The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (38 page)

When Benteen realized that French’s company had, in his words, “flunked” its test against the warriors, he sent word to Godfrey “to hold his vantage point, and everything would soon be O.K.” He then turned to Lieutenant Wallace of G Company. “Wallace,” he shouted, “put your troops here!” Wallace had inherited the leadership of his decimated company from Lieutenant McIntosh. “I have no troop,” Wallace said, “only three men.”

“Well, then,” Benteen replied, “put yourself and your three men here and don’t let any of them get away. I will look out for you.” It was a pathetic, even absurd way to begin what was about to become one of the greatest sieges in the history of the American West, but Wallace’s three men would have to do. With G Company serving as what Benteen called “the nucleus,” he assigned each company a position as he strung the men along in the arc of an irregular circle. Five of the seven companies were concentrated on the northern half of the entrenchment, with Moylan’s A Company bridging the gap to the east and Benteen’s H Company assigned to the hill to the south. Clustered in the center, in a “saucer-like depression of prairie,” were the mules and horses, positioned so as to screen the wounded, who were stationed in what was loosely termed Dr. Porter’s hospital: “the blue canopy of heaven being the covering,” Benteen remembered, “the sage brushes [and] sand being the operating board.”

As Benteen and Reno oversaw the positioning of the men, Lieutenant Godfrey did his best to hold back the Indians. Benteen had been deeply disappointed in the staying power of French’s M Company, but he was pleasantly surprised by the doggedness of K Company. Godfrey threw out a skirmish line about five hundred yards to the north of the entrenchment. Even when Reno’s new adjutant, Luther Hare, arrived with an order to retreat, Godfrey resolved to stay; otherwise “the Indians would make sad havoc in the other companies.” Seeing that Godfrey needed all the help he could get, Hare decided to remain with K Company, “adjutant or no adjutant.”

The two officers positioned the men so there were about five yards between them. Many of the soldiers had never been in battle before, and as the fire of the warriors increased, they began to bunch protectively together. The “swish-thud” of bullets striking around their feet was bad enough, but the high-pitched “ping-ping” of bullets whizzing around their heads was what bothered them the most. Up until this point, the soldiers had been slowly retreating toward the entrenchment. Godfrey ordered them to halt and restored the original intervals between the men. Sure enough, the rate of fire once again increased, and the warriors were temporarily driven back.

They continued to retreat slowly toward the rest of the battalion. They had reached the ridge overlooking Reno’s position when Godfrey realized that the Indians were galloping toward a hill to the right that would enable them to rake the entrenchment. He told Hare to go with a platoon of ten men and take the hill. But Reno had had enough. They must join the others on the line. Reluctantly, Godfrey called Hare back, and after firing one last volley at the Indians, the soldiers of K Company sprinted for the entrenchment without having lost a man.

G
odfrey was justifiably proud of how his company had covered the battalion’s retreat, but they were not alone. The Arikara scout Young Hawk had played a role as well.

When the Lakota and Cheyenne began leaving the valley, Young Hawk and his grandfather Forked Horn had emerged from the bushes and seen that they could now safely join Reno’s battalion on the ridge. To make sure the soldiers didn’t confuse them with the enemy, Young Hawk tied his white handkerchief to a long stick and rode at the head of the Arikara as they climbed the bluff. By the time they rejoined the battalion, the retreat to the entrenchment had begun. As the other Arikara fell back, Young Hawk, who had managed to kill two enemy warriors during Reno’s previous retreat, resolved to remain behind and fight. Soon the Lakota and Cheyenne were upon him, and Young Hawk had no choice but to pull back. Waving his white flag, he galloped toward the soldiers, who fired at the warriors behind him as the warriors fired at the soldiers. About a hundred feet from Reno’s line, the crossfire caught Young Hawk’s beloved horse, and the two of them tumbled to the ground. Young Hawk was quickly back on his feet, and with the white flag still in his hand, he ran to the entrenchment just as the guns of the Lakota and Cheyenne began what he later remembered as “a continuous roar.”

I
n the beginning, the fire from the warriors was so hot that the soldiers had little alternative but to lie as flat as possible and “take it.” A ridge provided the companies in the northern portion of the entrenchment with some protection, but Benteen’s H Company, high on its hill to the south, was exposed to fire from both ahead and behind, with only sagebrush and tufts of grass between them and the path of the warriors’ bullets. Even more exposed were the horses and mules, and during the three deadly hours before nightfall, dozens of the animals were killed.

The adrenaline rush of having held back more than a thousand warriors with his single troop seems to have endowed Godfrey with a giddy sort of bravado. Given the intensity of the Indians’ fire, he decided he must “reassure the men.” He stood up and began walking back and forth, spouting instructions and encouragement. It was clear to everyone but Godfrey that his actions were drawing the Indians’ fire, not only on him but on those who lay at his feet, and Lieutenants Hare and Edgerly both told him repeatedly to get down.

Godfrey was standing over Sergeant Dewitt Winney, “talking to somebody and giving orders,” when a bullet cut into the sergeant’s torso. “He gave a quick convulsive jerk,” Godfrey recounted in his diary, “said, ‘I am hit,’ and looked at me imploringly.” Soon Winney was dead. “This was the first time since 1861 that I had seen a man killed in battle,” Godfrey wrote, “yet I felt cool and unconcerned as to myself.” Those around him were anything but. Godfrey’s cook, Private Charles Burkhardt, begged him to “please lie down, Lieutenant, you will get hit. Please, sir, lie down.” Reluctantly, Godfrey retreated to the rear of the line. Only then did he realize that his actions had been “endangering others.” As Benteen later observed, Godfrey was always the last officer in the regiment to “see the nub of a joke.”

E
arly in the fighting, one of the regiment’s more cantankerous mules, Barnum, slipped through the soldiers’ line and headed for the Indians. Barnum had already survived a dramatic tumble during the march up the Rosebud, and he was now ambling toward the enemy with two ammunition boxes strapped to his back. The prospect of a thousand cartridges falling into the hands of the Indians was enough to inspire Sergeant Richard Hanley to set out in pursuit with his pistol drawn. If he was unable to catch up with Barnum, he planned to “shoot the mule down” before he reached the Indians.

Hanley was in the middle of the no-man’s-land between the soldiers and the warriors, with bullets flying all around him, when, thankfully, Barnum decided to turn back. Two years later, Hanley was awarded the Medal of Honor for having “recaptured singlehandedly, and without orders, within the enemy lines and under a galling fire lasting some 20 minutes, a stampeded pack mule loaded with ammunition.”

That evening a Lakota sharpshooter found the range on the soldiers of Captain French’s M Company. The first soldier to die was the fourth man to Sergeant John Ryan’s right. Soon after, the third man was hit, followed by the second. When the soldier lying beside him cried out in pain, Ryan “thought my turn was coming next.” But before the sharpshooter had a chance to reload and fire, Ryan, along with Captain French and six other soldiers, leapt to their feet and, spinning to their right, pumped a volley in the sharpshooter’s direction. “I think we put an end to that Indian,” Ryan remembered with considerable satisfaction.

Over the course of the next few hours, a rhythm developed. The warriors blasted away for fifteen to thirty minutes, creating, Varnum remembered, “one ring of smoke from their guns around the entire range.” Then, with “a general ‘Ki-Yi’ all around,” the warriors mounted their horses and, leaning as far back as possible, charged the entrenchment as the soldiers rose to their knees and “let them have it and drove them back.” After another fifteen minutes or so of unrelenting fire, the warriors charged once again.

It was when the soldiers were firing that they could see, however briefly, what they were up against. Gathered amid the surrounding hills and on the flats along the river were many more warriors than could fit along the firing line. As a consequence, most of the Indians were reduced to being spectators. “The hills were black with Indians looking on,” McDougall remembered, “while warriors were as thick as they could get within firing range.” The wonder was that the Indians didn’t overwhelm them with one deadly charge. Instead, they seemed content to test them with volley after halfhearted volley, knowing that time was on their side.

Now that the soldiers’ carbines were being fired so regularly, the weapons started to jam on an almost constant basis. M Company developed a solution of sorts. Every time a carbine jammed, it was handed to Captain French, who, sitting tailor-style just behind the line, coolly extracted the casing with his knife, slipped in a new cartridge, and returned the weapon to the firing line.

By 9:00 p.m. it was growing dark, and the Indians’ fire began to slacken. By 9:30 the firing had ceased altogether, and the officers and men stood up and began to mingle and talk. Private William Taylor of A Company wandered over to what became known as the corral, the roughly circular area where the horses and mules had been collected. There he found Sergeant Henry Fehler standing near Major Reno.

“What are we going to do,” Taylor asked, “stay or try to move?” Although the question had been addressed to the sergeant, Reno responded: “I would like to know how in hell we are going to move away.” Given the tenor of the major’s remarks, Taylor thought it best to pretend, at least, that he was still speaking with Fehler. “If we are going to stay,” Taylor said, “we ought to be making some kind of barricade.” “Yes, Sergeant,” Reno said, “that is a good idea. Set all the men you can to work, right away.”

By this point officers and men alike were so exhausted, hungry, and dehydrated that no one was thinking very clearly. Instead of dedicating a few hours to an activity that might save their lives, all they wanted to do was sleep. “Many of the men showed but little interest . . . ,” Taylor remembered, “officers less.” But an order was an order, and reluctantly the men began to build a breastwork made of hardtack boxes, saddles, and dead horses. They also dug shallow rifle pits in the cracked and flintlike earth with their forks, plates, and tin cups, heaping the excavated dirt into rounded, protective mounds.

But there was one exception. Even though H Company occupied more territory than any other company and was situated on a prominent hill, Benteen chose to ignore Reno’s order. “I had an idea,” he later testified, “that the Indians would leave us.” Benteen’s premonitions usually served him well, but not in this instance. His refusal to take even the most rudimentary measures to defend his troop meant that in the horrifying, blood-soaked day to come, his men suffered twice the casualties of any other company.

Benteen later claimed that Reno approached him that night with a proposition. The battalion should mount up and steal away under the cover of darkness. This required them to abandon the wounded, but in Reno’s estimation they had no choice.

In the years to come, Benteen made much of this supposed conversation and how he “killed that proposition in the bud.” But all sorts of proposals were made that night. Godfrey and Weir believed that Custer “had been repulsed and was unable to join us . . . [and] that we ought to move that night and join him.” Since this also would have required them to leave anyone who could not mount a horse, it is unclear why Reno’s proposition—if, in fact, he ever made it—was the dark crime against humanity that Benteen made it out to be. In truth, the one undeniable crime committed by an officer that night was Benteen’s refusal to attend to the welfare of his own company. However, compared to some of his other actions that day, this was a relatively minor transgression.

There was no one in the regiment who better understood both Benteen and the role he had been given to play that afternoon than Lieutenant James Bell. Bell had fought with the Seventh at the Washita but was away on leave during the Battle of the Little Bighorn. At the Washita, Bell had succeeded in doing what Custer had wanted Benteen to do: arrive just in the nick of time with the precious ammunition.

At the Washita they had used wagons instead of mules to transport their equipment, and Bell had been in charge of the wagon carrying the ammunition. Just as was to occur eight years later with the pack train, the Seventh had advanced well ahead of the ammunition wagon during its approach to Black Kettle’s village. By the time Bell reached the encampment, the Cheyenne from the larger village to the east had Custer surrounded. Without extra ammunition, Custer was at the warriors’ mercy. But Bell courageously ran the wagon through enemy lines and came to his commander’s rescue.