Hour after hour passed, and yet no friendly sign of Reno's coming; nothing to be seen through the battle-smoke, except streaks of fire splitting through the misty clouds, blood flowing in rivulets under tramping feet, dying comrades, and Indians swarming around him, rending the air with their demoniacal “hi-yi-yip-yah!—yah-hi-yah!”
The fight continued with unabated fury until late in the afternoon; men had sunk down beside their gallant leader until there was but a handful left, only a dozen, bleeding from many wounds and hot carbines in their stiffening hands.—The day is almost done, when look! Heaven now defend him! The charm of his life is broken, for Custer has fallen; a bullet cleaves a pathway through his side, and as he falters another strikes his noble breast. Like a strong oak stricken by the lightning's bolt, shivering the mighty trunk and bending its withering branches down close to the earth, so fell Custer; but, like the reacting branches, he rises partly up again, and striking out like a fatally wounded giant he lays three more Indians dead and breaks his mighty sword on the musket of a fourth; then, with useless blade and empty pistol, falls back the victim of a dozen wounds.—He was the last to succumb to death, and died, too, with the glory of accomplished duty on his conscience and the benediction of a grateful country on his head. The place where fell these noblest of heroes is sacred ground, and though it be the Golgotha of a nation's mistakes, it is bathed with precious blood, rich with the gems of heroic inheritance.
I have avoided attaching blame to any one, using only the facts that have been furnished me to show how Custer came to attack the Sioux village and how and why he died.
When the news of the terrible massacre was learned, soldiers everywhere made a pilgrimage to the sacred place, and friendly hands reared a monument on that distant spot commemorative of the heroism of Custer and his men. They collected together all the bones and relics of the battle and piled them up in pyramidal form, where they stand in sunshine and storm, overlooking the Little Big Horn.
Soon after the news of Custer's massacre reached us, preparations were immediately made to avenge his death. The whole Cheyenne and Sioux tribes were in revolt, and a lively, if not very dangerous, campaign was inevitable.
Two days before receipt of the news of the massacre, Colonel Stanton, who was with the Fifth Cavalry, had been sent to Red Cloud agency, and on the evening of the receipt of the news of the Custer fight a scout arrived in our camp with a message from the colonel informing General Merritt that eight hundred Cheyenne warriors had that day left Red Cloud agency to join Sitting Bull's hostile forces in the Big Horn country.
Notwithstanding the instructions to proceed immediately to join General Crook by the way of Fort Fetterman, General Merritt took the responsibility of endeavouring to intercept the Cheyennes, and as the sequel shows he performed a very important service.
He selected five hundred men and horses, and in two hours we were making a forced march back to Hat, or War Bonnet Creek—the intention being to reach the main Indian trail running to the north across that creek before the Cheyennes could get there. We arrived there the next night, and at daylight the following morning, July 17, 1876, I went out on a scout, and found that the Indians had not yet crossed the creek. On my way back to the command I discovered a large party of Indians, which proved to be the Cheyennes, coming up from the south, and I hurried to the camp with this important information.
The cavalrymen quietly mounted their horses, and were ordered to remain out of sight, while General Merritt, accompanied by two or three aids and myself, went out on a tour of observation to a neighbouring hill, from the summit of which we saw that the Indians were approaching almost directly toward us. Presently fifteen or twenty of them dashed off to the west in the direction from which we had come the night before; and, upon closer observation with our field-glasses, we discovered two mounted soldiers, evidently carrying despatches for us, pushing forward on our trail.
The Indians were evidently endeavouring to intercept these two men, and General Merritt feared that they would accomplish their object. He did not think it advisable to send out any soldiers to the assistance of the couriers, for fear they would show to the Indians that there were troops in the vicinity who were waiting for them. I finally suggested that the best plan was to wait until the couriers came closer to the command, and then, just as the Indians were about to make a charge, to let me take the scouts and cut them off from the main body of the Cheyennes, who were coming over the divide.