Terry. Saluting with parade-ground formality, he approached to report that they had examined the strangelooking objects along the hills to the east—197 dead men of duster’s force, stripped to the bloated, discoloring skin, most of them unrecognizable, the dark objects their horses, all dead for two, three days.

Early in the morning of the twenty-eighth, Reno ordered Captain McDougall and his Troop B to the Indian camps to search out implements to bury the dead. With what he could scare up—very little—the captain crossed the river in the bright morning sun. Spreading his force out in a sad skirmish line, he moved up from the river, searching through hollows and clumps of sagebrush. They found them, most of the men dead in the ravine. From a distance it was plain they had used the upper sides of the cut bank as a sort of breastwork, sliding down as they were struck. Bloated and blackened as the naked bodies were, the faces like the wounds, puffed and swollen, oozing and flyblown, few were recognizable. The captain had a record kept of those who could be identified, pathetically few, although he had known many of the troopers for years. One definite identification was a sergeant because he had one sock on, with his name still plain.

But in the heat and stench the men trying to examine the decomposing bodies began to vomit so violently that McDougall finally had great chunks of earth and sod cut from the banks of the wide draw and thrown down upon the dead of Company E, covering them as well as possible, filling in much of the ravine’s depth for all time, changing and obliterating much of the site.

Elsewhere other burial details moved over the ground. The bodies were all in similar condition on this third day of heat. Most of the dead were completely naked, many scalped and hacked, although it was no longer always possible to distinguish the wounds of actual combat from later mutilations. Custer’s stripped body had been found in a sort of sitting position between two troopers in the low pile of dead behind the breastwork that was a tangle of stiff horse legs sticking out.

The body of Tom Custer [Custer’s brother] was face down, most of his scalp gone except some tufts of hair at the nape. The skull was crushed, with several arrows shot into it and into his back. The features, which had been pressed into the ground, were flattened and decomposed, unrecognizable, but on one arm, broken by a shot, were the tattooed initials TWC with the goddess of liberty and the flag.

Altogether, the soldiers buried 212 bodies, bringing the dead, with the missing and Reno’s losses, to 265, including sixteen officers, seven civilians, and three Indian scouts. Without proper tools to dig the hard-baked and gravelly earth of the Custer ridge, the bodies were not buried in the usual deep graves or trenches. They were covered, but

so thinly that those who knew the swift gully-washers and cloudbursts of the dry country realized that some of the bodies would surely be washed out before fall, or covered by fill-ins beyond all finding, many of the poor markers set up at the graves of the officers certain to be swept away.