Brushing away the powder grimes that had settled in his face, Custer looked over the boiling sea of fury around him, peering through the smoke for some signs of Reno and Benteen, but seeing none.  Still thinking of the aid which must soon come, with cheering words to his men he renewed the battle, fighting still like a Hercules and piling heaps of victims around his very feet.

Hour after hour passed, and yet no friendly sign of Reno’s coming; nothing to be seen through the battle-smoke, except streaks of fire splitting through the misty clouds, blood flowing in rivulets under tramping feet, dying comrades, and Indians swarming around him, rending the air with their demoniacal “hi-yi-yip-yah!—­yah-hi-yah!”

The fight continued with unabated fury until late in the afternoon; men had sunk down beside their gallant leader until there was but a handful left, only a dozen, bleeding from many wounds and hot carbines in their stiffening hands.—­The day is almost done, when look!  Heaven now defend him!  The charm of his life is broken, for Custer has fallen; a bullet cleaves a pathway through his side, and as he falters another strikes his noble breast.  Like a strong oak stricken by the lightning’s bolt, shivering the mighty trunk and bending its withering branches down close to the earth, so fell Custer; but, like the reacting branches, he rises partly up again, and striking out like a fatally wounded giant he lays three more Indians dead and breaks his mighty sword on the musket of a fourth; then, with useless blade and empty pistol, falls back the victim of a dozen wounds.—­He was the last to succumb to death, and died, too, with the glory of accomplished duty on his conscience and the benediction of a grateful country on his head.  The place where fell these noblest of heroes is sacred ground, and though it be the Golgotha of a nation’s mistakes, it is bathed with precious blood, rich with the gems of heroic inheritance.

I have avoided attaching blame to any one, using only the facts that have been furnished me to show how Custer came to attack the Sioux village and how and why he died.

When the news of the terrible massacre was learned, soldiers everywhere made a pilgrimage to the sacred place, and friendly hands reared a monument on that distant spot commemorative of the heroism of Custer and his men.  They collected together all the bones and relics of the battle and piled them up in pyramidal form, where they stand in sunshine and storm, overlooking the Little Big Horn.

Soon after the news of Custer’s massacre reached us, preparations were immediately made to avenge his death.  The whole Cheyenne and Sioux tribes were in revolt, and a lively, if not very dangerous, campaign was inevitable.

Two days before receipt of the news of the massacre, Colonel Stanton, who was with the Fifth Cavalry, had been sent to Red Cloud agency, and on the evening of the receipt of the news of the Custer fight a scout arrived in our camp with a message from the colonel informing General Merritt that eight hundred Cheyenne warriors had that day left Red Cloud agency to join Sitting Bull’s hostile forces in the Big Horn country.