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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  For reading and commenting on my manuscript I am indebted to Louise Barnett, Susan Beegel, Rocky Boyd, Jim and Virginia Court, Raymond DeMallie, Richard Duncan, Michael Elliott, Hal Fessenden, Peter Gow, Michael Hill, Castle McLaughlin, Bruce Miller, Jennie Philbrick, Melissa D. Philbrick, Sam Philbrick, Tom and Marianne Philbrick, and Gregory Whitehead. All errors of fact and interpretation are mine alone.

  At Viking Penguin, it has been a privilege to work, once again, with the incomparable Wendy Wolf. Thanks also to Clare Ferraro, Nancy Sheppard, Margaret Riggs, Bruce Giffords, Francesca Belanger, Amy Hill, Carolyn Coleburn, Louise Braverman, and copy editor Adam Goldberger. Thanks also to Jen Neupauer for the cover and to Jeffrey Ward for the maps.

  My agent, Stuart Krichevsky, has a knack for intelligent and blessedly clearheaded advice. Many thanks, Stuart, for your friendship and for keeping me on track. Thanks also to his associates Shana Cohen and Kathryne Wick.

  Finally, thanks to my wife, Melissa D. Philbrick, and our children, Jennie and Ethan, and to all our family members for their patience and support.

  Notes

  Writing a balanced narrative involving two peoples with two widely different worldviews is an obvious challenge, especially when it comes to the nature of the evidence. As I discuss in detail in chapter 12 and in the notes to chapter 15, I have looked not only to written and oral testimony but also to visual evidence, including photographs, pictographs, and maps.

  When I describe the actions of Sitting Bull and other Native participants, I have relied primarily on the testimony left by Lakota and Cheyenne informants. That is not to say, however, that my account purports to be an “insider’s” view of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. “[J]ust as we are outsiders to other cultures,” writes the ethnographer Raymond DeMallie, “we are also outsiders to the past. To restrict our narratives to the participants’ points of view would be to negate the value of historical study as a moral enterprise, the purpose of which is to learn from the past,” in “ ‘These Have No Ears’: Narrative and Ethnohistorical Method,” p. 525. Throughout the book I remain a curious outsider doing my best to make sense of it all.

  It is also my firm belief that the spiritual and visionary aspects of experience are essential to understanding not only Sitting Bull but also Custer and his wife, Libbie, who, after all, saw a troubling vision of her husband’s fate as the Seventh marched through the mist at Fort Lincoln. According to Lee Irwin in Visionary Worlds: The Making and Unmaking of Reality: “No . . . history can capture the inner reality of outward change based only on physical or biological evidence. There must be an awakening to the psychic and spiritual dimensions which also motivate outward change and developments and which, for the sensitive and aware, are primary sources of motivation and conception,” p. 19.

  When it comes to our understanding of Sitting Bull, there is the underappreciated problem of evidence. During the painful transition to reservation life in the 1880s, there was a tendency—encouraged by the agency head James McLZughlin at the Standing Rock Reservation (Sitting Bull’s home during the final years of his life)—to view the Lakota chief as both a coward and a bully and to deny his role in effecting the victory at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In the 1930s, the writer Walter Campbell, who wrote under the pen name of Stanley Vestal, set out to write a revisionist biography of the Lakota leader, relying primarily on Sitting Bull’s two nephews, One Bull and White Bull. Not surprisingly, the two relatives had nothing but positive things to say about their uncle, and Vestal’s portrait is of an infallible, always fair-minded leader. Robert Utley’s more recent biography, which applies a higher degree of historical rigor to the notes left by Walter Campbell (who as the writer Stanley Vestal sometimes took considerable artistic license), is a more balanced portrait on the whole. However, since it also relies, for the most part, on the information provided by White Bull and One Bull, his opinion of Sitting Bull is in basic agreement with Vestal’s.

  Although Sitting Bull lived and died at the Standing Rock Agency, almost all his family members (with the notable exception of his nephew One Bull) relocated to the Pine Ridge Agency about two hundred miles to the south. While Campbell’s investigations remained based at Standing Rock, the noted Little Bighorn researcher Walter Mason Camp interviewed several Sitting Bull descendants at Pine Ridge. Recently a new Native voice has emerged in regards to Sitting Bull: that of his great-grandson Ernie LaPointe, who grew up at Pine Ridge. In two film documentaries and the book Sitting Bull: His Life and Legacy (2009), LaPointe relates the oral traditions passed down to him from his grandmother Standing Holy (Sitting Bull’s daughter) to his mother, Angelique.

  I cite the many sources I’ve depended on below, but there are a handful of titles that were of particular importance in shaping my overall view of the battle and its participants. Evan Connell’s Son of the Morning Star is the book that introduced me to the fascinating nooks and crannies of this story and stands in a class by itself as a lyrical exploration of the evidence. Robert Utley’s Cavalier in Buckskin: George Armstrong Custer and the Western Military Frontier is a model of crisp, accessible, and economical writing combined with impeccable scholarship. Richard Slotkin’s The Fatal Environment is another fundamental work that examines the intersection between history and myth, while Michael Elliott’s Custerology traces how that intersection has manifested itself in modern-day responses to the battle. Louise Barnett’s Touched by Fire is a provocative examination not only of the Custer marriage but of Libbie Custer’s subsequent role as spin doctor to her husband’s posthumous reputation. Other works that I found indispensable were Richard Fox’s Archaeology, History, and Custer’s Last Battle, John Gray’s Centennial Campaign and Custer’s Last Campaign, James Willert’s Little Big Horn Diary, Edgar Stewart’s Custer’s Luck, Roger Darling’s A Sad and Terrible Blunder, Larry Sklenar’s To Hell with Honor, and James Donovan’s A Terrible Glory. When it comes to the Native side of the battle, I have looked to Joseph Marshall’s The Day the World Ended at Little Bighorn, James Welch’s Killing Custer, and Gregory Michno’s Lakota Noon. In combining the many strands of Native testimony into a rich and coherent narrative, the relevant portions of Peter Powell’s chronicle of the Cheyenne, People of the Sacred Mountain, are a tour de force.

  Anyone writing about the battle owes a huge debt to the indefatigable researchers who interviewed many of the participants: Walter Mason Camp, Eli Ricker, W. A. Graham, E. A. Brininstool, Orin Libby, and others. Researchers John Carroll, Kenneth Hammer, Jerome Greene, and Richard Hardorff have been instrumental in making vast amounts of this previously unpublished material accessible as well as bringing other important sources to light.

  When it comes to my use of previously unpublished material relating to Private Peter Thompson, I am indebted to the Thompson family, especially Thompson’s granddaughter June Helvie, and to Rocky Boyd, who made available his unparalleled collection of Thompson material, as well as the edition of Thompson’s narrative edited by himself and Michael Wyman.

  The proceedings of the Reno Court of Inquiry (RCI) appear in several different forms. The most accessible is W. A. Graham’s The Reno Court of Inquiry: Abstract of the Official Record of Proceedings. The most comprehensive single volume is that compiled and edited by Ronald Nichols. Perhaps the most useful account, however, is that contained in The Reno Court of Inquiry: The Chicago Times Account, with an introduction by Robert Utley, which contains testimony and context that never made it into the official transcript. In the notes that follow, I refer at different times to all three versions of the RCI testimony.

  A brief word on the testimony of Private John Burkman found in Glendolin Damon Wagner’s Old Neutriment: Wagner made the unfortunate decision to translate Burkman’s memories (as recorded by Burkman’s friend I. D. O’Donnell) into a stilted vernacular. In comparing Wagner’s text with the notes on which they are based (which are scattered between the archives at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument and Montana State University), it seems clear
that Wagner did little, if anything, to alter the essence of what Burkman said. I’ve nevertheless chosen to return Burkman’s statements to a pre-Wagner, vernacularless state; see Brian Dippie’s excellent introduction to Wagner’s book, especially pp. xiii–xiv. In other instances, I’ve taken the liberty of adjusting the spelling and punctuation of participants’ accounts to bring them in line with modern usage.

  Preface: Custer’s Smile

  Custer describes the incident with the buffalo in My Life on the Plains, pp. 49–53. Of interest is that instead of portraying himself as a levelheaded hero, Custer (who is the only source for this story) admits to being “rashly imprudent”—indeed, he seems to revel in the inappropriateness of his behavior.

  Elsewhere in My Life Custer talks of the similarities between the plains and the ocean and the temptation “to picture these successive undulations as gigantic waves, not wildly chasing each other to or from the shore, but standing silent and immovable, and by their silent immobility adding to the impressive grandeur of the scene. . . . The constant recurrence of these waves, if they may be so termed, is quite puzzling to the inexperienced plainsman. He imagines, and very naturally too, judging from appearances, that when he ascends to the crest he can overlook all the surrounding country. After a weary walk or ride of perhaps several miles . . . he finds himself at the desired point, but discovers that directly beyond, in the direction he desires to go, rises a second wave, but slightly higher than the first,” p. 5. Francis Parkman also had trouble navigating the plains; in The Oregon Trail, he wrote, “I might as well have looked for landmarks in the midst of the ocean,” p. 57. Custer once stated that “nothing so nearly approaches a cavalry charge and pursuit as a buffalo chase,” in Frost’s General Custer’s Libbie, p. 162.

  I’m by no means the first to compare Custer’s Last Stand to the Titanic disaster. See, for example, Steven Schlesser’s The Soldier, the Builder, and the Diplomat: Custer, the Titanic, and World War One. For a probing analysis of how the Battle of the Little Bighorn fits into the mythic tradition of the Last Stand, see Bruce Rosenberg’s Custer and the Epic of Defeat, particularly the chapter titled “The Martyred Heroes,” pp. 155–216, and Richard Slotkin’s The Fatal Environment, especially “To the Last Man: Assembling the Last Stand Myth, 1876,” pp. 437–76. Sitting Bull’s words upon his surrender in 1881 were recorded in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 21 and 30, Aug. 3, 1881; cited in Robert Utley’s The Lance and the Shield, p. 232. Michael Elliott discusses Custer’s calculated association with the past in Custerology: “Custer . . . drew upon a model that emphasized theatricality and performance . . . and that derived its cultural status from its conscious evocation of the past. In a sense it was deliberately anachronistic,” p. 98.

  For the demographics of the Seventh Cavalry, see Thomas O’Neil, “Profiles of the 7th by S. Caniglia,” in Custer Chronicles, p. 36. In “Custer’s Last Battle,” Edward Godfrey wrote, “In 1876, there was not a ranch west of Bismarck, Dakota, nor east of Bozeman, Montana,” in W. A. Graham’s The Custer Myth: A Source Book of Custeriana, p. 129. On the inadequacy of the term “frontier” (“an unsubtle concept in a subtle world”), see Patricia Limerick’s groundbreaking study The Legacy of Conquest, p. 25. For a comparison of the Battle of the Little Bighorn and Isandlwana, see James Gump’s The Dust Rose Like Smoke and Paul Williams’s Little Bighorn and Isandlwana: Kindred Fights, Kindred Follies.

  Sitting Bull’s reference to an “island of Indians” appeared in Stanley Vestal’s Sitting Bull, p. 141. Benteen compared serving in the cavalry to shipboard life in a Feb. 22, 1896, letter to Theodore Goldin in The Benteen-Goldin Letters, edited by John Carroll, p. 278.

  In Mayflower I also strove to view the historical participants as idiosyncratic individuals instead of cogs in a “clash of cultures”: “the real-life Indians and English of the seventeenth century were too smart, too generous, too greedy, too brave—in short, too human—to behave so predictably,” p. xvi. In “Clash of Cultures as Euphemism: Avoiding History at the Little Bighorn,” Timothy Braatz writes, “Cultures do not clash; cultures do not even act—people do,” p. 109; see also Elliott, Custerology, pp. 138–39. Edward Godfrey described the “sickening, ghastly horror,” in W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, p. 346. Thomas Coleman’s description of Custer is in I Buried Custer, edited by Bruce Liddic, p. 21.

  Chapter 1: At the Flood

  For information on riverboats and the Missouri River, I’ve looked to Louis Hunter’s Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History, pp. 217–30; William Lass, A History of Steamboating on the Upper Missouri River, pp. 1–3; and Arthur C. Benke and Colbert E. Cushing, Rivers of North America, pp. 431–32. Hunter speaks of how deadly a snag could be in Steamboats, p. 236, and lists the average age of a Missouri riverboat as just five years, p. 100; after a trip up the Missouri in 1849, Francis Parkman wrote in The Oregon Trail: “It was frightful to see the dead and broken trees, each set as a military abatis, firmly imbedded in the sand and all pointing downstream, ready to impale any unhappy steamboat,” p. 2.

  Hunter writes of a Missouri riverboat’s “amphibian role, literally crawling along the river bottom,” p. 251; he also writes of how “the western steamboat, like the American ax, the revolver, and barbed wire, was a typical mechanical expression of a fluid and expanding frontier society,” p. 65. Joseph Mills Hanson in The Conquest of the Missouri (subsequently referred to as Hanson) provides the specifications of the Far West, p. 238. Hiram Chittenden in History of Early Steamboat Navigation on the Missouri River notes that the invention of the balanced rudder, with part of the blade forward of the rudder post, allowed for the replacement of two side wheels with a single stern wheel, p. 112. Hunter describes a Missouri riverboat as an “engine on a raft, with $11,000 worth of jig-saw work,” p. 62; he also writes of the “explosive exhaust of the high pressure engine,” p. 141, and of how the lightness of a riverboat’s construction meant that “every distinct motion of the propulsive power was vibrated through the entire frame,” p. 81. My description of “grasshoppering” is based on Hunter, p. 254, and Lass, who compares a riverboat perched on its two forward spars to a “squatting grasshopper,” in A History of Steamboating on the Upper Missouri River, p. 12.