The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (39 page)

It will never be known what would have happened if Benteen had done everything in his power to reach Custer in a timely manner on the afternoon of June 25—if not with the ammunition packs, at least with his even more desperately needed battalion of soldiers. Given the size of Sitting Bull’s village and the mistakes Custer had already made, it might very well have resulted in the demise of the entire regiment. But that did not justify Benteen’s passive-aggressive refusal to “Come on,” and deep down he knew it.

Benteen’s one overarching weakness, Bell told Walter Camp, was “vindictiveness.” He not only held a grudge against Custer for the death of Major Elliott at the Washita, he was galled by his low rank relative to what he’d achieved during the Civil War, especially when it required him to serve under inferior sorts like Custer and Reno. As a consequence, Benteen “never took the interest in his command that might have been expected of him.” He was “indifferent,” Bell claimed, “to minor matters of discipline and always had the poorest company in the regiment.” But if Benteen was “not a good company officer,” he was, Bell acknowledged, “a first rate fighter.” As the next day was about to prove, that was an understatement.

I
nstead of plotting to abandon the wounded, Reno appears to have spent the night nursing his whiskey and complaining about Custer. At one point, Private Burkman overheard Reno say to another officer: “Well I wonder where the Murat of the American army is by this time!” Since Burkman, who was illiterate, didn’t know that Murat was Napoleon’s greatest cavalry officer, the remark didn’t mean much to him; he did know, however, that Reno had “a sneer in his laugh.”

Later that night two civilian packers were searching for some food and blankets near the corral. The boxes and saddles that hadn’t made their way to the barricade had been tossed together into a large, disorganized heap. Standing alone in the darkness with a bottle in his hand was Major Reno. “Are the mules tight?” Reno said. Assuming the major had misspoken, one of the packers asked if he meant to ask whether the mules were “tied.” “Tight, goddamn you,” Reno shouted as he lunged toward the man and showered him with whiskey.

Lieutenant Edgerly also saw Reno near the horses and mules that night. When Reno asked what he’d been doing, Edgerly said that he’d been sleeping. “Great God,” Reno responded, “I don’t see how you can sleep.”

T
hat night Peter Thompson went to check on his horse. When he’d last seen the animal, it was one of five horses being held by Private John McGuire, who’d been so frightened by the terrific fire of the Indians that he’d scrunched down as low as was humanly possible and still hold five horses. When Thompson arrived several hours later, McGuire was in the exact same position, even though three of the horses were dead. Thompson asked McGuire whether he realized that he’d lost three of his charges. “He mournfully shook his head,” Thompson remembered. When he saw that one of the dead horses was his own, Thompson left “in disgust.”

As had been true all afternoon and evening, the only thing anybody wanted to talk about was the whereabouts of Custer and his battalion. In the beginning Thompson attempted to tell his fellow soldiers what he’d witnessed. They were perfectly willing to believe that he had seen Custer on the river, but they refused to believe that Custer had gotten “the worst of the fight, that was bosh.” Instead of attempting to convince them of the truth, Thompson decided to “say nothing further about it as contradiction was a thing I could not stand, when I was right.”

Thompson walked over to the edge of the bluffs and looked down into the valley. Large bonfires illuminated the village below, throwing long and quavering shadows across the hills. He could see the Indians dancing around the fires and hear the throb of the drums, the barking of the dogs, and the high-pitched howls of the women grieving for the dead. The sights and sounds “made the night hideous,” Thompson observed, but the Lakota and Cheyenne “seemed to enjoy it amazingly.”

While he and the others stood gazing at the village, they heard the hoarse bleat of a bugle echoing across the valley. One of the buglers in the battalion sent out an answering call. But the response was yet another meaningless, discordant blast. The Indians were mocking them, they decided, with a captured bugle.

Each company had stationed two pickets along the periphery of the entrenchment. In case of attack, the pickets were to provide at least a measure of advance warning that the enemy was approaching. But instead of warriors, the pickets thought they saw something else. A column of cavalry, they announced to those back in the entrenchment, was out there in the darkness.

The men studied the gloom ahead for what was described as a “shadow seen passing southward over to the east.” It was Custer, some insisted. Others said it was Terry and Gibbon. No, one of the packers claimed, it was the Wyoming Column, come to their rescue. The packer jumped onto a horse and rode up and down the line shouting, “Don’t be discouraged, boys, it’s Crook!” They stood staring into the dark as behind them the village blazed with light. Finally, the soldiers were forced to admit that nothing was out there.

The superstitious among them might have wondered whether they’d witnessed the departure of Custer’s battalion for the afterlife. But no one (with the exception of Thompson and Watson, who’d seen glimpses of the desperate fighting to the north) could imagine that Custer and his men were dead. The life force burned so vigorously within George Armstrong Custer that it was impossible to believe it could be extinguished. Despite all the circumstantial evidence—the captured guidons and bugles, the dust cloud they’d seen hovering over the hills—the officers and men of Reno and Benteen’s battalion remained convinced that Custer was alive and that, as Benteen had maintained from the start, he had forsaken them.

CHAPTER 14

Grazing His Horses

A
t 2:30 a.m., a pair of rifle shots tore through the cool predawn air. It was time, the Lakota and Cheyenne had decided, to resume the battle.

Benteen told the trumpeters to sound reveille. He wanted “to notify all concerned,” Lieutenant Gibson remembered, “including the Indians, that there were still men left on the hill.”

It was then that the phantoms of the previous night became real. A large number of mounted troopers, their guidons waving in the soft morning breeze, appeared to the north. “Of course . . . ,” Trumpeter William Hardy remembered, “we thought it was Custer’s command.” The cavalrymen marched to within four hundred yards of the entrenchment and halted. Then they opened fire. They were Indians dressed in the clothes of the soldiers’ dead comrades.

That morning the warriors unleashed what Private William Taylor remembered as a “perfect shower of bullets.” The fire was hot everywhere, but it was particularly bad for the soldiers of Benteen’s H Company, who were spread out around the irregular edge of a bluff that dominated the south end of the entrenchment. Since they occupied the highest ground, they were vulnerable from virtually every direction. Soon all the sagebrush on their hill had been clipped to the very roots. “My only wonder,” Lieutenant Gibson remembered, “is that every one of us wasn’t killed.”

Benteen had insisted that he and Gibson remain awake all night to make sure the pickets did their duty. But once the sky began to brighten and the bullets began to fly, Benteen decided it was time to sleep. Even though the Indians’ fire was much heavier than the day before and his men were without rifle pits and barricades, he retreated from the line, lay down on the bald and dusty hill, and, using his rifle as a pillow, took a nap.

The Indians quickly had his range, and a bullet cut the heel off his boot; another kicked up the earth under his armpit. But Benteen, who claimed, “I hadn’t the remotest idea of letting little things like that disturb me,” somehow managed to fall asleep.

As their commander slept, the soldiers of H Company became the enemy’s favored targets. The trooper lying beside Private Windolph decided to take off the overcoat he’d put on the night before. He’d rolled over onto his side and thrown out his arm when he cried out in pain. He’d taken a bullet through the heart and was dead. Seconds later, another bullet tore through Windolph’s clothes and nicked him in the torso; yet another shattered the wooden butt of his carbine.

With no way to protect themselves and with Benteen nowhere in sight, the soldiers of H Company began to seek refuge among the horses and mules at the corral in the hollow at the center of the entrenchment. Lieutenant Gibson, who’d been left in charge while his commander slept, feared the depleted ranks were about to be overrun. The Indians were gathering in the ravine that led up from the river. One of the soldiers said what was on all their minds: “Get the old man back here quick.”

B
enteen was not happy when awakened with the message that his lieutenant was having “a regular monkey and parrot time of it.” “To say that I felt like saying something naughty to that sergeant was putting it mildly,” he remembered. But as Benteen soon realized, his company was in deep trouble. The warriors were so close that they were pelting the soldiers with rocks and clods of dirt. Some were even
throwing
arrows at them. He must stop the retreat of soldiers to the corral and start building a breastwork.

He found a group of H Company soldiers and civilian packers cowering among the horses and mules. “Where are you running to, men?” he asked. “Come on back, and we will drive them off. You might as well be killed out there as in here.” He soon had fifteen or sixteen men headed back up the hill, carrying an assortment of hardtack boxes and saddles.

This was a help, but he needed more men and material with which to build a barricade. He must ask Reno for another company. He found the major lying in a pit with Captain Weir. It was an unexpected pairing. Earlier that spring, Reno had attempted to court-martial Weir for insubordination. Now they were sharing a hole in the ground, a partnership that was most likely inspired by their mutual love of the bottle.

Benteen told Reno that his company was being “hard pressed” by the Indians and that he required some reinforcements. Reno said that his side of the entrenchment was just as hard pressed and that he couldn’t spare any men. Benteen pointed out that if the Indians were able to cut through his line, the entire battalion would be overrun. Finally, Reno agreed to give him French’s M Company. “There was some dissatisfaction at the order,” Private Morris remembered, “as the men believed that the necessity was due solely to the neglect of ‘H,’ in digging pits.”

Benteen evoked a similar response from the men of Moylan’s A Company, who had spent the night constructing one of the better barricades in the battalion. From Benteen’s perspective it was better than they needed, and with Moylan’s consent, he supervised the relocation of a considerable portion of the barricade to his end of the entrenchment. Private William Taylor was one of those who reluctantly carried the material over to Benteen’s position on the hill. He was almost killed when the hardtack box on his shoulder was hit by a bullet, but Taylor could not help but admire Benteen’s courage under fire. “You could see the bullets throwing up dust as they struck all around him while he, calmly as if on parade, came down our lines and, after his errand, returned in the same manner carrying in his hand a carbine.”

After ignoring Custer’s order to “Come on,” after refusing to dig rifle pits and build barricades, after sleeping while his men endured the worst fire of the battle, Benteen had finally decided to wake up and fight.

L
ike Custer, Benteen had a theatrical streak. Unlike Custer, who was infatuated with the cavaliers of old, Benteen had a more contemporary source of inspiration: baseball.

Benteen loved the sport. Back in Kansas, he’d organized a pickup game in the midst of the wide and rolling prairie and proudly speculated that it was probably the first time baseball had been played in such a remote part of the American West. Late in life his hands began to give him problems, a condition he blamed on years of playing baseball.

In 1873 H Company organized “Benteen’s Base Ball Club.” Over the last three years, the Benteens had played throughout the Dakota Territory, even staging a game in the Black Hills, where they defeated a team of “citizen teamsters” 25–11. With the help of baseball, H Company had developed a cohesiveness and camaraderie that no other troop in the regiment could match. They might lack the fastidious attention to cleanliness that typified Yates’s “Bandbox Troop” (and thus earned Lieutenant Bell’s scorn as the regiment’s “poorest company”), but as they were about to prove, they were willing to follow their captain just about anywhere.

The best player on Benteen’s Base Ball Club was First Sergeant Joseph McCurry, a pitcher with professional ambitions who was described as the “stay and prop of the club.” During the hilltop fight, McCurry’s possible future as a pro was placed in jeopardy when he suffered a gunshot wound to the left shoulder. Including McCurry, four members of Benteen’s Base Ball Club were wounded during the battle.