One of the Crow scouts has said—although his account is generally disbelieved—that he went at last to Custer, as yet unharmed, and told him that he thought he could get him away, and that Custer, of course, refused to leave the field. The Crow altered his appearance by draping a blanket about him so as to look as much like a Sioux as possible, and in the confusion of the fight got away safely.[86] He was the only human survivor of the field.[87] What occurred after is a matter of conjecture, based upon the contradictory and inadequate testimony of the Indians themselves. Gall and Crazy Horse now determined to end the affair. Massing their warriors in the ravine, they fell on both flanks at the same time that Crow King and Rain-in-the-Face led a direct charge against the front of the thinned and weakened line. They swept over the little band of men, probably now out of ammunition, in a red wave of destruction. There was a fierce hand-to-hand struggle with clubbed guns, war-clubs, and tomahawks, and all was over. Some twenty or thirty men, without their officers, who had probably all been killed where they stood, for their bodies were found grouped around that of Custer on the highest hill, endeavored to break through on the right. They were slaughtered to a man before they reached the river. A few scattered bodies, here and there in different parts of the field, indicated that separate men had made futile dashes for freedom. But the bulk of the command was found just where it had fought, with _the troopers in line, their officers in position_! They had been beaten and killed. Not an officer or man lived to tell the story, but they had not been disgraced. There, the second day afterward, Terry, with Gibbon, having relieved Reno’s men, found them on the hills which they had immortalized by their desperate valor. They had been stripped and most of them mutilated. Custer’s body was shot in two places, in the side and in the temple. It was not scalped or mutilated. Colonel Dodge, an authority on Indian customs, declares that if Custer’s body was neither scalped nor mutilated, he is convinced that the general committed suicide. None of the officers with whom I have communicated who inspected the body is willing to indorse this statement; on the contrary. Therefore, I am sure Colonel Dodge must be in error. The Indians give no particular information as to Custer’s death. All that is known is that his body was there with those of his brave men.