Retreat Crossing

By editor

Crow Agency, Big Horn County, Montana, June 1876

The Little Bighorn River is not wide at the crossing, perhaps forty or fifty feet, and in June of 1876 it was running high and cold from the snowmelt in the Bighorn Mountains. A man on horseback could ford it without much difficulty under ordinary circumstances. The circumstances on the afternoon of June 25, 1876, were not ordinary.

Major Marcus Reno had been in the timber along the west bank of the river for perhaps thirty minutes when he decided the position was untenable. His battalion had charged down the valley floor, formed a skirmish line, held it for twenty minutes against a growing wave of Lakota and Cheyenne warriors, then pulled back into the cottonwoods and brush when the flanks began to collapse. The timber offered some cover, but the warriors were filtering through it, and the firing was coming from every direction. Reno later testified that he had heard a voice in the timber shouting "Charge!" and that he had believed it was his own voice, though he could not be certain. He ordered the retreat.

What followed was not a retreat in any military sense of the word. It was a run.

The soldiers burst out of the timber and rode hard for the river, the warriors right behind them and on their flanks. Lieutenant Benjamin Hodgson, Reno's adjutant and a popular officer in the regiment, was shot from his horse in the river and killed. He had grabbed the stirrup of a trooper's horse to be dragged across, and he was shot before he reached the far bank. The scout Bloody Knife had already been killed in the timber, shot through the head while standing next to Reno. Isaiah Dorman, a Black interpreter who had lived among the Lakota and was known to many of the warriors, was shot from his horse in the valley and died on the ground. Several soldiers drowned in the crossing. Others were pulled from their horses in the water and killed.

Black Elk, who was twelve years old that afternoon and fighting his first battle as a member of the Oglala Lakota, described the crossing from the other side: "Soon the soldiers were all crowded into the river, and many Lakotas too; and I was in the water awhile. Men and horses were all mixed up and fighting in the water, and it was like hail falling in the river. Then we were out of the river, and people were stripping dead soldiers and putting the clothes on themselves."

The warriors who led the pursuit across the river included Crazy Horse, who had been riding up and down the valley encouraging the warriors since the first alarm; Wooden Leg, a Northern Cheyenne warrior who later gave a detailed account of the battle to historian Thomas Marquis; and a great many others whose names have not come down to us in the written record, though the Lakota and Cheyenne oral traditions preserved many of them.

Standing Bear, a Minneconjou Lakota, described the pursuit from the bluffs: "We saw soldiers coming on a hill toward the south and east. Everybody began yelling: 'Hurry!' We started for the soldiers. They ran back toward where they had come from. One got killed, and many of us got off and couped him."

The soldiers who made it across the river scrambled up the bluffs on the east bank, a steep climb of perhaps 300 feet. The horses that made it were blown and lathered. The men who made it on foot were worse. Reno reached the top of the bluffs and tried to count his command. He had started the day with 175 men. He had perhaps 100 left, and 13 of those were wounded. The official count, established later, was 40 killed and 13 wounded in the valley fight and the retreat. The Lakota and Cheyenne casualties in this phase of the battle were, as the marker notes, few.

Lieutenant George Wallace of Company G, who survived the retreat and the two-day siege that followed, described the pursuit in his official testimony: "They were fighting in regular Indian style, riding up and down, some few on foot and some few on the hills to the left passing around and coming in on our rear, filling the whole space in our rear, a mile or two, with scattered Indians riding about."

Reno's conduct during the retreat was the subject of a formal court of inquiry in 1879, three years after the battle. The court found that his behavior did not require censure, a verdict that satisfied almost no one. His critics argued that the retreat from the timber was premature and disorganized, that officers had been left behind in the confusion, and that Reno had shown signs of panic. His defenders argued that he had been outnumbered ten to one, that his position in the timber was genuinely untenable, and that getting any of his men out alive was an achievement under the circumstances. The argument has never been fully resolved.

What is not disputed is the arithmetic. Forty men killed in a retreat across a river forty feet wide, in the space of perhaps fifteen minutes. The warriors who pursued them were Crazy Horse, Wooden Leg, Black Elk, and perhaps 600 others, and they came across the river and up the bluffs and surrounded the survivors on the high ground where Reno and Benteen would hold out for two more days before General Terry's column arrived from the north.

The crossing itself is marked now, a quiet spot on the Little Bighorn River where the cottonwoods lean over the water and the current runs clear and cold. In June it still runs high from the snowmelt in the Bighorn Mountains. A man on horseback could ford it without much difficulty.

See also

• Retreat Crossing at Crow Agency, Big Horn County (Erected by National Park Service)
• Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument near Crow Agency, Big Horn County