Read The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn for Free Online Page A

the grain. Custer had subsequently recanted in writing what had been one of the centerpieces of his testimony in Washington.
    He might attempt to cast himself as the noble truthsayer victimized by an implacable tyrant, but as was now obvious to Terry, no one had done more to undermine Custer’s career than Custer himself. He was an impulsive blabbermouth, but he was also the most experienced Indian fighter in the Dakota Territory, and Terry, fifty years old and very content with his office job in St. Paul, needed him. It remained to be seen whether Custer’s endearingly earnest declaration of fealty was for real.
     
    O n the morning of May 17, a thick gray mist blanketed Fort Lincoln. It had been raining for several days, and the water-soaked parade ground had been chopped and churned into a slippery alkaline gumbo. When the Seventh Cavalry assembled for its final circuit of the garrison in the foggy early-dawn twilight, it was about as dour and depressing a scene as could be imagined.
    All spring the wives of the officers and enlisted men had been haunted by a strange, seemingly unaccountable sense of doom. A month earlier, when the wife of Lieutenant Francis Gibson learned that her husband had been offered a transfer from Benteen’s company to one under Custer’s immediate command, she had felt a “weird something” grip her soul. Even though she knew it was the best thing for both her husband’s career and her own living situation, she insisted that her husband refuse the transfer.
    Another officer’s wife, Annie Yates, dreamed that Custer had been shot in the head by an Indian. When she told Custer of her dream, he responded, “I cannot die before my time comes, and . . . if by a bullet in the head—Why not?”
    Even Libbie, who had married Custer at the height of the Civil War, when a deadly battle was an almost daily occurrence, could not maintain her usual composure during those last days before the regiment’s departure. Custer’s striker (the military equivalent of a servant), John Burkman, had been in the kitchen of the general’s residence when he overheard Custer attempting to comfort his weeping wife. “I can’t help it,” she cried out. “I just can’t help it. I wish Grant hadn’t let you go.”
    On the day of their departure, both Terry and Custer were determined to lay to rest these fears with a rousing display of the Seventh’s unparalleled military might. As the regiment splashed triumphantly into the garrison, the band, conducted by five-foot two-inch Felix Vinatieri, a graduate of the Naples Conservatory of Music, struck up “Garry Owen,” a rousing Irish tune made popular in the Civil War and the regiment’s particular song.
    Unfortunately, the music did little to ease the fears of the soldiers’ families. Custer and Libbie were at the head of the column, and as they passed the quarters of the Arikara scouts, they could see the wives crouched on the ground, their heads bowed in sorrow. Next, they passed the residences of the enlisted men’s families, known as Laundress Row. It was here, recalled Libbie, that
my heart entirely failed me. . . . Mothers, with streaming eyes, held their little ones out at arm’s length for one last look at the departing father. The toddlers among the children, unnoticed by their elders, had made a mimic column of their own. With their handkerchiefs tied to sticks in lieu of flags, and beating old tin pans for drums, they strode lustily back and forth in imitation of the advancing soldiers. They were fortunately too young to realize why the mothers wailed out their farewells.
    By the time they reached the officers’ quarters, the band had moved on to “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” The wives, who had been standing bravely at their doors to wave good-bye, immediately melted in despair and retreated inside their homes. It was not the glorious departure Terry and Custer had been hoping for. But for Libbie, the most eerie and unnerving part of the