Crow Agency, Montana

You're standing on Last Stand Hill, the bare rise where the final knot of Custer's command was overrun on June 25, 1876. Look at the ground. No trees, no rocks, no ditch, just open grass with warriors closing in from every side. The men had nowhere to go, so they did something that sounds insane until you see this hilltop: they shot their own horses and lay down behind the bodies. A cavalry horse is a big animal, and a row of dead ones makes a low wall, something to crouch behind and steady a carbine on while fire poured in from all directions. It was the last cover left on an open hill. For a long time it was half legend, until a grass fire in 1983 stripped the slope bare and archaeologists finally combed the ground. The clusters of horse bone turned up right where a last barricade should be, exactly where dying men would have stacked them. (Source: National Park Service, Little Bighorn Battlefield.)

It took two days for help to arrive. When General Terry's column reached Reno's survivors on June 27, 1876, scouts rode north over the ridges and stopped cold: white shapes lay scattered all across the hills. From a distance some thought they were rocks. They were bodies, roughly two hundred and ten men of Custer's command, stripped, swollen in the summer heat, most cut up past recognition. Grown soldiers wept. They had come to fight a battle, not bury a regiment, and had only a few shovels among hundreds of men, so the dead went into shallow scrapes right where they fell. Custer, found with two bullet wounds and oddly spared the mutilation that found nearly everyone else, was laid in a shallow grave beside his brother Tom. None of it held. Within a year, weather and wolves stripped the thin soil back and left bones in the open. The officers were removed in 1877, Custer reburied at West Point that October. Not until 1881 were the scattered enlisted men gathered beneath the granite memorial that still stands on this hill, and the white marble markers were later set across the slopes, one for each spot a man fell. (Source: National Park Service, Custer National Cemetery.)

Shooting the horses was not only panic, it was arithmetic. A loose horse in a close fight is a liability: it plunges and bolts, it gives away a man's position, and a trooper kept a good share of his ammunition in his saddlebags, so a horse that ran off carried his reserve cartridges away with it. Killing the animal kept the rounds in reach and stopped it from dragging him around under fire. There's a grimmer layer too. Normally every fourth man held the reins of several horses while the others fought, which already pulled guns out of the firing line. As the position collapsed, that broke down completely, horses stampeded, and the warriors took most of them. Shooting the rest was half a tactic and half the last thing men do when they know they will never ride anywhere again. One horse walked off Custer's field alive: a mount named Comanche, found two days later with seven wounds, survivor only because he was already too shot up to be of any use as a wall. The Army nursed him back and never let anyone ride him again. (Source: National Park Service.)