about using the press for his own self-serving ends even if it might prove destructive to the morale of the regiment. But most of all, the dispatch laid bare Custer’s frame of mind in the days before his final battle. “Faint heart never won fair lady,” he wrote; “neither did it ever pursue and overtake an Indian village.”

O
n the morning of Tuesday, June 20, Custer and the Left Wing crossed the Tongue and marched up the Yellowstone toward Reno and the Right Wing. In the meantime, the
Far West
also moved up the Yellowstone, and at 12:30 p.m. Grant Marsh delivered General Terry to Re-no’s camp. Custer had gotten there about an hour ahead of him and appears to have already made his feelings known to Reno. “General Custer upbraided him very bitterly,” Private Peter Thompson wrote, “for not finding out the exact number and the direction the Indians were taking instead of supposing and guessing. There were some sharp questions and short answers; but General Terry interposed and smoothed the matter over.”

It was now time for Terry to do what Terry did best, devise another plan. He retreated to his cabin on the
Far West
and, surrounded by his staff, set to work. As far as the reporter Mark Kellogg was concerned, it was as if a benevolent, omniscient god—“large brained, sagacious, far reaching, cool”—had set up shop aboard the riverboat, and whatever plan he came up with “must be successful.”

Prior to the Civil War, when he had been clerk of the superior court in New Haven, Connecticut, Terry had been an amateur student of military history. He had even spent a year in Europe, traveling to famous battlefields and forts. His subsequent experience in actual warfare had done little to change his assumption that battle plans were to be drawn up on the European model, in which two well-ordered armies confronted each other on the open field. As had been true with his earlier, aborted plan, Terry based his strategy on using two columns in a pincer movement designed to ensnare the Indian village. Unfortunately, the mobility of the Indians meant that attempting to trap a village between two columns of cavalry was like trying to catch a glob of mercury between two sticks. From the start, the likelihood of successfully coordinating the movements of two different regiments over a vast and largely unknown territory was remote at best.

On the afternoon of June 21, Terry unveiled his plan in the cabin of the
Far West
. In attendance were Terry; his aide-de-camp, Colonel Robert Hughes; Custer; Gibbon; and Gibbon’s commander of cavalry, James Brisbin. Even though he was the source of their latest and best information about the Indians, Marcus Reno was not invited to the meeting.

They spread out the map on the table. The map was based on a partial survey conducted before the Civil War. Hostile Indians had prevented the surveyors from reaching many of the areas on the map. For example, the surveyors had not even seen the Little Bighorn River. That and portions of other rivers, including much of the Rosebud, were represented by dotted lines that could only be described as educated guesses.

Based on Reno’s scout and a recent report from the Crows, Terry believed the Indians were somewhere to the southwest between the Rosebud and Bighorn rivers, probably in the vicinity of the Little Bighorn. As Custer led the Seventh up the Rosebud, Terry and the Montana Column would work their way up the Bighorn to the west. Since Custer had considerably less distance to cover before he reached the projected location of the Indian village, Terry ordered him to continue south up the Rosebud even if the Indians’ trail headed west. Only after he had marched almost to the Wyoming border should he begin to sweep west. Not only would this postpone Custer’s arrival at the Little Bighorn until about the time Terry and the Montana Column were in the vicinity, it might prevent the Indians from escaping to the south.

Terry used stick pins to indicate Custer’s line of march. The pins pierced the thick parchment of the map and dug into the table underneath. Terry, who was nearsighted, asked Major Brisbin to use a blue pencil to mark Custer’s projected route.

There was one glaring problem with this plan. As the blue pencil line clearly showed, Terry was ordering Custer to march
away
from where the village was supposed to be. Custer had recently rebuked Reno for not having the courage to follow the trail to its source even though Reno was in violation of Terry’s orders. Did Terry really expect Custer to postpone his own attack and wait for the Montana Column to arrive?

There was an unwritten code in the military: Violating an order was accepted—in fact, encouraged—as long as it resulted in victory. At Gettysburg, Custer’s superior, General Alfred Pleasanton, had ordered him to join forces with General Judson Kilpatrick, an officer Custer disliked. Instead, he had chosen to remain with General David Gregg and had, it could be argued, won the Battle of Gettysburg for the Union. Custer, they all knew, was not going to let a blue pencil line prevent him from becoming a hero once again.

As commander in chief, President Grant had insisted that Terry, not Custer, lead the Seventh Cavalry in the field. Ever since leaving Fort Lincoln, Terry had done exactly that, and over the last month both Custer and Reno had demonstrated a disturbing tendency to ignore his orders. The only way to ensure that Custer followed his orders in this instance was for Terry to be there in person. Why didn’t he do as the president and, as a consequence, General Sheridan intended and lead the Seventh in the field? After the conference, Major Brisbin privately asked him this precise question.

“Custer is smarting under the rebuke of the President,” Terry responded, “and wants an independent command, and I wish to give him a chance to do something.” But as Brisbin’s continued questioning made clear, Terry’s decision was not simply motivated by an altruistic wish to let Custer redeem himself. He also believed that Custer was the better man for the job. “I have had but little experience in Indian fighting,” he told Brisbin, “and Custer has had much, and is sure he can whip anything he meets.”

Ever since the Civil War, Terry had distinguished himself as both a negotiator and an administrator. He had no interest in leading troops in battle. He might claim he was trying to do Custer a favor, but it was his own fundamental lack of confidence, a constitutional inability to take the reins and lead his officers and men in the field, that led Terry to give the command to Custer. Later that summer, with Custer dead, Terry relied on Colonel Gibbon in the same way, “very much to the disgust” of Lieutenant Godfrey and the other surviving officers of the Seventh. “Something must be wrong about Genl Terry,” Godfrey recorded in his diary, “that he cannot hold control of Cavalry & Infty without having merely
nominal
command.”

Hindsight has a way of corrupting people’s memories, inviting them to view a past event not as it actually occurred but as they wished it had occurred given the ultimate result. After the disaster, Terry, Gibbon, Brisbin, and Hughes all assured one another that the plan would have worked wonderfully well if Custer had simply obeyed his orders and followed the blue pencil line. If he had done this, he would have arrived at the Little Bighorn just as Terry and Gibbon approached from the north and victory would have been theirs.

But this does not appear to be what was considered the most likely scenario even at the actual time of the meeting. One of the few contemporary accounts we have is provided by Gibbon’s chief of scouts, Lieutenant James Bradley. “It is understood,” he recorded in his diary, “that if Custer arrives first he is at liberty to attack at once if he deems prudent. We have little hope of being in at the death, as Custer will undoubtedly exert himself to the utmost to get there first and win all the laurels for himself and his regiment.”

There is also the testimony of the interpreter Fred Gerard. Unlike the officers who attended the meeting on the
Far West,
Gerard had nothing to hide. Gerard said that he overheard Terry repeat the verbal instructions he had given Custer. “I told him,” Terry said, “if he found the Indians not to do as Reno did, but if he thought he could whip them to do so!”

Finally there is the testimony of Custer’s friend the actor Lawrence Barrett. Barrett visited Terry and his staff in St. Paul several months after the battle. “[The] story of [Custer’s] disobedience of orders is false,” he wrote to his wife on October 3, 1876, “as he was told to act according to his own judgment at his final interview with Terry.”