Free The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Big Horn by Nathaniel Philbrick Page A

and me can whip all the Whigs in Ohio, can’t we?”
    Thirty years later, it was still the Custers against the rest of the world. The Seventh Cavalry contained a few malcontents, such as Captain Frederick Benteen and Major Marcus Reno, but most of the officers were solidly in the Custer camp, and with five different family members presently associated with the regiment, along with more than half a dozen officers whose loyalty remained unquestioned, this was most definitely a Custer outfit.
    The Seventh Cavalry contained twelve companies, also known as troops, of between sixty and seventy enlisted men led by a captain and his first and second lieutenants. When it came to day-to-day operations, the company, designated by a letter, such as Benteen’s H Company and Tom Custer’s C Company, was run by a first sergeant, and for the enlisted men, the company, not the regiment, was where their primary loyalties lay.
    The companies were the interchangeable building blocks that the commander used to construct battalions: groups of companies that could act independently from the rest of the regiment during a battle. In peacetime, the regiment’s twelve companies were often spread across the country on separate assignments. Indeed, this campaign marked the first time the Seventh Cavalry had been fully reconstituted since the Battle of the Washita seven and a half years before.
    Custer was proud of the twelve companies of his regiment, but as even he had to admit, the army was not what it used to be. Compared to the epic days of the Civil War, when, in the words of Frederick Benteen, “war was red hot,” the once-mighty U.S. military had been reduced to a poorly paid and poorly trained police force. An army of only about five thousand soldiers was expected to patrol a territory of approximately a million square miles (representing a third of the continental United States) that was home to somewhere between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand Indians. Long stretches of boredom were punctuated by often terrifying encounters with Native warriors who the troopers assumed would torture them to death if they were unlucky enough to be captured. Since suicide was preferred to this grisly end, “Save the last bullet for yourself” was the cautionary motto learned by every new recruit, of which there were many in the Seventh. A quarter of the troopers were new to the regiment in the last year; 15 percent were raw recruits, with approximately a third having joined since the fall of 1875.
    Private Peter Thompson of C Company had been in the Seventh Cavalry for nine months and as a consequence was considered a “trained veteran.” In that time, he’d been taught how to groom his horse, cut wood, and haul water, but he’d learned almost nothing about his Springfield single-shot carbine, a weapon with a violent kick capable of badly bruising a new recruit’s shoulder and jaw. Years later, Thompson admitted to his daughter that he’d been scared “spitless” of his carbine, which in addition to being powerful, was difficult for a novice to reload.
    Since the pay was miserable, the army tended to attract those who had no other employment options, including many recent immigrants. Twenty-four-year-old Charles Windolph from Bergen, Germany, was fairly typical. He and many other young German men sailed for the United States rather than fight in their country’s war with France. But after a few months looking for work, Windolph had no choice but to join the American army. “Always struck me as being funny,” he remembered, “here we’d run away from Germany to escape military service, and now . . . we were forced to go into the army here.” Twelve percent of the Seventh Cavalry had been born in Germany, 17 percent in Ireland, and 4 percent in England. The regiment also included troopers from Canada, Denmark, Switzerland, France, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Greece, Poland, Hungary, and Russia.
    In August of 1876, the reporter