On June 25, 1876, along the banks of the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory, General George Armstrong Custer and his men rode into a catastrophe that would become one of the most debated disasters in American military history. By the end of that day, Custer and every soldier under his immediate command were dead. The survivors—those who fought alongside Major Marcus Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen—carried with them not only the memory of the fighting but also the torment of thirst, the dread of an unseen enemy, and the bitter mystery of what had happened to their commanding officer. The campaign had begun days earlier.
On June 22, Custer’s column departed the Rosebud River at noon and marched about twelve miles before making camp for the night. The following morning they continued the march, following a trail until late evening. On June 24, six Crow scouts who had been sent out ahead returned with word that they had found fresh pony tracks, indicating an Indian village nearby. Custer gathered his officers, though the soldiers could not hear what was discussed.
The scouts were sent forward once more. Around four in the afternoon the command reached an abandoned village site and camped about two miles below the forks of the Rosebud. The scouts were dispatched again, and by eleven that night Custer ordered the camp packed and the column moved up the right fork of the Rosebud. By dawn, the scouts reported they had spotted the village.
The troops concealed themselves in a ravine near the creek’s headwaters, about three miles from the divide where the village had been seen. Custer galloped ahead with his orderlies to scout the area but returned an hour later claiming he had seen nothing. The half-breed guide and the scouts insisted the village lay ahead, and they warned that they had been discovered and that Sioux war parties had already spotted the column. Custer gave the order to prepare for battle.
The command advanced cautiously along a small creek for about six miles until they came upon a single Indian lodge with a dead man inside, near the entrance to the Little Bighorn Valley. Five miles away clouds of dust rose into the air. Custer believed the Indians were retreating and sent a message to Reno ordering him to push the scouts toward the dust. Reno led his men across the river at a natural ford and advanced across the prairie.
After about a mile, his troops dismounted to fight on foot and sent their horses into the trees. Mounted Indians soon charged across the prairie, and Reno’s skirmishers opened fire. But as the enemy began moving to cut him off from the ford, Reno ordered a retreat into the trees. The Sioux pursued relentlessly, firing at close range and cutting off any chance of a safe withdrawal.
Soldiers and horses fell, and those left behind scrambled for safety. One survivor described seeing about thirteen soldiers, some wounded, and convincing them to take cover in the trees. Though the wounded men were eager to escape, he advised them to stay and fight, believing from experience that the situation was not beyond hope. They remained in the bushes for hours, listening to the distant sounds of battle, unaware that those shots came from Custer’s command.
When the shooting eventually quieted, he urged the soldiers to move. A small group forded the river and rejoined Reno’s command on the bluffs, just as the Indians swarmed back from Custer’s fight. Reno’s men fortified their position as darkness fell, using whatever they could find—saddles, packs, and dead horses. At dawn the Indians renewed their attack, charging multiple times and even throwing stones at the soldiers.
Captain Benteen rallied his troops and launched an unexpected offensive that surprised the attackers. His courage in standing firm in the line of fire saved many lives that day. By midmorning the men began begging for water. They had gone without it for thirty-six hours in the scorching heat.
Many were dehydrated, their tongues swollen. The men tried to eat crackers and hardtack but lacked the saliva to moisten them. Some resorted to chewing grass, but it clung to their lips and none could spit or speak clearly. The wounded were dying from dehydration, and several soldiers volunteered for a dangerous mission to the river, knowing they might not return.
The battlefield on the bluffs was about seven hundred yards from the river, with a ravine running from the fight to the water’s edge. To reach the ravine, the men had to sprint across an exposed area of roughly one hundred yards, all the while under fire from Indians positioned on the bluffs. Around fifty soldiers dashed across the open ground and made it into the ravine. At the bottom they found it guarded by Indians stationed in the timber across the river.
The soldiers could approach the water to within about thirty feet while under cover, but stepping out onto the bank meant facing a barrage of fire. Still, they went forward. Some dashed down to the river with camp kettles, filled them, and took refuge in the bend of the ravine behind rocks, where canteens were filled and passed back up the hill. Before the men and wounded were fully supplied, one soldier was killed and six or seven others were wounded.
One man had the bone in his leg shattered by a bullet and required an amputation later. By two in the afternoon the Indians began to withdraw, though skirmishing continued until late in the day. By nightfall the battlefield was clear of Indian forces. Finally the soldiers could bring water to the animals, many of which were on the brink of death, and allow them to graze.
That evening Reno repositioned the command on a stronger, higher location. They anticipated another attack the next day, but by morning there were no Indians in sight. Around ten o’clock word arrived that General Terry was approaching the valley with a large force only six miles away, and soon his troops came into view. One survivor, a man named Herendeen, recounted his position in the fight.
He had gone in with the scouts on the left side of Reno’s line, which included about sixty men—thirty-five Ree Indians, six friendly Sioux, six Crows, and the remainder white men. He witnessed a Ree scout raise his arm with a bloody knife before falling over, likely killed. Herendeen believed the two cavalry soldiers he had left in the timber were also killed, as they had not been seen since. Lieutenant McIntosh, whose horse was shot early in the fight, was killed while riding a soldier’s horse trying to make it back to the ford.
Lieutenant Hodgson was shot and wounded after his horse fell into the river; he tried to pull himself up the opposite bank by grabbing a horse’s tail but was shot by an Indian sharpshooter once he reached the top. The Indians did not capture any of Custer’s supply packs or mules. Most of Custer’s horses were killed during the battle, and Herendeen doubted the Indians captured more than one hundred animals. He suspected some men were captured alive and tortured, including the black scout Isaiah Dorman, who had small bullet wounds in his legs suggesting they were inflicted while he was still living.
Another man had strips of skin cut from his body. Many squaws and elderly Indians roamed the battlefield, howling in madness. They carried stone mallets and smashed the skulls of both the dead and wounded, cutting some with knives and mutilating their bodies. The heads of four white soldiers were later found in the Sioux camp, but their bodies were missing.
The soldiers themselves did not kill any squaws, but the Ree scouts did; the bodies of six squaws were found in a ravine. Herendeen estimated the Indian village housed around six thousand people, with at least three thousand warriors. The same group of Indians fought Reno first, then turned to engage Custer, and later returned to finish off Reno. He believed they were led by Sitting Bull along with eight or nine other chiefs, five of whom he identified; each carried a flag to rally the warriors, in colors of red, yellow, white, blue, and black.
Herendeen thought Crazy Horse and his band also took part and speculated the Indians suffered casualties equal to those of the whites. Custer’s men fought valiantly and killed many Indians, but none of Custer’s force escaped. They were surrounded by at least twenty-five hundred warriors. Fear spread among Reno’s men because of what many saw as Reno’s cowardice, which influenced their actions.
One soldier, Dan Neely, had been dubbed Crackerbox Dan for hiding behind a cracker box during the battle. Captain Miles Morland, known as Aparajo Mickey, spent the fight lying behind an aparajo. Another man, Billy Blake, pretended to be wounded for two days to avoid combat. Herendeen, in contrast, worked tirelessly in the intense heat, dragging dead horses to form breastworks and firing at the Indians, all while wondering what had happened to Custer.
On the morning of the twenty-fifth, the soldiers noticed smoke and dust on a nearby ridge. Most of the Indians left Reno’s position to join the fighting there. Some soldiers speculated Custer was engaging the Indians, but when the smoke and dust cleared and the shots ceased, they feared the worst. They heard volleys of gunfire, which many later believed were Custer’s distress signals, but they did not advance to aid him.
Herendeen and the others were left behind, thirsting and grappling with the heat. On the second night, stationed outside Reno’s tent on guard duty, Herendeen heard Reno inside drinking heavily from a keg. As he marched past, he overheard Reno tell another officer, with a sneering laugh, that he wondered where the majority of the American Army was now. Herendeen knew Reno was mocking Custer, and it angered him.
The night had grown eerily quiet. Down in the valley where there had been gunfire, smoke, and chaos all day, it was now as silent as a graveyard. He could hear the distant beat of tom-toms and the mournful wails of Indians grieving their fallen. He kept glancing toward the ridge where they had last seen Custer, straining to catch any sign of him and his men in the dark.
But nothing came. When morning broke, the air was still and heavy, and tension hung over the soldiers like a cloud. On both the twenty-fifth and the twenty-sixth, while the Indians below fired at the trapped soldiers, a sharpshooter perched on a nearby hill picked off the men one by one. Armed with a buffalo gun, he was deadly accurate, and every shot took out a man, horse, or mule.
Though the soldiers could not see him, he proved more of a threat than the warriors below. Eventually Captain Ryan managed to bring him down with a long-range rifle. After the battle, Herendeen went to that hill and saw the sharpshooter lying there, his buffalo gun still in hand, behind the boulders he had set up for cover. By the time the smoke cleared, none of the men had eaten since leaving camp with Custer earlier in the day.
They chewed on hardtack and raw bacon, but without water it was like swallowing hay. Most were utterly spent; some collapsed where they stood, too exhausted to care what came next. Herendeen recalled seeing his horse Dandy shot and killed during the fight. The horse had been with Custer for years, and Herendeen thought the general would be heartbroken to lose him.
As he stroked the horse’s neck, Dandy opened his eyes, filled with pain, and let out a quiet whinny, pleading for water. The day stretched on endlessly, every minute feeling like an hour, as the soldiers remained stranded, unsure of Custer’s fate and fearing the Indians would strike from behind at any moment. With no natural barriers behind them, the sense of doom was difficult to shake. As Herendeen later reflected, the events of that day seemed like a nightmare, something that could not possibly have happened.
When General Terry’s forces arrived, the siege was over, and the surviving soldiers could finally leave the bluffs. The fate of Custer and his immediate command became clear only as the battlefield was examined and the dead were counted. Custer’s entire detachment had been annihilated, surrounded and overwhelmed by the massive Indian force. The Battle of the Little Bighorn ended as a stunning victory for the Sioux and Cheyenne, but it was a victory born of desperate defense, and it came at a heavy cost in lives on both sides.
For the men who survived Reno’s hill, the memory of those two days—the thirst, the sharpshooter, the distant volleys, and the unanswered question of what had happened to Custer—never faded. The mystery of the Last Stand, long distorted by myth, remained in the minds of the soldiers who had been there, carrying the truth of what they had seen and endured.