Mitch Bouyer Mitch Bouyer ( sometimes spelled ' Bowyer ' , ' Buoyer ' , ' Boyer ' or ' Buazer ' , or in Creole , ' Boye ' ) ( 1837 – June 25 , 1876 ) was an interpreter and guide in the Old West following the American Civil War . General John Gibbon called him " next to Jim Bridger , the best guide in the country " . He was killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn . Family background . He was born Michel Bouyer in 1837 . His father , Jean - Baptiste Bouyer , was a French Canadian who was employed by the American Fur Company , trading with Sioux in the Wyoming area . Mitch ' s mother was a Santee Sioux . His father was killed by Indians while trapping , about 1863 . Mitch ' s Indian name was Kar - pash . He had three full sisters : Marie , Anne , and Thérèse , who seem to have been triplets born in 1840 . He also had at least two half - brothers : John Bouyer ( c . 1845 - 1871 ) , who was hanged at Fort Laramie for killing an Army scout in the first legal execution in Wyoming Territory , and Antoine Bouyer ( born 1852 ? ) , whom Walter Mason Camp interviewed in 1912 . John , in an interview just before he was hanged , stated that there had been other siblings who had already died . Bouyer was an interpreter at Fort Phil Kearny in 1868 . In the fall of 1869 , he married a young Crow woman named Magpie Outside ( or Magpie Out - of - Doors ) , who became known as Mary . Their first child , also named Mary , was born in 1870 . Sometime later they also had a son , apparently named Tom , but eventually called James LeForge ( see below ) . Army scout and death at the Little Big Horn . Bouyer became a guide for the 2nd U . S . Cavalry , working with the Northern Pacific Railroad ' s survey team . From 1872 on he was employed by the Crow Agency and the US Army . In 1876 Lt . Col . George Armstrong Custer requested that Bouyer be transferred to the 7th U . S . Cavalry as an interpreter for the Crow scouts when Gen . Alfred Terry ordered the 7th south from the Montana Column to search for hostile Indians . Custer ' s regular scouts were Ree ( Arikara ) . However , for this mission , Terry had assigned six of Lt . James Bradley ' s Crow scouts to the 7th ( including Curley ) . Bouyer had the additional bonus of knowing the country well . At the Crow ' s Nest , Bouyer was one of the scouts who warned Custer about the size of the Indian village , which Custer claimed he couldn ' t make out . Bouyer told him , " General , I have been with these Indians for 30 years , and this is the largest village I have ever known of . " After failing to convince Custer , it is reported Bouyer gave away his possessions , convinced he would die in the coming battle . There was a report that Sitting Bull had offered a bounty of 100 ponies for Bouyer ' s head . When Custer ' s command was divided into 3 battalion s , about noon , Bouyer was assigned to accompany Custer , whose battalion would be almost completely wiped out . There were only about a dozen survivors of Custer ' s battalion , all of whom had left it before the battle began . Soldiers in Reno ' s fight claimed to have seen Custer on the bluffs watching the retreat , but this was later shown probably to have been Bouyer and Curley , who had ridden ahead of the main force . Bouyer stayed with Custer and was killed in the Battle of the Little Big Horn . In 1984 , a fire burned through much of the Custer Battlefield , enabling archaeological digs to be made . Part of a skull was found that was identified as Bouyer ' s by comparison of the facial bones with the only photograph known of him . The skull was found to the west of the monument on Custer Hill , at what is called the ' South Skirmish Line ' . Bouyer seems to have been a flamboyant character . In the photograph , he is wearing a fur hat with 2 woodpecker s one on either side , and he was wearing a piebald calf ' s vest the day of the fatal battle . After Bouyer ' s death , his widow Mary was taken in by his close friend , Thomas Leforge . When his own wife died , Leforge married Mary and adopted her children . This is probably when Mitch ' s son was renamed , as Leforge had a son of his own named Tom . Mary died in 1916 . Accusation of duplicity . In 1985 , more than a century after the Bouyer ' s death , Henry Weibert and his son Don published a book called " Sixty - Six Years in Custer ' s Shadow " , in which they analyzed the battle in light of their intimate knowledge of the terrain . Amongst their theories was the idea that the Seventh Cavalry had been led by Bouyer into a trap . Though other writers had speculated the Seventh might have been entrapped , this was the only book to point a finger at Bouyer . Historians ridiculed the idea , saying that it was contrary to everything known about Bouyer ' s character . Furthermore , it would have been a personal betrayal of his family and friends of many years ' standing among the Crow . In a later book , written after his father died , Don Weibert , though repeating many of the earlier conclusions about how the battle was fought , dropped the claim that Bouyer had betrayed Custer .