Perhaps the reason why so much has been written about this famous action is that no one is sure what happened; there is nothing like ignorance for fuelling argument. Because until now there has been no account from a white survivor of the Custer part of the fight, the speculators have had a free rein, and what one eminent writer has called the Great American Faker and the Great American Liar have flourished. This is the more extraordinary when one considers that Little Bighorn was not (except to the participants and their families) an important battle; it settled nothing, it changed nothing, it was, as Flashman says, not really a battle at all, but a big skirmish.
And yet, Little Bighorn has an aura of its own. It is impossible to stand on the Monument hill, looking down towards the pretty river among the trees, or walk across the ridges and gullies of Greasy Grass slope, with the little white markers scattered here and there, showing where the men of the 7th Cavalry died, or look up from the foot of the hill at the silently eloquent cluster of stones where the last stand was made, or the distant ridge where Butler’s marker stands solitary – it is impossible to look at all this, and listen to the river and grass blowing, without being deeply moved. Few battlefields are more haunted; perhaps this is because one can stand on it and (this is rare on old battlefields) see what happened, if not how. However they came, on whatever course, is unimportant; any soldier or civilian can envisage the retreat from the river and coulee to the ridge and hill, for here there are no complex manoeuvres or great distances to confuse the visitor – just a picture of two hundred men in blue shirts and a few in buckskin fighting their way across a sloping field, pursued and outflanked by overwhelming numbers of an enemy determined to fight them in their own way, man to man and hand to hand. Purists and propagandists alike dispute over terms needlessly; in the English language, it was indeed a massacre.
Flashman’s account, in fact, is not one for the controversialists. Apart from his eyewitness detail, he does not help much to clear up the questions (most of them fairly trivial) which have raised such heat and fury over the past century. The Great Reno Debate is not affected in any matter of fact; only in his opinion does he touch on it, and supports the majority view.
What did happen, then, at Little Bighorn? So far as one can see, after studying as much of the evidence as one can reasonably digest, Custer split his command into three as he approached the (roughly) southern end of the valley where the Indian camp lay; he sent Benteen to the left, went himself among the right flank of the valley, and ordered Reno to charge into the valley itself; the idea was that while Reno was attacking (and possibly sweeping through) the camp from end to end, Custer would fall on it at a convenient point from the right flank, or possibly rear. A reasonable plan, in view of Custer’s previous experience; reasonable, that is, on the assumption that he did not know the Indian strength.
Reno did not get far; he was checked, and eventually, with Benteen who had come up, established a position on the bluffs where they held out until the Indians withdrew. Custer, meanwhile, had seen the camp from above the valley, and determined to attack it. Here we enter the realm of uncertainty; looking from the bluffs today, and knowing how big the camp was, it strikes one that Custer was ambitious; his scout Boyer certainly thought so: “If we go in there, we won’t come out”, and a pretty little quarrel ensued before Custer followed his own judgement and went down towards the ford. How far he got, we do not know; the precise movements of his five troops, we do not know. These things do not really matter; we know where they ended up. In the event, Custer obviously mismanaged his last action; how far it was his fault – for not having got better information of the Indian strength, for failing to assess it properly when the village was in sight, for exceeding the spirit if not the letter of Terry’s orders – these are things we cannot fairly judge, without knowing what was in Custer’s mind. And that we can only guess at. It looks as though he was unjustifiably reckless in deciding to go in with his five troops; with hindsight we know he was. But how it looked to him from the bluffs? He was there, and we were not.
Looked at from the Indian side, it was a competently, even brilliantly handled action. For a people unused to war or battle in the conventional sense, the Sioux and Cheyenne fought Greasy Grass in a manner which would have been approved by any sound military theorist. They turned back the initial attack, held it, saw the danger on their own flank, and enveloped this in turn. Reviewing it from their side (and this is personal opinion) it seems to me that Flashman is right to give the main credit to Gall, although Crazy Horse’s circular movement was an inspired use of cavalry. Gall as the anvil and Crazy Horse as the hammer is a fair simile – but it was an extremely mobile anvil.
One other point it seems fair to make. Reno came under heavy and unjustified criticism, initially from Custer’s hero-worshipping biographer Whittaker, later from others. He was subsequently cleared officially. And barely a week after the battle, four-fifths of the surviving rank and file of the 7th Cavalry petitioned Congress asking that Reno be promoted to fill the dead Custer’s place. After that, what do critics matter?
The number of books and articles on Little Bighorn is literally uncountable. Those against which I have checked Flashman’s story, not only of the battle, but of related subjects, number close on a hundred, so I am listing here those which readers may find of particular interest. Foremost must be a work which, though outstanding, is curiously hard to come by: Fred Dustin’s The Custer Tragedy (1939); it and those two splendid works by Colonel W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth (1943) and The Story of the Little Bighorn (1926), are the three books which no one interested in the battle can do without. The research of these two authors has been prodigious; Colonel Graham’s collection of letters, memoirs, and interviews, and Dustin’s great bibliography, have been immensely helpful. Here, for example, one finds Gall’s account of the battle, given to General Godfrey in curiously touching circumstances, as the two old enemies walked over the battlefield ten years later; here, too, Mrs Spotted Horn Bull’s story, and Two Moon’s, and Benteen’s lively reminiscences, and Wooden Leg’s story, and the Crow scouts’, and the arguments of survivors and critics. Also: Whittaker, Custer’s Life; E. S. Godfrey, General G. A. Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, 1921; Bourke, On the Border with Crook; Miller, Custer’s Fall; Vestal, Sitting Bull, 1972; E. I. Stewart, Custer’s Luck, 1955; Miles, Personal Recollections; Dunn, Massacres; Finerty, Warpath and Bivouac; Hanson, Missouri; De Land’s Sioux Wars; Custer’s My Life, and Mrs Custer’s Boots and Saddles and Following the Guidon; P. R. Trobriand, Army Life in Dakota, 1941; O. G. Libby, Arikara Narrative of the Campaign of June 1876, 1920; P. Lowe, Five Years a Dragoon, 1926; A. F. Mulford, Fighting Indians in the US 7th Cavalry, 1879; Mrs O. B. Boyd, Cavalry Life in Tent and Field. But there are many others, and among them I should mention the late William Jones of Regina, Saskatchewan, former scout for the Northwest (later Royal Canadian) Mounted Police, who served in the Indian wars, and whom I interviewed almost forty years ago. And for those who want to know something of Little Bighorn that cannot be got from books, let them travel up the Yellowstone valley, past the Powder and Tongue to the mouth of Rosebud Creek, and then take the Lame Deer road, past the great modern mining works which Custer and Crazy Horse never dreamed of, and follow the Rosebud to Custer’s camp-site, and so to the bluffs and the river, and walk across the Greasy Grass.