The Battle of the
Little Bighorn
(By Mark Henckel)
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     Because he thought he had been discovered, Custer decided at about noon to split up his force and attack the village that day.  Captain Frederick Benteen would take three companies--about 125 men--and swing to the southeast to look for Indians.  Major Marcus Reno would take another three companies--about 140 men--and ride down what is today called Reno Creek.  Custer would take five companies--225 men--and ride to the north.  Finally, Captain Thomas McDougall and 125 men would stay back and guard the pack mules, which carried the food and extra ammunition.
     Soon after the three groups set out in the early afternoon, the horsemen discovered a single tipi.  It turned out to be a burial lodge for Old She Bear, a Sioux warrior who had died from wounds he got fighting General Crook the week before.  Army scouts set the tipi on fire, even though the smoke could alert the Indian village that the Army was near.
     While the Army was approaching, the village was going about its daily business.  Is was Sunday afternoon.  It was sunny and very hot, and there wasn't much wind.  Many of the warriors were probably still asleep, even though it was well past noon.  There had been a dance the night before, and the Indians had probably stayed up late, visiting and exchanging stories.
"A Good Day to Die"
    Because of the heat, boys who weren't in charge of watching the horse herd were probably swimming in the Little Bighorn.  Women and girls were cooking, drying meat, digging wild turnips, and looking for early-ripening berries.  The elders of the tribe were probably sitting around and talking of old times.
     Because of the heat, the smoke flaps at the tops of the tipis were open. The bottoms of the tipis were probably rolled up to let the heat escape.  Some warriors were working on weapons.  Others were doing other tasks of their
warrior societies.  But mostly, the village was quiet that afternoon.  The Indians knew the U.S. Army was in the area.  But they felt safe because there were so many of them in the village.  Surely no one would attack a village as large as this one.  They decided not to attack the Army in the hope it would leave them alone.
     It was into this scene, at about three in the afternoon, that Reno's men and his Indian scouts rode.  Following Custer's orders, Reno crossed the Little Bighorn River and got his men ready to attack the southern end of the village.
    The Sioux didn't spot Reno and his men until they had formed a battle line on the valley floor.  So, despite all the fears that Custer's force had been spotted, the Sioux were surprised.
     As Reno's men began moving toward the Hunkpapa circle of lodges at the southern end of the village, there must have been a lot of confusion among the Indians.  Warriors rushed for their werapons.  Young boys ran for the warriors' horses.  Women and children looked for places to hide.
     The Indians didn't fight in an organized way like the U.S. Army.  They had no overall plan.  There were no commands passed from colonels to majors to captains to lieutenants to sergeants to corporals to privates.  Each Indian pretty much decided for himself what he was going to do.
     Because of that, some of the warriors must have rushed into battle immediately when they saw Reno's troops.  Others may have run to their lodges to get ready, painting their bodies and faces and putting on their finest clothes.  Some may even have chosen not to fight at all.  They may have thought the day just wasn't right for them to take part in a war.
     In the Indian way, the leaders were warriors who led by their urging, their example, and their reputations more than by any rank that was awarded to them.  Sitting Bull was reported to be in the Hunkpapa village as Reno approached, urging the warriors to fight.  Crazy Horse did the same, saying, "It's a good day to die.  Help the helpless ones."
Reno's Retreat
    Sitting Bull was well past the age of being a young warrior.  He was between forty-two and forty-five years old.  Life was hard for the Indians on the plains, and so they aged quickly.  In fact, sixty-five was considered to be very, very old.  Any Indian who lived to such an age was thought of very highly because he had lived through a lot.  Buy the time of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull was more of a spititual leader to his people than a war leader.  But he did his best to make sure the Sioux village was protected from the soldiers.
     As Reno's men came up the valley, they were met by more and more Sioux warriors.  Reno was probably looking hard for Custer, who had promised his help.  He ordered his men to dismount and fight on foot while some of the soldiers took the horses into the cottonwood trees near the river for protection. More and more Sioux kept entering the fight.
     The charging Sioux horses kicked up dust clouds, and the smoke of the rifles added to the haze. 
Gunshots and the shrieks of the Indians only made the scene more confusing for Reno and his men.  The Arikara scouts, who were on the left end of the battle line, fell back.  Then the Sioux under war chiefs Gall and Crow King had a way to get around behind Reno's men.  Other Sioux began to come down the other side of the Little Bighorn to Reno's right.  Reno began looking for a way to escape before all his men were killed.
     At first, Reno moved back to the cottonwood trees and brush along the river.  But the Sioux rode into the woods on horseback or sneaked in on foot.  They threatened to wipe out all of Reno's command.
     Reno decided to retreat when an Arikara Indian named Bloody Knife, Custer's favorite Indian scout, was killed.  Bloody Knife was on horseback next to Reno when a Sioux bullet struck him in the head.  Reno was so upset that he ordered his men to mount their horses, then dismount, and then mount again for a retreat back across the river.
     With Sioux on all sides, Reno's men made a mad dash back to the south to find a place to cross the Little Bighorn River.  The only place they could reach was a poor one with steep banks.  More men fell to the Sioux as the survivors scrambled to the top of wht is now called Reno Hill.  They would be trapped there for the next day and a half.
    After Reno attacked the southern end of the village, Custer decided to take his men across the hills to the northern end and attack there.  If his plan had worked, the Sioux would have been caught between the two forces.  They would have been split and disorganized as they tried to attack both.
     But everything about the Army's plan went wrong.  Reno awakened the village to the threat of the cavalry.  He was beaten bak, and finally he retreated to high ground with some of
his wounded men. About the time Reno's attack was done, Custer's men rode toward a wide-awake village bristling with warriors who were armed and ready to shift their attention almost entirely to Custer.
"Hurrah, Boys, We've Got Them!"
    Custer thought he was ging to score a mojor victory when he first saw the village.  In fact, one of the last things anyone heard him say was "Hurrah, boys, we've got them!"  The remark was reported by trumpeter John Martin, an Italian immigrant whose real name was Giovanni Martini.  He was the last man in the Seventh Cavalry to see Custer alive and live to tell about it.
     One of Custer's officers, Lieutenant William Cooke, gave Martin a message to take back to Captain Benteen.  It read, "Benteen.  Come on.  Big village.  Be quick.  Bring packs.  W.W. Cooke."
     Benteen read the message as he was coming back from his sweep to the south.  He had found nothing there but dry, rugged hills.  But before he could follow up on the order and go help Custer, he spotted Reno and his men on the hilltop.  He decided instead to go to the aid of Reno, who might have been wiped out himself without Benteen's help.
     No one really knows what happened to Custer and his men on that June day.  No cavalrymen lived to tell about it.  Indian accounts differed in many details.  Dozens, if not hundreds, of possible battle plans have been drawn up in the years since to help guess what happened to Custer's command.
     Most historians think Custer began his attack at about four in the afternoon.  Part of his troops rode down Medicine Tail Coulee toward a shallow spot in the Little Bighorn River.  From there, they could attack the village head-on.  The rest of the soldiers rode north along what would become known as Battle Ridge.
     We can only imagine Custer's charge toward the village.  More than 200 horsemen kicked up the dust amid the crack of gunfire and the sounds of an army bugle.  This was the kind of charge for which Custer had become famous.  In the past, luck had always pulled him through.  This time, Custer's luck ran out.
     The soldiers were overwhelmed by the number of Sioux and Northern Cheyenne warriors riding out of the village.  Just as the scouts had predicted, there were far too many Indians for the Seventh Cavalry to handle.  For the soldiers, the battle was one long retreat back up the hills on the east side of the river.
     The first warriors to lead the attack against Custer were Gall and Crow King.  Gall's wife and children had been killed when Reno first attacked the village.  Crazy Horse, Two Moons, and Lame White Man also charged in.  They pushed the Army back up the hill and forced it to take defensive positions.  Under the leadership of such officers as Lieutenant James Calhoun, Captain Tom Custer, Captain George Yates, Lieutenant Algernon Smith, and Captain Myles Keogh, the soldiers fought fiercely against the Indians.  The warriors charged on their war ponies or crept on foot up the gullies toward the desperate soldiers.
    The situation was bad for the Seventh Cavalry.  Curly, the only Crow scout who hadn't ridden with Reno, watched the death scene unfold before him.  And he saw Sioux and Northern Cheyenne warriors gather a lifetime of glory for themselves in the Indian way.
     According to the tribes' traditions, a warrior won honor in battle by "counting coup."  A coup was an act of bravery, such as striking an enemy, stealing his weapon, or stealing his horse.  If you were the first to strike an enemy, you counted a first coup, which was best of all.  But there were also honors for the second and third coups.
     It was important for a warrior to get a good start and build his reputation early in life.  So Indian boys began their warrior duties early.  At the age of twelve or thirteen, they went into battle with the warriors to hold their horses and to help them in other ways.  By the time they were fourteen to sixteen, they were young warriors themselves.
     These young warriors were among the Indians that swarmed up the hills after Custer's men.  With rifles, clubs, spears, and bows and arrows, they rained fire on the troops.  To the cavalrymen in the Seventh, the battle must have seemed like a nightmare.  They had heard terrible stories about Indians and how fierce they were with their enemies.  Some had witnessed this ferocity in earlier battles.  They must have been incredibly afraid to see so many Sioux and Northern Cheyennes coming at them.
     The Indians had their fears, too.  Several chiefs had gone back East with the Army to visit government officials.  They knew how many whites were back there.  They knew those whites had cannons, Gatling guns, and rifles that could reach out and kill enemies from a long distance.  But those fears were put aside on that Montana battlefield.  The Indians had crushed Crook and repelled Reno.  Now they were storming over Custer's men.  It was only a matter of time before not a soldier would be left standing.
     The Indians gradually pushed Custer's men back up the hill until the last men were holding out on top of what is now known as Last Stand Hill.  A flanking blow was delivered by Crazy Horse, who had gone back to the village for a fresh war pony.  While there, he was like a magnet, gathering warriors around him for a final charge up the north side of Last Stand Hill.
     Near the end, a group of soldiers atop the hill huddled behind the dead bodies of their horses.  The Northern Cheyennes and the Sioux under Crazy Horse finally stormed over the top of this final position.
     Some believe Custer was among the last men standing on Last Stand Hill.  His body was found there.  Others think he was killed earlier and his body was carried up the hill as the fight went on.  It didn't really matter in the end.  Custer and all of the men in his command were dead.  His brothers Tom and Boston, his nephew Autie Reed, and his brother-in-law Calhoun were dead.  Mark Kellogg, a newspaper correspondent for the Bismarck Tribune who rode a pack mule into the battle, had died.  So had everyone else with Custer's command.
Custer's Last Stand
The Disaster Is Discovered
    Reno and his men had no way of knowing what was happening to Custer.  They could hear gunshots in the distance.  Some thought they should try to push through and help Custer.  One of these was Captain Thomas Weir, who led a force of men to the north.  He ran into so many Indians that he had to retreat back to Reno Hill.
     The rest of that day and all of the next, Reno and Benteen and their men were pinned by Indians to the top of that hill.  Indians shot an them from below.  They threatened to creep up the hillside and attack.  They probably could have rushed the hilltop at any time and killed all the soldiers the same way they wiped out Custer.
     All that Reno and Benteen could do was wait and hope that Custer or Terry or Crook or someone would come to rescue them.  The wounded men suffered in the heat.  Their canteens were empty.  The troopers held out as best they could.  They scratched shallow holes in the hard Montana dirt so that they could hide from enemy bullets.  They stacked up pack saddles and dead horses so that they could lie behind them.
     During the long night of June 25, the men on the hill could hear some of the Indians celebrating.  They also could hear the sad wailing of women who had lost husbands or sons in the battle.  The next day, the men desperately fought back the charges of the warriors coming up the hill.
   
    As dangerous as it was to move off the hill, the need for water for both the wounded and healthy men was getting worse as the morning wore on.  Something had to be done.  Some men volunteered to rush to the river with kettles and canteens to try to bring back water.  They dashed downhill through a hail of bullets and arrows.  They returned with only a little water, but it was enough to give the men some relief.
     That afternoon, Reno and Benteen were surprised when the Indians started to retreat.  Gradually, the warriors went away.  By evening, the survivors of the Seventh Cavalry could see Indians moving up the valley.  They were heading southwest, toward the Big Horn Mountains.  they had set fire to the dry grass in the valley bottom.  The smoke hid their movements, and the flames destroyed grass that otherwise might feed the Army's horses.
     The men on Reno Hill spent a quiet but uneasy night worrying that the warriors might return.  But at dawn, not an Indian was in sight.  The troopers breathed a little easier.
     At mid-morning on Tuesday, June 27, Reno's men saw dust kicked up by horses' hooves to the north. At first they thought it must be Custer.  But it was Terry and Gibbon instead.  And what these men had to report would send shock waves throughout the entire country.
     On the ridge above the valley of the Little Bighorn, Gibbon's scouts had found that every man of Custer's command had been killed.  The only Army survivor of the battle was said to be Keogh's horse, Comanche, which was badly wounded.  Dead soldiers and dead and dying horses littered the battlefield.
     In all, 210 men died with Custer.  Another fifty-three of Reno's men died, and sixty more were wounded.  No one knows exactly how many Sioux and Northern Cheyennes died.  Estimates vary from thirty to 300.
The Price of Change
    The Battle of the Little Bighorn was the last big victory for the Sioux and Northern Cheyennes.  It was the last big defeat on the plains for the U.S. Army. 
     In the days after the battle, the Indians headed toward the Big Horn Mountains.  From there, they broke up into small groups.  Many found their way back to the reservation in Dakota Territory.
     Terry sent word of the battle back to the Army in Washington, D.C.  Furious and horrified, the Army sent more soldiers to the West.  They kept after the Sioux and Northern Cheyennes until the tribes' free life on the plains was gone forever.
     People often look for good guys and bad guys in a conflict like the Battle of the Little Bighorn.  Some think that Custer and his men, in their greed for victory, were all bad--that Crazy Horse and the Sioux, in their defense of their village, were all good.  But for the most part, Custer and his men were just soldiers following orders that were given to them by the U.S. government.  And Crazy Horse and the other Indians were trying to protect a way of life that could not withstand the westward movement of the white people.
     In the end, the real meaning of Custer's Last Stand can't be measured in terms of good guys and bad guys.  It's just one part of a story of two very different peoples who had two very different ways of life.  June 25, 1876, will always be remembered as a turning point for the Sioux and Cheyenne people and for the Army of the West.  And it will always hold a bit of mystery for anyone who takes the time to learn more about the fascinating Battle of the Little Bighorn.