By this time other help was coming for Crook, as he lay in the south nursing his ill fortune. General Custer, having scouted out Crazy Horse’s retreat, had been ordered to stop him from the north and to pinch the Indians between the prongs of his force and Crook’s. But it was Custer rather than Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull who met the pincers. Coming upon the headquarters village of the enemy, Custer divided his force of 600 men into four groups: Benteen with 140 odd, Reno with about 125, McDougall with the ammunition and supplies and perhaps 140 men, and Custer himself retaining the balance. While McDougall stayed to the rear, Benteen was sent off on a fruitless errand into a badly broken terrain to the southwest. Custer and Reno in the meantime proceeded side by side toward the village. Coming over the last remaining hill before the Indian camp, Custer dispatched Reno ahead to make a preliminary contact with the enemy, while he rode off in a somewhat parallel direction, apparently bent on encircling the savages. Meanwhile Reno did indeed encounter the Indians, and when he realized how tragically outnumbered he was, he immediately dismounted his men to fight a delaying action on foot, thereby saving both men and horses. He obviously adopted this tactic on the theory that he would be supported from the rear by Custer. When he saw that Custer had decided to make a diversionary attack on the right flank of the enemy, Reno and his men gave up the fight and concentrated on scrambling out of the trap and making their way to the hill which overlooked the village. From that vantage point Custer and his force could be seen across the Little Big Horn at a distance of perhaps a thousand yards. Apparently thinking that Reno was still successfully engaging the Indians, Custer rode his men down into a ravine where he apparently encountered the full horde of savages and where he met his death. The details of that last action have never been made clear, but most experts think that he divided his pitifully weak force into two segments at the time of the final charge which took him full into the heart of the great enemy body. Thus it was that Custer was caught in the pliers of the attack, in which hopeless position his entire force was wiped out to the last man, officer, and guide. Custer’s Last Stand, as it has been poetically called, was in every respect the greatest defeat of white forces in the history of Indian warfare. Custer’s death marked the end of the Black Hills controversy. Although the Indians had been completely victorious, they had spent so heavily of their warriors and their supplies that they were never again able to mount a major attack against the whites. Swiftly the troops hunted them down, village by village, and within a year the great Sioux War had ground to a stop.