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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Hanson writes of Grant Marsh’s experiences in the 1860s, p. 80; Lass claims that $24 million worth of gold was taken down the Missouri during the Montana gold rush in the 1860s, A History of Steamboating, pp. 67–68. The town of Bismarck was named for the chancellor of Germany in the unrequited hope that he would invest in the Dakota Territory; see Lass, A History of Steamboating, p. 80. According to Lass, the Dakotas in the mid-1870s were “one of the last lucrative steamboat frontiers in the nation,” p. 89. Edward Lazarus in Black Hills White Justice: The Sioux Nation Versus the United States, 1775 to the Present puts the national debt in 1874 at $2 billion, p. 78. My description of Custer’s Black Hills Expedition is based on Sven Froiland’s Natural History of the Black Hills and Badlands and Ernest Grafe and Paul Horsted’s Exploring with Custer. Charles Windolph in I Fought with Custer, edited by Frazier and Robert Hunt, wrote of the incredible profitability of the Homestake Mine in Lead, South Dakota, p. 40. On Custer’s testimony before Congress in the spring of 1876, see Robert Utley’s Cavalier in Buckskin, pp. 152–54. Hanson reported that Marsh and the Far West were paid $360 a day by the U.S. Army, p. 239.

  My account of the Centennial Exhibition is based largely on Dorothy G. Beersin’s “The Centennial City,” pp. 461–68, in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, edited by Russell F. Weigley. The opening ceremony of the exhibition is described in Robert Rydell’s All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916, pp. 14–17. Custer’s troubles with his horse during the Grand Review at the conclusion of the Civil War are described in Jeffrey Wert’s Custer: The Controversial Life of George Armstrong Custer, p. 228; Jay Monaghan’s Custer: The Life of General George Armstrong Custer, pp. 248–51; Frederick Whittaker’s A Life of Major General George A. Custer, pp. 311–14; and Lawrence Frost’s General Custer’s Libbie, p. 47. The New York Herald’s reference to Grant as the “modern Caesar” is in James Wengert’s The Custer Despatches, p. 5. William Dean Howells referred to the “silent indifference” of the crowd’s response to Grant and added, “Ten years ago earth and sky would have shaken with the thunder of his welcome. What a sublime possession to have thrown away, the confidence and gratitude of a nation!” in William Randel’s Centennial: American Life in 1876, p. 291. Robert Utley in The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890 writes of Grant’s Indian policy, pp. 129–31.

  General Terry described the logistics of the campaign in a May 17, 1876, letter to his sister Polly Jane in The Terry Letters, edited by James Willert, p. 1. Mark Kellogg wrote of the scouting report placing Sitting Bull’s village on the Little Missouri River in the May 18, 1876, Bismarck Tribune; see also Terry’s May 15, 1876, letter to General Sheridan, cited in Gray, Centennial Campaign, p. 89; Gray puts the total size of the column, including both the Seventh Cavalry and the infantry columns at 879, p. 97. Custer’s boast that the Seventh “could whip and defeat all the Indians on the plains” appeared in J. R. Perkins, Trails, Rails and War: The Life of General G. M. Dodge, who added that Custer “went not only to fight the Indians but determined to wipe out the disgrace of his arrest,” p. 193. Frost in General Custer’s Libbie referred to the two canaries for Libbie; the reference to Custer being as “happy as a boy with a new red sled” is in Windolph, I Fought with Custer, p. 50. In Boots and Saddles, Libbie Custer wrote that prior to the departure of the Seventh in May 1876 Custer’s “buoyant spirits made him like a boy,” p. 219.

  Custer’s 150-mile sprint to Libbie in 1867 is described by Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, p. 169. Libbie Custer referred to that “one long perfect day” in Tenting on the Plains, p. 403. When the legendary scout Jim Bridger heard about Sheridan’s plan for a winter campaign against the Cheyenne, he felt compelled to travel to Fort Hays to dissuade the general: “You can’t hunt Indians on the plains in winter,” he said, “for blizzards don’t respect man or beast,” in Carl Rister, Border Command, p. 92. As Perry Jamieson in Crossing the Deadly Ground: United States Army Tactics, 1865–1899 points out, the concept of a winter campaign was nothing new, pp. 37–38. Although Jamieson cites examples as far back as the eighteenth century, there are even earlier precedents. During the winter of 1675, New England colonial forces launched a winter campaign against the Narragansett Indians; see my Mayflower, pp. 265–80. Benteen described his confrontation with Custer concerning his article about the Washita in a Feb. 22, 1896, letter to Goldin in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, p. 280.

  In a March 24, 1869, letter to Libbie, Custer wrote of his deliberate plan to answer the critics of his Washita campaign with diplomacy: “[M]y command, from highest to lowest, desired bloodshed. . . . I paid no heed but followed the dictates of my own judgment upon which my beloved commander [General Sheridan] said he relied for the attainment of the best results. . . . And now my most bitter enemies cannot say that I am either blood-thirsty or possessed of an unworthy ambition,” in Elizabeth Custer’s Following the Guidon, pp. 56–57. Utley in Cavalier in Buckskin quotes Custer’s letter to Libbie concerning “Custer luck,” pp. 104–5. Libbie wrote of the “aimlessness” of Custer’s time in Kentucky in Boots and Saddles, p. 123; she also wrote of how smashing chairs was typical of how he “celebrated every order to move with wild demonstrations of joy,” p. 5. The officer’s reference to how Custer was “making himself utterly detested” during the march up the Missouri in 1873 is cited in Roger Darling’s Custer’s Seventh Cavalry Comes to Dakota: New Discoveries Reveal Custer’s Tribulations Enroute to the Yellowstone Expedition, p. 177.

  Benteen’s account of his conversation with Custer concerning his cousin Lawrence Gobright is in his Feb. 22, 1896, letter to Goldin in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, pp. 281–82. The surgeon James DeWolf wrote of Benteen in his diary, edited by Edward Luce: “He has silver gray hair and is very easy spoken,” “Diary and Letters of Dr. James M. DeWolf,” p. 67. In a Mar. 10, 1897, letter to the photographer D. F. Barry, Benteen wrote, “Mrs. Custer knows that I am one of the few men who thoroughly understood her husband,” D. F. Barry Correspondence, edited by John Carroll, p. 44. Benteen wrote of his “happy facility of making enemies” in a Mar. 23, 1896, letter to Goldin in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, p. 293. In a Nov. 17, 1891, letter Benteen wrote, “I’ve been a loser in a way, all my life by rubbing a bit against the angles—or hair—of folks, instead of going with their whims; but I couldn’t go otherwise—’twould be against the grain of myself,” in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, p. 206. In a Nov. 10, 1891, letter to Goldin, he wrote of how Custer “wanted me badly as a friend,” in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, p. 199; he wrote of Libbie as “cold-blooded” in a Feb. 17, 1896, letter, p. 262; the reference to “wheels within wheels” is from Benteen’s Feb. 22, 1896, letter to Goldin, p. 282.

  Marguerite Merington in her collection of correspondence titled The Custer Story (subsequently referred to as Merington) wrote of Custer reading The Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 204; Libbie described Custer as a “self-appointed hermit” in Boots and Saddles, p. 118. Glenwood Swanson’s G. A. Custer has a picture of Custer’s “THIS IS MY BUSY DAY” card, p. 59. Libbie described Custer’s study in Boots and Saddles, p. 149. Libbie recounted Custer’s words during his meeting with Terry on May 16, 1876, in a letter to Custer’s friend Jacob Greene; quoted by Greene in a Sept. 1, 1904, Greene letter reprinted in Cyrus Townsend Brady’s Indian Fights and Fighters, p. 393. Custer’s Mar. 29, 1876, testimony before Congress on the “Sale of Post Traderships” is in House of Representatives, 44th Cong., 1st Sess., Report 799. For an account of these hearings that is sympathetic to Custer, see John Hart’s “Custer’s First Stand: The Washington Fight.” But as even Hart admits, Custer did recant the only substantive part of his testimony.

  In the article “Campaign Against the Sioux in 1876,” General Terry’s aide and brother-in-law Robert Hughes claimed that Terry told him how Custer “with tears in his eyes, begged my aid. How could I resist it?” p. 12; Hughes also wrote of Custer’s encounter with Terry’s good frien
d William Ludlow and his intention to “swing clear of Terry.”

  In describing the regiment’s departure from Fort Lincoln on May 17, I’ve looked to James Willert’s Little Big Horn Diary, pp. 2–8, and L. J. Chorne’s Following the Custer Trail, pp. 10–27. Several research trips to North Dakota during the wet spring months have given me a firsthand knowledge of what Don Rickey in Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay describes as “a semi-liquid gumbo quagmire,” p. 259. The account of the “weird something” felt by Lieutenant Gibson’s wife is recounted in Katherine Gibson Fougera’s With Custer’s Cavalry, p. 252. Annie Yates’s account of Custer’s statement that he “cannot die before my time comes” is in A Summer on the Plains with Custer’s 7th Cavalry, edited by Brian Pohanka, p. 154. John Burkman’s description of Libbie telling Custer “I wish Grant hadn’t let you go” is in Glendolin Damon Wagner’s Old Neutriment (subsequently referred to as Wagner), p. 119. Libbie wrote of the regiment’s tearful departure in Boots and Saddles, pp. 217–18. My discussion of the phenomenon of the superior image is based in part on W. J. Humphreys’s Physics of the Air, pp. 470–71.

  Libbie’s description of Custer’s first extended kiss is in Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, p. 80. In a letter written early in their marriage, Libbie wrote, “He brushes his teeth after every meal. I always laugh at him for it, also for washing hands so frequently,” Merington, p. 109. She wrote of Custer’s sensitive stomach in Boots and Saddles, p. 76. Another one of Custer’s idiosyncratic traits was his love of raw onions, which he bit into like apples. In Boots and Saddles, Libbie wrote, “[O]nions were permitted at our table, but after indulging in them, [Custer and Tom] found themselves severely let alone, and that they did not enjoy,” p. 267. Concerning Custer’s silences, Annie Yates wrote that “like all unusual and original men, he had moods of silence when he seemed too full of earnest serious thoughts for words,” Pohanka, A Summer on the Plains, p. 154. Rebecca Richmond also wrote of Custer’s silences in Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, p. 233. John Burkman told of Custer’s gambling, in Wagner, p. 93. At one point Custer wrote Libbie: “Am I not right darling to tell of my faults and tell you I have discarded them forever,” Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, p. 85. Benteen made repeated references to Custer’s relationship with the Cheyenne captive Monahsetah and his African American cook in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, pp. 30, 258, 262, 271, 276; see also Jeffrey Wert’s Custer, p. 291. In an 1868 letter to Vinnie Ream, Custer wrote, “Please have your servant examine the floor of your studio to see if my wallet (not my pistol) was not [left] there last night,” in the Vinnie Ream Hoxie Collection, LOC. See Edward Cooper’s Vinnie Ream on her affair with Sherman, pp. 178–80.

  The letter fragment in which Custer refers to his “erratic, wild, or unseemly” conduct is at the Beinecke Library at Yale; see Barnett’s Touched by Fire, pp. 198–200, for an excellent discussion of this letter. Libbie’s possible relationship with Thomas Weir in 1867 is discussed by Robert Utley in Cavalier in Buckskin, pp. 106–8; by Shirley Leckie in Elizabeth Bacon Custer and the Making of a Myth, pp. 102–3; and by Louise Barnett in Touched by Fire, p. 139. Frost discusses Libbie’s potential interest in Myles Keogh, General Custer’s Libbie, p. 192. In his fascinating biography of Custer, Glory-Hunter, Frederic Van de Water quotes extensively from Custer’s letter about his ambition “not to be wealthy, not to be learned, but to be great.” As Van de Water quite rightly comments, “This is not a march-worn husband writing to his wife. This is adolescence engaged in autobiography,” p. 161. Libbie’s comments about “making history” are recorded in Katherine Fougera’s With Custer’s Cavalry, p. 137. Frost cites the letters from Libbie about her ambitions for Custer in General Custer’s Libbie, p. 205.

  In My Life on the Plains, Custer unflinchingly lingered on Monahsetah’s considerable physical charms. She was, Custer wrote, “an exceedingly comely squaw, possessing a bright, cheery face, a countenance beaming with intelligence, and a disposition more inclined to be merry than one usually finds among the Indians. She was probably rather under than over twenty years of age. Added to the bright, laughing eyes, a set of pearly teeth, and a rich complexion, her well-shaped head was crowned with a luxuriant growth of the most beautiful silken tresses, rivaling in color the blackness of the raven and extending, when allowed to fall loosely over her shoulders, to below her waist,” p. 282. In 1890, fourteen years after her husband’s death, Libbie published Following the Guidon, in which she described her first meeting with Monahsetah at Fort Hays, Kansas, in 1869. “How could I help feeling,” she wrote, “that with a swift movement she would produce a weapon, and by stabbing the wife, hurt the white chief who had captured her, in what she believed would be the most cruel way,” p. 95. In this passage Libbie somehow manages to acknowledge the threat Monahsetah posed to her marriage without betraying the truth of her husband’s infidelity.

  Libbie wrote of Custer’s relationship with the actor Lawrence Barrett in Tenting on the Plains, p. 220; she also referred to how Barrett typically greeted her husband: “Well, old fellow; hard at work making history, are you?” Libbie wrote of how Custer sat spellbound, performance after performance, watching Barrett perform as Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “There were forty nights that these friends sat side by side, until the call boy summoned the actor to the footlights. The General listened every evening with unflagging interest to the acting of his friend,” in Boots and Saddles, p. 208. Early in their marriage, Libbie was taken with how thoroughly Custer immersed himself in a play, remarking that he “laughed at the fun and cried at the pathos in the theatres with all the abandon of a boy unconscious of surroundings,” in Frost, p. 94.

  My account of Grant Marsh’s encounter with Libbie and the other officers’ wives is based on Hanson, pp. 237–40. John Burkman’s description of Libbie and Custer’s farewell is in Wagner, pp. 123–24. Libbie wrote of her mistaken impression that Custer had “made every plan” to have her join him by steamboat in Boots and Saddles, p. 219. John Neihardt’s description of Marsh as a “born commander” is from The River and I, p. 250. Libbie wrote of how terrible it was “to be left behind” in Boots and Saddles, p. 60. Thomas Marquis in “Pioneer Woman Describes Ft. Abraham Lincoln Scenes When Word Came of the Custer Disaster,” Billings Gazette, Nov. 13, 1932, quotes a Mrs. J. C. Chappell (who was eleven years old in 1876) as saying that Libbie told her mother, Mrs. Manley, that “she never had seen her husband depart on active service with so heavy a heart. . . . She was grievously disappointed that Captain Marsh was not willing she should be a passenger in the Far West.”

  My description of Marsh’s two exploring expeditions up the Yellowstone, in 1873 and 1875, are based on Hanson, pp. 197–225. According to an article in the Sept. 23, 1873, New York Tribune: “It seems not a little singular . . . that one of our largest and most beautiful rivers . . . should remain entirely unexplored by large steamers until the year 1873.”

  Chapter 2: The Dream

  My description of a butte is largely based on the description by Ellen Meloy in Home Ground, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney, p. 57. My description of Sitting Bull’s actions in this chapter are based on the “Prophecy of Sitting Bull As Told to One Bull,” box 110, folder 8, WCC. Interestingly, Campbell/Vestal chose not to include any mention of this particular vision in his biography of Sitting Bull. As Raymond DeMallie writes in “ ‘These Have No Ears’: Narrative and Ethnohistorical Method,” the vision of two clouds colliding was “redundant in a narrative sense” when paired with Sitting Bull’s more well-known sun dance vision described in chapter 4. “To Campbell,” DeMallie writes, “the second prophecy apparently seemed unnecessary—a kind of afterthought,” p. 523. DeMallie refers to an account interpreted by Robert Higheagle, box 104, WCC, that places this prophecy after Sitting Bull’s sun dance vision. I’ve chosen to follow Robert Utley in The Lance and the Shield, who places this vision prior to the sun dance, sometime between May 21 and May 24, p. 136. This chronology is corroborated by Ernie LaPointe,
the great-grandson of Sitting Bull, in “Thank You Grandfather, We Are Still Alive,” part 2 of his film The Authorized Biography of Sitting Bull. Although several details of the vision vary in LaPointe’s account, he also places Sitting Bull’s vision of the collision of what he describes as “two whirl-winds” prior to the sun dance.

  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.