Distinctly Montana Magazine

45 w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m start singing mourning songs and deserted their posts shortly thereafter. Finally, Bradley and Terry split up, the former to examine the ridge and the strange objects, the latter to cautiously probe the apparently empty Indian village. In the village, they found hast- ily abandoned cookware and other sundries. Musician George Berry of Company E reported seeing "lodge poles, buffalo robes, pots and pans galore, and in one place I saw a stack of new milk pans" among the camp. Berry theorized that the milk pans had been stolen from settlers in the Black Hills, since the gold rush in that region had recently broken out in Hunkpapa territory, the ancestral homeland of the Lakota. If the hasty disassembly of the camp wasn't sign enough, they soon found other evidence that the unthinkable had occurred. Here and there lay trophies: boots, saddles, cavalry clothing, and, finally, three severed heads and mallets covered in bloody hair. Near the stream, a pair of tepees was discovered, with sev- en Sioux warriors laid inside them in full regalia, their horses arranged in a circle around the lodges. Following the river, they began to find more bodies, badly mutilated and full of arrows. The stench was overwhelming. "After passing the camp we soon came to the ground that Ma- jor Reno and his command fought over, and wherever we saw a batch of feathered arrows sticking up we knew that there the body of a trooper lay, especially those who had life in them after they had fallen," remembered Berry. As they marched on to relieve Reno's men, the true extent of the horrors they were to face became clear. Lieutenant Bradley, scouting ahead, discovered what the white shapes on the ridge truly were: the bodies of the men under the command of Custer, stripped of their clothes. The darker objects they had taken for unskinned buffalo were the men's horses, fallen where they had been struck, some used as desperate makeshift breastworks by their doomed riders. Accounts from those who buried the dead vary widely—some found bodies stripped but untouched, others encountered re- mains maimed beyond recognition. Historian Thom Hatch suggests this variance reflects different areas of the battlefield rather than conflicting memories. Each tribe had its own way of marking defeated enemies. The Lakota slashed the thighs of their enemies, while the Cheyenne left the bodies of their enemies face down to avoid bad luck. Heads, legs, hands, fin- gers, and scalps were removed and strewn about the battlefield. Skulls were crushed or filled with arrows or bullets at close range. Eyes were shot out. Members were removed. Sgt. John Hammon wrote of finding Private John Armstrong's head stuck on a pole. Even some horses were mutilated. Captain Tom Custer, brother of the General, was scalped, his head smashed in and then filled with arrows, his arm shot and broken, and his belly slashed open, an injury out of which "his entrails protruded," according to Lieutenant Godfrey. George Armstrong Custer was intact but no less dead. Some controversy persisted over the state of his body. Sensationalist accounts in the first decade held that his heart had been cut out by Rain-in-the-Face, who had threatened to do just that to the Son of the Morning Star. Others, like Godfrey, insisted that Custer, though stripped naked, was untouched and almost ap- peared to be in repose. In an 1896 interview, Godfrey held that "The General was not mutilated at all; he laid on his back, his upper arms on the ground, the hands folded or so placed as to cross the body above the stomach; his position was natural and one that we had seen hundreds of times while taking cat naps during halts on the march." Elsewhere, he wrote that Custer was found with "his right forearm and hand supporting his head in an inclining posture like one resting or asleep." In short, he had the look of someone who had "fallen asleep and enjoyed peace- ful dreams." Captain Keogh

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