Sharpshooter Ridge

By editor

Crow Agency, Big Horn County, Montana, June 1876

There is a hill in southeastern Montana that earned its name in the worst possible way. The soldiers who named it were not standing on it when they did so. They were crouching in rifle pits a mile to the south, listening to the bullets come in, and the name they gave the ridge was not a compliment to themselves.

The marker at Sharpshooter Ridge reads, in the economical language favored by the National Park Service: "From the ridge to your right, Custer first views the village. Needing more information about the extent of the encampment, he moves further north. After witnessing the beginning of Reno's charge, Custer's five companies descend Cedar Coulee, the ravine to your immediate front. After Custer's destruction, this promontory was occupied by Lakota and Cheyenne warriors who poured a deadly and accurate fire into Reno and Benteen's besieged troops -- thus the name Sharpshooter Ridge."

That is a great deal of history compressed into a few sentences. Let us see if we can spread it out a little.

On the morning of June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led the 7th Cavalry Regiment over the Wolf Mountains and down toward the Little Bighorn River, where his scouts had told him there was an Indian village. The scouts had told him a good deal more than that, but Custer had a talent for hearing only what he wished to hear. From the ridge now called Sharpshooter Ridge, he got his first look at the village, and what he saw should have given him pause. The encampment stretched for three miles along the river. There were perhaps ten thousand people in it, of whom somewhere between fifteen hundred and three thousand were fighting men.

Custer had brought six hundred soldiers.

He looked at the village and decided he needed more information. He moved his command further north along the bluffs, trying to see the full extent of the encampment. What he saw did not change his plan. He had been afraid the village would scatter before he could attack it, and that fear had governed every decision he made that day. He divided his regiment into three battalions and sent Major Marcus Reno with three companies to charge the south end of the village, while he took five companies north to strike from the other direction.

From this ridge, Custer watched the beginning of Reno's charge. He saw the dust rise from the valley floor as Reno's 175 men galloped toward the village. He may have seen the warriors streaming out to meet them. He sent a message to Captain Frederick Benteen, who was somewhere to the south with three more companies: "Come on. Big village. Be quick. Bring packs." Then he led his five companies down Cedar Coulee, the ravine that drops away from the ridge toward the river.

He was never seen alive by any soldier outside his immediate command again.

What happened to Custer's five companies in the next hour is the most debated question in American military history, and it will not be resolved here. What is known is that by late afternoon, all 210 men in those five companies were dead, scattered across a series of ridges and ravines between the river and the high ground now called Last Stand Hill. The warriors who killed them were, by every account, numerous, well-armed, and fighting for their families.

Reno's charge, meanwhile, had gone badly. He had advanced to within a few hundred yards of the village before the sheer weight of the warrior response forced him to halt, dismount, form a skirmish line in the timber along the river, and then retreat. The retreat became a rout. Reno's men splashed across the Little Bighorn under fire and scrambled up the bluffs to the east, where they dug in on a hilltop that would bear Reno's name. Benteen arrived with his three companies and the pack train. The survivors of Reno's charge and Benteen's command, perhaps 350 men in all, found themselves on a hilltop with no water, dwindling ammunition, and no idea what had happened to Custer.

Then the warriors came back from wherever they had been.

Lieutenant Edward Godfrey, commanding Company K, later wrote: "About 9 p.m. we heard very heavy firing in the direction of Custer's command. I reported this to Colonel Reno, who said he had heard it. The firing lasted about twenty minutes, then ceased. We did not know what it meant."

What it meant was that Custer and five companies of the 7th Cavalry had ceased to exist as a military force. The warriors who had accomplished this were now free to turn their attention to the men on the hilltop.

This is where Sharpshooter Ridge enters the story for the second time.

The ridge that Custer had used as an observation post became, after his destruction, a firing platform. Lakota and Cheyenne warriors occupied the high ground and poured fire down onto the Reno-Benteen position for the better part of two days. The range was long but the marksmanship was not. Private William Morris of Company M recalled the constant, searching fire: "The bullets came from every direction. You could not tell where they were coming from. A man would be hit and you would look around and see nothing."

The warriors had captured a number of Springfield carbines and Springfield rifles from the soldiers they had killed, and they knew how to use them. The men in the rifle pits on Reno Hill had to keep their heads down. Those who did not were shot.

Wooden Leg, a Northern Cheyenne warrior who fought at the Little Bighorn, described the second day of the siege in his account recorded by Thomas Marquis: "All the Cheyennes and Sioux were around the hill where the soldiers were. We kept shooting at them. They kept shooting at us. Neither side could do much. The soldiers had dug holes and were lying in them."

The standoff lasted until the morning of June 27, when the warriors broke camp and moved south, having spotted the approach of General Alfred Terry's column from the north. Terry's men arrived to find the Reno-Benteen survivors alive but badly shaken, and the Custer battlefield covered with bodies that had been in the June sun for two days.

The ridge that gave Reno's men such misery was named Sharpshooter Ridge by the survivors, and the name stuck. It is a plain, functional name, the kind of name that soldiers give to places where they have been shot at. It does not celebrate the marksmanship of the men who held it. It simply records the fact that men with rifles occupied high ground and used it to good effect, which is what soldiers are supposed to do.

The village that Custer had seen from this ridge on the morning of June 25 was the largest gathering of Lakota and Cheyenne people in the history of the northern plains. It had come together that summer because the government had ordered the bands onto reservations and the bands had declined to go. Sitting Bull had called for unity, and the people had responded. They had whipped General Crook at the Rosebud eight days earlier. They had now whipped Custer at the Little Bighorn.

It would not last. The army would send more soldiers, and more after that, and the village would scatter and be hunted down through the winter and into the following year. But on the afternoon of June 25, 1876, from the ridge where Custer had stood that morning to look at the village and decide he needed more information, the warriors of the Lakota and Cheyenne nations held the high ground and made the soldiers below them keep their heads down.

They had earned that ridge. They had paid for it in blood, and so had the men in the rifle pits. The name Sharpshooter Ridge is the only monument to that transaction that does not take sides.

See also

• Sharpshooter Ridge at Crow Agency, Big Horn County (Little Bighorn Battlefield, National Park Service, erected c. 2000)
• Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument -- the full battlefield, including Custer Hill, the Reno-Benteen defense site, and the Indian Memorial