From Edgar Leoni's _Nostradamus and His Prophecies_.

C7 Q28
The captain will lead a great herd
On the mountain closer to the enemy
Surrounded by fire he will cut such a path
All escaped except thirty put on the spit
This whole quatrain is about Major Marcus Reno's attack on the Greasy Grass Indian
encampment from the south and the following Weir Point sorties during the Battle of the Little
Bighorn.
Before I proceed I will give an overview of the battle.
On July 25th, 1876, at about 12:00 noontime, Custer divided his Seventh
Cavalry into three attack prongs before attacking the Indian camp. One
battalion under Fredrick Benteen was sent west on a scouting mission.
Another battalion under Marcus Reno was ordered to attack the Indian
camp from the south while Custer and his battalion moved up to attack
the Indian camp from the north.
It was 3:00 when Reno arrived at the south end of the Indian camp and
prepared for an attack. Reno dismounted his men, formed a skirmish line
and fired a few volleys before an overwhelming Indian force charged the
outnumbered battalion, forcing him to hastily fall back and form a
second skirmish line by a bend of the Little Bighorn. Here Reno held
out for a little while longer until overwhelming Indian pressure forced
him to withdraw from his second position and retreat onto a nearby bluff
overlooking the valley.
Meanwhile Benteen decided that his scouting mission was useless. He
headed up north to link up with the rest of the unit where he though he
was needed more. He was not aware of Custer's plans of attacking the
Indian camp in a double pincer attack. Nor was he aware that Custer's
plans had gone entirely wrong.
He rode north following the sound of gunfire until he reached Reno's
besieged men on the bluff a little after 4:00. Reno was in state of
panic and Benteen took over command. Both men really didn't know where
Custer was except that he was somewhere up north and probably in serious
trouble. Both commanders were reluctant to come to the aid of Custer.
According the "The Soldiers", pg. 216, part of Time-Lifes's _Great West_
series:
"Finally a junior officer, Captian Thomas Weir, who admired Custer as
Benteen decidedly did not, set off down stream without authority. He
and his company reached a high point -known afterward as Weir Pointfrom which he could look down on both the Indian encampment and the
field to which Custer had gone. By this time the heavy fighting had
died down. Weir could see no sign of Custer's men, but he did see
clouds of dust and warriors milling about in the distance. Meanwhile
the remainder of the command moved forward in the direction of Weir

Point. On reaching the vantage point Beteen, for the first time, began
to realize the enormity of the situation. Across the river he said he
saw at least 1800 lodges."
"The Indians saw the soldiers on Weir Point and moved against them,
gliding up the slopes and around the troops on both sides. Clearly the
situation was untenable, and the men retreated back to their position on
the bluff. More men were lost in the movement and still another soldier
was left to the Sioux."
The fighting on the bluff is described in Richard H. Dillion's _North
American Indian Wars_ as follows (pg.212):
"They easily chased them back to their bluff. The troopers fought well
to save their lives but, even in rifle pits, they suffered 18 more
deaths and had 43 wounded. Enemy fire did not slacken until
nightfall, when the besieged soldiers watched a wild scalp dance below
them, illuminated by the glow of camp fires. In the darkness the
officer and 16 men trapped in the cottonwoods (during Reno's two
previous valley skirmishes) slipped safely through Reno's lines."
"With the first light of dawn, the siege was tightened. Benteen and
Reno had to throw back two assaults. Bravely Benteen led a few counter
attacks to keep the Sioux and Cheyenne at a respectable distance."
"...Reno and Benteen as yet did not realize that Custer's force had been
destroyed to the last man of the original 215. The Army buried the
dead, took 52 wounded in wagons, and fell back to fort Abraham Lincoln.
Reno's casualties were 47 killed and 53 wounded. Estimates of Indian
losses ran all the way from 30 to 300."
With this all being said, I will now begin my interpretation of the
quatrain. The first two lines describe Captain Weir's sortie to Weir
Point in his effort to reach Custer. Line three probably describes the
retreat from Weir Point back to the bluff in the face of renewed Indian
assaults after they had finished destroying Custer's force.
The final line is not as obvious. "All escaped except thirty" may not
simply mean just surviving the battle, but rather to the number of
casualties who were left unrestrained during the hasty retreats from the
Little Bighorn Valley and Weir's Point. It was always desirable to
retrieve all casualties when fighting on the Plains because Indian
warriors usually mutilated bodies left behind ("put on the spit").
If we accept Dillion's casualty figures as accurate, then we can deduce
that Reno must have left behind 29 men -many of whom were probably
wounded who were unable to mount their horses- in the valley during his
two skirmishes (47 dead - 18 dead = 29 dead). But who was the thirtieth
man to be left behind to the Indians?
It is not certain if the casualty figures Dillion gives us after the
retreat from Wier Point, 18 dead and 47 wounded, are the casualty
figures for just the bluff siege or if they are the casualties from both
the Weir Point sortie *and* the bluff siege. If the later case is true,

then the 30th man to be left behind to the Indians was probably the man
left behind during the retreat from Weir Point.
Skeptics eager to debunk my theory can best do so by looking at official
US Army accounts of the battle which provide accurate casualty lists and
ask the following question: How many dead and wounded were left
unrestrained during the two valley skirmishes and the Weir Point sortie?
So called Nostradamus experts who seek to debunk my theory on
translation grounds are merely taking advantage of other people's
ignorance of the subject so they can conveniently bend word meanings
into making the quatrain mean something entirely different, using the
"I am the translation expert and this is a corrupted transcription"
excuse as their pretext.
Finally, are there any people here who are familiar with Indian
prophecy -or better yet, who claim to have prophetic insights of their
own? If so, we (alt.prophecies.nostradamus) need some alternative
voices from all the egotism, religiously biased messianic gibberish, and
plain silliness one finds in abundance over here. We (or at least I)
would be interested in hearing what you have to say.
Brian Ghilliotti

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