The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (46 page)

In the story of the White Buffalo Calf Woman, the Lakota told of the young man whose lustful thoughts unleashed a dark and enveloping cloud that reduced him to a gleaming skeleton. Custer had also succumbed to the perils of ruinous temptation. Whether it was the Cheyenne captive Monahsetah, military glory, or gold in the Black Hills, Custer had been, like the country he represented, unabashed in his greed.

Kate Bighead claimed that after the battle, two southern Cheyenne women recognized Custer. Since they knew the white general was still beloved by their relative Monahsetah, they told the Lakota warriors not to mutilate the body. But this did not prevent the two women from performing mutilations of their own. Custer, they knew, had ignored his earlier promise never to attack their tribe. So they took out an awl and pierced his eardrums so that he might hear better in the afterlife.

Yet another mutilation, it turns out, was performed that day, a mutilation that was revealed only recently when an interview with Custer’s former lieutenant Edward Godfrey came to light. Out of respect for his widow, the soldiers who viewed Custer’s remains had neglected to mention that an arrow had been jammed up the general’s penis.

T
wo and a half days after the battle, a detail of troopers buried Custer and his brother Tom in the same grave. To protect the bodies from predators, the troopers placed the basket from an Indian travois over them and held it down with rocks. A year later, a party led by General Sheridan’s brother Michael traveled to the battlefield to retrieve the officers’ bodies. They discovered that coyotes had managed to get at the grave of the Custer brothers and spread their bones across the grassy hill.

CHAPTER 16

The River of Nightmares

B
y the evening of June 28, three days after the defeat of Custer’s command and a day and a half after General Terry’s reinforcements had joined Reno, the dead had all been buried by the survivors of the Seventh. There appears to have been no thought on Terry’s part of pursuing Sitting Bull. Even though there were only a few hours left before dark, he decided it was time they start down the Little Bighorn toward their rendezvous with the
Far West
.

Many of the fifty or so of Reno’s wounded were carried in stretchers, but not Peter Thompson. Stubborn as always, he insisted on riding a horse. But after only a few minutes in the saddle, he was already regretting the decision. Overcome with nausea, he laid his head down on his horse’s neck and, grasping the mane, held on for dear life. Finally, around midnight, Terry ordered the column to halt. “Glad . . . I was when we moved into camp,” Thompson remembered.

Lugging the wounded by hand had proven both exhausting and unbearably slow. It had taken them six hours to travel just four and a half miles. Terry decided they must construct horse-drawn litters similar to the Indians’ travois if they were to have any hope of covering the twenty miles to the Bighorn in the next few days.

They had plenty of tepee poles from the abandoned village, but they needed a supply of rawhide to knit the poles together. Dozens of dead horses still lay scattered across the battleground, but after three days in the sun, the animals’ bodies were badly decomposed. There were, however, quite a few wounded horses and mules still lingering about the encampment. According to a surgeon with Gibbon’s Montana Column, the soldiers executed many of the animals and stripped off their skin to make rawhide thongs for the litters.

There was at least one injured horse that the soldiers refused to kill. Despite having been hit by seven different bullets and arrows, including the gunshot blast that shattered his master’s leg, Comanche, the fourteen-year-old bay gelding ridden by Captain Myles Keogh, was kept alive. He was found, Private Jacob Adams of H Company said, sitting on his haunches near Battle Ridge, “the only living thing,” it was later claimed, near Last Stand Hill. Comanche whinnied when Adams and the other soldiers approached, and once they’d dismounted and carefully helped the wounded animal to a stand, he began eating grass. The next day he was strong enough to follow the column in its slow march down the river.

At 6 p.m. on June 29, the column resumed its march. The soldiers had proceeded just a short way with their newly constructed travois when two mounted couriers appeared on a bluff. The messengers had good news. The
Far West
was waiting for them at the mouth of the Little Bighorn.

G
rant Marsh, the master and pilot of the
Far West,
first learned of the Custer tragedy from the Crow scout Curley, who appeared on the riverbank not long after the steamboat’s arrival at the confluence of the Bighorn and Little Bighorn. Up until that point, Marsh and his compatriots had heard nothing about the battle, and they were eager for news about Custer’s much-anticipated victory.

Once on deck, Curley collapsed onto a chest and began to rock back and forth, weeping and moaning. Try as he might, Marsh was unable to penetrate the Indian’s bewildering outpouring of fear and sorrow. Eventually, however, Curley accepted a pencil and a piece of paper.

He lay down on the deck and began to draw. As the others looked on, he drew two circles, one inside the other. In the space between the inner and outer circles, he began to make dot after furious dot, each time shouting out in despair, “Sioux! Sioux!”

Once he had entirely filled the space with dots, he turned his attention to the inner circle, which he once again began to cover with dots, this time shouting, “Absaroka! Absaroka!”

Marsh had heard a Crow use that word before and suspected it meant “soldiers.” In actuality, Absaroka meant “Crow,” and Curley was attempting to reaffirm that he was a regimental scout. Curley jumped to his feet and began to slam his hands against his chest while making a weird and disturbing sound: “Poof! Poof! Poof!”

It soon began to dawn on Marsh and the others that Curley was imitating the sounds of gunfire. With the help of pantomime and pencil and paper, he was telling them what he had seen a few days before from a hillside beside the Little Bighorn: the slaughter of Custer and his entire battalion.

O
n the morning of June 29, Marsh received orders from General Terry to prepare his vessel for the arrival of more than fifty wounded men. He immediately set to work transforming the
Far West
into a hospital ship. As some of his crew cleared away the provisions and equipment from the aft portion of the lower deck, others began harvesting grass from the marshlands near the Little Bighorn. By evening, an approximately eighty-foot section of the lower deck had been covered with a foot-and-a-half-thick blanket of fresh green grass. When topped by tarpaulins from the quartermaster’s stores, the lower deck became what Marsh described as “an immense mattress.” Chests of medicine and medical supplies were distributed along the edges of the carpeted deck, making it, a doctor aboard the
Far West
proclaimed, “the best field hospital he had ever seen.”

Around midnight Marsh learned that the column was within three miles of the river mouth. It was a wet, cloudy night and the difficult terrain made it impossible for the soldiers to continue in the darkness. Already one of the mules had fallen into a ravine and pitched Private Madden, whose bullet-shattered leg had been amputated by Dr. Porter, into a bed of cactus. Without some assistance, the wounded would have to wait in the rain till daylight.

In order to help the column find its way, Marsh directed his men to begin building a series of fires along the banks of the Little Bighorn. The troopers resumed the march, and by 2 a.m. the head of the column, “looming weirdly through the darkness in the flickering firelight,” had reached the riverboat. By dawn, fifty-two wounded men had been delivered to the hospital on the lower deck. Behind them, in the space between the
Far West
’s two rudders, Marsh created a stall for Comanche, and “his care and welfare became the special duty of the whole boat’s company.”

B
y the morning of June 30, Marsh had prepared his vessel for the more than thirty-mile voyage down the Bighorn to the column’s base camp on the north side of the Yellowstone. Stacks of four-foot-long cordwood and sacks of grain had been positioned along the gunwales of the lower deck to protect the wounded from possible Indian attack. The thin walls of the pilot house had been armored with plates of boiler iron. All was in readiness, but before they began down the river, General Terry wanted to speak to the master of the
Far West
.

As soon as Marsh reported to Terry’s cabin, the general closed the door. Terry’s long, solemn face was even more somber than usual. “Captain,” he said, “you have on board the most precious cargo a boat ever carried. Every soldier here who is suffering with wounds is the victim of a terrible blunder; a sad and terrible blunder.” Marsh had never seen Terry so deeply moved. “With equal feeling,” Marsh’s biographer Joseph Hanson wrote, “Marsh assured him that he would use his best efforts to complete the journey successfully.”

But when he entered the pilothouse and grabbed the steering wheel, the normally unflappable Marsh experienced a sudden loss of confidence: “The thought that all their lives were depending on his skill alone, the sense of his fearful responsibility, flashed upon him and for a moment overwhelmed him.”

There was no doubt that Marsh had an extraordinary challenge ahead of him. When the current was behind a steamboat, steerage often became a problem, especially on a river as fast flowing and narrow as the Bighorn. During their voyage up the river, a series of misunderstandings had caused them to steam past the mouth of the Little Bighorn, and it wasn’t until they’d ventured fifteen additional miles up the Bighorn that they’d realized their mistake and headed back down for the rendezvous point. Several times during that fifteen-mile run Marsh had temporarily lost control of the
Far West,
and the 190-foot vessel had been swept stern-first down the river in what Sergeant James Wilson described as “a whirling, revolving manner.” This was disconcerting to say the least, especially when the boat’s bow smashed into a large cottonwood tree, but Marsh had experienced these kinds of challenges before. What he hadn’t experienced before was General Terry’s almost preternatural ability to project his own insecurities onto the psyche of a subordinate. Just as Custer had emerged from his final meeting with Terry uncharacteristically hesitant and depressed, so had Marsh been unnerved by the general’s attempts to inspire him.

Sitting on the bench behind Marsh were his mate and another pilot. “Boys,” Marsh said, “I can’t do it. I’ll smash her up.”

“Oh, no, you won’t,” one of them said. “You’re excited. Cool off a minute and you’ll be all right.”

Marsh paused for a few seconds and finally pulled the bell cord, the signal for the engineer to engage the paddle wheel.

Before he could turn the
Far West
around and head down the river, he needed to clear a large island. It took some finagling to straighten her out once he’d made it past the obstruction, but they were soon on their way down the Bighorn.

“Never again,” his biographer wrote, “does he want to experience such a sickening sensation of utter helplessness as gripped him that morning in the pilothouse of the
Far West
.”

M
any of the wounded were in desperate need of the kind of medical attention that was available only back at Fort Lincoln. It was also important that word of the battle be transmitted as quickly as possible to the authorities in the East. But instead of immediately sending the
Far West
down the Yellowstone, Terry insisted that Marsh remain at the encampment across from the mouth of the Bighorn for an additional three days. Not until 5 p.m. on July 3 did the
Far West
finally start down the river toward the Missouri.

It was true that a riverboat was needed to ferry the troopers across the Yellowstone; but another steamer, they all knew, was on its way from Fort Lincoln. The real reason for the delay, Private William Nugent of A Company claimed, was that Terry and his staff needed all the time they could get to craft an official dispatch that put this botched campaign in the best possible light. “It was,” Nugent bitterly insisted, “a difficult problem to write a report that would suit the occasion.” In the end, Terry put his name to two dispatches: one for public distribution that made no attempt to find fault; the other, a more private communication to General Sheridan that blamed the catastrophe on Custer.

By the time Marsh and the
Far West
set forth down the Yellowstone, fourteen of the fifty-two wounded soldiers had improved enough that they were left at the encampment, leaving a total of thirty-eight wounded aboard the riverboat. Terry provided Marsh with seventeen dismounted troopers from the Seventh Cavalry; also aboard was a member of Terry’s staff, Captain E. W. Smith, with the dispatches for General Sheridan in Chicago.