The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (40 page)

That morning, Benteen prowled the top of his hill like a curmudgeonly baseball manager. When his shirttail worked out of his pants, he made no effort to tuck it back in. He had more important things to worry about. “Men . . . ,” he said, “it is live or die with us. We must fight it out with them.”

Besides baseball, Benteen’s other passion was his wife, Frabbie. Benteen had fallen in love with her during the Civil War; they had had five children together, only one of whom, their nine-year-old son, Fred, was still alive. When a particularly frightful barrage of bullets seemed sure to kill his commander, one of Benteen’s soldiers asked, “Why don’t you keep down, Captain?” “Oh I am all right,” Benteen insisted with a laugh; “mother sewed some good medicine in my blouse before I left home, so they won’t get me.” Whatever the couple had decided to use as “medicine,” they were following the example of the Lakota and Cheyenne, who relied on a diverse range of sacred objects—from bear claws, to bird skins, to stones and even dirt—to protect them in battle. Thanks to Frabbie, Benteen was invulnerable.

The Indians had infiltrated a ravine that began just south of Benteen’s hilltop and led down to the river. Most of the warriors were hidden from view, but the troopers could hear them “singing,” a soldier remembered, “some kind of war cry.” As Benteen stood on his hill amid a shower of bullets, he was suddenly taken with the sheer number of Indians gathered not only in the ravine but all around their little saucer of grass. One of his favorite soldiers in H Company was Private Windolph. “Windolph,” he said, “stand up and see this.” Fearing for his life, Windolph asked, “Do I have to?” “If you do,” Benteen replied, “and ever get out of here alive, which I sincerely doubt, you will be able to write and tell the Old Folks back in Germany how many Indians we had to fight today.”

“It took a
man,
” Windolph later marveled, “to stand in that exposed position.”

L
ong Road’s Sans Arc relatives were worried about him. His older brother had been killed the week before at the Battle of the Rosebud, and Long Road no longer wanted to live. As the warriors in the ravine crept constantly closer to the soldiers of Benteen’s H Company, Long Road—a cartridge belt looped over his shoulder, a knife between his teeth, and a pistol in each hand—was at the head of the pack.

The ravine opened up onto the bluff in a welter of grassy crevices and gulches that provided the young Sans Arc with just the cover he needed. Moving quickly among this complex system of dry streams and creeks, he paused, rose, fired, ducked, and moved on.

Private Pigford had been watching Long Road’s gradual but sure progress up the ravine. “Every little while this Indian would rise up and fire,” Pigford remembered. At one point, Long Road grew bold enough to reveal the entire upper half of his body. “Taking deliberate aim,” Pigford fired his carbine and killed the Sans Arc, who was less than seventy-five feet from the soldiers’ line—so close that his fellow warriors were unable to retrieve his body. Some of Benteen’s soldiers later claimed that the warrior had ventured near enough to touch the body of a fallen trooper, a practice known as counting coup, before he died. Whether or not this was true, Long Road had joined his brother in the afterlife.

H
is men remembered him for his courage, but Benteen’s most distinct memory of that day was being “so confoundedly mad and sleepy.” More than anything else, Benteen wanted to take a nap, but the Indians had made that impossible. He told his men he “was getting mad, and I wanted them to charge down the ravine with me when I gave the yell.”

Given the topography, it was impossible to see how many warriors were massed in the ravine below, but this also meant that the warriors could not see them. With Benteen in the lead and with every man screaming at the top of his lungs, the soldiers poured over the barricade toward the unsuspecting warriors. “To say that ’twas a surprise to them,” Benteen wrote, “is [putting it mildly], for they somersaulted and vaulted as so many trained acrobats, having no order in getting down those ravines.” The charge continued for close to a hundred yards and effectively rid the ravine of warriors.

Before turning back, Benteen raised his carbine and shot one of the fleeing warriors in the spine. The “exquisite satisfaction” Benteen admitted to feeling had nothing to do with bloodlust (“I’m rather fond of Indians than otherwise,” he insisted) and everything to do with being exhausted. “I was so tired,” he wrote, “and [the Indians] wouldn’t let me sleep.”

One of the favorite soldiers of French’s M Company, Private James Tanner, was wounded during the charge. Seeing that Tanner was hit, Sergeant Ryan went back for a blanket, rolled him onto it, and with the help of three others carried him back to Dr. Porter’s hospital. “Poor old Tanner,” Private Newell said, “they got you.” “No,” Tanner gasped, “but they will in a few minutes.” The soldiers did everything they could to make him comfortable, even laying a coat over him as he grew cold beneath the searing summer sun, and soon he was dead.

About that time, Captain French’s horse was shot in the head and began to stagger among the other animals. Private Henry Voight grabbed the horse’s bridle and started to lead him away when Voight, too, was shot in the head and killed. The next day, the soldiers buried Tanner and Voight in the same rifle pit. For a headstone they used the lid of a hardtack box with the dead men’s names written across it in pencil.

B
enteen had no sooner completed the charge and returned to his newly fortified breastwork when he realized that the Indians were now massing on Reno’s end of the entrenchment. With a hill between them and the warriors, the soldiers to the north were unaware of the threat. They were also unaware that these same warriors were firing on the rear of Benteen’s line. Once again, he must speak to Reno.

—THE SIEGE, DAY 2,
June 26, 1876
—

Reno was still in his hole with Captain Weir, and he had no interest in leaving. “No doubt,” Peter Thompson wrote, “[Reno] would have pulled the hole in after him if he could.” Several times Benteen demanded that Reno lead a charge. Only after Benteen pointed out that Reno’s position was now in more peril than his own did Reno, who finally sat up enough to lean on his elbow, say, “All right, give the command.”

“Ready boys,” Benteen shouted, “now charge and give them hell!”

To his credit, Reno leapt up and led his men over the barricade. Lieutenant Varnum was running toward the puffs of gray smoke coming from the warriors’ line when he felt a sudden pain in his legs. “I thought I’d lost them,” he remembered. He later discovered that one bullet had punctured his calf while another had skimmed the length of the other leg, neatly cutting off the yellow cavalry stripe from his trousers before it smashed into his leather boot top. The concussion against his ankle-bone was “like a blow of a hammer,” he remembered, and after collapsing to the ground, he limped back to the barricade.

By that time, the entire battalion had been called back. They had gone only forty or fifty yards, but the charge had served its purpose. The Indians had scattered. Miraculously, not a man had been lost during the charge. However, there was one soldier, Private Patrick Golden, who had elected to stay behind. The night before, he’d become convinced that he was fated to die the next day, and he remained weeping in the pit as his comrades ran bravely into the Indians’ fire. On their return, Lieutenant Edgerly and another soldier joined Golden in his pit. A few seconds later, the heaped earth in front of the pit exploded in a dusty cloud and Golden fell over with a bullet in the head.

Once back behind the line, Varnum attempted to check the wound on his ankle, which was bothering him much more than the bullet through the calf. But every time he rolled on his back and tried to get his boot off, an Indian marksman nearly picked him off and sent him scurrying for cover. A young private from B Company lying next to him found all of this quite funny and began to laugh. Varnum was about to say something when a bullet slammed into the soldier’s head and killed him instantly.

Many of the Indians were firing at such long range that the bullets landed harmlessly along the soldiers’ line. “We could pick the balls up as they fell,” Herendeen remembered. A spent bullet hit the regiment’s chief packer, John Wagoner, in the head. Instead of killing him, it merely knocked him unconscious. Once he’d been revived, his bloody head was wrapped in a bandage, and Wagoner lived for many years afterward with the bullet still lodged against his skull.

By noon the temperature was approaching a hundred degrees, and the stench from the dead horses along the barricade had become intolerable. No one appreciated this more than George Herendeen. His horse had died the day before, and the carcass was swarming with maggots and flies. Even worse, whenever an enemy bullet struck the horse, Herendeen could hear the slow, appalling hiss of gas leaking from the animal’s bloated corpse.

Many of the soldiers had not had a drink of water in two days. Their mouths were so dry they could no longer speak. In hopes of promoting the secretion of saliva, some of them tried chewing on hardtack. But it was no use, and rather than gag on the bread, they were forced, Lieutenant Godfrey wrote, to “blow it out of their mouths like so much flour.” Some of the soldiers grew so desperate for a drink that they reverted, the Cheyenne claimed, to collecting urine from the horses.

The soldiers were all suffering from dehydration, but for the more than forty wounded men, most of whom had lost significant amounts of blood, the torment—technically known as volumetric thirst—was beyond imagining. “It was awful . . . ,” remembered Dr. Porter, who lacked the water even to clean the soldiers’ wounds, “the groans of the men . . . crying and begging piteously for water to moisten their parched lips, which were soon to close and stiffen in death.”

Peter Thompson had been wounded in the arm and hand before he could join Benteen’s charge. He staggered over to Porter’s hospital and, feeling light-headed from loss of blood, collapsed. When he came to, he discovered that another soldier had stolen his carbine. By that time, a considerable number of soldiers had made their way back to the corral, and as Thompson lay on the ground, “meditating on the meanness of human nature,” Benteen arrived shouting, “Get out of here! Do your duty!” and drove the skulkers back to the lines.

The heat had become so oppressive that Dr. Porter decided to try to shade the wounded with a piece of canvas held up by a few pieces of wood. The canvas was so low that it inevitably trapped the smothering heat, but at least they were no longer frying in the sun. Lying beside Thompson was his good friend James Bennett, who’d been hit in the spine and was now paralyzed from the waist down. Thompson asked if there was anything he could do to help. “Water, Thompson,” he said. “Water, for God’s sake.”

“I’ll get it,” Thompson replied, “if I live.” Bennett let go of Thompson’s hand and “seemed satisfied.” It was only then, Thompson wrote, that “I began to realize what the promise I had made meant.”

B
y the late morning, the fire from the Indians had begun to slacken. Thompson took up a coffee kettle and two canteens and headed down the ravine for the river. On his way, he passed some troopers examining the body of Long Road. The group included two soldiers from his own troop, C Company: Sergeant Daniel Kanipe, who’d greeted him when he first joined Reno’s battalion on the bluff, and Private John Jordan. Kanipe told him he was foolish to try to get water, particularly given his badly wounded right hand, which made it impossible to carry a carbine. But Thompson, stubborn as always, would not be deterred, and after Jordan gave him a handkerchief with which to make a sling, he started down the ravine, wounded and unarmed.

H Company’s charge had flushed the bluff of Indians, but this did not mean there weren’t a few warriors waiting to ambush anyone attempting to approach the river. “As I went down the ravine,” Thompson wrote, “I found it got narrower and deeper, and became more lonesome and naturally more depressing.” The bottom of the ravine was chopped up with hoof prints from the warriors’ ponies. It was clear to Thompson that “the Indians had made a desperate effort to make an opening through our place of defense by this route.” With his hand in a sling and the kettle and canteens in his arms, he moved cautiously down the ever-constricting corridor of grass until the ravine began to bend toward the river.

Ahead of him the ravine opened up enough that it offered no protection from the Lakota snipers who were surely lurking in the dense stand of cottonwoods on the opposite bank of the river. After about a hundred yards, the topography once again provided some cover until the ravine eventually ended about twenty yards from the edge of the Little Bighorn.

Not long before, Thompson had been convinced that if he did as Benteen ordered and ran up the hill to the H Company line, he would surely be killed. The bullets were coming from three different directions and “all exposed places were pretty well riddled.” But he went anyway, running as fast as he could even as he was “seized with a tendency to shrink up”—a posture that his wife and children, for whom he later provided a demonstration, called “a squatty shuffle.” Instead of hitting him in the legs, as he’d expected, a bullet had torn off a knuckle on his right hand before it ricocheted from the barrel of his gun and ripped through his elbow. He’d been badly injured, but he had survived.