The eye-witness answer to the eternal question...
Who Killed Custer?

YOU HEAR many names put forward as the man (or woman) who killed George Armstrong Custer -- from Sioux war chief Rain In The Face to Cheyenne war chief Two Moon to Sioux woman warrior Moving Robe.

None of these esteemed warriors actually killed Custer, though, based on the eye-witness record of the battle.

To find who really killed Custer -- or at least identify the most likely suspects -- it is crucial to know the appearance of Custer and the other officers in his command on June 25, 1876.

Boiled down, eye-witness Edward Godfrey's account of what Custer wore establishes that the strongest visual clue for Custer was his ironically named sorrel horse, "Victory." There were as many as five officers on the field that day in buckskin, but only one on a sorrel horse with four white socks.

Peter Thompson, the last Seventh Cavalry survivor to see Custer alive, noted Custer's "sorrel horse" and added that Custer was wearing "a broad brimmed cream colored hat on his head, the brim of which was turned up on the right side and fastened by a small hook and eye to its crown. This gave him opportunity to sight his rifle while riding. His rifle lay horizontally in front of him."

Unhorsed, Custer was considerably harder to identify. Custer -- the man the Sioux called Long Hair -- had recently cut his hair short, and both Thompson and the Arikara scout, Soldier, said Custer had taken off his buckskin coat and was in his shirt sleeves. Unfortunately, any number of Seventh Cavalry officers could fit this general description: an officer in shirt sleeves with short hair.

However, Custer's wounds may help identify his killer. Most observers agreed with Godfrey and Seventh Cavalry surgeon Dr. H.R. Porter that Custer was shot twice, once through the ribs below the heart, and once through the left temple. It is also useful to know that unlike most of the Seventh Cavalry dead, Custer was not badly mutilated.

Armed with this information, we at Astonisher.com have canvassed our 100 Voices -- the world's largest and most complete collection of eye-witness accounts of the Battle of the Little Bighorn -- and assembled Astonisher.com 's "Who Killed Custer -- Top Ten List."

Part 2 -- And The Winner is...

Based on the eye-witness record, it appears Sioux warrior White Cow Bull was the man who killed George Armstrong Custer.

The next most likely candidates are an Anonymous Boy, Sioux warrior Spotted Calf and Cheyenne warrior Brave Bear. The complete "Who Killed Custer - Top Ten List" is displayed at right.

Our #1 guy, White Cow Bull, doesn't just win it on points; he really looks like "Custer's conqueror." Here is his story...

White Cow Bull, a 28 year-old Oglala Sioux warrior, said he was hanging out in the Cheyenne camp that Sunday morning with a Cheyenne buddy named Roan Bear.

"He [Roan Bear] was a Fox warrior, belonging to one of that tribe's soldier societies, and was on guard duty that morning," White Cow Bull recalled to David Humphreys Miller. "He was stationed by the Shahiyela [Cheyenne] medicine tepee in which the tribe kept their Sacred Buffalo Head."

When word of Reno's attack on the Hunkpapa end of the village swept the Cheyenne camp, White Cow Bull watched Cheyenne war chief Two Moon lead his men out to meet the American attackers "at a gallop," but neither he nor Roan Bear joined the departing warriors because of Roan Bear's duty to guard the Sacred Buffalo Head.

The two of them had just "settled down to telling each other some of our brave deeds in the past" when another alarm ran through the camp, this time announcing that the Americans were charging to attack the village at Medicine Tail Coulee across the river from the Cheyenne camp.

Happily considering themselves free to join the fight against this immediate threat, White Cow Bull and Roan Bear ran to the river, where they found Bobtailed Horse, White Shield, Calf and a couple other warriors, most without guns.

On the other side of the Little Bighorn were the first white soldiers White Cow Bull had ever seen -- 200-plus Seventh Cavalry troopers, who charged to the river's edge in hot pursuit of a handful of Indians who whipped their ponies across the ford moments ahead of the Americans.

White Cow Bull and the other Cheyenne and Sioux defenders threw up a light screen of fire to cover the fleeing Indians' escape. The American soldiers halted on the opposite shore and gathered there for a few minutes until a man in a buckskin jacket "shouted something and they all came charging at us across the ford."

White Cow Bull said: "I gave the man in the buckskin jacket my attention."

Bobtailed Horse fired first and White Cow Bull saw a soldier on a gray horse fall out of the saddle and hit the water.

White Cow Bull said: "The other soldiers were shooting at us now. The man who seemed to be the soldier chief was firing his heavy rifle fast. I aimed my repeater at him and fired. I saw him fall out of his saddle and hit the water."

Then an amazing thing happened. White Cow Bull said as soon as the officer on the "sorrel horse with... four white stockings" hit the water, Custer's charge came to an immediate and complete halt in the middle of the river. White Cow Bull said Custer's men "all reined up their horses and gathered around where he had fallen."

White Cow Bull said he saw several American soldiers quickly dismount in the middle of the river and apparently pull the fallen officer's body out of the water.

White Cow Bull said the officer he shot in the middle of the Little Bighorn was wearing buckskin and riding a "sorrel horse with... four white stockings." He said the officer had a mustache and a "big hat" and was "firing his heavy rifle fast" as he led the charge across the Little Bighorn.

Based on the eye-witness accounts of Custer's appearance and gear on June 25, 1876 by Seventh Cavalry survivors Edward Godfrey and Peter Thompson, the man White Cow Bull shot can only be George A. Custer.

All the major points of White Cow Bull's story are supported by other survivors' accounts (witnesses are in parenthesis, with links to supporting portions of their eye-witness accounts of the battle):

• Custer led his men down Medicine Tail Coulee to attack the village on the other side of the Little Bighorn River (witnessed by: White Man Runs Him, Goes Ahead, Curley, Hairy Moccasin, Pretty Shield, Peter Thompson)...
• Custer and his men were hotly pursuing a small band of Indians when they reached the river (witnessed by: Foolish Elk)...
• Custer and his men encountered Indian fire from the other side of the river when they reached the Little Bighorn (witnessed by: Curley, Anonymous Sixth Infantry Sergeant)...
• Custer and his men paused briefly on the far side of the river before charging forward to attack the huge Indian village (witnessed by: Peter Thompson)...
• The ford where Custer tried to cross the Little Bighorn was very thinly defended by the Sioux and Cheyenne (witnessed by: Bobtailed Horse, White Shield, He Dog, Wooden Leg)...
• White Cow Bull was one of the few warriors there when Custer charged into the river and the Indians opened fire (witnessed by: Bobtailed Horse)...
• Two or three Seventh Cavalry troopers were shot out of the saddle and fell in the Little Bighorn before Custer's men could get across the river (witnessed by: Curley, Pretty Shield)...
• Custer was the second one shot while crossing the Little Bighorn River and "fell in the water" (witnessed by: Pretty Shield)...
• Custer's charge at Medicine Tail Coulee was suddenly repulsed mid-river by the Cheyenne and Sioux defenders (witnessed by: George Glenn)...

In fact, the only point of difficulty with White Cow Bull's story involves a couple small details; e.g., Peter Thompson and Soldier both said Custer had taken off his buckskin jacket and was riding in his shirt sleeves, while White Cow Bull said the officer he shot was wearing a buckskin jacket.

But who knows? Thompson and Soldier's observations were made as much as a half hour earlier, and maybe Custer put his jacket back on for the attack. Either way, Custer was the only Seventh Cavalry officer on a sorrel horse with four white socks.

Rain In The Face's Anonymous Youth and Sioux warrior Spotted Calf receive second and third consideration on the Astonisher.com Top Ten List because of the early timing of their kills, but it is unlikely that either of them actually killed Custer because neither had a gun, and Custer apparently died from bullet wounds.

Part 3 -- The "most dangerous"...

Our #4, Brave Bear, was the most dangerous of the top four warriors on the Astonisher.com List. A battle-hardened Southern Cheyenne Dog Soldier, Brave Bear was completely capable of killing Custer in close combat (and was in fact given the honorary title of Custer's Killer at the last Great Council on the Little Bighorn sponsored by wealthy Philadelphian Rodman Wanamaker in 1909), but Brave Bear's kill came late in the chaotic final phase of the battle, when anyone could have been riding a sorrel horse.

Furthermore, there is no eye-witness support for the theory that Custer was alive and leading his men after his initial charge across the ford at Medicine Tail Coulee faltered. Let me repeat that. There is no eye-witness support for the theory that Custer was alive and leading his men after the very beginning of the Custer fight, when his charge at the head of 200-plus Seventh Cavalry troopers was suddenly halted and repulsed mid-river by less than a dozen warriors (more on this later).

Most Indian warriors, from Crazy Horse to He Dog to Standing Bear to Little Soldier, admitted the Sioux and Cheyenne did not recognize Custer during the battle, or even know that Custer was the Bluecoats' commander. Several warriors like Foolish Elk, Left Hand, White Shield and Lazy White Bull saw officers in buckskin whom they later believed were Custer, but at the time no one knew, and those who thought they knew -- like Bad Soup -- actually had it wrong.

So the whole legend of Custer heroically leading his men to the end rests on one eye-witness account, that of the 19-year old Crow scout, Curley. In his first story of the battle, published in the Helena Daily Herald on July 15, 1876, Curley said, "Custer remained alive through the greater part of the engagement, animating his men to determined resistance; but about an hour before the close of the fight received a mortal wound."

That's it. That's the rock on which the whole heroic Custer legend has been built. Not much of a rock, especially when you consider that Curley admitted he was quite sensibly hiding in a "deep ravine" for most of the Custer fight, where he could see nothing of the battle, let alone whether Custer was leading his men. Curley was frank about this: he told the Helena Daily Herald that he was "not well informed" about most of the battle.

In fact, the only portion of the battle that Curley personally witnessed was at the river at the very beginning of the Custer fight -- when he saw two Seventh Cavalry troopers blown out of the saddle trying to charge across the Little Bighorn -- and that's also when Curley said Custer was shot.

In the same breath (the same sentence, actually) where he told the Americans what they so badly wanted to hear -- that "Custer remained alive through the greater part of the engagement" -- Curley also slipped the Americans the cold, hard truth: that Custer was mortally wounded "an hour before the end of the fight."

Since both Indians like He Dog and Americans like George Herendeen agreed that the Custer fight lasted about "an hour," Curley wasn't saying Custer was killed at the end on Last Stand Hill at all, but rather the opposite!

What Curley actually said was that Custer died at the outset of the Custer fight, about the time Custer charged across the Little Bighorn and White Cow Bull shot an officer on a "sorrel horse with... four white stockings"!

Part 4 -- Custer "hit the water..."

When you realize that Curley and White Cow Bull and Pretty Shield were telling the truth and Custer was killed at the beginning (in the Little Bighorn River), not at the end (on Last Stand Hill), the Battle of the Little Bighorn suddenly makes sense.

Consider what happened next -- right after White Cow Bull said he shot an officer on a "sorrel horse with... four white stockings" and Pretty Shield said Custer "fell in the water." As quickly and completely as if you'd thrown a switch, Custer disappeared from all further eye-witness accounts of the battle and his men simultaneously lost all strategic direction.

Custer's men continued to show some tactical capacity for a while longer -- e.g., their charge 20 minutes or so later to drive back the Indians gathering lower down on Calhoun Ridge -- but there is no further evidence of any strategy on their part, or any will to press the offensive Custer had thrown his men into so enthusiastically mere minutes before.

Nor did Custer's men do what the circumstances desperately demanded, which was to reunite with the troops under Marcus Reno and/or Frederick Benteen. History demonstrates this was their only chance for survival, but after the charge at Medicine Tail Coulee was thrown back, Custer's men didn't continue the attack, and they didn't maneuver for reinforcement either.

They just presented themselves on the doorstep of the largest Plains Indian village in recorded history and obligingly waited there for the Indians to gather enough force to drive them like a nail, strong circumstantial evidence that Custer was still alive at this point, but so badly wounded that his men feared that he would die if they moved him.

If Custer was still compos mentis and commanding his men, it is impossible to imagine him meekly allowing a handful of defenders to both thwart his attack on the village AND prevent any him from taking any further action to support or reinforce Reno, especially since he already knew from four of his scouts -- Hairy Moccasin, Goes Ahead, White Man Runs Him and Fred Gerard -- that the 112 Seventh Cavalry troopers he sent with Reno badly needed his support.

These were 112 of CUSTER's men, 112 men Custer had ordered to charge the combined Sioux and Cheyenne village on the Little Bighorn River, an encampment White Man Runs Him called "the biggest Indian camp I have ever seen." From the intelligence he had received, Custer knew Reno and his men were out-numbered by more than 10-to-1. Without the support Custer had promised them, these men were on a suicide mission.

White Man Runs Him, Standing Bear and George Glenn agreed that Custer allowed a considerable length of time to pass between Reno's charge and his own attack on the village (possible evidence of Custer's ruthless glory seeking), and Mrs. Spotted Horn Bull also noted the gap between the two attacks, saying Reno had attacked "too soon" (she did not know that Reno was merely following Custer's explicit orders).

By the time Custer led the charge down Medicine Tail Coulee, the time for waiting was over. The battle was raging and Custer knew from his scouts that Reno's men were literally getting annihilated. He had asked these 112 men to bleed for him; now they were bleeding and they badly needed the support he promised them.

At this point, it was imperative for Custer to immediately support his men, as every observer (Marcus Reno, Frederick Benteen, William Edgerly, William Slaper, the Findings of the Marcus Reno Court of Inquiry, etc.) agreed Custer promised he would. So despite what the U.S. Park Service says in its battlefield brochures, Custer did not have the luxury right then of cautiously sitting and waiting for 20 minutes or so to see if Benteen showed up before committing to further strategic action.

And frankly, having already sent Reno charging into the unsuspecting Indian village murdering women and children as he went, setting fire to the village and shooting at One Bull -- the man Sitting Bull quickly deputized to ride under his shield and ask for parley with the American attackers -- there really was no other course of action left for Custer but to attack.

So what happened? This was the moment on the battlefield that Custer lived for, when everything was on the line and great glory was there to be won. Why didn't Custer continue his attack at Medicine Tail Coulee when he had the element of surprise and a virtually undefended ford in front of him?

Or alternately, why didn't Custer maneuver to join forces with Reno and reinforce his beleaguered command when Custer knew from FOUR of his scouts that Reno's men were in big trouble?

This is the central enigma of the Battle of the Little Bighorn -- why did Custer apparently freeze at the crucial moment in the battle? Did Custer lose his nerve? Or perhaps his mind?

The eye-witness account of Medal of Honor winner Peter Thompson, who saw Custer at the river minutes before Custer tried to attack the Indian village, suggests that Custer may indeed have "lost it" at the end, but there is no hint of cowardice in the eye-witness record of Custer.

Part 5 -- Custer did NOT freeze...

Whatever else you want to say about George Armstrong Custer, he was not a man to freeze at the crucial moment of a battle, and from the eye-witness record it appears that initially Custer did NOT freeze.

All four of the Crow scouts with Custer -- White Man Runs Him, Hairy Moccasin, Goes Ahead and Curley -- testified that Custer led his men down Medicine Tail Coulee to attack the Indian village on the other side of the Little Bighorn River.

Curley said that when the Indian village came in sight, "Custer appeared very much elated, and ordered the bugles to sound a charge." Seventh Cavalry trooper Peter Thompson also described how he and the rest of Custer's command began to charge on sight of the village.

Brule Sioux warrior Foolish Elk, who was sitting in front of his lodge across the river in the Indian village, caught sight of the American soldiers at the same moment. He remembered, "a trumpet blared and they began to gallop," while Hunkpapa Sioux observer Mrs. Spotted Horn Bull remembered "the music of the bugle" as Custer's men rode "down to the river to where the attack was to be made."

Excused from further service by Custer, the Crow scouts parted company with the American soldiers at this point, but all four continued down to the river independently, bent on their own dark business. From the banks of the Little Bighorn, and subsequently from the bluffs above while they were fleeing for their lives, the four Crow scouts caught some of the last living glimpses of Custer's doomed command.

Here are their primary memories. White Man Runs Him said Custer "tried to cross the river... but was unable to do so. This was the last time we saw Custer." Curley, who was not with the other three, said much the same thing. "They (the Sioux) would not let the soldiers cross the river," Curley recalled in 1916.

When Custer tried to cross the Little Bighorn, Curley said he saw "two of Custer's men killed who fell into the stream." A short time later -- before the Indians had marshaled enough strength to cross the river and drive the Americans back -- Goes Ahead heard Custer's men fire "two volleys."

Unfortunately, confusion has long clung to Custer's attack at Medicine Tail Coulee, primarily because of a series of battlefield interviews given by Hunkpapa Sioux war chief Gall on the tenth anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Gall essentially said that the second, "Custer fight" portion of the battle didn't begin until he arrived, and denied that Custer ever charged to the river.

Gall didn't know what happened at Medicine Tail Coulee, though, because Gall wasn't there. When Custer led the charge at Medicine Tail Coulee, Gall was still miles away fighting the troops under Reno who had murdered his family. According to an 1883 account by Hunkpapa Sioux observer, Mrs. Spotted Horn Bull (Pretty White Buffalo Woman), Gall didn't get into the Custer fight until after Custer's men had been driven back from the river.

Mrs. Spotted Horn Bull described both Custer's failed attack at Medicine Tail Coulee, and how Gall subsequently entered the Custer fight, following Crazy Horse and Crow King across the Little Bighorn River and up the ravines on the other side to engage Custer's men, who had by then retreated to Calhoun Hill.

The Seventh Cavalry's four Crow scouts were there at that decisive moment, though, and in a 1919 battlefield interview with Gen. H.L. Scott, White Man Runs Him declared emphatically, "I know for sure that Custer went right to the river bank. I saw him go that far. The Sioux were right across the river."

White Cow Bull said the American soldiers paused briefly on the far side of the river, and Peter Thompson agreed. Moments before the attack, Thompson saw Custer riding along the banks of the Little Bighorn, quickly scouting (as was his habit) for a better place to cross the river.

Crow scout Curley's first eye-witness account on July 15, 1876 indicated that the problem with crossing at the ford at Medicine Tail Coulee was "it only could be done in column of fours," meaning the American soldiers had to ride in relatively tight formation which made them more vulnerable to enemy fire, a dead-on observation, as it turned out.

It was at this moment, when Custer was taking a quick personal look at his options for crossing the Little Bighorn, that Thompson and Custer more-or-less simultaneously stumbled upon one of Seventh Cavalry's Crow scouts in the midst of an apparent war crime. To his eternal credit, Custer took immediate action. According to Thompson, Custer rode straight to the Crow scout and "commence[d] to talk to him" by sign language, whereupon the scout released the Sioux woman he had roped.

Once he'd dealt with the Crow scout and the tethered squaw, Custer motioned to Thompson and his companion, Pvt. James Watson, to follow him, and then rode quickly back along the river bank the way he came. Thompson and Watson were on foot, though, so fortunately (as it turned out for them) they couldn't keep up with Custer, who spurred "Victory" back to his 200-plus men waiting at the ford downriver, and defeat.

White Cow Bull saw Custer across the river when he returned from this quick scout, although he didn't know who it was. He said: "The man in the buckskin jacket seemed to be the leader of these soldiers, for he shouted something and they all came charging at us across the ford."

From the eye-witness accounts of Cheyenne warriors White Shield and Bobtailed Horse, as well as the Oglala Sioux warrior White Cow Bull, we know that the ford where Custer tried to cross the Little Bighorn was very thinly defended, as Custer likely hoped and anticipated.

So how could less than a dozen warriors (many like White Shield without a gun) turn back the charge of more than two hundred Seventh Cavalry troopers with Custer in the lead?

Part 6 -- Custer "died in the water..."

Well, based on the eye-witness record of the battle, the answer is easy!

Before the vanguard of the charge got across the river, Custer took a slug in the ribs below the heart from the repeating rifle of the Oglala Sioux marksman, White Cow Bull, and toppled from his saddle into the river, either dead or so badly wounded that he was not a factor for the remainder of the battle.

This is not the heroic Custer story that the Americans like to tell themselves (the one full of buckskin bravado to the bitter end), but a few of the Indians -- supported by a few Seventh Cavalry survivors -- have been trying to tell a different story from the beginning.

In his first eye-witness account of the battle, Curley said he saw "two of Custer's men killed who fell into the stream." In his account of the same moment in the battle, White Cow Bull -- who was much closer to the action than the furtive Curley -- said the second trooper shot mid-river was an officer on "a sorrel with... four white stockings" -- in other words, Custer himself, although White Cow Bull didn't know it at the time!

Crow chronicler Pretty Shield, who gave the Crow scouts' candid, for-family version of what happened that day, told the same story from the Seventh Cavalry side. She said both Goes Ahead (her husband) and Half Yellow Face (her uncle) told her that Custer was shot at the outset of the battle -- not the end -- and "died in the water of the Little Bighorn."

White Cow Bull said the Seventh Cavalry's charge stopped the moment the officer on the sorrel horse was blown "out of his saddle and hit the water," whereupon the American troopers "all reined up their horses and gathered around where he had fallen," exactly the sort of rudderless behavior that characterized Custer's men for the last hour of their lives.

According to Seventh Cavalry survivor George Glenn, the physical evidence the day after the battle supported what White Cow Bull said. Glenn, who went over the battlefield on burial detail, said: "We found [the] trail [of Custer's charge] going down in the river, but it seems that Custer got repulsed before he got across the river ... [because] we never found any trail of him on the other side of the river."

White Cow Bull said two American soldiers besides Custer were shot out of the saddle and fell into the waters of the Little Bighorn. Pretty Shield agreed and named one of the dead as Mitch Bouyer, Custer's half Sioux interpreter for the Crow scouts. White Cow Bull saw a "small man on a dark horse," who was probably Bouyer, riding beside the officer on a "sorrel horse with... four white stockings," but White Cow Bull did not see him shot.

Both Seventh Infantry scout Thomas LaForge and Arapaho warrior Sage told a story that seems to fit like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle with the story told by White Cow Bull and Pretty Shield. Essentially, Sage and LaForge said Bouyer was badly wounded at the river, but did not die, and LaForge added that Bouyer was shot in the back, which could explain why White Cow Bull didn't see it -- it happened after gunsmoke had obscurred the river and Custer's men were pulling back to the far shore.

LaForge and Sage said Bouyer subsequently struggled to the edge of the river where he was discovered by the Sioux after the battle, begged to be killed, and was finally accomodated by the Sioux before they threw his body into the river. Sage spoke of two wounded Americans found at the edge of the river who were killed by the Indians -- Bouyer and "a soldier with a bugle and a carbine" -- and Curley also identified one of the Americans killed at the river as "the bugler."

According to Reno's official report on the burial of the dead, dated July 5, 1876, the Americans never found Bouyer's body, but LaForge noted that "Boyer's vest, made of the skin of a spotted calf, was found near the river after the battle." And according to George Glenn, the Seventh Cavalry burial detail found "the body nearest the river was that of the chief trumpeter [Henry] Voss."

August DeVoto, another Seventh Cavalry survivor who was also on burial detail, recalled they found Voss "all alone and stark naked. His body was in a kneeling position and his back was stuck full of arrows."

Part 7 -- Everyone who could fee was fleeing...

Peter Thompson -- who was on foot and separated from his comrades because his exhausted horse "entirely played out" charging down Medicine Tail Coulee -- apparently caught a glimpse of Custer's men shortly after Custer fell.

Moments before he and his companion, James Watson, decided that trying to rejoin Custer was an exceptionally bad idea, and turned around and fled to join Reno instead, Thompson saw Custer's command on the banks of the Little Bighorn across from the village, "drawn up in battle line, two men deep." Significantly, Thompson did not see Custer himself.

At the same time, while Custer's men were still dismounted on the banks of the Little Bighorn across from the huge Indian village, Crow scout Goes Ahead saw and heard Custer's troops fire two controlled volleys. Two volleys were also heard by some of the troopers fighting for their lives with Reno a couple miles away, including John Burkman and Edward Godfrey, both of whom later believed the double volley was intended as a distress signal or a location indicator.

After some skirmishing at the ford where Custer fell, a rapidly growing Indian force commanded by Cheyenne war chiefs Comes In Sight (brother of the reknowned Cheyenne woman warrior, Buffalo Calf Road Woman), Contrary Big Belly, Yellow Nose and Lame White Man crossed the river and drove Custer's decapitated command back in disarray. The Americans abandoned the body of New York Herald correspondent Mark Kellogg "a stone's throw" from the Little Bighorn, but Cheyenne warrior Hanging Wolf saw them rescue a trooper whose horse had been shot and carry him with them when they retreated.

Everyone who could fee was fleeing now. The Crow scouts were all whipping their horses for the horizon, and Custer's Arikara scout Black Hawk was already long gone. It was at this moment that John Martin, who was carrying Custer's last order -- the famous "Benteen. Big village. Be quick. Bring packs." message penned by Custer's adjutant Lt. W.W. Cooke -- looked back from "high ground"and glimpsed Custer's men for the last time. He said he "saw Custer's command over on the flat and Indians over in the village riding toward the river and waving buffalo hides. The battalion appeared to be falling back from the river."

Peter Thompson and James Watson were running for their lives too, and when Thompson looked back at his comrades in Custer's command for the last time he saw them under heavy attack on the east side of the river. He said, "hordes of savages had gained a footing on the right bank of the river and had driven the soldiers back a short distance."

Thompson's eye-witness account is particularly interesting because he described the Indians using a clever "stationary wheel" technique to turn a kind of living Gattling gun against the American soldiers. Thompson said the Cheyenne and Sioux warriors, who were all mounted by this time, rode in a circle, firing when they were closest to the soldiers and then reloading while they were circling around in the distant part of the wheel away from the firing point.

It was about this time, when the Indians had crossed the river and begun to drive Custer's men back up the hill, that Rain In The Face's Anonymous Youth and Spotted Calf made their kills. All the rest of the possible Custer kills on the Astonisher.com "Who Killed Custer -- Top Ten List" occurred after this, in the chaotic final phases of the battle, when the eye-witness record says Custer was already either dead or so badly wounded he was no longer a factor.

Part 8 -- "A Whirlwind..."

Meanwhile, news of Custer's attack on the Cheyenne end of the village ran like "a whirlwind" through the Sioux and Cheyenne warriors who were by then besieging Reno in the bluffs across the river between two and three miles away.

Thousands of them -- including the Sioux war chiefs Crazy Horse, Crow King, Gall and Runs The Enemy -- hastily turned to confront Custer's men, who had by then retreating along the ridge above the river. Gall said, "The Indians were in coulees behind and in front of Custer as he moved up the ridge to take position, and were just As Many As the Grass..."

The Helena Daily Herald wrote, "Curley says the firing was more rapid than anything he had ever conceived of, being a continuous roll, like (as he expressed it), "The Snapping of the Threads in the Tearing of a Blanket." Medal of Honor winner Peter Thompson also described the incredible din as the battle ignited to full fury. "The noise gradually became louder and louder until it became indescribably and almost unbearable to the ears of civilized persons," recalled Thompson.

In the battle that followed, many warriors in the combined Indian force described the Seventh Cavalry troopers as "drunk" or what we might today term demoralized and/or shell shocked, and several described suicides -- even group suicides -- by Custer's men. This breakdown of command and tactical cohesion among the Americans further demonstrates that Custer was no longer "animating his men to determined resistance," as Curley put it.

The desperate men in Custer's rudderless command may have spent that last hour of their lives waiting for the steely Frederick Benteen, whom Custer had summoned in his last order, or they may have simply had no idea what to do with the mortal mess Custer had gotten them into. Either way, Benteen was never coming.

Instead they got Lame White Man and Brave Bear and Yellow Nose and Two Moon and Wooden Leg and Gall and Crow King and Rain In The Face and Red Horse and American Horse and Moving Robe and Low Dog and He Dog and Hump and Charging Hawk and Little Hawk and Flying Hawk and Waterman and Short Bull and Lazy White Bull and One Bull and Sitting Bull and the greatest 19th century Native American mujahidin, Crazy Horse... all without any help from the prostrate form of George A. Custer, which his men carried with them like a proverbial dead weight until nearly the end.

Part 9 -- Custer's men, all alone at the end...

When you break it down, there are two very different stories of what happened at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

One of them -- the Consensus View accepted by most American writers and taught to virtually every American child for over a century -- has Custer dying at the end on Last Stand Hill.

Unfortunately, as discussed above, there is no eye-witness support for this theory at all. It therefore rests entirely on the circumstantial evidence of where Custer's corpse was found, which is meaningless under the circumstances.

As Seventh Cavalry surgeon Dr. H.R. Porter and Private Edward Pigford vividly indicated, the Americans were terrified of falling into the hands of the "savages," fearing that they would be tortured in life and mutilated in death. There is no doubt that Custer's retreating men would have carried their fallen leader with them, dead or alive, and he was probably badly wounded but still alive at that point.

Furthermore, the Accepted Consensus View of the Battle of the Little Bighorn is unable to rationalize numerous important aspects of the battle, such as why Custer abandoned his attack at Medicine Tail Coulee in the middle of the river, why Custer didn't directly reinforce Reno, how and when Custer was killed, why Custer's men fired two apparent signal volleys at the very beginning of the Custer fight before they were under heavy pressure from the Indian forces, what happened to Curley, etc.

In short, America's Accepted Consensus View of the Battle of the Little Bighorn is riddled with Ptolmeic problems, and simply doesn't square with the facts of the battle from the eye-witness record. The eye-witness record says Custer was killed at the beginning of the Custer fight when he and his 200-plus men tried to charge across the ford at Medicine Tail Coulee to attack the huge Indian village on the other side of the Little Bighorn.

Nor are the problems with the Accepted Consensus View restricted to Custer. The story the Americans teach their children also makes a shameful hash of the Seventh Cavalry's Indian scouts -- see The Twisted Saga of the Seventh Cavalry's Unsung Scouts for more info.

Then there's the other explanation for the Battle of the Little Bighorn: the eye-witness explanation. White Cow Bull's account of shooting an officer on a "sorrel horse with... four white stockings" -- who can only be Custer -- at the beginning of the battle is supported in its various parts by a dozen other eye-witness accounts from Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow and American surivors of the battle. It also makes sense and simultaneously resolves all of the persistent problems with the Accepted Consensus View cited above.

So it turns out the eye-witness record of the Battle of the Little Bighorn reveals that the cherished American picture of Custer standing heroically erect in buckskin at the end is a lie, the sort of big, self-serving lie that Americans love to tell themselves, then (during America's illegal, immoral, atrocity-laced invasion of the Great Sioux Nation) and now (during America's illegal, immoral, atrocity-laced invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq).

Check it out. Each thumbnail is linked to the related portion of the supporting eye-witness account...