Timber Fight

By editor

Crow Agency, Big Horn County, Montana, June 1876

The cottonwoods along the Little Bighorn River are old trees, thick-trunked and close-growing, the kind that make a man feel hidden even when he is not. On the afternoon of June 25, 1876, Major Marcus Reno led the remnants of his skirmish line into those cottonwoods and discovered that feeling hidden and being hidden are two entirely different things.

Reno had crossed the Little Bighorn River about an hour earlier, formed his three companies into a skirmish line across the valley floor, and advanced toward the southern end of the great Lakota and Cheyenne village. The advance lasted perhaps twenty minutes. The warriors came out of the village in numbers that no one in the regiment had anticipated, and they came fast, riding up and down the valley, working around the flanks of the skirmish line, threatening to cut off the soldiers from the river behind them. Reno dismounted his men to fight on foot, which was the correct tactical response to cavalry being outflanked, but it did not change the arithmetic. There were perhaps 175 soldiers on the skirmish line and somewhere between 600 and 800 warriors moving against them.

Reno pulled his men back into the timber.

The cottonwoods and the thick brush along the river offered cover of a sort. A man could crouch behind a tree and be reasonably safe from direct fire. The problem was that the timber was not a defensive position in any military sense. It had no clear fields of fire. It had no water, though the river was only yards away. It had no exits except back across the open valley or across the river itself. And it was not, as it turned out, impenetrable.

Wooden Leg, a Northern Cheyenne warrior who was eighteen years old that afternoon and who later told his story to the physician Thomas Marquis, described what happened when the warriors followed the soldiers into the timber: "The soldiers had gone into the brush. We went in after them. I was in the middle of the fight. I could hear the guns going off all around me in the brush. I could not always see who I was shooting at."

The warriors filtered through the cottonwoods the way water filters through gravel, finding the gaps, working around the soldiers, appearing where they were not expected. Low Dog, an Oglala Lakota leader, said afterward: "I heard the alarm but I did not believe it. I thought it was a false alarm. I did not think it possible that any white men would attack us, so strong as we were." But the warriors who had followed Reno into the timber were not surprised. They were defending their village, their families, and everything they owned, and they were doing it on ground they knew.

The village they were defending was the largest assembly of Lakota and Cheyenne people in a generation. Sitting Bull had called the bands together for the summer hunt, and they had come: Hunkpapa, Oglala, Minneconjou, Sans Arc, Blackfoot Lakota, Brule, and Northern Cheyenne, perhaps 8,000 people in all, with somewhere between 1,500 and 1,800 warriors. The village stretched for more than two miles along the west bank of the Little Bighorn. When Reno's battalion crossed the river and charged down the valley, the warriors had perhaps three minutes of warning before the soldiers were within rifle range of the southernmost lodges.

Waterman, an Arapaho warrior who was present that day, remembered: "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."

Reno held the timber for approximately thirty minutes. During that time, the Arikara scout Bloody Knife was shot through the head while standing next to Reno, spattering the major's face with blood. Whether this event contributed to what happened next is one of the questions that the court of inquiry of 1879 examined at length without reaching a satisfying conclusion. Sergeant Ferdinand Culbertson, who was in the timber, testified that Reno appeared to lose his composure after Bloody Knife was killed. Other men said they could not hear Reno's orders over the noise of the fighting. What is certain is that the order to retreat, when it came, was not communicated to all the men in the timber, and some of them did not know the command had been given until the men around them began to run.

The retreat from the timber was not orderly. The soldiers burst out of the cottonwoods and rode hard for the river, the warriors right behind them. Lieutenant Donald McIntosh was shot from his horse and killed before he reached the water. Lieutenant Benjamin Hodgson was wounded crossing the river and drowned. Isaiah Dorman, a Black interpreter who had lived among the Lakota for years and was known to many of the warriors, was killed on the riverbank. Forty men were killed in the retreat and thirteen wounded. The survivors scrambled up the bluffs on the east bank of the Little Bighorn and dug in as best they could, waiting for Captain Benteen's battalion to arrive from the south.

Moving Robe Woman, a Hunkpapa Lakota woman whose brother had been killed at the Battle of the Rosebud eight days earlier, rode into the fight during the retreat. She had dressed for battle, wearing her brother's war clothes, and she rode among the warriors pursuing the soldiers to the river. Her account, recorded years later, described the soldiers as riding in a panic, their horses stumbling in the river, men falling into the water. She said the warriors were shouting and the women of the village were watching from the bluffs on the west bank, calling out to the warriors.

The marker here records the fight in the timber with the precision of a military dispatch: Reno occupies a defensive position in the timber, warriors penetrate the woods, Reno retreats. Thirty minutes of fighting compressed into three sentences. The cottonwoods do not appear in the marker, but they are still here, old and thick-trunked, growing along the river the way they have always grown, making a man feel hidden even when he is not.

See also

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