The Reno-Benteen Defense

By editor

Crow Agency, Big Horn County, Montana, June 1876

The bluffs above the Little Bighorn River are not high, as bluffs go, but they are high enough. From the top, on a clear day, a man can see the valley floor below, the river glinting through the cottonwoods, and the benchland rolling away to the west where the great Lakota and Cheyenne village had stood. On the afternoon of June 25, 1876, Major Marcus Reno stood on those bluffs with the remnants of his battalion and watched the dust of his own retreat settle over the valley below. He had about 100 men left. He had started the day with 175.

The charge down the valley had not gone as planned. Reno had crossed the Little Bighorn River, formed his men into a skirmish line across the valley floor, and advanced toward the southern end of the village. The warriors came out to meet him in numbers that no one in the regiment had anticipated. Reno himself later wrote: "The very earth seemed to grow Indians and they were running towards me." He dismounted his men, held the skirmish line for perhaps twenty minutes, then pulled back into the timber along the river when the Lakota began working around his flanks. The timber was no better. Warriors filtered through the brush, firing from cover, and Reno ordered a retreat across the river and up to the bluffs.

It was not an orderly retreat. Lieutenant Benjamin Hodgson, one of Reno's officers, was shot from his horse while crossing the river and killed. The Arikara scout Bloody Knife was shot in the head while standing next to Reno, spattering the major's face with blood and brains, a detail that appeared in several accounts and that Reno's critics later used against him. Forty soldiers were killed in the retreat and thirteen wounded. The warriors who pursued them across the river included Crazy Horse, Wooden Leg, and a twelve-year-old Oglala boy named Black Elk, who later described the crossing in terms that left nothing to the imagination.

Lieutenant George Wallace of Company G described the pursuit from the soldiers' side: "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 survivors reached the bluffs and dug in as best they could with their bare hands and tin cups. Then Captain Frederick Benteen arrived.

Benteen had been sent south on a scout earlier in the day, looking for any Lakota who might have fled in that direction. He had found nothing and had turned back toward the sound of the guns. He had also received a written message from Custer, carried by the orderly Trumpeter John Martin, that read: "Benteen. Come on. Big village. Be quick. Bring packs. W.W. Cooke, Adjt. P.S. Bring pacs." Benteen had read this note and continued at a trot rather than a gallop, a decision that his critics found difficult to explain and that he himself never explained to anyone's satisfaction. He arrived at Reno's position on the bluffs with his three companies and the pack train, bringing the combined force to roughly 400 men.

The question of what to do next was not simple. Custer was somewhere to the north. No one on the bluffs knew what had happened to him. The sound of heavy firing had come from the north earlier in the afternoon, but it had stopped. Captain Thomas Weir, commanding Company D, could not stand the uncertainty. Without orders, he led his company north along the bluffs, trying to reach Custer. From a high point that now bears his name, Weir could see the ridges to the north where Custer's battalion had fought. He could see horsemen moving among the ridges, and guidons flying, and he told his sergeant, "That is Custer over there." The sergeant looked through field glasses and said, "Here, Captain, you had better take a look through the glasses; I think those are Indians." Weir looked and changed his mind.

The warriors who had finished with Custer's battalion were now turning back south. Weir's company was forced to retreat to the main position, and by early evening on June 25, the combined Reno-Benteen command was surrounded on the bluffs, dug into shallow rifle pits, with warriors on the high ground to the south and west pouring fire into the position. The men dug with whatever they had. They used tin cups, mess plates, and their bare hands. They piled up dead horses and mules as breastworks. They had water in their canteens and no way to get more, because the river was 300 feet below the bluffs and the path to it was covered by Lakota and Cheyenne sharpshooters.

Low Dog, an Oglala Lakota leader, said afterward: "The soldiers had crossed the river and were coming toward the camp ... there were not many soldiers, and I knew they would be beaten because there were many Sioux and Cheyenne." He was speaking of Reno's initial charge, but the arithmetic applied equally to the bluffs. The warriors outnumbered the soldiers by four or five to one, they held the high ground, and they had the water.

The night of June 25 was long. The warriors kept up a steady fire and built fires on the surrounding hills, singing and dancing to celebrate the destruction of Custer's battalion, though the men on the bluffs did not yet know that was what they were celebrating. Several soldiers tried to reach the river for water and were shot. A party of volunteers finally made it to the river and back under covering fire, bringing enough water to keep the wounded alive.

The second day, June 26, was worse in some ways and better in others. The warriors renewed the attack at dawn, and the firing was heavy all morning. Then, in the early afternoon, the shooting slackened. The warriors began to withdraw. From the bluffs, the soldiers could see the village moving, the great column of people and horses and travois heading south up the valley. The warriors who had been on the surrounding hills were riding away.

The reason became clear the next morning, June 27, when General Alfred Terry's column appeared from the north. Terry had been moving up the Little Bighorn from the Yellowstone River with Colonel John Gibbon's infantry, arriving a day late for the battle that Custer had started without them. The Lakota and Cheyenne scouts had seen Terry's column coming and the village had moved before it could be trapped.

Terry's men found Reno and Benteen on the bluffs, alive and in possession of their position. They found Custer's battalion on the ridges to the north, every man dead, the bodies stripped and in many cases mutilated, the horses shot or run off. The total count was 268 dead, including soldiers, civilians, and scouts. It was the worst defeat the United States Army had suffered at the hands of Native Americans since St. Clair's disaster on the Wabash in 1791.

The men on the bluffs had held their position for two days against a force that outnumbered them by a wide margin, and they had done it without knowing whether anyone was coming to relieve them or whether they were simply the last survivors of a regiment that had ceased to exist. That is the story the marker tells, in its careful, official way: an unsuccessful attack, a retreat, a desperate stand, a withdrawal of the enemy. The marker does not mention that Reno was court-martialed three years later, in 1879, on charges that included cowardice and conduct unbecoming an officer. He was acquitted, but the charges followed him for the rest of his life.

The bluffs are still there, above the Little Bighorn River. The rifle pits have been marked with small signs. The view from the top is much as it was in 1876, the valley below, the river through the cottonwoods, the benchland rolling away to the west.

See also

• The Reno-Benteen Defense at Crow Agency, Big Horn County (Erected by National Park Service)
• Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument near Crow Agency, Big Horn County