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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  In describing Sitting Bull’s village, I have relied on Wooden Leg, interpreted by Thomas Marquis, who mentions the number of buffalo skins required to make a tepee, p. 77. According to the scout Ben Clark, a “tepee of freshly-skinned buffalo skins was always white as snow. Always made of cow skins tanned as soft as buckskin and very pliable. If bull hide tanned had to split where hump and sew up with sinews,” in James Foley, “Walter Camp and Ben Clark,” p. 26. My thanks to Jeremy Guinn and Rick Delougharie, who conducted a Buffalo Brain Tanning Workshop at Porcupine, North Dakota, while I was visiting the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in June 2007.

  Charles Eastman in Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains wrote that Sitting Bull’s “legs were bowed like the ribs of the ponies that he rode constantly from childhood,” p. 108. Even though Sitting Bull walked with a noticeable limp, he managed to win a running race against a white cowboy at the Standing Rock Agency when he was a relatively old man, proclaiming, “A white man has no business to challenge a deer,” in Vestal’s New Sources of Indian History, p. 345. My description of Sitting Bull’s killing of the Crow chief is based on several accounts at WCC: Circling Hawk, box 105, notebook 13; One Bull, “Information in Sioux and English with Regard to Sitting Bull,” MS box 104, folder 11; Little Soldier, c. 1932, box 104, folder 6; One Bull, MS 127, box 104, One Bull folder, no. 11. The incident is also described by Vestal, Sitting Bull pp. 27–30, and in Robert Utley’s The Lance and the Shield, p. 21.

  Vestal describes Sitting Bull’s high singing voice in Sitting Bull, p. 21, and adds, “[T]here was a theme-song appropriate to every occasion,” p. 22. See also Frances Densmore’s Teton Sioux Music and Culture, p. 458. The song Sitting Bull sang while charging the Crow chief is in “25 Songs by Sitting Bull,” by Robert Higheagle, box 104, folder 18, WCC. On the early history of the plains tribes, see William Swagerty’s “History of the United States Plains Until 1850” in Plains, edited by Raymond DeMallie, vol. 13 of the Handbook of North American Indians, pp. 256–79, and DeMallie’s “Sioux Until 1850,” also in the Handbook, pp. 718–27, in which he decribes Radisson’s impressions of the Sioux. My thanks to Professor DeMallie in pointing out this passage as well as for his guidance in spelling the Lakota words hokahe, tiyoshpaye, and washichus for a general audience. I’ve also relied on George Hyde’s Red Cloud’s Folk: A History of the Oglala Sioux Indians, pp. 5–42, and Michael Clodfelter’s The Dakota War, p. 18. Richard White in “The Winning of the West” writes of the role of disease in devastating the sedentary tribes along the Missouri, p. 325. Dan Flores in The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains mentions the term “hyper-Indians,” p. 56. John Ewers discusses the evolution from the use of dogs to the use of horses in The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture, p. 308. Colin Calloway in “The Intertribal Balance of Power on the Great Plains, 1760–1850” writes, “What the United States did to the Sioux was what the Sioux themselves had been doing to weaker peoples for years,” p. 46. The Oglala Black Hawk’s comparison of the Lakota’s expansion to that of the white man is cited by Richard White in “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West, p. 95. Royal Hassrick in The Sioux: Life and Times of a Warrior Society writes of the Sioux’s “unswerving faith in themselves,” p. 69, and how for a warrior it was “good to die in battle,” p. 92. Jeffrey Ostler in The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee writes of the “universal process by which those moving into a new country come to see themselves as a chosen people,” p. 27. Vestal describes plains warfare as “a gorgeous mounted game of tag,” in Sitting Bull, p. 11. My references to winter counts are based on Candace Greene and Russell Thornton’s The Year the Stars Fell: Lakota Winter Counts at the Smithsonian, pp. 77, 87, 151–52, 230, 249, 254–55. Dan Flores in The Natural West writes of the decline of the buffalo among the Cheyenne to the south, p. 67.

  Sitting Bull spoke of his interest in the world while still in his mother’s womb in an article by Jerome Stillson in the Nov. 16, 1877, New York Herald, cited by Utley in The Lance and the Shield, pp. 27–28. On Native spirituality I have consulted Raymond DeMallie and Douglas Parks’s Sioux Indian Religion, pp. 25–43, and Lee Irwin’s The Dream Seekers: Native American Visionary Traditions on the Great Plains; according to Irwin, the “most common place for seeking a vision is a hill, butte, or mountain. . . . To be up above the middle realm of normal habitation meant making oneself more visible to all the powers,” p. 106. Sitting Bull’s vision of the eagle at Sylvan Lake is told by One Bull, box 104, folder 6, and ww box 110, folder 8, WCC.

  Irwin in The Dream Seekers cites the quotes from Sword, p. 122, and John Fire, p. 127. Billy Garnett’s account of Crazy Horse’s vision of the man in the lake is in The Indian Interviews of Eli S. Ricker, edited by Richard Jensen, p. 117. Kingsley Bray provides an excellent account of this vision in Crazy Horse, pp. 65–66, in which he cites Garnett’s account as well as that of Flying Hawk, p. 66.

  My rendering of the myth of the White Buffalo Calf Woman is based largely on Black Elk’s account in The Sacred Pipe, edited by Joseph Epes Brown, pp. 3–9. I’ve also consulted James Walker’s Lakota Belief and Ritual, especially pp. 109–12 and 148–50, and William Powers’s Oglala Religion, pp. 81–83. Raymond DeMallie in “Lakota Belief and Ritual” in Sioux Indian Religion writes of the buffalo having once been at war with the ancestors of the Lakota, p. 31. White Bull’s claim that Sitting Bull could “foretell anything” is in ww box 105, notebook 24, WCC. Raymond DeMallie in “ ‘These Have No Ears’ ” writes of “Sitting Bull’s well-documented reputation for prophecy,” p. 527.

  Chapter 3: Hard Ass

  Throughout this chapter I have relied on James Willert’s Little Big Horn Diary and Laudie Chorne’s Following the Custer Trail of 1876 (subsequently referred to as Chorne). In a May 29, 1876, letter, the surgeon James DeWolf wrote, “The bridges are just logs & brush put in the bed of the stream . . . and dirt & sods piled on and the banks graded so the teams can drive in & out,” Edward Luce, ed., “The Diary and Letters of Dr. James M. DeWolf,” p. 77. The regiment’s engineer, Lieutenant Edward Maguire, wrote in detail about the difficulties encountered during the march in General Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn: The Federal View, edited by John Carroll, pp. 38–39. As Chorne rightly says of the alkaline mud of North Dakota, it “sticks to whatever it comes in contact with,” p. 33. Custer wrote of how “everybody is more or less disgusted except me” in a May 20 letter to Libbie in Boots and Saddles, p. 266.

  Maguire refers to the wild rose in John Carroll’s General Custer . . . The Federal View, p. 38, which as Chorne points out, is now the state flower of North Dakota, p. 63. In a May 19, 1876, letter, DeWolf wrote, “I should like you to see us all after we get in camp, the tents and wagons and animals all lariated out completely cover the ground for about ½ mile square,” in Luce, “Diary and Letters,” p. 73. Chorne refers to the practice of wearing wet boots at night, p. 25. Jacob Horner spoke of raw sowbelly dipped in vinegar, as well as “hardtack fried in fat and covered with sugar” for dessert, in Barry Johnson’s “Jacob Horner of the Seventh Cavalry,” p. 81. A. F. Mulford’s Fighting Indians in the U.S. 7th Cavalry is a wonderful source of information about being a trooper in the 1870s; Mulford described how the aroma of the horse “creeps up out of the blanket,” cited by Chorne, p. 43. For a description of a military tent of the time, see Douglas McChristian and John P. Langellier’s The U.S. Army in the West, 1870–1880: Uniforms, Weapons, and Equipment, pp. 102–3. Terry’s description of the badlands is in a May 30 letter, Terry Letters, p. 9. John Gray in Centennial Campaign goes so far as to describe the scout up the Little Missouri as a “diversionary exercise” and a “skit,” p. 100.

  According to Charles Francis Bates (a member of the extended Custer family), “Custer mounted was an inspiration,” Custer’s Indian Battles, p. 29. James Kidd, who served with Custer during the Civil War, described him “as if ‘to the manor born’ ” in At Custer’
s Side: The Civil War Writings, p. 79. Frost in General Custer’s Libbie quotes a letter in which Custer says his weight had dropped to 143 pounds, p. 187. Custer’s jacket and boot size come from Thomas O’Neil’s Passing into Legend, pp. 14–15. According to the Custer living-historian Steve Alexander, Custer wore 9½B shoes, not 9C, in Michael Elliott’s Custerology, p. 94. Custer’s Irish tailor was Jeremiah Finley of Tipperary, in Ronald Nichols’s Men with Custer, p. 100. Richard Slotkin writes about how Buffalo Bill Cody and Custer copycatted each other’s clothing styles in The Fatal Environment, p. 407. Varnum’s account of how he and Custer had “the clippers run over their heads” is in Coughlan’s Varnum: The Last of Custer’s Lieutenants, p. 35. John Burkman’s statement that Custer looked “so unnatural” after cutting his hair is in Wagner, p. 117. The reporter John Finerty, who was with Crook’s Wyoming Column, wrote that “after the [Custer] tragedy some of the officers who survived likened the dead hero to Samson. Both were invincible while their locks remained unshorn,” War-Path and Bivouac, p. 208.

  Custer’s ability to leap to a stand from a lying-down position is referred to in Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, p. 47. Custer’s letter to Libbie describing Bloody Knife’s comments about his endurance is in Boots and Saddles, p. 267. Charles Francis Bates wrote about Custer’s napping habit in Custer’s Indian Battles, pp. 12, 34. According to Katherine Gibson Fougera, Custer “had a habit of throwing himself prone on the grass for a few minutes’ rest and resembled a human island, entirely surrounded by crowding, panting dogs,” With Custer’s Cavalry, p. 110. Chorne writes of the seventy-eight unmounted troopers having to march in their high-heeled cavalry boots, p. 40. According to Private William Slaper, Custer was “a hard leader to follow. He always had several good horses whereby he could change mounts every three hours if necessary, carrying nothing but man and saddle, while our poor horses carried man, saddle, blankets, carbine, revolver, haversack, canteen, ” in Troopers with Custer by E. A. Brininstool (subsequently referred to as Brininstool), p. 63. The reporter Mark Kellogg wrote of Custer’s “hell-whooping over the prairie” in the June 14 New York Herald. Don Rickey in Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay wrote about Custer’s nickname of “Hard Ass,” p. 90.

  Kellogg wrote in his diary on May 21, 1876, “General Custer visits scouts; much at home amongst them,” in “Notes, May 17 to June 9, 1876 of the Little Big Horn Expedition” (subsequently referred to as diary), p. 215. Red Star’s account of Custer’s interactions with the scouts is in The Arikara Narrative of Custer’s Campaign and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, edited by Orin Libby (subsequently referred to as Libby), p. 61. Custer’s remarks about becoming “the Great Father” appear in Libby, pp. 62, 82. Emanuel Custer’s Sept. 22, 1864, letter to his son is part of the Bacon-Custer Correspondence, Monroe County Museum Library. For an account of the political scene in 1876, see Roy Morris Jr.’s Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876. Utley has an excellent discussion of Custer’s presidential ambitions in Cavalier in Buckskin: “That Custer fantasized such an absurdity cannot be disproved, of course, but that presidential aspirations governed his tactical decisions demands more weighty evidence than supplied by the Arikara scout,” p. 164. Utley believes that Custer was actually referring to his hopes of being promoted to brigadier general.

  The anecdote about Custer telling his father “you and me can whip all the Whigs in Ohio” is in Jay Monaghan’s Custer, p. 13; see also Emanuel Custer’s Feb. 3, 1887, letter to Libbie Custer in Tenting on the Plains, p. 182. For the organization of a cavalry regiment, see Jay Smith’s “A Hundred Years Later,” p. 125, and Robert Utley’s Frontier Regulars, in which he states that the company, not the regiment, “commanded loyalties and fostered solidarity,” p. 25. Benteen’s reference to when “war was red hot” is in a Feb. 12, 1896, letter to Goldin in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, p. 248. Perry Jamieson in Crossing the Deadly Ground describes the army’s mission in the West as a “long-running police action . . . broadly understood but never precisely defined,” p. 36. Don Rickey writes of the lack of target practice in the army at the time in Forty Miles, p. 101. In his diary, the surgeon James DeWolf describes when he and Dr. Porter went “pistol shooting” with Lieutenants Harrington and Hodgson: “Porter was best,” he wrote, “so you see, some of the cavalry cannot shoot well,” in Luce, “Diary and Letters,” p. 81. Peter Thompson’s daughter Susan recorded her father’s comment about being scared “spitless” of his Springfield carbine in her unpublished manuscript about her father’s account of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. She also had some additional comments about the training standards of the Seventh Cavalry: “Thompson said . . . that he scarcely knew how to shoot a gun, he was scared ‘spitless’ of one. He had gotten to shoot his gun a little on the way from Ft. Lincoln when hunting was permitted, briefly, but that was about all the experience he had and he was simply not at ease with his gun loaded. Target practice had been neglected the winter of 1875–76. Of course, Thompson had been in the cavalry for nine months and he was considered to be a ‘trained veteran.’ He was; of horse grooming, stable cleaning, wood cutting, water hauling, policing barracks, saluting smartly and keeping a low profile around officers, listening to jokes and barracks rumors. Apparently, the recruits were supposed to get on-the-job training, if they lived long enough,” pp. 252–53. My reference to the kick of a Springfield carbine and its reloading difficulties comes from personal experience; my thanks to Dr. Timothy Lepore for letting me fire his replicas of a Springfield and a Colt revolver.

  Charles Windolph mentioned the ironies of a German immigrant joining the army in I Fought with Custer, p. 4. The demographics of the Seventh are in Thomas O’Neil’s Custer Chronicles, “Profiles of the 7th by S. Caniglia,” p. 36. The statistics concerning the size of the army and the territory it was responsible for are in Jay Smith’s “A Hundred Years Later” in Custer and His Times, edited by Paul Andrew Hutton, p. 125. According to Windolph, the “Old Timers” told the new recruits “we must save our last cartridge to blow out our own brains,” p. 6. John Keegan in Fields of Battle writes of the various levels of experience among the soldiers of the Seventh and adds, “[T]here were too many unfamiliar faces for it to be reckoned by European officers an effective fighting force,” p. 285. Don Rickey in Forty Miles writes of the high rate of suicide in the U.S. Army, p. 165, and claims that alcoholism was three times that of the British army, p. 159. James O’Kelly’s account of the hapless charge of Captain Weir’s company is in the Aug. 24, 1876, New York Herald. Charles King’s words of praise regarding the “snap and style” of the Seventh are in Campaigning with Crook, p. 72. Windolph described being “part of a proud outfit that had a fighting reputation” in I Fought with Custer, p. 53.

  Terry’s censure of Custer for having left the column “without any authority whatever” is from his May 31, 1876, diary entry, p. 19. Custer described his, Tom’s, and Boston’s antics in a May 31, 1876, letter to Libbie in Boots and Saddles, p. 270. Custer’s May 31 letter to Terry is in the Letters Received 1876 Record Group 98, NA. DeWolf wrote to his wife on June 1, 1876: “The men in their dog tents have it worst. They have been standing around the fire most of the day,” in Luce, “Diary and Letters,” p. 78. Terry wrote of his fears the Indians had scattered on May 30, 1876, in Terry Letters, p. 9. Terry described his quarters during the snowstorm on June 2, 1876, in Terry Letters, p. 13. Mark Kellogg wrote of the meeting between Terry and messengers from Gibbon in the June 12, 1876, New York Herald. In his diary, edited by Edgar Stewart, Godfrey wrote in a June 4, 1876, entry, “Genl Terry had Sun stroke today,” p. 5. Terry described his tactical thinking in great detail on June 12, 1876, in Terry Letters, p. 15. Edward Maguire described the alkaline bottomlands encountered by the column during its march toward the Powder River, in John Carroll’s General Custer . . . The Federal View, p. 41. The phrase “the sky fitting close down all around” is quoted by Libbie Custer in Following the Guidon, p. 196. DeWolf described
his terrible sunburn in his diary, in Luce, “Diary and Letters,” pp. 79–80. As Chorne observes, “[I]f [a soldier] had a mustache, his upper lip . . . was protected,” p. 122.

  Terry told of his conversation with Custer about getting the column to the Powder River on June 6, 1876, in Terry Letters, pp. 16–17. Boston Custer described the march to the Powder River in a June 8, 1876, letter to his mother in Merington, p. 300. Lieutenant Winfield Edgerly also described the march in an Oct. 10, 1877, letter to Libbie Custer in Merington, pp. 301–2. Peter Thompson’s description of Custer’s erratic riding habits is in Peter Thompson’s Account of the Battle of the Little Bighorn: The Waddington Typescript, edited by Michael L. Wyman and Rocky L. Boyd (subsequently referred to as Account), p. 6. The description of a cavalry charge is from Frederick Whittaker’s Life of Custer, p. 158. In the July 29, 1876, Army and Navy Journal, General A. B. Nettleton wrote of Custer’s “instantaneous quickness of eye—that is lightning-like formation and execution of successive correct judgments in a rapidly-shifting situation.” Wert provides a good account of Custer’s activities prior to attending West Point, pp. 22–25. Custer wrote of his wish “to see a battle every day during my life” in an Oct. 9, 1862, letter cited in Thom Hatch’s Custer Companion, p. 20. Thom Hatch provides an excellent account of Custer’s role in the Battle of Gettysburg in Clashes of Cavalry, p. 118, to which I am indebted; for a recent, more detailed account of Custer’s pivotal role at that battle, see Thom Carhart’s Lost Triumph, pp. 213–40. Sheridan’s note to Libbie is quoted by Frost in General Custer’s Libbie, p. 130. Custer’s tongue-lashing of Corporal French is described in Account, p. 7. Red Star told of Custer’s abuse of Isaiah Dorman in Libby, p. 195, and of Custer’s firing at Bloody Knife during the Black Hills Expedition, p. 194. Custer’s claim that they were “the first white men to see the Powder River at this point of its course” is related by Edgerly in Merington, p. 302, as is Terry’s claim that “nobody but General Custer could have brought us through such a country,” in Merington, p. 302. Boston Custer wrote of Terry and his staff’s “exalted opinion of themselves” in a June 8, 1876, letter to his mother in Merington, p. 301.