“Wallace, there is no use falling back any further. Form your troop, your right resting here, and we will make a stand.”
Wallace grinned and said,
“I haven’t any troop, only two men.”
Benteen laughed grimly and answered,
“Form yourself and your two there, and I will tell you more about it when I find out myself.”
That was the nucleus of our line of defense. Others soon joined us and we sheltered ourselves behind sage brush and hurriedly heaped piles of dirt and opened fire, keeping the Indians at a respectable distance until darkness came to our relief. During the night we changed our position a trifle, located our corral and hospital, and put in the night intrenching ourselves as best we could. At daybreak the fight opened again and continued without intermission until about three in the afternoon, when to our surprise the Indians began to take down their tepees, pack their travois, and in a few hours were moving up the river valley, a great mass of ponies, travois and Indians, unfortunately just out of rifle range.
Twice during the afternoon volunteer parties had gone for water, each time being fired upon by the Indians, but it was only on the second trip that any one was hit. Poor Madden, of “K” Troop, was the unfortunate, his leg being shattered three times between the ankle and the knee. We carried him back to the hospital, where his leg was amputated that night.
On the following day Gen. Terry and Gen. Gibbon came to our relief, and through them we received the first authentic information as to the fate of our comrades of the other battalion. On the 28th, after having transported our wounded across the river, we visited the scene of the battle and buried such of Custer’s men as we found. Aside from General Custer, we found hardly a body on the field that had not been mutilated in some manner or another, but as I recollect now, we found no marks of mutilation on our dead leader.
In the space at my disposal it is not possible to deal in incidents of the fight or go into detailed descriptions. In fact, those have been well covered in your article already.
Since the fight I have discussed it with many officers of the army, and others who have had experience on the frontier, and the general opinion seemed to be that there were two, possibly three, main causes for this disaster.