Weir Point Fight

By editor

Crow Agency, Big Horn County, Montana, June 1876

There is a distinction, which the National Park Service has been careful to preserve in its signage at Little Bighorn Battlefield, between Weir Point and the Weir Point Fight. They are two separate markers, about five hundred feet apart, and they describe two separate moments in the same episode. Weir Point is where Captain Thomas Weir arrived and looked through the field glasses and saw, or thought he saw, the end of Custer's command. The Weir Point Fight is where the rest of the story happened.

The marker at the Weir Point Fight reads: "This is the farthest point reached by Capt. Weir in his attempt to assist Custer. Minutes after arriving, his company was joined by Capt. Benteen's company and others. They remained about 45 minutes until mounting warrior pressure forced them back to the Reno-Benteen battlefield."

Forty-five minutes. That is the span of time in which the farthest advance of Reno and Benteen's combined command played out. It is not a long time. It was long enough.

When Weir rode north from Reno Hill without orders on the afternoon of June 25, he was followed, in sequence, by his own Company D under Lieutenant Winfield Edgerly, then by Captain Frederick Benteen with three companies, then by the pack train and its escort, and finally by Major Marcus Reno with the remainder of the command. The advance was not organized. It was more like a procession in which each element followed the one ahead of it, uncertain of the destination but unwilling to be left behind.

Weir reached the high point now called Weir Point first. He looked north through the field glasses and saw what he saw. The companies arrived behind him and deployed along the ridge. For a few minutes, the men of the 7th Cavalry held the farthest point they would reach in their attempt to find Custer.

Lieutenant Edgerly, who was at Weir Point that afternoon, later recalled the scene in a narrative collected by researcher John Carroll: "We stayed out there on the Weir Peaks about 2 hours, according to my recollection." The marker says 45 minutes; Edgerly remembered two hours. The discrepancy is not unusual for men who spent those minutes under fire and in confusion. Time moves differently when people are shooting at you.

What is not in dispute is what ended the advance. The warriors who had finished with Custer's five companies were now free, and they came south in large numbers. Standing Bear, a Minneconjou Lakota, described the moment: "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 retreat from Weir Point back to Reno Hill was not orderly. The warriors pressed hard, and the soldiers moved fast. One man was killed. The companies arrived back at Reno Hill in disorder and dug in for the night. The siege that followed lasted until the morning of June 27, when the warriors broke camp and moved south upon sighting the approach of General Alfred Terry's relief column.

The Weir Point Fight, such as it was, amounted to this: a column of cavalry advanced to a hilltop, held it for less than an hour under increasing pressure, and then retreated. No ground was taken. No prisoners were exchanged. No tactical objective was achieved. The one man who died in the retreat left no record of his name in the accounts that survive.

It is worth considering what the men on that hilltop believed they were doing. They had heard firing from the north. They believed Custer and five companies were engaged with the enemy and needed help. They advanced toward the sound of the guns, which is what soldiers are trained to do. They were stopped not by orders but by the warriors who came at them from the north, and they retreated not in panic but in the face of numbers that made further advance impossible.

Whether any of them understood, as they looked north from this hilltop, that there was no longer anyone to help, is a question that the survivors answered in different ways over the years that followed. Some said they had seen the fighting. Some said they had seen only dust and movement. Some said they had known, without being able to say how they knew, that it was already over.

Wooden Leg, the Northern Cheyenne warrior who fought at the Little Bighorn, described the warriors' perspective on the afternoon's events in his account recorded by Thomas Marquis: "After Custer's soldiers were all killed, we went back to fight the soldiers on the hill. There were many of us. The soldiers had dug holes. We could not get at them easily."

The soldiers on the hill were the men who had retreated from Weir Point. They dug their rifle pits and held on through the night and through the following day, June 26, while the warriors kept up a long-range fire from Sharpshooter Ridge and the surrounding high ground. They ran low on water and sent men crawling down to the river under fire to fill canteens. They tended their wounded as best they could. They waited.

On the morning of June 27, the firing stopped. The warriors broke camp and moved south. General Terry's column arrived that afternoon and found the survivors alive. The Custer battlefield, three miles to the north, held 210 bodies.

The Weir Point Fight is not a famous episode in the history of the Little Bighorn. It does not have the drama of Reno's charge or the mystery of Custer's last stand. It is a footnote to a footnote: the story of what happened when a handful of cavalry companies tried to do something that was already too late to do, and were turned back by the same force that had just destroyed a third of their regiment.

The marker is there because the place deserves to be marked. Men were here. One of them died here. The rest retreated and lived. That is the whole of it.

See also

• Weir Point Fight at Crow Agency, Big Horn County (Little Bighorn Battlefield, National Park Service, erected c. 2000)
• Weir Point at Crow Agency, Big Horn County -- the observation point where Weir first arrived
• The Reno-Benteen Defense at Crow Agency, Big Horn County -- the hilltop position to which the troops retreated