The Last Stand

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  By this point, Peter Thompson had become suspicious of one of the Far West’s passengers. During the march from Fort Lincoln, Thompson had given a knife to a soldier in C Company who was later killed in the battle. That afternoon, as he sat with his badly wounded friend James Bennett (“who seemed glad to have me beside him”), Thompson noticed that an Indian with a bandage wrapped around one of his arms was leaning against the wheelhouse. Tucked into the scabbard attached to the Indian’s belt was a knife with a distinctive chip in the handle. Thompson immediately recognized it as the knife he’d given to the trooper. “To say I was astonished,” he wrote, “was putting it mildly.” He began to wonder whether instead of being an Arikara scout, this Indian (who had two rifles in his hands) was, in fact, a hostile who’d pilfered the knife from the body of his dead comrade.

  Before Thompson could inquire as to the true identity of this mysterious Indian, the Far West began to edge dangerously close to shore. Up ahead he saw a Native woman washing some clothes beside the river. As the boat rushed past her, Thompson watched as two rifles, followed by the wounded Indian, landed on the shore. “[I] saw the Indian scramble up the bank,” Thompson wrote, “take his guns and go away.”

  Several decades later, he was still mystified by this odd and troubling scene. “Was he hostile or was he friendly?” Thompson wrote. “How did he get the knife, and why did he leap from the boat when it was going full speed? These are questions I cannot answer.” Just as when he had watched the man he took to be General Custer gallop along the banks of the Little Bighorn River, Thompson was once again the baffled and awestruck witness to an event he did not wholly understand but nonetheless remembered with an eerie, almost clinical exactitude.

  If Thompson had made some inquiries that afternoon, he would have learned that what he had just seen was not the clandestine escape of a Lakota warrior but the return of the Arikara scout Goose to his home at Fort Berthold. But Thompson’s attention was quickly diverted to other, more important matters on the afternoon of July 5. At three o’clock, James Bennett, the soldier whose pleas for water had first inspired Thompson to venture from Reno Hill to the Little Bighorn and back, finally succumbed to his wounds. “Poor Bennett died . . . with my hand clasping his,” Thompson wrote. “So died a man who always gave me good advice.”

  That evening, Marsh prepared the Far West for her projected arrival before midnight. In accordance with Terry’s orders, he draped the boat in black and lowered the flag to half-mast. Once again, all lights were extinguished as the riverboat steamed south in the deepening twilight toward Bismarck.

  On the night of December 15, 1890, Sitting Bull lay asleep in one of the two cabins he’d built beside the Grand River about forty miles to the south of the agency headquarters at Standing Rock. Over the last few years, his relationship with the agent James McLaughlin, never good to begin with, had deteriorated dramatically. Two summers before, Sitting Bull had opposed the government’s plan to sell off large portions of Lakota land, a plan McLaughlin endorsed. More recently, Sitting Bull had shown interest in a new religious movement called the Ghost Dance.

  By 1890, several years of drought had made it almost impossible for the Indians to support themselves by farming. A terrible series of diseases had swept across the reservations, killing many of their children, including a child of Sitting Bull’s. Making conditions even worse, the government had recently reduced their already meager allotment of rations. Sick and starving, with no hope for the future, many Lakota reached out in desperation to the promise provided by the Paiute medicine man Wovoka.

  Wovoka predicted that a giant wave of earth was about to sweep across the world, burying the whites and bringing back the buffalo along with the Indians’ cherished ancestors. Until the coming of this new Native utopia, true believers must commune with the dead by means of the Ghost Dance. Despite Wovoka’s insistence on pacifism, authorities throughout the West viewed the movement with alarm, and large numbers of soldiers, including the Seventh Cavalry, had been dispatched to the reservations south of Standing Rock.

  Rumor had it that Sitting Bull was about to join a group of Ghost Dancers at a remote area in the Dakota badlands known as the Stronghold. McLaughlin, who’d been looking for an opportunity to get rid of Sitting Bull ever since he’d arrived at Standing Rock seven years before, ordered his arrest. In the early morning hours of December 15, thirty-eight agency policemen, known as the Cheska Maza or “Metal Breasts” for the badges they wore, crossed the frozen Grand River to capture Sitting Bull.

  In the frigid darkness, eight Lakota policemen prepared to storm Sitting Bull’s cabin. They were led by Lieutenant Bull Head. Several years before, Bull Head had gone out of his way to insult Sitting Bull’s friend Catch the Bear. Sitting Bull had responded by refusing to give Bull Head a much-coveted horse. “[Bull Head’s] personal arrogance was hurt,” a Lakota woman remembered, “and he resented it.”

  The policemen pushed through the door, and as they felt their way in the dark, one of them lit a match. Sitting Bull, they saw, was lying in bed with one of his wives and their small child. Before he could reach for a nearby rifle, the policemen grabbed the Hunkpapa leader and blew out the light.

  “I come after you to take you to the agency,” Bull Head announced. “You are under arrest.” Sitting Bull responded that he needed to put on his clothes before he could go with them. As the policemen helped him dress, one of Sitting Bull’s wives burst into a loud cry.

  Even before they’d led Sitting Bull out the door, his followers had begun to gather around the cabin. The darkness made it difficult to see who was who, but they all recognized the voice of Bull Head’s enemy Catch the Bear.

  “Here are the Cheska Maza,” Catch the Bear called out, “just as we had expected all the time. You think you are going to take him. You shall not do it.” Sitting Bull’s adopted brother Jumping Bull urged him to cooperate with the police. But it was the chief’s fourteen-year-old son Crowfoot who carried the day.

  Crowfoot was an unusual boy, more comfortable with his father’s friends than with children his own age. “You always called yourself a brave chief,” Crowfoot said to his father. “Now you are allowing yourself to be taken by the Cheska Maza.”

  Up until this point, the policeman Lone Man maintained, Sitting Bull had seemed willing to go with them. But after the taunt from his son, he changed his mind. “Then I will not go,” he said.

  “Uncle,” Lone Man pleaded, “nobody is going to harm you so please don’t let the others lead you into trouble.”

  But as more and more of the chief’s followers arrived, they became increasingly belligerent. Sitting Bull’s old friend Crawler, whose son Deeds had been one of the first to die at the Little Bighorn, shouted, “Kill the old police first. They have experience and the young will flee.”

  Lieutenant Bull Head was holding Sitting Bull’s right arm; Shave Head was on the left, with the policeman Red Tomahawk behind. As the chief resisted their efforts to lead him toward an awaiting horse, Bull Head repeatedly struck him on the back and shouted: “You have no ears, you wouldn’t listen!” Suddenly, Catch the Bear threw back his blanket, raised his rifle, and fired at Bull Head, who instantly turned and fired a bullet into Sitting Bull’s chest. Another shot hit Shave Head while Red Tomahawk fired into Sitting Bull’s head, and the chief fell lifelessly to the ground.

  The policemen retreated back into the cabin and, after knocking out the mud chinks between the logs, began firing at Sitting Bull’s followers, who quickly dispersed toward the river. As the policemen blazed away, Lone Man saw something moving behind the strips of colored cloth tacked to the cabin’s walls. It proved to be Sitting Bull’s son Crowfoot. “My uncles,” the boy cried, “do not kill me. I do not wish to die.”

  Lone Man asked Bull Head, who’d received a mortal wound to the stomach, what he should do. “Do what you like with him,” he replied. “He is the cause of this trouble.” After hitting him with the butt of his rifle, Lone Man and two others shot the
boy and threw his body out the door, where it lay beside the corpses of his father and his father’s brother Jumping Bull.

  Holy Medicine had been one of Sitting Bull’s devoted followers. But when he saw that his brother Broken Arm, a policeman, had been killed, he took up a wagon yoke and began beating his former leader’s already mutilated face until it was, Shoots Walking remembered, “a shapeless mass.”

  When Lone Man returned home that night, he bathed himself in a sweat lodge and burned his clothes “that I [might] cleanse myself for participating in a bloody fight with my fellow men.”

  So ended what the Lakota at Standing Rock came to call “the Battle in the Dark.”

  Around 11 p.m. on July 5, 1876, Grant Marsh sounded the boat’s whistle to announce the arrival of the Far West at the Bismarck landing. Windows throughout the town blossomed with light as the inhabitants hastily put on their clothes and came out onto the street to learn the much-anticipated news. Even before the Far West was secured to the dock, C. A. Lounsberry, the editor of the Bismarck Tribune, had arrived in his buggy to greet his good friend Dr. Porter along with General Terry’s staff member Captain Smith.

  Lounsberry soon learned not only of the death of Custer and his officers and men but of the passing of his own correspondent, Mark Kellogg. Retiring to the telegraph office with Smith’s bulging suitcase full of dispatches, the men awoke the telegrapher John Carnahan. Over the course of the next twenty-four hours, Carnahan passed along more than forty thousand words of copy to the editors of the New York Herald, who enjoyed one of the biggest scoops in newspaper history.

  As the words flowed across the wires to the East, Grant Marsh backed the Far West from the landing and headed down the Missouri in the early morning darkness to Fort Lincoln.

  Two weeks after the death of Sitting Bull, on the morning of December 29, 1890, about two hundred miles to the south of the Standing Rock Agency, the Seventh Cavalry lay encamped at a place called Wounded Knee. There was much excitement among the troopers. Their commander, Colonel James Forsyth, had accepted the unconditional surrender of a band of Ghost Dancers under the leadership of the Minneconjou chief Big Foot. Many of Big Foot’s men, it was rumored, had fought at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

  —THE RIVER OF NIGHTMARES, June 28, 1876-December 29, 1890—

  That night, several of the officers and men of the Seventh Cavalry got drunk. What they wanted to know, more than anything else, was who among the Minneconjou had been there back in 1876. “They wouldn’t let us get any sleep,” Dewey Beard remembered. “All night they tortured us [with questions] by gun point. They asked us who was in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the battle with Custer. . . . We told them we didn’t know.”

  The next morning, Colonel Forsyth positioned his troopers around Big Foot’s people. He announced that before they were escorted to the Pine Ridge Agency, about fifteen miles away, the Indians must turn over their weapons.

  Captain George Wallace feared there might be trouble. He could tell the Indians were having difficulty understanding his commander’s orders and urged Joseph Horn Cloud to “tell the women to hitch up and get out of camp.” Three days before the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Wallace had predicted that Custer was fated to die. Fourteen years later, Wallace’s premonition once again proved true.

  Wallace was attempting to take a rifle from a deaf Minneconjou man who didn’t fully comprehend why he must surrender his weapon. As the two struggled, the gun fired in the air.

  “Look out! Look out!” a soldier shouted.

  “Fire! Fire on them!” another cried.

  Will Cressey was watching from a nearby hill. “In a moment,” he wrote, “the whole front was a sheet of fire, above which the smoke rolled. . . . [T]he draw in which the Indian camp was set looked like a sunken Vesuvius.”

  Dewey Beard was caught in the deadly crossfire. “I saw my friends sinking about me, and heard the whine of many bullets. I was not expecting this. It was like when a wagon breaks in the road.” In just a few minutes, eighty-three Minneconjou men lay dead. Since Forsyth had positioned his soldiers around the camp, they were firing not only on the Indians but on one another, and one of the casualties was Captain Wallace, who was later found, according to one account, with a bullet through his forehead.

  Women, children, and the handful of men still left alive attempted to escape into the surrounding bluffs and canyons. Captain Edward Godfrey, another veteran of the Little Bighorn, led a detail of between fifteen and twenty soldiers in pursuit. Several miles from the battleground at a place called White Horse Creek, they came upon some Indians hiding in the bushes. Godfrey suspected that they might be women and children and called out, “Hau, Kola,” meaning “Hello, friend.” When there was no response, he ordered his soldiers to fire. The next thing they heard were “screams as from women and children.”

  When Godfrey and another soldier went to investigate, they found a woman and two small girls “in their death struggles.” There was also a boy with his arms stretched out and his coat pulled over his head as if he had just fallen down. When the boy moved, the soldier shot him in the head.

  Godfrey received the brevet rank of major after the engagement, but there were those in the highest ranks of the military who believed he’d committed an atrocity at Wounded Knee. One of those was President Theodore Roosevelt, who vowed that Godfrey would never receive a promotion under his administration. Roosevelt eventually relented, and Godfrey retired as a brigadier general.

  In addition to Captain Wallace, a second Little Bighorn veteran of the Seventh Cavalry was killed that day. Gustave Korn was a blacksmith with I Company and the caretaker for Myles Keogh’s horse Comanche, by then the pampered mascot of the regiment. When Korn died at Wounded Knee, Comanche became despondent. His health declined, and on November 6, 1891, Comanche, famed as “the last living thing” found near Last Stand Hill, died at age twenty-nine.

  In the early morning hours of July 6, 1876, Libbie Custer lay on her bed, unable to sleep in her home at Fort Lincoln. She, along with all the soldiers’ wives, had heard the blasts of the Far West’s whistle when the boat arrived at Bismarck, just a few miles up the Missouri.

  Already, they feared the worst. Two days before, the families of the Indian scouts at the fort had received news “of a great battle.” But what the results had been, “no white man knew.”

  At 7 a.m., a delegation led by Captain William McCaskey, the ranking officer at the fort, arrived at the front door of the Custer residence. As they waited, Lieutenant C. L. Gurley went to the back of the house to awaken the Custers’ maid, Marie, who was to ask that Libbie and her sister-in-law Maggie meet them in the parlor. As soon as Gurley knocked on the back door, Libbie threw on a dressing gown, opened her bedroom door, and saw Gurley walking down the hall to open the front door for the others. She asked the lieutenant why he had come to the house at such an early hour. Choosing not to reply, Gurley followed McCaskey and the others into the parlor, where they told Libbie and Maggie the terrible news. “Imagine the grief of those stricken women,” Gurley later wrote, “their sobs, their flood of tears, the grief that knew no consolation.”

  The day was already quite hot, but Libbie began to shiver and sent for a wrap. She decided that as the wife of the regiment’s commander she must accompany McCaskey as he made the rounds of the garrison. There were twenty-six more wives who had yet to learn that they were now widows.

  The Far West remained at Fort Lincoln until the following day. That morning, Libbie Custer sent a carriage to the landing with the request that Marsh visit with her and the other wives of the garrison.

  A month and a half before, he and these same women had enjoyed an impromptu lunch in the cabin of the Far West. Since that time their world had irrevocably changed. In the months ahead Libbie became so despondent that her friends feared for her sanity. That fall, Custer’s best friend, the actor Lawrence Barrett, visited her at the home of Custer’s parents in Monroe, Michigan.

  In one of the r
ooms, Libbie had re-created Custer’s study, complete with the animal heads and the photograph of Barrett that hung in its customary place above the desk. “I could almost fancy that [Custer] himself was about to enter,” Lawrence wrote his wife. “So thoroughly was the place embraced by his belongings.” Libbie admitted that she had considered suicide until the “presence” of her husband had told her “to live for those they loved.”

  She’d since begun to cooperate with the author Frederick Whittaker, who was writing a book that would prove “her dear Husband was ‘sacrificed’—that Reno was a coward, by whose fault alone the dreadful disaster took place.” She was also waiting for “the proper moment” to demand a military investigation to clear her husband’s name. “I learned to estimate the true strength of Mrs. Custer,” Barrett wrote. “And to see what a wife she had been to him, sinking her own personality to push him forward.” Libbie insisted that she had no regrets—“that her life with him had been one of intense happiness—which could not last, she knew—that she would live upon the memory of it.”

  But on the morning of July 7, the day the nation first learned of her husband’s death, Libbie was still in the throes of inconsolable despair. Marsh decided that he “could not bear the thought of witnessing [her] grief,” and declined the invitation.

  Libbie spent the rest of her life playing out her grief and widowhood before a national audience. The Lakota and Cheyenne widows (some of whom had also lost sisters, brothers, children, and parents in the battle) were afforded no such stage or audience. In the years to come those who were not gunned down or otherwise mistreated during the incidents up to and including Wounded Knee lived out the rest of their lives on the reservations, where malnutrition, disease, and poverty replaced the variety and endless challenges of life on the plains.