Free Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors by Stephen Ambrose

the Indians would have attacked in great numbers, Custer should have been able to hold them off. Custer might have been able to rally his troopers and hold Custer Hill long enough to be rescued by Benteen and Reno or by Gibbon. Doubtful, certainly, but it was his best chance, what he almost surely must have had in mind.

    Crazy Horse ruined it all. At the supreme moment of his career, Crazy Horse took in the situation with a glance, then acted with great decisiveness. He fought with his usual reckless bravery on Custer Hill, providing as always an example for the other warriors to admire, draw courage from, and emulate, but his real contribution to this greatest of all Indian victories was mental, not physical. For the first time in his life, Crazy Horse’s presence was decisive on the battlefield not because of his courage, but because of his brain. But one fed on the other. His outstanding generalship had brought him at the head of a ferocious body of warriors to the critical point at the critical moment. Then with his courage he took advantage of the situation to sweep down on Custer and stamp his name, and that of Custer, indelibly on the pages of the nation’s history.
    There is some intriguing postfight speculation about this battle. What if Reno had charged, as Custer ordered and expected? He might have put the Indians on the run but that seems unlikely; more probably he would have pinned down Crazy Horse’s blocking force and that could have been important. But Crazy Horse had planned for and expected just such a maneuver (the soldiers always tried to hit from at least two directions at once, he had learned through experience). He still, probably, could have outflanked Custer.
    What if Custer had followed Reno and supported his attack? Certainly that would have given him a better chance, but his horses and men just didn’t have sufficient energy to press home a charge. With a rested command, it might have worked.
    What if Benteen had obeyed orders and come quick with the packs? || That would have helped only if Custer had gained the high ground. As it was, Crazy Horse had rubbed Custer out long before Benteen could have gotten there (if he ever could have made it). As to the charges that Benteen and Reno, who each hated Custer, deliberately abandoned him, such charges are a wholly unjustified slur on them and on the officer corps of the United States Army. These men were professional soldiers who did their best under trying conditions. Of course they made mistakes—who hasn’t in a combat situation?—but they were neither cowards nor traitors to their commander. They were hot, sweaty, hungry, thirsty, absolutely spent men, whose mistakes were in large measure a result of the positions Custer had placed them in. They thought (and so did their men) that Custer had abandoned them, but they did not abandon him.

    The conclusion is inescapable. At the Little Bighorn, Custer was not only outnumbered; he was also outgeneraled.
    All that followed the battle on Custer Hill was anticlimax. The Indians besieged Reno and Benteen, but as always they lacked the killer instinct. Enough had been done. The next day, when Sioux scouts reported to Crazy Horse Gibbon’s advance from the north, the great camp—possibly the largest Indian village ever seen in the Great Plains—retired to the south, toward the Bighorn Mountains.
    The battle of the Little Bighorn had been a supreme moment in the life of the Sioux nation. Never before had the Sioux people been so united, nor would they be again. Never before had the Sioux warriors been so ably led, nor would they be again.
    As the Sioux nation dispersed, Crazy Horse counted up the losses. Forty men dead, or thereabouts. He mourned for them, of course, but not too deeply, because it had been a good day to die.
    * In this chapter I shall footnote only quotations. Statements of fact are taken from various sources—the literature on this battle is voluminous—but I have used as a