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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

He and his regiment were pursuing hostile Indians across the plains of Kansas, a portion of the country about which he knew almost nothing.

In less than a decade this same trick of western topography would lure him to his death on a flat-topped hill beside a river called the Little Bighorn. On that day in Kansas, however, George Armstrong Custer quickly forgot about his regiment and the Indians they were supposedly pursuing when he saw his first buffalo: an enormous, shaggy bull.

Both Custer and his horse were veterans of the recent war. Indeed, Custer had gained a reputation as one of the Union’s greatest cavalry officers.

he proved to be a true prodigy of war—charismatic, quirky, and fearless—and by the age of twenty-three, just two years after finishing last in his class at West Point, he had been named a brigadier general.

two years since Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Custer had come to lon...

the spring of 1867,

Custer’s transformation into an American myth had much to do with the timing of the disaster. When word of his defeat first reached the American public on July 7, 1876, the nation was in the midst of celebrating the centennial of its glorious birth. For a nation drunk on its own potency and power, the news came as a frightening shock.

The variations are endless—from the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae to Davy Crockett at the Alamo—but they all tell the story of a brave and intractable hero leading his tiny band against a numberless foe.

When it comes to the Little Bighorn, most Americans think of the Last Stand as belonging solely to George Armstrong Custer. But the myth applies equally to his legendary opponent Sitting Bull. For while the Sioux and Cheyenne were the victors that day, the battle marked the beginning of their own Last Stand.

Within a few years of the Little Bighorn, all the major tribal leaders had taken up residence on Indian reservations, with one exception. Not until the summer of 1881 did Sitting Bull submit to U.S. authorities, but only after first handing his rifle to his son Crowfoot, who then gave the weapon to an army officer. “I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle,” Sitting Bull said. “This boy has given it to you, and he now wants to know how he is going to make a living.”

Sitting Bull did not go quietly into the dark night of reservation life at the Standing Rock Agency in what would become North and South Dakota.

The massacre that unfolded on December 29 at a creek called Wounded Knee was seen by at least some of the officers of the Seventh Cavalry as overdue revenge for their defeat at the Little Bighorn.

Forty percent of the soldiers in Custer’s Seventh Cavalry had been born outside the United States in countries like Ireland, England, Germany, and Italy; of the Americans, almost all of them had grown up east of the Mississippi River. For this decidedly international collection of soldiers, the Plains were as strange and unworldly as the surface of the moon.

In 1876, there were no farms, ranches, towns, or even military bases in central and eastern Montana. For all practical and legal purposes, this was Indian territory.

two years before, however, gold had been discovered in the nearby Black Hills by an expedition led by none other than George Custer. As prospectors flooded into the region, the U.S. government decided that it had no choice but to acquire the hills—by force if necessary—from the Indians.

Instead of an effort to defend innocent American pioneers from Indian attack, the campaign against the Sioux and Cheyenne in the spring of 1876 was an unprovoked military invasion of an independent nation that already happene...

America was not the only place in the world where Western and indigenous peoples were coming into conflict in the late nineteenth century. Little Bighorn–like battles had been or were about to be fought in India, the Middle East, and Africa—most spectacularly, perhaps, at Isandlwana in 1879, when twenty-four thousand Zulus annihilated a British force of more than thirt...

Since the battles were not fought on a distant and colonized continent but within our own interior, we are living...

The fluidity of the sea, not the rigidity of irresistible law, characterizes human conduct, especially in the midst of a calamity. Even when people are bound by strict codes of behavior, their distinctive personalities have a way of asserting themselves.

The collision that occurred on June 25, 1876, resulted in three different battles with Sitting Bull’s village of Sioux and Cheyenne: one fought by Custer; another fought by his second-in-command, Major Marcus Reno; and yet another fought, for all intents and purposes, by Captain Frederick Benteen. Reno, Benteen, and a significant portion of their commands survived. Custer and every one of his officers and men were killed.

Captain Grant Marsh guided the riverboat Far West toward Fort Lincoln, the home of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the U.S. Army’s Seventh Cavalry. This was Marsh’s first trip up the Missouri since the ice and snow had closed the river the previous fall, and like any good pilot he was carefully studying how the waterway had changed.

For the U.S. military, rivers were the point of entry into some of the country’s most inaccessible areas. In May of 1876, before railroads extended across Montana, rivers provided Custer’s Seventh Cavalry with provisions and equipment via Grant Marsh and the Far West.

By the late 1860s, what came to be known as the Missouri riverboat had been perfected: an amphibious watercraft that ranks with the Bowie knife, barbed wire, and the Colt revolver as one of the quintessential innovations of the American West.

as it lurched over the mud on two spindly legs that this technique of going where no riverboat had ever gone before became known as “grasshoppering.” It might take hours, sometimes days, to make it over a particularly nasty stretch of river bottom, but grasshoppering meant that a riverboat was now something more than a means of transportation. It was an invasive species of empire.

In the beginning, furs lured the boats up the Missouri; by the 1860s, it was gold that drew them as far north and west as Fort Benton, twenty-three hundred miles above the mouth of the Missouri and almost in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. In 1866, Grant Marsh, soon to become known as “the king of the pilots,” left Fort Benton with $1.25 million worth of gold, said to be the most valuable cargo ever sent down the Missouri.

the Black Hills were sacred to the Sioux and—until Custer’s expedition—almost unknown to the whites, save for rumors of gold.

There was a saying among the soldiers of the western frontier, a saying Custer and his officers could heartily endorse: “Indian women rape easy.”

Just as the Indians valued counting coup as the ultimate test of bravery, a soldier in the Civil War had wanted nothing more than to capture the enemy’s flag.

That morning on the eastern slope of the Wolf Mountains, Custer leapt onto his horse Dandy and rode bareback throughout the column, spreading the news of the Crows’ discovery and ordering each troop commander to prepare to march at 8 a.m. There was at least one officer to whom he did not speak. “I noticed Custer passed me on horseback,” Benteen wrote. “[He] went on, saying nothing to me.”

At 8:00 sharp, Custer led the column due west on a gradual climb toward the divide. At 10:30, after a march of about four miles, he directed the regiment toward a narrow ravine less than two miles east of the divide. As Custer, Red Star, and Gerard continued on to the Crow’s Nest, the soldiers were to hide themselves here until nightfall.