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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

The vision in the shallows of the lake transformed Crazy Horse into his tribe’s greatest warrior. “[W]hen I came out,” he told his cousin Flying Hawk, “I was born by my mother.”

Custer was known for his long hair, but in 1876 he, like many men approaching forty, was beginning to go bald. Before leaving Fort Lincoln, he and another officer with thinning hair, Lieutenant Charles Varnum, “had the clippers run over their heads.” This meant that the former “boy general” of the Civil War with the famously flowing locks now looked decidedly middle-aged. “He looked so unnatural after that,” Burkman remembered.

Adding to his edge was the fact that while each trooper was required to carry close to seventy-five pounds of personal equipment, all of Custer’s baggage was normally transported by wagon.

At one point, he repeated a claim he’d already made back at Fort Lincoln. If they won a victory against the Lakota, he and Bloody Knife would go to Washington, D.C., where Custer would become the Great Father, or president of the United States.

Custer’s father, Emanuel, was a staunch, even rabid, Democrat, and during the Civil War in the fall of 1864, he wrote his son an extraordinary letter, in which he berated him for the pro-Lincoln comments recently attributed to him in the press.

Practical jokers are jovial sadists. They require someone to mock and humiliate, and the Custers’ raucous household was full of a brawling, pugnacious love that thrived on combat.

Indeed, this campaign marked the first time the Seventh Cavalry had been fully reconstituted since the Battle of the Washita seven and a half years before.

Long stretches of boredom were punctuated by often terrifying encounters with Native warriors who the troopers assumed would torture them to death if they were unlucky enough to be captured. Since suicide was preferred to this grisly end, “Save the last bullet for yourself” was the cautionary motto learned by every new recruit, of which there were many in the Seventh.

But after a few months looking for work, Windolph had no choice but to join the American army. “Always struck me as being funny,” he remembered, “here we’d run away from Germany to escape military service, and now…we were forced to go into the army here.” Twelve percent of the Seventh Cavalry had been born in Germany, 17 percent in Ireland, and 4 percent in England. The regiment also included troopers from Canada, Denmark, Switzerland, France, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Greece, Poland, Hungary, and Russia.

Sending raw recruits and untrained horses to fight mounted Indians is simply sending soldiers to be slaughtered without the power of defending themselves.”

Perhaps it was Private Windolph who best described the pride inherent in being a veteran member of Custer’s regiment. “You felt like you were somebody when you were on a good horse, with a carbine dangling from its small leather ring socket on your McClellan saddle, and a Colt army revolver strapped on your hip; and a hundred rounds of ammunition in your web belt and in your saddle pockets. You were a cavalryman of the Seventh Regiment. You were part of a proud outfit that had a fighting reputation, and you were ready for a fight or a frolic.”

“My nose and ears are nearly all off and lips burned,” Dr. James Madison DeWolf recorded in his diary. “Laughing is impossible.” DeWolf now understood why Custer and so many of his officers hid their lips beneath bushy mustaches.

“This action would have seemed strange to us had it not been almost a daily occurrence,” Thompson wrote. “It seemed that the man was so full of nervous energy that it was impossible for him to move along patiently.”

However, Custer had fallen in love with a local girl, whose father, hoping to get Custer as far away from his daughter as possible, appears to have done everything he could to persuade the congressman to send the schoolteacher with a roving eye to West Point.

Custer finished last in his class, but it was because he was too busy enjoying himself, not because he was unintelligent.

Actual battle, not the patient study of it, was what he was destined for, and with the outbreak of the Civil War he discovered his true calling. “I shall regret to see the war end,” he admitted in a letter. “I would be willing, yes glad, to see a battle every day during my life.”

With the signing of the Treaty of 1868, the U.S. government granted the Lakota most of the modern state of South Dakota, along with hunting rights to more than twenty-two million acres of prime buffalo territory to the west and north in modern North Dakota and Montana.

In addition to the Oglala and the Brulé, the Lakota, whose name means “alliance of friends,” included five other bands: the Minneconjou, Sans Arcs, Two Kettles, Blackfeet, and Sitting Bull’s people, the Hunkpapa.

The concept of having a supreme leader did not come naturally to the Lakota, for whom individuality and independence had always been paramount. Even in the midst of battle, a warrior was not bound by the orders of a commander; he fought for his own personal glory. Decisions were reached in Lakota society by consensus, and if two individuals or groups disagreed, they were free to go their separate ways and find another village to attach themselves to.

Both chiefs decided that given the inevitability of white expansion into their territory, the time was right to start working with, rather than against, the U.S. government.

Then there was Sitting Bull’s position: complete autonomy, as far as that was possible, from the washichus. It was true that the horse and the gun had come to them from the whites, but all the rest of it—their diseases, their food, their whiskey, their insane love of gold—all of this had a hateful effect on the Lakota.

Instead of shunning the whites, these Lakota felt it was time to begin a conscious effort at accommodation. Increasing numbers of Lakota opted for the reservations (by 1875 more than half of the total Lakota population of approximately eighteen thousand had moved to the agencies), and Sitting Bull’s staunch insistence on isolationism was beginning to seem willfully anachronistic.

The Lakota assumed the Grabber was an Indian half-breed. He certainly looked like an Indian with dark skin, jet-black hair, and high cheekbones. The speed with which he learned the Lakota language and the enthusiasm with which he embraced all aspects of the culture also seemed to corroborate the impression that Grouard was at least part Native American. But as Grouard later insisted to anyone who listened, he was something else entirely: a South Sea Islander, commonly referred to by American sailors as a Kanaka.

Frank Grouard was not the only non-Indian to embrace Lakota culture. For decades, what was known as the “squaw man” had been a fixture in the West, and many of the children born from these interracial unions served as scouts for the U.S. Army.

Sitting Bull undoubtedly liked Frank Grouard, but he had other, largely political reasons for bringing him into the fold. Since Sitting Bull refused to deal directly with the whites, he needed an intermediary, someone he could trust who was capable of understanding and communicating with the washichus, and Grouard quickly became a member of his inner circle.

Only fourteen lodges, composed mostly of the families in his immediate kinship circle, known as a tiyoshpaye, joined him that winter in his obstinate insistence on remaining beyond the reach of the whites. Sitting Bull was in danger of losing his tribe.

Given Sitting Bull’s renown as a composer and singer of songs, it is tempting to speculate on his reaction to the boisterous strains of Felix Vinatieri’s band. Having once sung of his own bravery and daring as he sprinted toward the Crow chief, he would have known exactly what Custer was attempting to accomplish as the notes of “Garry Owen” echoed up and down the valley of the Yellowstone.

Grouard had found the transition back to white society surprisingly difficult. Several years on an all-meat diet had made it almost impossible for him to digest bread. He also had trouble with the language. “It was two or three months before I could talk English without getting the Indian mixed up with it,” he remembered.

Sitting Bull, on the other hand, responded to both the message and the messenger with unbridled scorn. “He told me to go out and tell the white men at Red Cloud that he declared open war,” Grouard remembered, “and would fight them wherever he met them from that time on. His entire harangue was an open declaration of war.”

Although neither Sitting Bull nor Crazy Horse participated in the negotiations that September, a leading Oglala warrior named Little Big Man did his best to convince the government’s commissioners that the Black Hills were not for sale.

Grant had called them together to discuss the Black Hills, where there were now an estimated fifteen thousand miners despite Crook’s halfhearted attempts over the summer to keep them out.

Grant chose what he felt was the lesser of two evils. He decided to wage war on the Indians instead of on the miners.

Sitting Bull and his followers, Watkins claimed, were raising havoc—not only killing innocent American citizens but also terrorizing rival, peace-loving tribes. Without mentioning the Black Hills once, Watkins spelled out a blueprint for action that might as well have been (and perhaps was) written by Sheridan himself.

It owes it to civilization and the common cause of humanity.

Watkins’s report was false. To expect the Lakota to journey to the reservations in January, when blizzards often made travel impossible, was absurd. Sheridan privately admitted that the order would most likely “be regarded as a good joke by the Indians.”

By adopting the Grabber as his brother and not, as he had threatened, killing him after his first betrayal, Sitting Bull had unwittingly provided the army with the only person capable of not only finding the village but, just as important, eluding the scouts who were guarding it.

The sad truth was that the white soldiers were acting under the explicit, if evasively delivered, orders of the grandfather.

If the Lakota and Cheyenne were to see Sitting Bull’s sun dance vision to its proper conclusion, they must deny their desires for the material goods of the washichus.

That January, while he and Libbie were in New York City soaking up Julius Caesar,

Dark-haired and dark-eyed—the Arikara scouts called him “the man with the dark face”—Reno was the quintessential outsider. Whether or not it was because he’d lost both his parents by fifteen, something always seemed to be smoldering inside him, and his reticent, stubborn manner won him few friends.

In April, Captain Thomas Weir refused to participate in a battalion drill. As Reno led his officers and men on the parade ground, Weir sat on the porch of one of the officers’ quarters, no doubt with a huge, mocking grin on his face. Reno charged Weir with insubordination, a charge that was dismissed by General Terry, who, if his earlier refusal to grant Reno a leave after his wife’s death is any indication, had no love for Marcus Reno.

Besides demonstrating Terry’s frustrations with Custer, the decision to put Reno in charge of the scout also showed how low the expectations were for finding any Indians on the Powder and Tongue rivers.

“Tuck regularly comes when I am writing,” he wrote Libbie on June 12, “and lays her head on the desk, rooting up my hand with her long nose until I consent to stop and notice her.

A crippling hesitation and fear seemed to waft from these gurgling, sun-glinting waters, and as Dr. Paulding could sense, the Lakota and Cheyenne knew it.

The Crows had long since decided to align themselves with the United States, not because they had any great love for the Americans but because they saw the alliance as a way to keep from losing their lands to the Lakota.

Reno was, and still is, derided for his lack of experience fighting Indians. In actuality, he’d been chasing Indians since before Custer had even graduated from West Point. In 1860, he’d been assigned to Fort Walla Walla in the Oregon Territory, where he’d been ordered to investigate the whereabouts of a missing pioneer family. He found their mutilated bodies “pierced by numerous arrows” and set out in search of the Indians responsible for the attack.

the fact remained that Reno knew how to pursue and find Indians.

There was much more death to come in the days ahead, but for Grant Marsh and the crew of the Far West, the tragedy began on June 12 with the drowning of Sergeant Fox, his lifeless body left to tumble and twist in watery freefall down the rushing river.

It had been so cold that morning back in 1868 that what was supposed to have been a dramatic crescendo of horns had turned into a few strangled squawks and squeaks when the musicians’ spittle froze almost instantly in their instruments—but no matter. The band with all its gaiety and swagger had been there on the snowy plains. That morning the band members climbed up onto a hill beside the Yellowstone and played “Garry Owen” one last time. “It was something you’d never forget,” Private Windolph remembered.

After having witnessed the grisly evidence of the unknown trooper’s torture and death, Custer appears to have been in the mood for revenge.