The Other Man Who Killed Custer
How a Crow scout named White Man Runs Him shaped the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but history forgot him.
The first thing he saw was dust. A thick plume, rising fast from the riverbank below. Then came the noise—shouts in Lakota and Cheyenne, the thunder of hooves, the unmistakable crack of gunfire. White Man Runs Him squinted into the sun, tightened the strap of his carbine, and nudged his pony forward. He was one of Custer’s scouts. A Crow. A man caught in the middle of a war not truly his own.
Minutes later, he would watch from a bluff as hundreds of warriors enveloped the 7th Cavalry. Later still, he would ride through the smoking battlefield, past the mutilated dead, including that of George Armstrong Custer.
For the rest of his life, White Man Runs Him would be asked about that day. How it began. What he saw. What he told Custer. He always answered carefully. He never said he killed the general.
But some say he did.
In the spring of 1876, General Philip Sheridan assembled a three-pronged campaign to trap and subdue the last free bands of Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne resisting U.S. authority. The tribes had left their reservations, following Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse into the unceded Powder River country—a declaration of independence the U.S. government refused to tolerate.
One column under General George Crook would come up from the south. Another under Colonel John Gibbon would approach from the west. The third, commanded by General Alfred Terry, included the 7th Cavalry under Custer. Terry planned to push Custer’s regiment along the Rosebud River and down toward the Little Bighorn. The terrain was wild, the logistics stretched thin. And timing was everything.
Each commander hoped for a fast, decisive fight. Custer, ever ambitious, hoped for more.
To guide their columns through hostile country, the Army hired Native scouts from rival tribes. The Crow and Arikara were ancestral enemies of the Sioux and Cheyenne. Among the Crow scouts riding with Custer were Goes Ahead, Curly, Hairy Moccasin, and White Man Runs Him.
White Man Runs Him was about thirty, lean, quiet, with a face hardened by weather and war. He had survived intertribal battles, watched white settlers flood his homelands, and now found himself working for the same government that threatened his people’s way of life. But he also understood the old enemies. He knew what was at stake.
He was paid three dollars a day, promised rations and ammunition. But his real value lay in something no payroll could measure: the ability to read a landscape, track a war party, and smell ambush in a sudden silence.
He had no illusions about Custer. The general was bold, yes, but also impatient, prideful. White Man Runs Him had watched him ride at the head of the column with theatrical flair, yellow scarf fluttering, hair oiled and brushed. He looked like a painting come to life—a man who expected history to admire him.
On the morning of June 25, 1876, the scouts saw the signs first: a massive village stretched out for miles along the Little Bighorn River. Thousands of horses. Tipis shimmering in the heat. Children playing near cookfires. And warriors everywhere.
They warned Custer. This was no ragged band of renegades. This was a full tribal alliance, drawn together by vision, prophecy, and rage. Custer listened, frowned, then shrugged. He feared the village would break and scatter if given time.
He chose to attack.
The scouts, stunned, begged him to wait. Goes Ahead later said Custer’s hands trembled. Hairy Moccasin claimed he looked pale. White Man Runs Him remained silent. He had said what needed saying.
At noon, Custer split the regiment into three. Major Reno would attack from the south. Captain Benteen would swing left. Custer himself, with five companies, would circle north.
He told the scouts they were dismissed. Free to leave. Instead, they climbed a bluff east of the valley.
They knew what was coming.
From their high perch, the Crow scouts watched it unfold like a nightmare.
Reno’s men charged into the village’s southern edge, only to be met with blistering resistance. The warriors, startled but not unprepared, rallied fast. Reno panicked, pulled back, retreated to the woods, then bolted across the river in disarray.
Meanwhile, Custer pressed on, unaware of Reno’s failure. He rode into the teeth of a force five times his size. Lakota and Cheyenne fighters swarmed out of the valley, led by Gall, Crazy Horse, Lame White Man, and Two Moon. They came on horseback and foot, in waves, with repeating rifles, bows, war clubs. They circled, surrounded, then crushed.
Custer tried to hold the high ground. His men dismounted, formed skirmish lines. They fired volley after volley. Then the ammunition ran low.
Some fled. Some knelt. Some stood and fought to the last.
In under an hour, it was over.
The scouts waited until the dust settled, then descended cautiously into the valley. The battlefield was a ruin of silence and ash. Bodies sprawled in broken lines. Horses twitched in their final breaths. Flies swarmed the open mouths of the dead.
They found Custer near the crest of a rise, surrounded by his officers. He had been shot in the chest and temple. His body was stripped but not mutilated, unlike many others. Some say the warriors had recognized him, or that Sitting Bull had ordered restraint.
White Man Runs Him dismounted, walked through the field, and said nothing.
News reached the outside world within days. The U.S. was stunned. A century after independence, the Army had suffered its greatest defeat at the hands of Indigenous warriors.
The search for blame began instantly. Reno survived and was accused of cowardice. Benteen, for hesitating. Custer, for recklessness. But few asked the scouts.
White Man Runs Him was interviewed many times. He told the same story: that Custer ignored their warnings, that the enemy was too many, that he had tried to help. But there was one moment he did not always repeat.
In 1916, speaking to a reporter from the Billings Gazette, White Man Runs Him made a cryptic aside. When asked about Custer’s final moments, he paused, then said he had seen the general’s body—and had "finished the job."
Some thought he was joking. Others believed it was true. One theory held that Custer had been wounded and begged for a clean death before mutilation. The Crow scout, out of pity or honor, gave it.
There is no proof. But the legend stuck.
In old age, White Man Runs Him performed in Wild West shows, sat beside Buffalo Bill, posed for photographs in war paint. But behind the theatrics was a man who remembered every detail. At the 50th anniversary of the battle, he rode with other surviving scouts, now old and stooped, but still watchful.
He wore a broad-brimmed hat and a dark suit. In his hand, he carried a long-stemmed pipe. On his face, there was no triumph.
He said the battle could have gone differently. That Custer might have lived. That war was always a failure of listening.
White Man Runs Him died in 1929. He was buried with honors on the Crow Reservation. No medal. No pension. Just the memory of what he had seen.
History remembered the cavalry, the defeat, the monument. It forgot the men who tried to stop it.
He was not a traitor to his people. He was not a tool of the government. He was a man who saw what others would not, and paid the price for their blindness.
How many men shape history simply by knowing what they see, and watching others ignore it?
Footnotes
Richard G. Hardorff, Indian Views of the Custer Fight (University of Oklahoma Press, 2004)
Evan S. Connell, Son of the Morning Star (North Point Press, 1984)
Stanley Vestal, New Sources of Indian History (University of Oklahoma Press, 1934)
Billings Gazette archives, July 1916 interview with White Man Runs Him
National Archives, U.S. Army Scout Contracts, 1876