The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (20 page)

In 1846, Francis Parkman spent several nights in the tepee of the village’s chief. “There, wedged close together,” Parkman wrote, “you will see a circle of stout warriors, passing the pipe around, joking, telling stories and making themselves merry after their fashion.” As Parkman sat contentedly in the tepee’s flickering darkness listening to the warriors talk, a woman tossed a hunk of buffalo fat into the lodge’s central fire. The pyrotechnics that followed were, he soon learned, a regular and spectacular part of life in a Lakota tepee. “Instantly a bright flame would leap up,” Parkman recounted, “darting its light to the very apex of the tall, conical structure, where the tips of the slender poles that supported the covering of hide were gathered together. It gilded the features of the Indians as with animated gestures they sat, telling their endless stories of war and hunting. . . . For a moment all would be bright as day; then the flames would die out; fitful flashes from the embers would illuminate the lodge, and then leave it in darkness.” Later that night, Parkman ventured outside and watched in wonder as tepee after tepee momentarily blazed like a “gigantic lantern.”

On a warm night in June of 1876 on the Little Bighorn River, it must have been a magnificent sight. A thousand tepees were assembled in six horseshoe-shaped semicircles, each semicircle facing east, as was each tepee’s entryway. Like stationary fireflies, the lodges intermittently flared with fat-fueled flame, glowing softly through the tepees’ translucent buffalo hides.

Some have claimed that nomads are the happiest people on earth. To be always on the move, to be forever free of the boundaries, schedules, and material goods that circumscribe a sedentary existence, more than offset the dangers and discomforts of rootlessness. Late in life, the Cheyenne Wooden Leg admitted that living on the reservation had its compensations. “It is pleasant to be situated where I can sleep soundly every night, without fear that my horses may be stolen or that myself or my friends may be crept upon and killed.” And yet, when he looked back on his life as a young warrior, “when every man had to be brave,” he knew when he had been the most contented and fulfilled. “I wish I could live again through some of the past days,” he said, “when it was the first thought of every prospering Indian to send out the call: ‘Hoh-ohoh-oh, friends: Come. Come. Come. I have plenty of buffalo meat. I have coffee. I have sugar. I have tobacco. Come, friends, feast and smoke with me.’”

A
round sunset on June 22, Custer sat on the cot in his A-frame field tent, waiting for his officers to arrive. Gradually they assembled about him, some squatting, some standing, some chatting in hushed tones in the deepening twilight.

Since leaving the
Far West
close to noon, they had marched just twelve miles before camping beneath a steep bluff beside the Rosebud River. Given Custer’s earlier warnings about ruthless pursuit of the Indians, it had been an unexpectedly easy day, and now as he spoke to them about the march ahead, there was, Lieutenant Godfrey remembered, an “indefinable something that was
not
Custer.”

His officers expected him to be, Lieutenant Gibson wrote, “dominant and self reliant.” But on the evening of June 22, with his officers gathered around him, Custer seemed in the grip of what Gibson called “a queer sort of depression”—a depression that dated back just twenty-four hours to his discussions with General Terry aboard the
Far West.

At some point during those talks, Terry had halfheartedly floated the possibility that they change the plan. Instead of Custer leading the Seventh up the Rosebud, maybe it would be better if he (Terry) led a column that contained both the Seventh and a battalion of the Second Cavalry. When Custer strenuously objected, Terry quickly backed down. But the damage had been done. In his hesitant and evasive way, Terry had unintentionally planted the seeds of doubt and paranoia in a psyche that not even the president of the United States had been able to crack.

As his striker, John Burkman, could attest, Custer had a tendency to overreact. “That’s the way he always was,” Burkman remembered, “flying off the handle suddenly, maybe sometimes without occasion.” In this instance, Custer leapt to the conclusion that Terry’s eleventh-hour failure of confidence had been instigated by comments made by the hated Marcus Reno. In actuality Major Brisbin of the Second Cavalry had been the one whispering in Terry’s ear, but Custer would never know that. The thought that one of his own officers had been scheming against him seems to have become a major distraction to Custer, and at officer’s call on the evening of June 22 he was not his usual cocksure self.

In the past, Custer had followed the model of Napoleon, telling his subordinates as little as possible about his intentions. That night it seemed as if he needed to justify his every decision. He’d opted against the Gatling guns, he explained, so as not to “hamper our movements.” He’d decided against the offer of an extra battalion from the Second Cavalry because he felt the Seventh “could whip any force” of Indians it was likely to meet. He claimed that he’d done some research that spring at the Indian Bureau in Washington, D.C., and he was confident that even with infusions from the agencies, there were no more than fifteen hundred warriors under Sitting Bull. And besides, if in the unlikely event they should encounter an overwhelming force of Indians, the extra troopers from the Second Cavalry, which would inevitably create “jealousy and friction” between the two regiments, would not, in all probability, be enough to “save us from defeat.” The most important consideration, he insisted, was that there be “sure harmony” within the Seventh.

Custer then made a statement that was certain to destroy whatever harmony did exist among his officers. “I will be glad to listen to suggestions from any officer of the command,” he said, “if made in proper manner. But I want it distinctly understood that I shall allow no grumbling, and shall exact the strictest compliance with orders from everybody—not only mine, but with any order given by an officer to his subordinate. I don’t want it said of this regiment as a neighboring department commander said of another cavalry regiment that ‘It would be a good one if he could get rid of the old captains and let the lieutenants command the companies.’ ”

There were only two officers about whom Custer could be speaking: Major Marcus Reno and the regiment’s senior captain, Frederick Benteen. Never one to back down from an encounter with his commander, Benteen asked Custer “who he meant by that remark about grumbling.” “I want the saddle to go just where it fits,” Custer replied. Benteen then asked if Custer “knew of any criticisms or grumbling from him.” “No, I never have,” Custer insisted, adding for good measure that “none of my remarks have been directed towards you.”

This meant, of course, that Reno was the officer to whom Custer was referring. Before departing from the mouth of the Rosebud, Custer had disbanded the command structure he had established back at Fort Lincoln. Since all the companies were now reporting directly to Custer, Reno—formerly the leader of the Right Wing—no longer had any official responsibilities. Custer was doing everything in his power to ostracize and belittle the officer he had already vilified in his anonymous dispatch to the
New York Herald
.

If Custer had hoped to build the morale of his junior officers by casting aspersions on Benteen (who had called his bluff) and Reno (who no longer cared enough to try), he had failed miserably. Throughout his speech that night, there had been none of the “brusque and aggressive” manner to which his officers had grown accustomed. “There was something akin to an appeal, as if depressed,” Lieutenant Godfrey wrote, “that made a deep impression on all present.”

Once the meeting had broken up, four officers—Lieutenants Godfrey, McIntosh, Gibson, and George Wallace—walked together to their tents. The four of them proceeded in silence until Wallace, a six-foot four-inch South Carolinian who weighed just 135 pounds, said, “Godfrey, I believe General Custer is going to be killed.”

“Why, Wallace,” Godfrey asked, “what makes you think so?”

“Because I have never heard Custer talk in that way before.”

T
he next morning, Custer added to Benteen’s already sour mood by putting him in charge of the three companies that were to guard the pack train. General Crook may have perfected the use of mules in transporting provisions and ammunition, but Custer hadn’t a clue as to how to properly train the mules and tie and adjust the packs, and he wasn’t about to learn now. As a result, the pack train was and would continue to be part millstone, part sea anchor: an annoying and ultimately catastrophic drag on a regiment that was supposed to be a nimble and fast-moving attack force.

It seemed as if the pack train could not proceed more than a few steps before sloppily tied packs began to spill from the mules’ sides, requiring that the train halt as the mules were laboriously repacked. After the first day, Custer must have begun to realize that given the realities of traveling with a pack train, at least
this
pack train, he might as well have brought along the Gatling guns, which could easily have kept up with this group of obstinate and poorly tended mules.

In an attempt to improve the efficiency of the 175-mule pack train, Custer placed Lieutenant Edward Mathey in charge of its operations. Each of the twelve companies had a group of mules it was responsible for, and Custer ordered Mathey to report the three companies whose mules were “the most unmanageable in the regiment.” The next morning, those three companies were given the onerous duty of guarding the pack train, which meant that they must spend the day at the rear of the column, eating the dust of the entire command. On the morning of June 23, Benteen was notified that his company was one of the three worst. “I saluted the General,” Benteen recounted in his typically sardonic manner, “and awaited the opportunity of crossing the Rosebud in rear of the regiment.”

At 5 a.m. sharp, Custer, dressed in his white buckskin suit, followed by two flag bearers, trotted off at the head of the column. As Benteen was well aware, the members of the Custer clique identified themselves by what they wore, and a full-fledged Custer man wore buckskin.

In the old days, trappers and scouts had all worn buckskin. But in the last ten to fifteen years, with the advent of the railroads and the ready availability of cloth garments, most westerners, including the scouts Charley Reynolds and Bloody Knife, had abandoned buckskin, which was slow to dry when wet and didn’t breathe the way cotton and wool did. The advantages of the new clothing were so obvious that even the Lakota traditionalist Sitting Bull had taken to wearing a cotton shirt.

But for Custer, who was all about image and romance, buckskin was the clothing of choice, even if in the eyes of many, including Charley Reynolds, who referred to Custer as “George of the quill and leather breeches,” it was more than a little absurd. All three Custer brothers wore buckskin, as did their brother-in-law Lieutenant James Calhoun and five additional officers—Captain George Yates, Captain Myles Keogh, Lieutenant James Porter, Lieutenant Algernon Smith, and Custer’s adjutant, Lieutenant William Cooke.

Benteen had no patience with such pretentious silliness. Ever since he had first met Custer almost a decade earlier, he had been unimpressed by this frustratingly young and charismatic popinjay. Benteen, a Virginian by birth, had never known the closely knit family unit that had produced the Custer brothers and, by extension, the Custer clique. When Benteen told his father, a former slave owner, that he was going to fight for the Union, the old man told his son that he hoped “the first god damned bullet gets you.”

During the early years of the Civil War, Benteen’s two commanding officers feuded incessantly; the scuffle that killed one of them and sent the other to prison seems to have been a kind of object lesson for Benteen, who, as several officers in the Seventh could attest, instinctively reached for his pistol whenever he felt his honor had been slighted. Benteen loved his wife, Frabbie, intensely and passionately (he sometimes decorated his letters to her with anatomically precise drawings of his erect penis), but they were a couple who had known more than their share of hardship. Benteen’s combative relationship with Custer meant that he was inevitably assigned to the most miserable and primitive posts, and over the course of the last decade, he and Frabbie had lost four out of five children to illness. These were devastating losses, of course, but a part of Benteen seemed to revel in the adversity. “In Russia,” he later wrote, “they’d call me a Nihilist sure!”

Benteen could easily have sought a transfer from the Seventh, but he was not about to give Custer and his minions the pleasure of seeing him leave. “I had far too much pride,” he later wrote, “to permit Custer’s outfit driving me from it.” Benteen took credit for orchestrating Custer’s court-martial back in 1868; but he also took credit for Custer’s early return less than a year later. Benteen claimed that General Sheridan’s adjutant had offered
him
command of the Seventh in the weeks prior to the Washita campaign. With the two officers who outranked him on leave and with Custer cooling his heels in Monroe, Michigan, Benteen might have led the Seventh in the field. But Benteen “politely declined” the offer. He was full of pride, but he was not, apparently, full of ambition. Instead, he suggested to the adjutant that General Sheridan invite Custer back. Perhaps after his time in Michigan, he had learned his lesson. “So Custer came!” Benteen later remembered.

Why Benteen, who claimed to loathe Custer, would have urged his return is difficult to fathom. But for Benteen, whose greatest joy in life was proving how inadequate his superiors were, there was no better commanding officer than General George Armstrong Custer.

W
hile Benteen watched in disgust as it took an hour and a half to get the pack train across the river, Custer and the rest of the regiment moved effortlessly up the wide green corridor of the Rosebud. With Custer at the head of the column were Mitch Boyer and the six Crow scouts, along with Bloody Knife and his fellow Arikara.