The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (32 page)

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 slaughter all the more one-sided was the condition of the horses. The soldiers’ mounts were famished, exhausted, and burdened with equipment, while the Indians’ ponies were well watered, fresh, and, in many instances, barebacked. Pretty White Buffalo Woman compared the Indians’ ponies to birds that “flitted in and through and about the troopers’ broken lines.”

The soldiers tried to defend themselves with their six-shooters, holding them out at arm’s length and firing at the approaching Indians; but all a warrior had to do was slip over to the far side of his horse—no easy matter in the midst of a gallop—until the soldier had fired his last round and then he was free to attack. Wooden Leg and Little Bird found themselves on either side of a soldier. They were lashing him with their pony whips when the soldier pulled out his pistol and shot Little Bird in the thigh. Wooden Leg responded by whacking the trooper with the elk-horn handle of his whip, then grabbed the carbine strapped to the soldier’s back and yanked it free as the dazed and bloodied trooper tumbled to the ground.

By the time Varnum reached the head of the column, the troopers were being herded toward a makeshift fording place that was about to become a scene of even worse slaughter as the troopers floundered through the fast-flowing current and struggled up the river’s steep east bank. Now more than ever, an effort needed to be made to provide the retreating soldiers with some covering fire. In the building cloud of dust and black powder smoke, Varnum couldn’t see who was who at the ragged head of the column. “We can’t run away from Indians,” he pleaded. “We must get down and fight.”

Out of the roiling dusty murk came the voice of Major Reno. “I am in command,” he said.

O
ver on the right side of the panicked herd of soldiers was Captain French. He may or may not have endorsed the move out of the timber, but he was now so angered by how the retreat was being conducted that he decided to try to cover his company by himself. As his men veered left for the fording place, he remained on the right, doing his best to hold back the Indians. “And when all had gone for safety,” he melodramatically wrote, “was when I sought death—and tried to fight the battle alone—and did so for nearly a mile.”

It is tempting to dismiss French’s self-aggrandizing account of how he fought off hundreds of warriors so that his men might retreat to the river unmolested. Sufficient evidence exists from both sides of the battle, however, to credit French with being one of the few officers to actively resist the enemy during the battalion’s retreat.

French claimed to have killed or wounded at least eight warriors while covering his company’s withdrawal to the river and immodestly opined what the result might have been if
he,
not Reno, had been leading the charge in the first place. “If I were able to do all this singlehanded,” he wrote, “what might I not have done with the coveted opportunity?”

W
hen the soldiers first entered the timber, Dr. Porter had been wearing a linen duster—a long billowing coat designed to keep the grime off a gentleman’s clothes. As the Indians’ fire increased, the scout Charley Reynolds pointed out that Porter’s fashionable smock was making him an inviting target. Not long after taking off the duster, Porter found himself stooped over a mortally wounded man. Then something strange happened: All the soldiers started to leave.

When mounted Indians burst out of the woods behind him with their guns blazing, Porter realized it was time for him, too, to be going. He dabbed the trooper’s wound with laudanum, threw on a bandage, and mounted his badly frightened horse. “For God’s sake, Doctor,” the soldier cried, “don’t leave me to be tortured by those fiends.” By then the bullets were “flying thick and fast,” and Porter was on his way out of the timber without his patient.

Private William Morris had also been tending to a fallen man when he, too, realized he was about to be left behind. “Go on, don’t mind me,” Private George Lorentz urged him; “you cannot do me any good.” Morris’s horse, the aptly named Stumbling Bear, was jumping wildly with fright. Unable to get his foot in the stirrup, Morris leapt desperately onto the saddle and was lying awkwardly on his stomach when Stumbling Bear took off through the woods. Morris emerged from the trees with a badly 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 hesitation when it came time to leap into the river. “I thought I was a goner,” Morris admitted, “but we came up smiling.” Even though soldiers all around him were fighting for their lives, Morris had the presence of mind to reload his pistol as Stumbling Bear surged across the fast-flowing river toward the eastern bank. Up ahead he could see Reno’s adjutant, Benny Hodgson, unhorsed and floating in the river. “The water was crimson around his legs and thighs,” Morris wrote.

Soon after entering the river, Hodgson had been shot through both legs and fallen from his horse. He’d been able to grab the stirrup of a passing soldier, who towed him most of the way across, but was now in need of assistance. Unfortunately, the way out of the river was blocked by two soldiers who had managed to wedge their horses together in the narrow cut, both of them refusing to back away and let the other one pass. “The bullets were flying like hailstones,” wrote Morris, who implored the two men up ahead to sort things out quickly. In the meantime, he held out his right stirrup for Hodgson, who grabbed it with both hands as Morris grabbed the wounded lieutenant by the collar.

Finally one of the soldiers ahead backed away from the cut. The first soldier through was almost immediately killed, but at least the way was now clear. Burdened by not just Morris but also Hodgson, Stumbling Bear struggled up the bank. On the horse’s third desperate lunge, something happened to Hodgson—he either was shot once again or simply passed out from blood loss, but in falling to the ground, he almost dislocated Morris’s shoulder while pulling the saddle back to Stumbling Bear’s rear haunches.

Morris had no choice but to dismount and refasten the saddle. Before him was a flat section of land that led to a two-hundred-foot-high hillside cut up into a confusing series of ridges and ravines. Morris started up the steep incline, his hands clinging to Stumbling Bear’s mane as the force of gravity threatened to slide him off the saddle. Some of the horses were too winded to make it the whole way, forcing the men to walk their mounts up the grassy slope, “little puffs of dust rising from the ground all around” as the warriors fired on them from both the valley below and the hilltops above.

Two-thirds of the way up the hill Morris came upon Privates William Meyer and Henry Gordon. “That was pretty hot down there,” Morris commented.

“You will get used to it, shavetail,” Gordon replied.

At that moment, the warriors above unleashed a vicious volley, instantly killing Gordon, who was shot through the windpipe, and Meyer, who was hit in the eye. Morris, it turned out, was the lucky one, suffering only a bullet wound to the left breast. Unable to remount his horse, he did what Lieutenant Hodgson had done in the river; he grabbed Stumbling Bear’s stirrup, and his trustworthy horse dragged him the rest of the way to the top of the bluff.

Once on the ridge, Morris saw that Captain Moylan, who had been at Reno’s side for much of the retreat, was still on the run as he and what remained of his company continued to dash to the east. By that time, Lieutenant Luther Hare had reached the top of the bluff. “If we’ve got to die,” Hare proclaimed, “let’s die here like men.” Hare was, in his own words, “a fighting son of a bitch from Texas,” and he shouted after Moylan’s company, “Don’t run off like a pack of whipped curs.”

The outburst appears to have finally startled Reno into acting like a commanding officer. “Captain Moylan,” Reno said. “Dismount those men.” Moylan was slow to obey, and Reno repeated the order. Reluctantly, Moylan, who was seen a few minutes later “blubbering like a whipped urchin, tears coursing down his cheeks,” told his men to dismount.

It was, according to Private Morris, “one of the bravest deeds of the day.” Hare, a mere second lieutenant and only two years out of West Point, had “saved the command from a stampede then and there.”

I
n the chaotic aftermath of Reno’s departure, Sergeant Henry Fehler, the A Company flag bearer, mounted his horse. Before Fehler could insert the butt end of the guidon’s staff into his boot top, the swallow-tailed silk flag slipped from his hand and fell to the ground. Rather than retrieve the guidon, he followed the others out of the timber.

Lieutenant DeRudio decided it was his duty to go back for the flag. He scooped up the guidon and laid the flagstaff against the pommel of his saddle. He was riding through the timber when the flag became entangled in the brush and once again fell to the ground. He’d just jumped down to retrieve it when his horse was hit by a Lakota bullet and galloped off in fright. Stranded at the edge of the timber, with an estimated three hundred Indians just fifty yards away, seemingly all of them shooting at him, DeRudio leapt into a nearby thicket.