The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (14 page)

R
eno and the approximately three hundred officers and men of the Right Wing headed out that afternoon. Instead of wagons, each company was equipped with eleven pack mules to help transport twelve days of rations and forage. The sure-footed mules could travel over country that was inaccessible by wagon. Unfortunately, the only mules the regiment had at its disposal were the ones that had pulled the wagons from Fort Lincoln. For the last two days, the troopers had attempted to convince these recalcitrant animals that lugging a heavily loaded aparejo, a specially designed saddle equipped with large side bags, was in their best interests. When not bucking and braying until the contents of the aparejos had been scattered in every conceivable direction, the mules demonstrated a remarkable talent for locking their knees and refusing to budge. To no one’s surprise, the pack mules proved to be a problem throughout the scout.

Adding to Reno’s logistical challenges was a different kind of burden: a precursor to the modern machine gun known as the Gatling gun. This six-barreled, cannon-sized, rapid-firing behemoth was mounted on a two-wheel carriage and pulled by two cavalry horses that were judged unfit for regular service. Since its invention during the Civil War, the Gatling gun had been used only sparingly in actual battle, but there was no denying it was, potentially at least, an awesome weapon. In the years ahead, the Gatling would be used to curb labor riots, defeat the Spanish in Cuba (Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders swore by the Gatling), and provide a dramatic and deafening conclusion to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Military traditionalists liked to claim the gun was unreliable, but in actuality the Gatling functioned surprisingly well. The biggest problem with the gun was transporting it to where it might be of some use. In the week ahead, the Gatling, not the mules, proved to be the biggest hindrance to the expedition.

The scout was led by a man who was a cipher to most of his officers. After a commendable but unspectacular Civil War career, Marcus Reno, a West Point graduate, joined the Seventh in 1870, just around the time the regiment was being scattered across the South for Reconstruction duty. This meant that he had missed the defining moment of the regiment, the Battle of the Washita. His subsequent assignments—fighting the Ku Klux Klan in Spartanburg, South Carolina; serving on a munitions board in New York; and escorting a survey of the U.S.-Canada border—prevented him from participating in the other two most significant events in the life of the regiment: the Yellowstone Campaign of 1873 and the Black Hills Expedition of 1874.

Dark-haired and dark-eyed—the Arikara scouts called him “the man with the dark face”—Reno was the quintessential outsider. Whether or not it was because he’d lost both his parents by fifteen, something always seemed to be smoldering inside him, and his reticent, stubborn manner won him few friends. He was bullnecked and sleek as a seal, and almost as soon as he joined the Seventh back in 1870, he made the mistake of insulting blue-eyed and graying Frederick Benteen, who slapped him across the face and called him a “dirty S.O.B.”

If Reno’s relations with the officers of the Seventh improved after this inauspicious start, it was because his ebullient wife, Mary, and their son, Robert, were there to save him from his own worst impulses. However, during the summer of 1874, while leading the escort on the Canadian border, Reno learned that Mary had died at her family home in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Heartbroken and desperate, Reno sent an urgent message to General Terry in St. Paul, requesting an immediate leave so that he could be reunited with his grieving ten-year-old son.

Reno had recently served under Terry on the five-man munitions board that had selected the 1873 Springfield “trapdoor” carbine as the standard-issue weapon for the U.S. cavalry. Assuming the leave was forthcoming, he had already begun the more than fifteen-hundred-mile trip back to Harrisburg when he learned that Terry had denied his request. “While fully sympathizing with you in your affliction,” the telegram read, “the Department Commander feels it imperative to decline to grant you leave. You must return to your command.” Not until more than two months after his wife’s death was Reno able to return to Harrisburg.

Reno applied for an eight-month extension of his leave, and in anticipation of a significant inheritance from his wife’s estate, he promptly left with Robert on a transatlantic steamer for Europe. They arrived in Paris in November, and over the course of the next year traveled as far as Moscow and St. Petersburg, not returning to Harrisburg until mid-October of 1875. Leaving Robert in the care of his wife’s family, Reno reported to Fort Lincoln on October 30.

Custer and Libbie were already on leave in New York City, and Reno found himself temporarily in charge of a regiment he hardly knew. The following spring, with Custer stranded in Washington, D.C., he made no secret of his desire to lead the Seventh in the upcoming campaign, an ambition that was not appreciated by the Custer loyalists in the regiment. In April, Captain Thomas Weir refused to participate in a battalion drill. As Reno led his officers and men on the parade ground, Weir sat on the porch of one of the officers’ quarters, no doubt with a huge, mocking grin on his face. Reno charged Weir with insubordination, a charge that was dismissed by General Terry, who, if his earlier refusal to grant Reno a leave after his wife’s death is any indication, had no love for Marcus Reno.

And yet, here he was, leading this scout up the Powder River. Besides demonstrating Terry’s frustrations with Custer, the decision to put Reno in charge of the scout also showed how low the expectations were for finding any Indians on the Powder and Tongue rivers. Assuming Reno obeyed his orders, he should be back at the Yellowstone in a week. As Terry soon learned, this was a big assumption.

T
he morning after Reno and the Right Wing headed south, Terry came to Custer’s tent and requested that he lead the rest of the column on the day’s march to the Yellowstone. Having already ridden down the Powder and back, he feared the country to the north might prove impassable for the wagons. Once again, Custer achieved wonders. Boldly veering east to avoid a maze of badlands, he found a sequence of high, surprisingly flat plateaus upon which the column marched all the way to the mouth of the Powder. It was a good thing, too, since after donating most of their provisions to Reno’s officers and men, they had only enough food to last them a single day.

Grant Marsh and the
Far West
had been downriver at the original rendezvous point at Glendive Creek collecting the much-needed provisions. When they returned to the Powder River, what had once been a wide and lonely stretch of wilderness had become a bustling, noisy encampment, particularly when the sutler and his men set up a temporary trading post underneath two large tents. With a wall of canned goods separating the enlisted men from the officers, and with several employees collecting the money behind makeshift countertops, the tents were quickly overrun by hundreds of thirsty, trail-weary men. “The tent was black with soldiers buying liquor,” remembered the Arikara scout Red Star; “it looked like a swarm of flies.”

At the beginning of the campaign, Custer had delayed paying the troopers their overdue wages until the first night on the Heart River, thus depriving them of their customary payday debauch in Bismarck. Now, at long last, they could make up for that lost opportunity. The troopers’ canteens held three pints of liquor, and many of them were soon on their way to getting roaring drunk. The interpreter Frederic Gerard informed the Arikara scouts that Custer, despite his own abstemious ways, had said they could each buy a single drink. With the band playing beside the wide and beautiful river (“[M]y heart was glad to hear the band,” Red Star remembered), General Terry, Custer, and the Left Wing of the Seventh Cavalry settled in for a few days of rest and relaxation.

Terry quickly reestablished his headquarters on the
Far West
, where he once again began to pore over his maps and papers. Back in February, before Custer’s problems with President Grant, Terry had begun planning the campaign. “I think my only plan will be,” he had written Sheridan on February 21, “to give Custer a secure base well up on the Yellowstone from which he can retire at any time if the Indians gather in too great numbers for the small force he will have.” Even though Gibbon’s men had sighted Indians on the Rosebud just a few weeks before, Terry refused to scrap his original plan. Using Reno’s fruitless reconnaissance of the Powder and Tongue to buy him an extra week, he was now where he had always wanted to be, on the Yellowstone, assembling his “secure base.”

As Terry scrutinized his maps, Custer sat in his tent with his dogs, putting the finishing touches on his latest article for the
Galaxy
. “Tuck regularly comes when I am writing,” he wrote Libbie on June 12, “and lays her head on the desk, rooting up my hand with her long nose until I consent to stop and notice her. She and Swift, Lady and Kaiser sleep in my tent.” Custer was keeping himself busy, but as his letters to Libbie make clear, he was frustrated and depressed. He now knew Libbie was not going to join him by steamboat. It was also clear that even though they were just a few days’ march from where the Indians had last been seen on the Rosebud, he was going to have to wait in idleness as Reno led a scout that was just as likely to alert the Indians to the regiment’s presence as it was to gather any useful information.

Terry was not alone in this oddly passive approach to pursuing Indians. All spring Colonel Gibbon had been choosing to focus on anything that might prevent him from the matter at hand—attacking Indians. He worried about how he was going to keep his men provisioned; he worried about how to best obey Terry’s clearly outdated orders; and when his scouts located an Indian village—first on the Tongue on May 17 and then on the Rosebud on May 27—the column remained rooted to the north bank of the Yellowstone.

Even the regiment’s doctor was baffled and appalled by Gibbon’s listlessness. “A large camp was found on the Rosebud about 18 miles off,” Dr. Holmes Paulding wrote his mother on June 14, “but our genial C.O. did not deem it advisable to attack it. . . . After laying there for 10 days, with the Indians showing themselves every day as though they knew what a harmless command they were dealing with, he began to do something . . . go away. . . . Our C.O.’s excuse was that he had rec’d orders to guard
this
side of the Yellowstone. There’s literal obedience for you.” Something was going on here on the banks of the Yellowstone. A crippling hesitation and fear seemed to waft from these gurgling, sun-glinting waters, and as Dr. Paulding could sense, the Lakota and Cheyenne
knew it
.

Frederick Benteen shared a tent with Lieutenant Francis Gibson, and on June 13 he wrote his wife, Frabbie, a letter that captured in telling and troubling detail the strange languor that had taken over the command. “I am now sitting in my undershirt & drawers—and slippers,” Benteen wrote. “Gibson is lying on his rubber blanket on floor of tent, puffing away quietly and calmly and regularly, like a high pressure engine. The mattresses and blankets are out on the sage brushes getting sunned, the horses and mules all dozing around, everything seeming as lazy as can well be imagined.”

In the meantime, Marcus Reno was edging toward a momentous, potentially insubordinate decision. Instead of simply finding, as he later put it, “where the Indians are
not,
” why not try to find
where they are
? Contrary to nearly everyone’s expectations—especially General Terry’s—Reno decided to do the obvious: find the Indians’ trail and follow it.

P
rior to his departure from the Powder River encampment, Reno had been assigned the man who knew perhaps more than anyone else about the territory over which they were now moving. His name was Mitch Boyer, and he was living proof of just how complex the culture of the northern plains had become in recent decades. Half Lakota and half French, he was married to Magpie Outside, a Crow. The Crows had long since decided to align themselves with the United States, not because they had any great love for the Americans but because they saw the alliance as a way to keep from losing their lands to the Lakota. Even though Boyer’s mother was a Lakota, he remained loyal to his wife’s people and willingly took up arms against his kindred.

There is a photograph of Boyer wearing a fur hat decorated with what appear to be two stuffed blue jays. The birds are poised as if to peck opposite sides of his skull. It is the perfect piece of headgear for a man caught between two warring peoples. “If the Sioux kill me,” he once said, “I have the satisfaction of knowing I popped many of them over, and they can’t get even now, if they do get me.”

Boyer had so impressed Colonel Gibbon over the course of the last few months that Gibbon had offered him to General Terry when the two had met aboard the
Far West
. By June 13, Boyer had led Reno up the Powder River to the Mizpah Creek, about ten miles to the west. Attempting to follow the course of a river was bad enough, but the most difficult terrain was inevitably encountered when marching over the jagged ridge of hills, known as a divide, that separated each north-flowing tributary from the other. When atop the bare, rugged divide between the Powder and the Mizpah, they had been able to see far to the north. Terry’s orders had instructed them to continue down the Mizpah Valley, but they could see perfectly well that there were no Indian villages along that creek. They decided to skip the Mizpah and continue west to Pumpkin Creek and then to the Tongue, where the LakotaCheyenne village had first been sighted on May 17.

Two days later, they were on the banks of the Tongue. Compared to the cloudy and shallow Powder, the Tongue was a paradise—clear, cool, and about two feet deep—and the men took turns swimming. Terry’s orders had been quite specific. Reno was to continue down the Tongue to the river’s confluence with the Yellowstone, where he was to meet up with Terry, Custer, and the Left Wing. Under no circumstances was he to go as far west as the Rosebud, even though that was where the hostiles had last been seen on May 27. That river was to be left to Custer. Once Reno had proven there were no Indians east of the Tongue, Custer and nine companies of the Seventh were to march back up the Tongue a considerable distance, then cross over to the Rosebud, where, it was assumed, the Indians still were. As Gibbon marched up the Rosebud from the Yellowstone, Custer would proceed down the river, and if all went according to plan, they’d crush Sitting Bull’s village between them.