On June 25, 1876, Sergeant Daniel Kipe of Company C, 7th Cavalry, rode into a battle that would consume nearly every man fighting beside him. He survived, and his testimony before the Army’s subsequent investigation would become one of the most important eyewitness accounts of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. His memoir, The Custer Story, preserved a rare soldier’s perspective on the disaster that claimed Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and more than two hundred of his men. The campaign began in May 1876, when the 7th Cavalry set out toward the Yellowstone River.
On the seventeenth, the regiment moved twelve miles and camped near the Big Horn River. By June 10, they had reached the Powder River, where six of the twelve companies were detached for reconnaissance. The men loaded ten days of rations onto mules and rode two days upriver. When they found signs of an Indian trail along the Rosebud River, they marched through the night on coffee and determination alone.
At dawn, with supplies nearly gone, Major Reno ordered a retreat back down the Rosebud, where they rejoined the six remaining companies under Custer and General Terry, the department commander. Custer at that moment was reportedly under arrest, caught up in a scandal involving corrupt post merchants who had been cheating the troops, a controversy that reached back into President Grant’s administration. Despite the tension, he was restored to command and his troops were resupplied from the steamboat Far West, which carried fifteen days of provisions. None of the men knew they were only days from catastrophe.
Custer was offered two Gatling guns and two Rodman cannons, but he refused them, handing the artillery over to General Gibbon in the belief that it would not be needed. In hindsight, that decision looked devastating. A single Rodman shell fired into the village or one Gatling gun in the field might have changed everything. As it was, the regiment marched on without artillery.
The column broke camp on June 22 and advanced all day. That evening Custer gave strict orders: no bugle calls, only hand signals, and fires small enough only to boil coffee. The next day they pressed on until dusk. By June 24, they reached ground where the Indians had recently held a war dance and a sun dance.
The earth was packed smooth, and cottonwood brush huts still stood. Then the Crow scouts found a grim warning: the scalp of a white soldier from Gibbon’s command hanging from a willow branch. The scouts’ enemies, the Sioux they were pursuing, reacted in a frenzy of shouting and dancing. The scalp was presented to Custer, examined, and passed among the men.
It eventually reached Sergeant Finley of Kipe’s company, where it remained in his saddlebag at the time of his death. That night scouts returned with reports, and around nine o’clock the regiment received orders to pack up and move. They advanced through the dark toward the confluence of the Little Bighorn and Rosebud rivers. Custer led the column into a hidden gully, a good position for remaining concealed.
But Quartermaster Sergeant Hurst lost hardtack from the pack train during a brisk trot, and when he went back to recover it, he found two Indians already helping themselves to the fallen bread. They fled when they saw him. Hurst reported the incident to Custer, who immediately ordered the men to prepare their horses. Kipe believed Custer planned to attack at dawn, but with the enemy aware of their presence, Custer decided to strike that very night.
After ascending the divide, Custer rode ahead with two scouts and the chief trumpeter. Two hours later he returned and split the regiment into three detachments. Reno received Companies A, M, and G. Captain Benteen took H, K, and D.
Captain McDougall was assigned to guard the pack train with Company B. Custer kept Companies C, E, I, and F under his own command. Reno was positioned to Custer’s left, Benteen farther left still, the strategy unmistakable: a three-pronged assault on the Indian village. The pack train would follow the main trail behind.
They moved along what is now known as Benteen’s Creek and found a recently deserted Indian camp, fires still smoldering, with a dead warrior inside one tepee. Custer ordered it set ablaze. Reno crossed the creek as instructed while Custer advanced with his companies. Near the confluence of Benteen’s Creek and the Little Bighorn, Kipe noticed Indians watching from the bluffs.
He told First Sergeant Bobo, and Custer ordered Companies C, I, and F to climb the heights. Captain Tom Custer, the general’s brother, led Kipe’s company. They rode fast, but by the time they reached the summit, the Indians had vanished. Below them the valley revealed an enormous camp, tepees stretching for miles.
A few Crow scouts tried to slip down to steal ponies, but gunfire drove them back. Bloody Knife, Curly, and Chief Scout Mitch Bouyer remained on the bluffs as the men prepared to strike. The men grew restless and shouted when they finally saw the camp. Kipe was beside Captain Tom Custer and Sergeant Fincke, who said he was nearing his breaking point.
Fincke’s horse was struggling. Kipe called out to him to come on if he could, but Fincke fell behind. At that moment Captain Tom Custer ordered Kipe to find Captain McDougall and the pack train with urgent instructions from General Custer. He was to tell McDougall to move the packs to higher ground.
If the mules became loose, he was to cut them free and keep moving. There was a large Indian encampment ahead. Kipe departed at once. What seemed at first a misfortune, being sent away from the coming fight, saved his life.
Had Fincke not fallen behind, he would have received the order in Kipe’s place, and Kipe would not have lived to tell the story. In the distance he saw dust rising from the pack train. As the rest of the regiment charged toward the village, he rode in the opposite direction. He remembered Custer’s last words to the men as they spurred forward: hold your horses, boys, there was ample opportunity down there for all of them.
After delivering the message to McDougall, Kipe rode to Captain Benteen. By then Reno was withdrawing from the valley, and McDougall’s troops were climbing the bluffs to support him. Behind them was chaos: Indians shouting, gunfire erupting, men falling under arrows and bullets. Before help could reach them, warriors were already scalping the dead.
Dr. DeWolf was killed just as he reached the summit. A few more steps and he might have survived. Kipe rejoined Benteen’s battalion on the ridge, where it linked up with Reno and McDougall.
They could not reunite with Custer’s men. The Indians had cut them off completely. When Reno tried to advance down the bluffs, the warriors overwhelmed them, forcing a retreat and the formation of skirmish lines. Many men were lost before they could fall back.
The Indians surrounded the position and fired without pause until nightfall. At dawn on June 26 they attacked again, war cries echoing through the valley as the second day of torment began. Sixty-eight of their comrades were wounded, and the men were entirely without water. It was agonizing to hear the wounded beg for a sip no one could give them.
A few tried to reach the river. Most never returned. Kipe remembered the first shot of that two-day siege, which struck the ground near him and passed beneath his horse. Lieutenants Harrington and Sturgis, along with fourteen soldiers, were never located.
Some said the Indians had taken their heads and paraded them through camp during the night’s festivities. On the hilltop, they lost fifty-six men. Gunfire continued from morning until nightfall on the twenty-sixth, when they saw the Indian camp beginning to move, women packing belongings while warriors kept firing. At dawn on June 27 the valley was silent.
The Indians had vanished. The men made coffee, gathered water, and tended the wounded as best they could. Around ten o’clock General Gibbon and General Terry arrived. The men cheered, and Terry broke down in tears.
Then came the news no one wanted to hear: Custer and his four companies had been annihilated, two hundred men dead in the valley below. For a time they had hoped Custer’s men were trapped as they had been, but deep down they already knew the truth. That afternoon Kipe rode with Captain Benteen across the battlefield. The sight was unbearable.
He recognized several acquaintances, among them Sergeants Fincke and Finley. Finley lay next to his horse, twelve arrows in him, still gripping the reins. The bodies had been exposed to the sun for two days and were disfigured beyond recognition. Women and young warriors had stripped every body, beating and stabbing any man who still clung to life.
Not one soldier remained in uniform. The Indians had taken everything: weapons, boots, money, and nearly twenty-five thousand dollars in pay issued just days earlier at the Powder River. Kipe saw where the last of Custer’s men had fallen, gathered in a small pile. Custer lay across his men, a bullet lodged in his heart.
Around him lay his brother, Captain Tom Custer, and his brother-in-law, Lieutenant Calhoun of H Troop. Nearly four thousand warriors had fought in the final battle, part of a larger force of twelve to fifteen thousand. Custer and his men had no chance. Not a single soldier survived the last stand.
Only Comanche, Captain Keogh’s horse, was found alive, riddled with seven bullets. Approximately seventy-five Indians lay dead within three tepees, and more were carried away as the great camp continued its journey. Kipe came across one warrior wrapped in buffalo robes. When he cut him loose, he found four women’s scalps, two with long red hair, strung together like trophies.
The sight sickened him, and he threw them away. After the fighting ended, the soldiers buried their dead and transported the wounded to the steamboat Far West. Most of the injured recovered, including Comanche, the sole survivor of Custer’s immediate command. Headquarters ordered that Comanche be given a stall for life.
He became a living memorial, tended by a soldier of the 7th Cavalry, draped in black during parades, a silent symbol of what had happened on that fateful day. When it was over, the Sioux and Cheyenne dismantled their camp and moved on, triumphant and unopposed. The army was too defeated to follow. Their victory was complete, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn ended not with honor but with quiet.
The cavalry buried its dead under a silent Montana sky, while the greatest Indian victory of the Great Sioux War of 1876 became a legend written in blood.