The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Eleven years earlier, during a sun dance on the Little Missouri River, Sitting Bull had “pierced the heart.” Two sharp sticks had been thrust through the flesh and muscle wall of his chest. Ropes were attached to the sticks, and with an eagle-bone whistle in his lips, he had hung suspended from the top of the sacred pole at the center of the lodge. There was a downy white feather at the end of the whistle that danced pulselike with each breath. Even though his lifelong training as a warrior helped him endure the searing pain, he did his best to lay bare all his pitiful human frailties before Wakan Tanka and, weeping, prayed “for his people to be healthy and have plenty of food.”

  His nephew One Bull had been fifteen years old during that sun dance on the Little Missouri, and he later remembered that as his uncle was “hanging there and crying,” Sitting Bull heard a voice say “God will give you what you ask for.” Eventually, the wooden sticks had torn through Sitting Bull’s flesh, and now, more than a decade later, as he entered the circular lodge beside the Rosebud River, his naked torso bore the scars of that and other sun dances.

  For Sitting Bull, this sun dance beside the Rosebud River, with which the northern Lakota appealed to Wakan Tanka to support them in the year to come, marked the culmination of an almost decade-long struggle. Only now, after years of contention and hardship, had the way become clear. Much, however, remained to be revealed.

  With the signing of the Treaty of 1868, the U.S. government granted the Lakota most of the modern state of South Dakota, along with hunting rights to more than twenty-two million acres of prime buffalo territory to the west and north in modern North Dakota and Montana. The following year, Red Cloud and Spotted Tail, the leaders of two of the largest bands of the Lakota, the Oglala and the Brulé, respectively, decided that it was in their people’s best interests to move to government-created reservations in northern Nebraska.

  Around this time, Sitting Bull emerged as leader of the Lakota to the north. In addition to the Oglala and the Brulé, the Lakota, whose name means “alliance of friends,” included five other bands: the Minneconjou, Sans Arcs, Two Kettles, Blackfeet, and Sitting Bull’s people, the Hunkpapa. In the 1860s, the northern Lakota had not yet felt the full brunt of the coming collision with the whites, whom they referred to as the washichus. But as several tribal leaders, including Sitting Bull’s powerful uncle Four Horns, recognized, change was coming. With the washichus becoming an increasing presence, there was a need for a single, all-powerful leader to coordinate the actions of the tribe.

  Sitting Bull’s nephew One Bull remembered how in the late 1860s the warriors Gall and Running Antelope presided over a ceremony attended by four thousand Lakota, in which Sitting Bull was named “the leader of the entire Sioux nation.” Instead of being the “head chief,” Sitting Bull’s new authority appears to have applied only to the issue of war. One Bull claimed that Gall was named his “2nd in command as War chief,” while Crazy Horse was named “war chief of the Oglala, Cheyenne, and Arapaho.” “When you tell us to fight,” they told Sitting Bull, “we shall fight. When you tell us to make peace, we shall make peace.”

  The concept of having a supreme leader did not come naturally to the Lakota, for whom individuality and independence had always been paramount. Even in the midst of battle, a warrior was not bound by the orders of a commander; he fought for his own personal glory. Decisions were reached in Lakota society by consensus, and if two individuals or groups disagreed, they were free to go their separate ways and find another village to attach themselves to. From the start, Sitting Bull had to strive mightily to balance his own views with those of the majority of the tribe.

  There were three possible paths for the Lakota to follow. They could do as Red Cloud and Spotted Tail eventually opted to do and move permanently to a reservation. For both leaders, this was not an act of submissive resignation. Red Cloud had recently led a number of raids (which came to be known as Red Cloud’s War) that had forced the American government to shut down a series of forts along the Bozeman Trail, running from eastern Wyoming all the way to western Montana. Spotted Tail had spent several months as a prisoner of the U.S. government and knew more about the realities of white society than any other Lakota leader. Both chiefs decided that given the inevitability of white expansion into their territory, the time was right to start working with, rather than against, the U.S. government.

  A second and more attractive option for many Lakota was to have it both ways: spend the winter months at the agencies, where there was meat, bread, tobacco, and even ammunition for firearms, and depart for the hunting grounds in the summer. Then there was Sitting Bull’s position: complete autonomy, as far as that was possible, from the washichus. It was true that the horse and the gun had come to them from the whites, but all the rest of it—their diseases, their food, their whiskey, their insane love of gold—all of this had a hateful effect on the Lakota.

  As the Cheyenne and Lakota to the south had come to recognize, self-imposed isolation from the whites was impossible once the buffalo disappeared. But for now, with the herds to the north still flourishing, Sitting Bull resolved to do everything he could to keep the washichus at bay.

  In the late 1860s, Sitting Bull launched his own version of Red Cloud’s War against the growing number of army forts along the upper Missouri River. In 1867, at Fort Union, near the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers, he took time out from what proved to be a four-year campaign against the washichus to scold some Indians who had made a habit of scrounging food at the outpost. “You are fools to make yourself slaves to a piece of fat bacon, some hard tack and a little sugar and coffee . . . ,” he said. “[The] whites may get me at last . . . , but I will have good times till then.”

  By 1870, however, Sitting Bull had been forced to soften his stance toward the washichus. “Be a little against fighting,” advised his mentor Four Horns, “but when anyone shoots be ready to fight him.” Even Crazy Horse, the foremost warrior of the Oglala, endorsed the policy advocated by Four Horns. “If any soldiers come . . . and don’t start firing, we won’t bother them,” he was heard to say to Sitting Bull. “But if they come firing we will go after them.”

  There were other factors contributing to the tempering of Sitting Bull’s warrior spirit. By the late 1860s, he had been seriously injured a total of three times. Being an only son with two sisters, he was responsible for a large extended family. Now that he was approaching forty years old, it was time, his mother insisted, that he become more mindful of his own safety. “You must hang back in warfare,” she said; “you must be careful.” His change in behavior on the warpath was immediately noticeable. Even his adoring nephew White Bull later admitted that his uncle was “sort of a coward from [then] on.” Given his much-heralded reputation for bravery as a young man, this must have been a most difficult adjustment for Sitting Bull.

  Adding to his troubles was the rise of a movement within the northern Lakota known as iwashtela, which stood for “living with the washichus gradually.” Instead of shunning the whites, these Lakota felt it was time to begin a conscious effort at accommodation. Increasing numbers of Lakota opted for the reservations (by 1875 more than half of the total Lakota population of approximately eighteen thousand had moved to the agencies), and Sitting Bull’s staunch insistence on isolationism was beginning to seem willfully anachronistic.

  In the spring of 1870, Sitting Bull and his followers were encamped on the north side of the Yellowstone River. His warriors had just returned from a raid against the Crows when some Hunkpapa appeared on the south bank of the Yellowstone. The Indians in this group had made the controversial decision to enroll at the newly formed Grand River (eventually known as Standing Rock) Agency to the east. Whether they viewed themselves as possible emissaries or simply wanted to visit with their relatives, they had traveled several hundred miles to find Sitting Bull, a leader whose scorn for reservation life was well known.

  The agency Indians constructed bullboats, tiny circular craft made of willow b
ranches and male buffalo skins, and paddled across the Yellowstone. Once they’d arrived on the north bank, they were met by the warrior Crow King. Crow King was unfailingly loyal to Sitting Bull; he was also known for his temper, and he was already angry by the time the agency Hunkpapa approached the encampment. They were armed, and it wasn’t proper etiquette to come into your own people’s camp bristling with hatchets, guns, and bows. Clutching his own weapons, Crow King paced menacingly back and forth and shouted, “What do you pack those guns for? You ought to do everything in a peaceful way.”

  One of the agency Indians tried to calm Crow King. “We came over here to bring Sitting Bull an invitation to our camp,” he insisted. He also admitted that they were a “little bit afraid” of their Hunkpapa brethren, who had obviously just returned from the warpath. “We thought you were on the warpath still. That is why we packed our guns along. We meant nothing by that. We came to help ferry you across.”

  Still seething with indignation, Crow King stormed into Sitting Bull’s lodge. Eventually, the tepee flap was pulled aside and both Crow King and Sitting Bull emerged. “Friends,” the Hunkpapa leader said, “Crow King means no harm. But the way you came over excited him. . . . That’s why he is getting crazy mad. But your suggestion is welcome to me. I accept your invitation. And so we are going to move across the river to your camp.” In this instance, Sitting Bull had chosen to accept the agency Indians’ overtures, and the visit proceeded peacefully. He would not always prove so amenable.

  That same year the Oglala agency chief Red Cloud returned from his first visit to Washington, D.C., with stories of the immensity of the white population and the daunting power of its military arsenal. Sitting Bull was dismissive of the claims. “Red Cloud saw too much,” he was reported to say. “[T]he white people must have put bad medicine over Red Cloud’s eyes to make him see everything and anything that they pleased.”

  Making matters even worse for the embattled Hunkpapa leader was his domestic situation. His two wives, Red Woman and Snow on Her, did not get along. The simmering tension between the two was bad enough during the day, but at night it became intolerable as Sitting Bull lay sleepless on his back, bracketed by two wives who refused to allow him to turn on his side and face the other. It was during this difficult, divisive time in his life that Sitting Bull reached out for help in a most unlikely direction.

  On a cold, snow-swept afternoon in 1869, somewhere to the west of the Missouri River, Sitting Bull and a small war party lay in ambush, waiting for the rider on the local mail line to enter a narrow gulch. The warriors soon captured the rider—a big nineteen-year-old dressed in a shaggy buffalo coat—and instead of killing him as the others had expected, Sitting Bull decided to let the rider live.

  The rider called himself Frank Grouard, but the Lakota chose to call him the Grabber. His furry coat and big, wide-shouldered physique reminded them of a bear, a creature that used its front paws like hands.

  The Lakota assumed the Grabber was an Indian half-breed. He certainly looked like an Indian with dark skin, jet-black hair, and high cheekbones. The speed with which he learned the Lakota language and the enthusiasm with which he embraced all aspects of the culture also seemed to corroborate the impression that Grouard was at least part Native American. But as Grouard later insisted to anyone who listened, he was something else entirely: a South Sea Islander, commonly referred to by American sailors as a Kanaka.

  Grouard’s father, Benjamin, had been a Mormon missionary who established a church on an island in the South Pacific and married the daughter of the local chief. They had three children, and Frank was born in 1850. In 1852, the Grouards moved to California. Frank’s mother and sister eventually returned to the South Pacific, while Frank was adopted by a Mormon family who relocated to Utah. Frank ran away from home at sixteen and in a few years’ time, after being abducted by Sitting Bull, was living with the Hunkpapa.

  Soon after Grouard’s capture, Sitting Bull decided to adopt him as his brother. Ten years before, he’d successfully done the same thing when he adopted a thirteen-year-old Assiniboine boy who’d been captured in a raid. The boy proved so loyal that two years later, when Sitting Bull’s father was killed by the Crows, the boy was given the old man’s name of Jumping Bull. At some point after 1869, the Grabber became the Lakota leader’s second adopted brother.

  Frank Grouard was not the only non-Indian to embrace Lakota culture. For decades, what was known as the “squaw man” had been a fixture in the West, and many of the children born from these interracial unions served as scouts for the U.S. Army. Custer’s Seventh Cavalry had two brothers, Billy and Bob Jackson, who were part Pikuni Blackfoot. One of Custer’s own officers, Lieutenant Donald McIntosh, was part Iroquois. According to Cheyenne oral tradition, Custer’s relationship with the Cheyenne captive Monahsetah in 1868–69 produced a son named Yellow Hair.

  It was true that Native and white worlds were profoundly different in the 1870s. There were some Lakota and Cheyenne in Sitting Bull’s village on the Rosebud who had not yet even seen a white person. But instead of a hard and fast division, the barrier between cultures was so permeable that men like Frank Grouard could move between the washichus and Lakota as conditions required.

  Sitting Bull undoubtedly liked Frank Grouard, but he had other, largely political reasons for bringing him into the fold. Since Sitting Bull refused to deal directly with the whites, he needed an intermediary, someone he could trust who was capable of understanding and communicating with the washichus, and Grouard quickly became a member of his inner circle. In 1872, a government official described him “as a Sandwich Islander, called Frank, who appears to exercise great control in the Indian councils and who excels the Indians in their bitter hatred of the whites.”

  Grouard came to have a deep respect for Sitting Bull’s skills as a leader. The Hunkpapa warriors Gall and No Neck often opposed him at the tribal councils, but Sitting Bull was, according to Grouard, “a first class politician [and] could hold his own.” Grouard noticed how he worked indefatigably to garner as much backing as possible, whether it was with his male peers in the various warrior societies or—perhaps even more important—with the women, who far outnumbered the men in a typical Lakota village and who, Grouard recounted, “sang his praises to the exclusion of every one else.” Women usually had no voice at the tribal councils, but since grandmothers were the ones who raised the children, Sitting Bull realized they counted for much in molding the attitudes of the tribe.

  Sitting Bull’s strongest source of support, according to Grouard, was among the Lakota youth. For teenagers who had not yet attained their war honors, reservation life, and the cessation of intertribal warfare that went with it, would be a disaster. Their fathers and grandfathers could enjoy the comforts of the reservation without compromising their sense of self-worth, but that was not possible for those whose best fighting years were still in the future. For them, the uncompromising traditionalism of Sitting Bull’s stance was irresistible. “All the young warriors worshipped him,” Grouard remembered.

  In the early 1870s, the U.S. government opened the Milk River Agency at Fort Peck on the Missouri River, where rations and clothing were made available to the Lakota in a conscious attempt to undercut hard-liners such as Sitting Bull. In the winter of 1872–73, even some of his strongest supporters, including his uncles Four Horns and Black Moon, succumbed to the lure of the agencies. Only fourteen lodges, composed mostly of the families in his immediate kinship circle, known as a tiyoshpaye, joined him that winter in his obstinate insistence on remaining beyond the reach of the whites. Sitting Bull was in danger of losing his tribe.

  To make matters worse, his adopted brother the Grabber betrayed him. In the spring of 1873, Grouard pretended to go on a horse-stealing raid against the Assiniboine when he really intended to visit Fort Peck. Like many cultural go-betweens before and since, Grouard felt the competing pulls of two different ways of life. It would be several years before he completely turned his back on the L
akota, but for now he decided it was time he at least visited the fort. When Sitting Bull learned the truth soon after Grouard’s return, the Hunkpapa leader was so angry that Grouard feared for his life. Sitting Bull’s mother attempted to patch things up between them, but Grouard finally decided it was better to leave Sitting Bull’s family circle and join the Oglala, where, much as he had once done for Sitting Bull, he became the trusted lieutenant of Crazy Horse.

  Sitting Bull had at least one consolation. After his divorce from Snow on Her and the death of Red Woman, he was now happily married to two sisters, Four Blankets Woman and Seen by the Nation.

  In the summer of 1873, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry ventured for the first time into Lakota territory as escorts for the surveyors of the Northern Pacific Railway. Having seen what had happened to the Cheyenne to the south, the Lakota knew that the railroads had a devastating effect on the buffalo, and they responded to this invasion of their hunting territory with force.

  The year before, in 1872, the appearance of the soldiers on the Yellowstone had given Sitting Bull an opportunity to reestablish his once unsurpassed reputation for bravery. A bloody confrontation between about a thousand warriors and several companies of soldiers had reached an unsatisfying stalemate. Armed with only a lance, Crazy Horse rode back and forth in front of the soldiers, challenging them to fire at him. It was a magnificent display of courage that appears to have inspired Sitting Bull to perform his own kind of bravery run.

  He laid down his rifle and, with only his pipe in his hand, started to walk toward the enemy line. Once he’d come to within a quarter mile of the soldiers, he sat down and lit his pipe. Since he was well within range and presented such an inviting target, the soldiers immediately began to blast away. With bullets flying all around, Sitting Bull turned to the warriors behind him and called out, “Whoever wishes to smoke with me, come.”