Soldiers scalped. Bodies mutilated by battle-crazed Indian warriors. A new book describes how General Custer's reckless ego led his men to needless deaths



To the thousands of indian warriors howling their murderous war cries, it was just like hunting buffalo.



Before them, hundreds of American soldiers were retreating in disarray, stumbling and dying on the grassy slope above the Little Bighorn River.



These were no longer government troopers but terrified members of a desperate mob.



The indians, on foot and on horseback, riddled them with bullets, pummelled them with stone hammers and shot them down with arrows.

Heroic: A traditional portrayal of General Custer in the 1970 film Little Big Man

One solder was hit in the back of the head with an arrow and kept riding with the shaft rooted in his skull until another arrow hit him in the shoulder and finally he toppled from his horse.



So it was that Custer's famous Last stand turned from a battle into a bloody rout. In retreat, the troopers were being herded to a fording point across the river that was to become the scene of even worse slaughter as they floundered through the fast-flowing current.



There was a 15ft drop down the bank to the river. The slap of the horses' bellies as they hit the water reminded one indian warrior, Brave Bear, of 'cannon going off'.



But the way out of the river on the other side was even more difficult - a V-shaped cut that barely accommodated a single horse.



As mounted soldiers leapt lemming-like into the river, the crossing became jammed with a desperate mass of men and horses, all of them easy targets for the warriors now gathered on both banks.



'The indians were shooting the soldiers as they came up out of the water,' Brave Bear later recalled. 'I could see lots of blood in the water.'



Private William Meyer was shot in the eye and killed instantly. Private Henry Gordon died when a bullet went through his windpipe.



Soon after entering the river, adjutant Benny Hodgson was shot through both legs and fell from his horse.



Like all the other men who followed Custer that day, he perished beneath the burning sun, his consciousness slipping away under the blows of a merciless indian assault...



The carnage of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, in the Black Hills of Montana - where 'General' George Armstrong Custer led his 750 men of the 7th U.s. Cavalry into a massacre by more than 3,000 warriors of the sioux and Cheyenne tribes - is etched into America's soul as one of the most iconic events of the romantic old West.



The traditional story has the dashing, golden-haired, buckskin-wearing Custer bravely making his Last Stand, holding out with awesomely courageous men who refused to back down against impossible odds.



Victorious: Sitting Bull pictured in 1885. The Indian leader led a furious and savage attack on American forces

Cherished as a charismatic hero with an aura of righteous determination, in defeat he achieved the greatest of victories - for he would be remembered for all time.



But the truth, as the riveting new book The Last stand by award-winning historian Nathaniel Philbrick reveals, is rather different.



Philbrick suggests that while Custer may have been brave, he was also reckless - an impetuous and vain romantic with a narrow-minded nostalgia for a vanished past, whose ego meant he ignored orders and took appalling risks with his men's lives.



He was not a general as the legend anointed him; technically, he was a lieutenant colonel, one who at West Point military school had finished bottom of his class.



His career, after some distinction in the American Civil War during the 1860s, was on the slide, so he was desperate for a quick victory to re-establish his reputation and restore his ailing finances.



As for his army, far from being craggy-faced Marlboro men, nearly half were immigrants from England, Ireland, Germany and Italy.



They were nervous, ill-trained and overly fond of the bottle. The American plains - now South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana - would have been as strange to them as the surface of the moon.



In June 1876, when Custer and his army met their grisly end, there were no farms, ranches, towns or even military bases in the plains. This was deep into indian territory.



But, two years earlier, gold had been discovered in the nearby Black Hills by none other than Custer himself during a reconnaissance mission.



As prospectors flooded into the region, the U.s. government decided it had no option but to acquire the hills - by force if necessary - from the indigenous indians.



Thus, the campaign against the sioux and Cheyenne tribes in the spring of 1876 was hardly an effort to defend innocent American pioneers from indian attack. It was an unprovoked military invasion.



While Custer and the U.S. military believed it would be a walkover, they had not reckoned on their implacable opponent, Sitting Bull, the 45-year-old sioux leader, a man whose legs were bowed from a boyhood of riding ponies and whose left foot had been maimed by a bullet in a horse-stealing raid.



Sitting Bull was determined that his people would never give up their revered lands without a bitter fight.



After a series of increasingly bloody skirmishes in the Black Hills in May and June of 1876, the U.S. military decided only a 'severe and persistent chastisement' would bring the indians to submission.



And so Custer and 750 men were sent out as an advance party from their base camp at Fort Lincoln to locate the villages of the sioux and Cheyenne responsible for the Black Hills insurrections.



Crucially, they were under strict orders not to attack until they were joined by thousands of cavalry reinforcements who would follow later.

Fictional tale: Errol Flynn stars as Custer, surrounded by the bodies of his dead soldiers

Custer's men marched in sweltering heat for five weeks amid a pungent stench of horsehair and human sweat. As they went, they raped indian women and desecrated indian graves as they found them.



It was in the early morning of June 25 that Custer's Crow indian scouts peered out into the dawn sunlight from the rocky peak known as the Crow's Nest and tried to make sense of what they could see in the far distance of the Little Bighorn Valley.



The scouts insisted they saw a 'tremendous indian village' some 15 miles away. Sure enough, camped by the Little Bighorn River was the biggest gathering of indians any white man had ever seen: 8 ,000 men, women and children.



More than a 1,000 gleaming white tepees filled an area two miles long and a quarter-of-a-mile wide, while behind them swirled a constantly moving reddish-brown sea of 15,000 ponies.



Under his command, sitting Bull had at least 3,000 warriors, all armed with bows, but many with repeat-action rifles far superior to the single-action carbines carried by the men of the 7th.



Sitting Bull's strategy was not to go looking for a fight with the white man, but to be ready to fight back if they were attacked.



Fatally, and in defiance of his orders, Custer made the decision to do just that. it was only the first of a series of disastrous tactical errors he would make that day, many prompted by Custer's ignorance of his enemy's true strength and by his misplaced fear that they would simply run away and deprive him of a glorious victory that would revive his career.



The next blunder came after an advance of only a few miles. Angered by the fast pace set by the regiment's senior captain, Colonel Fredrick Benteen, Custer ordered Benteen to take three of the regiment's companies on a reconnaissance mission.



Custer had just reduced the size of his main force by 20 per cent.



American hero: General George Custer has been revered as a brave leader, but there is evidence to show he was reckless with his men's lives

But he didn't stop there. His second-in-command, Major Marcus Reno, was ordered to take three more companies - nearly 100 men - and ride down the left bank of a tributary of the Little Bighorn river.



Custer himself led the remaining five companies down the right.



But there was a problem: unbeknown to Custer, Reno was drunk. Things quickly got worse: one of his men galloped to the top of a ridge and yelled that he could see indians running away.

'Running like devils,' he yelled, waving his hat. What the man could actually see is unclear, but Reno was quickly summoned from the other bank and given clear orders: 'Charge as soon as you find them.'



But Reno's advance over the ridge was a disaster. When he saw the awesome size of the indian encampment, he told his men to dismount and form into a skirmish line.



They advanced about 100 yards, planted their company flags in the soil and began firing their carbines.



Standing among his warriors, sitting Bull watched Reno advancing. When the soldiers dismounted, the chief thought it was a prelude to negotiations and sent his nephew One Bull and his friend Good Bear Boy out to talk.



Unarmed, and carrying a special shield purportedly blessed with spiritual powers, the pair rode towards the skirmish line.



When they were 30ft away, however, bullets smashed though both Good Bear Boy's legs. One Bull was enraged.



By this time, Sitting Bull had mounted his favourite horse, but when two bullets felled it from underneath him the Sioux leader quickly abandoned all hopes of peace.



'Now my best horse is shot,' he shouted, 'it is like they have shot me. Attack them.'



Sitting Bull's warriors - some 500 alone in the first wave - charged towards Reno's soldiers.



'They tried to cut through our skirmish line,' Sergeant John Ryan would later recall: 'We poured volleys into them, repulsing their charge and emptying many saddles.'



But it was a moment of false hope. As the Indians regrouped, Reno's soldiers soon realised the terrible danger they were in.



Even the most inexperienced among them had heard of the terrible tortures the Indians inflicted upon their prisoners, and they all knew the old soldiers' saying: 'Save the last bullet for yourself.'



Deafened by gunfire and war-cries, Reno's men began a retreat towards the river, with their drunken commander leading the way.



Observing from his position on high ground, Custer now realised his mistake in dividing his forces against such a vast number of Indians.



At once he dispatched a messenger to find Colonel Benteen and tell him to come quickly and bring ammunition packs.



Then Custer and his troops spurred forward into the fray.



No white man would ever see him, or his men, alive again.



Countless numbers died during Reno's shambolic retreat, including Bloody Knife, a U.S. scout who was shot in the back of the head, covering the panicking Reno in blood and brains.



By now, Reno's horse was plunging wildly. Waving his six-shooter, his face smeared with gore, Reno shouted: 'Any of you men who wish to make their escape, follow me.'



Among those who didn't get away was Isaiah Dorman, a translator married to a Sioux woman - and thus known to the Indians he was fighting.



His body would later be found propped up with his coffee pot and cup by his side. Both were filled with his blood.



His penis had been hacked of f and stuffed into his mouth and his testicles staked to the ground.



Another singled out for particular attention was Lieutenant Donald McIntosh, who was part-Indian and last seen surrounded by more than 25 warriors.

Lasting tribute: Visitors look at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument set on the site of Custer's Last Stand

His body could later only be identified by a distinctive button that had been given to him by his wife.



Slowly, Reno' s shattered band regrouped on a hill on the far side of the river that would later bear his name and where, eventually, they were joined by Benteen and his three companies.



One brief but abortive attempt was made to ride to Custer's aid as his main force forged down the slope of a hill called Greasy Grass, but Reno and Benteen and their companies were beaten back by scores of charging Indians and were forced to hold out for two days under siege until reinforcements finally arrived.



For that reason, no one is quite sure what happened to Custer and his men.



Indians reported that Custer was shot down early in the battle during an attempt to ford the Little Bighorn River and take thousands of Indian women and children on the other side hostage.



That would certainly explain the speed at which his force was overcome.



It would also explain the random, disorganised positions in which their bodies were later found after the remnants of the battalion retreated to what became known as Last Stand Hill, where the last of them met their end.



When the Indian warriors closed in to engage Custer's soldiers in hand-to-hand fighting, many of the troopers were said to be so confounded by their ferocity that they simply gave up, throwing their guns away and pleading for mercy.



One warrior, Standing Bear, later told his son that 'many of them lay on the ground, with their blue eyes open, waiting to be killed'.



Some were shot by rifles, other by arrows. Some were battered to death with stone clubs.



Custer's brother Tom is thought to have been the last to die, killed by the Cheyenne Yellow Nose who, having lost his rifle, was fighting with an old sabre.



As Yellow Nose charged, Tom pulled the trigger of his revolver. Click. He was out of bullets.



There were tears in the soldier's eyes, Yellow Nose recalled, but 'no sign of fear'.



When his body was found two days later, Tom Custer's skull had been pounded to the thickness of a man's hand. A hundred yards to the West lay the bodies of a third Custer brother, Boston, and the brothers' nephew, Autie Reed.



When the fighting came to an end, Custer's Last Stand was over. The reinforcements from Fort Lincoln who eventually relieved Benteen and Reno found several hundred bodies, hacked to pieces and bristling with arrows, putrefying in the summer sun.



Amid this scene of 'sickening, ghastly horror' they found Custer - who was just 36 years old - lying face-up across two of his men with a smile on his face.



Custer's body had two bullet wounds, one just below the heart and one to the left temple, the latter possibly evidence of a final act of mercy, carried out by his brother Tom, to stop a wounded Custer falling into Indian hands.



His smile in death could have been manufactured post-mortem by Indians who, despite scalping, stripping and mutilating most of the bodies, let Custer's off relatively lightly - busting his eardrums with a spiked weapon called an awl and jamming an arrow into his genitals.



Perhaps it had been a final smile of reassurance to a brother about to commit the most harrowing act of mercy.



Or maybe it was the last rueful smile of a buccaneering adventurer who finally realised that his luck had well and truly run out.



The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull And The Battle Of The Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick is published by The Bodley Head, £20. To order a copy for £15.99 (p&p free) call 0845 155 0720.