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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  That night the main cabin of the Far West was the scene of a high-stakes poker game that was, according to Marsh, “the stiffest ever played on the river.” At the table were Marsh, Custer’s brother Tom, his brother-in-law James Calhoun, and Captain William Crowell of the Sixth Infantry. By the end of the night, Captain Crowell had won several thousand dollars, leaving Tom Custer and Jim Calhoun not only exhausted and hung over but broke.

  As Tom Custer and Calhoun lost at cards, Marcus Reno sang. That afternoon he’d purchased a straw hat from the sutler and at least one half-gallon keg of whiskey. He appears to have spent much of the evening getting drunk, and that night he and several officers stood arm in arm on the deck of the Far West singing sentimental songs. Custer’s tent was beside the riverboat, and one can only wonder whether the major’s slurred harmonizing contributed to the anger his abstemious commander directed toward him that night in his anonymous dispatch.

  Burkman watched the cabin light on the Far West finally go out. “All got still,” he remembered. “Here and there was blotches where men was laying asleep on the ground. You couldn’t hear nothing except horses munching their feed or nickering soft to one another.” At some point Custer’s dog Tuck sat down on his haunches and with his muzzle pointed skyward started to howl. “It sounded like the death howl . . . ,” Burkman remembered. “I tried to shut him up.”

  When streaks of light began to appear in the sky, Burkman knew he must awaken his commander. He found Custer “hunched over on the cot, just his coat and boots off, and the pen still in his hand.” As he’d done every night for the last month and a half, Custer had spent the night filling up the darkness with words. The pen was his talisman, his way to whatever future might exist beyond the next few days, and he’d fallen asleep clutching it like a rosary. “I hated to rouse him,” Burkman remembered, “he looked so peaked and tired.”

  Once awake, Custer asked, “What’s the day like outside?”

  “Clear and shiny,” Burkman said.

  They departed at noon on June 22. There was a cold wind blowing out of the north, and as the Seventh Cavalry approached Terry and Gibbon, who waited at the head of the camp along with Brisbin, the regiment’s colorful flags, known as guidons, could be seen, Gibbon wrote, “gaily fluttering in the breeze.” “Together we sat on our horses,” he continued, “and witnessed the approach of the command as it threaded its way through the rank sage brush which covered the valley.” Once the advance had started, Custer rode up to join Terry and the others, where they were accompanied by the regiment’s buglers, who gave as rousing a version of “Garry Owen” as was possible without Vinatieri’s band. “General Custer appeared to be in good spirits,” Gibbon wrote, “chatted freely with us, and was evidently proud of the appearance of his command.” The horses, Gibbon noted, were of unusually high quality for the U.S. cavalry, and Custer claimed that despite the many days of hard marching they’d already seen, “there was not a single sore-backed horse amongst them.”

  Once the pack mules had passed, followed by the rear guard, Custer shook hands with the assembled officers and started after his regiment. Gibbon claimed that it was then that he called out, “Now, Custer, don’t be greedy, but wait for us.” Over the course of the last month, Gibbon had passed up two matchless opportunities to attack the Indians. That he now had the audacity to ask Custer to save some of the fighting for him was, to put it politely, disingenuous.

  Custer’s response to Gibbon’s plea to not “be greedy, but wait for us” was suitably ambiguous. “No, I will not,” he said.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Approach

  In 1846, when Crazy Horse was six years old and Sitting Bull was fifteen, a twenty-three-year-old Bostonian named Francis Parkman spent three weeks with an Oglala village in modern Wyoming. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Parkman decided to write the definitive history of England and France’s battle for the New World. To prepare himself for his life’s work, he must go west and see firsthand a Native people unaffected by extended contact with the European invaders. The book he eventually wrote about his experiences in the West, The Oregon Trail, contains some of the best contemporaneous descriptions of Lakota life ever written.

  For most of his time with the Oglala, Parkman was desperately sick with a dysentery-like illness that may have been linked to drinking the alkaline water. But this did not prevent him from participating in the exhilarating bedlam of a buffalo hunt. “While we were charging on one side,” Parkman wrote, “our companions attacked the bewildered and panic-stricken herd on the other. The uproar and confusion lasted but a moment. The dust cleared away, and the buffalo could be seen scattering as from a common centre, flying over the plain singly, or in long files and small compact bodies, while behind them followed the Indians riding at furious speed, and yelling as they launched arrow after arrow into their sides.”

  Parkman accompanied the village to the southwestern fringe of the Black Hills, where he watched the Oglala women harvest tepee poles from the pine-studded peaks. Just when he feared his illness might be the death of him, he was saved by a restorative handful of pemmican: a nutritious combination of protein and fat made from pounded slices of dried buffalo meat. This allowed him to accompany the village as it made its way across the dusty plains to a new campsite, the old women leading the travois-laden ponies with two or three children clinging to the pack animals’ backs as the elders, “stalking along in their white buffalo-robes,” led the throng beneath the unceasing blue glare of the sky.

  Thirty years later, on June 18, 1876, a similar scene was enacted on the banks of the Little Bighorn River as approximately four thousand Lakota and Cheyenne and more than twice that many ponies made their way to a new campsite. Back in 1846, Parkman had believed that traditional Lakota culture was doomed to almost immediate extinction. Already, he noted, whiskey and disease had taken a terrible toll on the Oglala. He would no doubt have been stunned by the size and vibrancy of this village in south-central Montana in 1876.

  It was no accident that Sitting Bull and his people had ended up here, beside the Little Bighorn River. This narrow, tree-lined waterway was in the middle of the last buffalo-rich region in the United States. By the end of the nineteenth century, the buffalo had become so rare that when a small herd appeared near the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, several elderly Lakota felt compelled to hug, instead of kill, the animals. In the spring and summer of 1876, however, the buffalo had been remarkably abundant, and as a consequence, Sitting Bull’s people, who ate on average six buffalo per person per year, were flourishing.

  In the meantime, conditions at the reservations had never been worse. The previous fall, thousands upon thousands of Lakota had flocked to the agencies to attend councils about the possible sale of the Black Hills. The agencies’ attempts to feed these huge gatherings had completely overwhelmed the already inefficient rationing system, and by the winter there was little food left. In the past, agency Indians had supplemented their meager rations by hunting for game. But on January 18, with war looming, the agents were instructed to stop selling any more ammunition to the Indians.

  Rather than starve to death on the reservations and angered by the government’s attempts to purchase the Black Hills, unprecedented numbers of Lakota elected to join Sitting Bull and hunt the buffalo that summer. But before they could set out on the three-hundred-mile journey from the agencies, their ponies must first strengthen themselves on the new spring grass, which did not appear until the end of April. This meant that it wasn’t until mid- to late June that the agency Indians started to reach Sitting Bull’s village in significant numbers.

  It began slowly, but by June 18, the day after Crook’s retreat at what became known as the Battle of the Rosebud, the outflow from the reservations was averaging a stunning seven hundred Lakota and Cheyenne per day. In the week ahead, Sitting Bull’s village more than doubled in size to eight thousand men, women, and children, making it one of the largest gatherings of Indians in the history of the
northern plains.

  The warriors and their leaders had difficulty imagining how anyone could dare attack a village of this immense size. At the center of the camp was the large council lodge painted a distinctive yellow, where the leaders from the many bands met to discuss the issues of the day.

  Back in 1846, Parkman had watched the Oglala elders struggle to come to a consensus about when to launch a war party against their enemies, the Snakes. “Characteristic indecision perplexed their councils,” Parkman wrote. “Indians cannot act in large bodies. Though their object be of the highest importance, they cannot combine to attain it by a series of connected efforts.” Three decades later, Parkman was proven wrong. As the challenges to traditional Native culture increased, a leader had emerged whose intelligence, charisma, and connection to the shadowy forces of Wakan Tanka enabled him to unite these disparate bands into a single, albeit loose-jointed, entity.

  Not everything had gone Sitting Bull’s way. Despite the council’s decision to wait until Crook’s forces attacked them, the warriors had forced Sitting Bull’s hand. He had accompanied the young men to the Battle of the Rosebud, but this had not deterred him from advocating a policy of restraint in the days ahead. In his vision he had seen soldiers falling into a Lakota camp, and this could happen only if the washichus attacked first. The warriors’ first priority must be the protection of the women and children.

  Sitting Bull’s tepee was larger than most and decorated with colorful images of his many accomplishments. Living in his lodge were at least a dozen family members, including his mother, Her Holy Door; his two wives, the sisters Seen by the Nation and Four Blankets Woman; their brother Gray Eagle; Sitting Bull’s two adolescent daughters; and a total of six children, the youngest of whom were twin baby boys born to Four Blankets Woman just two weeks before.

  Sitting Bull’s eldest wife, Seen by the Nation, sat to the right of the entryway and was responsible for the family’s food, while her sister was in charge of the cooking utensils. The family’s baggage was carefully lined up against the inner edge of the tepee. When a guest arrived outside, barking dogs inevitably alerted the family that someone wanted to come in. Only after being formally invited could the guest enter the tepee, where he was given the place of honor across from the entryway on the opposite side of the central fire.

  In 1846, Francis Parkman spent several nights in the tepee of the village’s chief. “There, wedged close together,” Parkman wrote, “you will see a circle of stout warriors, passing the pipe around, joking, telling stories and making themselves merry after their fashion.” As Parkman sat contentedly in the tepee’s flickering darkness listening to the warriors talk, a woman tossed a hunk of buffalo fat into the lodge’s central fire. The pyrotechnics that followed were, he soon learned, a regular and spectacular part of life in a Lakota tepee. “Instantly a bright flame would leap up,” Parkman recounted, “darting its light to the very apex of the tall, conical structure, where the tips of the slender poles that supported the covering of hide were gathered together. It gilded the features of the Indians as with animated gestures they sat, telling their endless stories of war and hunting. . . . For a moment all would be bright as day; then the flames would die out; fitful flashes from the embers would illuminate the lodge, and then leave it in darkness.” Later that night, Parkman ventured outside and watched in wonder as tepee after tepee momentarily blazed like a “gigantic lantern.”

  On a warm night in June of 1876 on the Little Bighorn River, it must have been a magnificent sight. A thousand tepees were assembled in six horseshoe-shaped semicircles, each semicircle facing east, as was each tepee’s entryway. Like stationary fireflies, the lodges intermittently flared with fat-fueled flame, glowing softly through the tepees’ translucent buffalo hides.

  Some have claimed that nomads are the happiest people on earth. To be always on the move, to be forever free of the boundaries, schedules, and material goods that circumscribe a sedentary existence, more than offset the dangers and discomforts of rootlessness. Late in life, the Cheyenne Wooden Leg admitted that living on the reservation had its compensations. “It is pleasant to be situated where I can sleep soundly every night, without fear that my horses may be stolen or that myself or my friends may be crept upon and killed.” And yet, when he looked back on his life as a young warrior, “when every man had to be brave,” he knew when he had been the most contented and fulfilled. “I wish I could live again through some of the past days,” he said, “when it was the first thought of every prospering Indian to send out the call: ‘Hoh-ohoh-oh, friends: Come. Come. Come. I have plenty of buffalo meat. I have coffee. I have sugar. I have tobacco. Come, friends, feast and smoke with me.’”

  Around sunset on June 22, Custer sat on the cot in his A-frame field tent, waiting for his officers to arrive. Gradually they assembled about him, some squatting, some standing, some chatting in hushed tones in the deepening twilight.

  Since leaving the Far West close to noon, they had marched just twelve miles before camping beneath a steep bluff beside the Rosebud River. Given Custer’s earlier warnings about ruthless pursuit of the Indians, it had been an unexpectedly easy day, and now as he spoke to them about the march ahead, there was, Lieutenant Godfrey remembered, an “indefinable something that was not Custer.”

  His officers expected him to be, Lieutenant Gibson wrote, “dominant and self reliant.” But on the evening of June 22, with his officers gathered around him, Custer seemed in the grip of what Gibson called “a queer sort of depression”—a depression that dated back just twenty-four hours to his discussions with General Terry aboard the Far West.

  At some point during those talks, Terry had halfheartedly floated the possibility that they change the plan. Instead of Custer leading the Seventh up the Rosebud, maybe it would be better if he (Terry) led a column that contained both the Seventh and a battalion of the Second Cavalry. When Custer strenuously objected, Terry quickly backed down. But the damage had been done. In his hesitant and evasive way, Terry had unintentionally planted the seeds of doubt and paranoia in a psyche that not even the president of the United States had been able to crack.

  As his striker, John Burkman, could attest, Custer had a tendency to overreact. “That’s the way he always was,” Burkman remembered, “flying off the handle suddenly, maybe sometimes without occasion.” In this instance, Custer leapt to the conclusion that Terry’s eleventh-hour failure of confidence had been instigated by comments made by the hated Marcus Reno. In actuality Major Brisbin of the Second Cavalry had been the one whispering in Terry’s ear, but Custer would never know that. The thought that one of his own officers had been scheming against him seems to have become a major distraction to Custer, and at officer’s call on the evening of June 22 he was not his usual cocksure self.

  In the past, Custer had followed the model of Napoleon, telling his subordinates as little as possible about his intentions. That night it seemed as if he needed to justify his every decision. He’d opted against the Gatling guns, he explained, so as not to “hamper our movements.” He’d decided against the offer of an extra battalion from the Second Cavalry because he felt the Seventh “could whip any force” of Indians it was likely to meet. He claimed that he’d done some research that spring at the Indian Bureau in Washington, D.C., and he was confident that even with infusions from the agencies, there were no more than fifteen hundred warriors under Sitting Bull. And besides, if in the unlikely event they should encounter an overwhelming force of Indians, the extra troopers from the Second Cavalry, which would inevitably create “jealousy and friction” between the two regiments, would not, in all probability, be enough to “save us from defeat.” The most important consideration, he insisted, was that there be “sure harmony” within the Seventh.

  Custer then made a statement that was certain to destroy whatever harmony did exist among his officers. “I will be glad to listen to suggestions from any officer of the command,” he said, “if made in proper manner. But I want it distinctly under
stood that I shall allow no grumbling, and shall exact the strictest compliance with orders from everybody—not only mine, but with any order given by an officer to his subordinate. I don’t want it said of this regiment as a neighboring department commander said of another cavalry regiment that ‘It would be a good one if he could get rid of the old captains and let the lieutenants command the companies.’ ”

  There were only two officers about whom Custer could be speaking: Major Marcus Reno and the regiment’s senior captain, Frederick Benteen. Never one to back down from an encounter with his commander, Benteen asked Custer “who he meant by that remark about grumbling.” “I want the saddle to go just where it fits,” Custer replied. Benteen then asked if Custer “knew of any criticisms or grumbling from him.” “No, I never have,” Custer insisted, adding for good measure that “none of my remarks have been directed towards you.”

  This meant, of course, that Reno was the officer to whom Custer was referring. Before departing from the mouth of the Rosebud, Custer had disbanded the command structure he had established back at Fort Lincoln. Since all the companies were now reporting directly to Custer, Reno—formerly the leader of the Right Wing—no longer had any official responsibilities. Custer was doing everything in his power to ostracize and belittle the officer he had already vilified in his anonymous dispatch to the New York Herald.

  If Custer had hoped to build the morale of his junior officers by casting aspersions on Benteen (who had called his bluff) and Reno (who no longer cared enough to try), he had failed miserably. Throughout his speech that night, there had been none of the “brusque and aggressive” manner to which his officers had grown accustomed. “There was something akin to an appeal, as if depressed,” Lieutenant Godfrey wrote, “that made a deep impression on all present.”