This will not do at all, thought Custer. He galloped forward, along the column, passing the troops. Catching up with Benteen, he waved at him to stop his troop.
“Cooke, come with me,” Custer said to his adjutant, Lieutenant William Cooke. Custer liked having the Canadian-born officer as his right-hand man. Cooke was a deadly shot with both carbine and pistol. He also presented a fierce appearance, with bushy sideburns adorning his cheeks that were so long they flapped about in the breeze.
The two men rode forward about fifty yards. They halted on a slight rile, but there was nothing to be seen to the front except rolling grass-covered hills and a small gap between them.
Custer used the tail of his red cravat to wipe sweat from his face. It was hot already, the temperature somewhere in the mid-90s and likely to get higher. Two Crow scouts raced up and reported in sign language that they had spotted some Sioux nearby. The Sioux had ridden off quickly to the north. Custer dismissed the scouts with a wave of his hand. There was no doubt the seventh had been spotted. The problem was, despite his time on the Crow’s Nest, Custer still had no real idea where exactly the Indian camp was.
He knew the Little Big Horn ran in a roughly northeasterly direction and that the Sioux were most likely on the west side of the river; at least that’s what all the scouts agreed on. If the hostiles were going to run, they would run either north or south along the river, Custer decided. West was high ground leading to the Rocky Mountains; it was possible they might go that way, but if they did, Custer wasn’t exactly in position to stop them, being to the east. To loop around to the west would take much too long.
Eight years earlier, in November 1868, Custer had been in t similar situation on the Washita. In the dead of night he’d divided the Seventh into four groups and surrounded the village. It had been over in fifteen minutes. One hundred three Indians lay dead, their blood seeping into the snow. It had been glorious. Custer remembered. Riding forward at the head of his troopers, the strains of “Garry Owen” in the air, he had rushed through the village, firing his pistol at any red target that presented itself. It had been hailed as a great victory, perhaps the greatest of the western Indian Wars to date. By God, Custer remembered, General Phil Sheridan himself had ridden down from Fort Hays in the middle of the winter to congratulate Custer personally. Custer hoped to top that now.
Today, though, Custer knew he had a time problem. At Washita he’d been able to deploy the regiment at night to surround the village. He’d also known exactly where the village as. Right now he was still more than twelve miles away from the little Big Horn River, and he didn’t know exactly where along the water the village was. It was likely the regiment had been spotted, so the element of surprise might well have been lost. And if he didn’t burry, he might even lose what daylight he had left. To wait for next morning. He knew there would be no village.
Custer turned to look at the head of the regiment. Waiting like a deadly snake, the body stretching out to the east. His mind wrestled with the tactical situation. Then he spotted Benteen. His shock of white hair making him easily visible. Benteen had been with him at the Washita victory, but ever since then the man had become an irritating presence in the regiment Farther back in the column, Custer knew Reno was riding. Another burr.
If those were rebels down there, Custer had no doubt about what he’d do. Swing the regiment on line along the valley floor. Making sure they were south of the village. And weep up it, taking the enemy head-on. But if he tried that against the Sioux, he knew they wouldn’t stand and fight. They’d run, especially if the entire might of the Seventh was brought to bear.
No. Custer thought, this was going to be difficult to pull off. “How far do you make it, Cooke’?” he asked, pointing through the gap in the bills ahead to a dark line that marked the river.
‘’Ten miles or so, sir,” Cooke replied.
There was a creek a quarter-mile ahead. Ash Creek, the scouts had told him. It divided farther down, but eventually led into the Little Big Horn. To the right were rolling ridges, the same to the left with the Wolf Mountains behind them.
Custer noticed a group of riders coming in from the left. He waited impatiently, feeling success tick away with each minute. It was Varnum with his scouts, come from Crow’s Nest.
“General, we spotted some Sioux moving north along Ash Creek ahead of you,” Varnum reported.
Bloody Knife’s hands moved in the hand symbols typical of the Indian. They are too many!
Bouyer had come up to meet Varnum and the other scouts. He echoed Bloody Knife’s hands. “There are many in the village. It fills the valley.”
“How many is many?” Custer demanded.
Bouyer shrugged. “Two thousand warriors. Maybe more.”
Custer blinked. “They’ve never had that many in one place before. They couldn’t feed their ponies or their people.”
Bouyer didn’t answer.
“Even if they did,” Custer continued, “they can’t coordinate a force like that.”
“If you go in there,” Bouyer said, pointing ahead, “you will never come out.”
“Are you afraid?” Custer demanded, his patience with the temperamental scouts snapping.
A slight smile crept across Bouyer’s face, which irritated Custer, but the man said nothing.
Bloody Knife’s hands moved, gesturing toward the sun. Custer knew the sign language well enough to read it: I will not see the sun go down behind the hills tonight.
Custer ordered the scouts to move back to the column. He needed a moment to think. He stared straight ahead as if he could see through the blocking hills to the Indian camp.
He turned to Cooke. “Relay my orders to Captain Benteen. He is to take Companies D, H and K and move to the southwest along those hills there.” Custer pointed in the desired direction. “He is to explore that terrain for hostiles and also make sure that no Indians make their escape in that direction.”
Lieutenant Cooke was startled by the command, but he nodded and rode off toward Benteen.
Benteen and Custer were like two wolves prowling the same territory. Custer had the rank, but Benteen had something else, a look in his eyes, that belied his gentle appearance. And the one time the two had come head to head, it had been Custer who had backed off.
Benteen was used to conflict, having grown up in a southern family that had owned slaves in Virginia and prior to the Civil War had moved to St. Louis in the border state of Missouri. When war came, Benteen accepted a commission in the Tenth Missouri, a move that stunned and angered his father, who promptly disinherited him. The father went to work for the Confederacy aboard a supply steamboat that plowed the Mississippi. As fate would have it, the Tenth Missouri captured that same steamboat, so the younger Benteen, disinherited though he might have been, held sway over his father.
While his father was held in custody the rest of the war, · Frederick Benteen served with bravery throughout numerous campaigns. He had been recommended for brevet brigadier general on June 6, 1865, but the brevet’ wasn’t approved due to the influence of politicians and the West Point network. Like many of the other officers now in the Seventh Cavalry, · at the end of the war his rank was reduced back to his regular Army commission as a captain.
Benteen came to the Seventh Cavalry in January 1867. From the very first meeting he didn’t hit it off with Custer. Benteen was older and he’d served more time with troops than Custer. But Custer was West Point and Benteen wasn’t. Still, Benteen had tried to be professional. Then came Washita and the issue of Major Elliott that put acid in the moat between the two men.