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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

Normal procedure, especially when running with the current, was to tie up to the embankment and wait for dawn. But Marsh insisted on continuing, even though the Yellowstone was still a relatively new river to him.

Blinds were placed across the boat’s skylights, and huge tarpaulins curtained the glow from the furnaces on the lower deck to create what Mark Twain remembered as “that solid world of darkness.”

Of the Seventh Cavalry’s approximately 750 officers and enlisted men, 268 had been killed and 62 wounded. They’d lost not only their leader, but almost half their officers and men in the most devastating military loss in the history of the American West.

Five months later, after drinking himself to insensibility for much of the summer and fall, Weir was assigned to recruitment duty in New York City, where on December 9, 1876, he was found dead in his hotel room at the age of thirty-eight.

At four in the morning on July 4, on the lower deck of the Far West, Private William George of Benteen’s H Troop died of a bullet wound he’d received through the left side.

In the months to come, after a series of small but bloody skirmishes, virtually every band of Lakota and Cheyenne, even the Oglala under Crazy Horse, found that they had no choice but to surrender. By the autumn of 1876 Sitting Bull realized that his people’s world was falling apart, and on October 20, he agreed to meet with Colonel Miles.

His warriors, he claimed, had told him about Custer’s final moments: “It was said that up there where the last fight took place, where the last stand was made, the Long Hair stood like a sheaf of corn with all the ears fallen around him.”

“I did not come on your land to scare you,” Sitting Bull countered. “If you had not come on my land, you would not have been scared, either.”

McLaughlin believed, as did almost all Indian reformers in the late nineteenth century, that Native culture was doomed to extinction. To prepare the Lakota for the future, he must wean them from the past. Many Lakota children were sent away to boarding schools where the watchword was “Kill the Indian, and save the man.”

In order to increase the heat of the furnaces, he instructed his men to throw hunks of spoiled bacon into the fire. The rising boiler pressure caused the “incessant clang and cough” of the Far West’s machinery to increase in speed as the boat’s timbers shook with the added strain.

In the early morning hours of December 15, thirty-eight agency policemen, known as the Cheska Maza or “Metal Breasts” for the badges they wore, crossed the frozen Grand River to capture Sitting Bull.

Up until this point, the policeman Lone Man maintained, Sitting Bull had seemed willing to go with them. But after the taunt from his son, he changed his mind. “Then I will not go,” he said.

As the chief resisted their efforts to lead him toward an awaiting horse, Bull Head repeatedly struck him on the back and shouted: “You have no ears, you wouldn’t listen!” Suddenly, Catch the Bear threw back his blanket, raised his rifle, and fired at Bull Head, who instantly turned and fired a bullet into Sitting Bull’s chest. Another shot hit Shave Head while Red Tomahawk fired into Sitting Bull’s head, and the chief fell lifelessly to the ground.

Lone Man asked Bull Head, who’d received a mortal wound to the stomach, what he should do. “Do what you like with him,” he replied. “He is the cause of this trouble.” After hitting him with the butt of his rifle, Lone Man and two others shot the boy and threw his body out the door, where it lay beside the corpses of his father and his father’s brother Jumping Bull.

After hitting him with the butt of his rifle, Lone Man and two others shot the boy and threw his body out the door, where it lay beside the corpses of his father and his father’s brother Jumping Bull.

Holy Medicine had been one of Sitting Bull’s devoted followers. But when he saw that his brother Broken Arm, a policeman, had been killed, he took up a wagon yoke and began beating his former leader’s already mutilated face ...

So ended what the Lakota at Standing Rock came to call “the Battle in the Dark.”

Over the course of the next twenty-four hours, Carnahan passed along more than forty thousand words of copy to the editors of the New York Herald, who enjoyed one of the biggest scoops in newspaper history.

Two weeks after the death of Sitting Bull, on the morning of December 29, 1890, about two hundred miles to the south of the Standing Rock Agency, the Seventh Cavalry lay encamped at a place called Wounded Knee. There was much excitement among the troopers. Their commander, Colonel James Forsyth, had accepted the unconditional surrender of a band of Ghost Dancers under the leadership of the Minneconjou chief Big Foot. Many of Big Foot’s men, it was rumored, had fought at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Three days before the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Wallace had predicted that Custer was fated to die. Fourteen years later, Wallace’s premonition once again proved true.

In just a few minutes, eighty-three Minneconjou men lay dead. Since Forsyth had positioned his soldiers around the camp, they were firing not only on the Indians but on one another, and one of the casualties was Captain Wallace, who was later found, according to one account, with a bullet through his forehead.

When Godfrey and another soldier went to investigate, they found a woman and two small girls “in their death struggles.” There was also a boy with his arms stretched out and his coat pulled over his head as if he had just fallen down. When the boy moved, the soldier shot him in the head.

Godfrey received the brevet rank of major after the engagement, but there were those in the highest ranks of the military who believed he’d committed an atrocity at Wounded Knee. One of those was President Theodore Roosevelt, who vowed that Godfrey would never receive a promotion under his administration. Roosevelt eventually relented, and Godfrey retired as a brigadier general.

When Korn died at Wounded Knee, Comanche became despondent. His health declined, and on November 6, 1891, Comanche, famed as “the last living thing” found near Last Stand Hill, died at age twenty-nine.

The day was already quite hot, but Libbie began to shiver and sent for a wrap. She decided that as the wife of the regiment’s commander she must accompany McCaskey as he made the rounds of the garrison. There were twenty-six more wives who had yet to learn that they were now widows.

In the months ahead Libbie became so despondent that her friends feared for her sanity. That fall, Custer’s best friend, the actor Lawrence Barrett, visited her at the home of Custer’s parents in Monroe, Michigan.

“I could almost fancy that [Custer] himself was about to enter,” Lawrence wrote his wife. “So thoroughly was the place embraced by his belongings.” Libbie admitted that she had considered suicide until the “presence” of her husband had told her “to live for those they loved.”

“I learned to estimate the true strength of Mrs. Custer,” Barrett wrote. “And to see what a wife she had been to him, sinking her own personality to push him forward.” Libbie insisted that she had no regrets—“that her life with him had been one of intense happiness—which could not last, she knew—that she would live upon the memory of it.”

The Lakota and Cheyenne widows (some of whom had also lost sisters, brothers, children, and parents in the battle) were afforded no such stage or audience. In the years to come those who were not gunned down or otherwise mistreated during the incidents up to and including Wounded Knee lived out the rest of their lives on the reservations, where malnutrition, disease, and poverty replaced the variety and endless challenges of life on the plains.

Whittaker’s biography of Custer appeared in the fall of 1876. As Libbie had hoped, the book depicted Reno as both a coward and a traitor. To clear his name, Reno requested a court of inquiry into his conduct during the battle. In the winter of 1879, a military court convened at the Palmer House in Chicago, Illinois.

The rancor many of the officers had expressed about Reno’s actions during the battle had begun to cool—especially when General Sheridan made it clear that he wanted no disclosures during the proceedings that might reflect poorly on the U.S. Army. By January 1879, the officers of the Seventh had closed ranks. In the end, the judges refused to condemn Reno, but they also refused to exonerate him.

In addition to the court of inquiry, he endured two humiliating courts-martial, one for making illicit advances toward the wife of a fellow officer, another for peeping through the bedroom window of Colonel Sturgis’s teenage daughter. He was dismissed from the service, and in 1889 he died of complications after surgery for throat cancer.

Benteen did as he’d done after the Washita and fed an unflattering story to the press. Unlike Custer, who had let it pass, Crook was unwilling to tolerate such blatant insubordination, and Benteen had no choice but to retire.

To Theodore Goldin, another veteran of the battle, he admitted that he had felt no sorrow upon viewing the dead bodies of Custer and his circle of relatives and friends. “The Lord, in His own good time had at last rounded the scoundrels up,” he wrote, “taking, however, many good and innocent men with them!”

In the late nineteenth century, with the help of Buffalo Bill Cody’s tremendously popular Wild West Show, which often ended with an earsplitting reenactment of Custer’s demise, the perpetually thirty-six-year-old general became the symbol of what many Americans wanted their country to be: a pugnacious, upstart global power.

On a Saturday in late September 2006, Steve and his wife, Sandy (who plays the role of Libbie Custer with equal passion and commitment), hosted a noted guest: Ernie LaPointe, the great-grandson of Sitting Bull.

LaPointe, on the other hand, is a wounded veteran of the Vietnam War, in which he served with the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne Division.

LaPointe made it clear that he held no grudges against the man Alexander portrays. “Sitting Bull didn’t dislike Custer,” he said. “He realized he was a military guy following orders.”

LaPointe’s attitude in 2006 could not be more different from that expressed over thirty years earlier by the Lakota intellectual and activist Vine Deloria Jr. in Custer Died for Your Sins. Reflecting the radicalism of the Vietnam War era, Deloria described Custer, the righteous martyr of the first half of the twenti...

In 1919, the Lakota warrior He Dog recounted what he had told an army officer looking for information about the Battle of the Little Bighorn on behalf of Libbie Custer. “[I]f he wanted to know the cause of that trouble,” He Dog told him, “he would have to look in Washington…[because] Washington was the place all those troubles started.”

General Terry, like Sheridan before him, had told Custer to do whatever he thought best once he came in contact with the Indians. At the Washita in 1868, Custer had attacked. As the campaign against the southern Cheyenne progressed the following year, Custer chose a completely different course.

Washington sent Custer to south-central Montana in 1876, but what Custer decided to do at the Little Bighorn was by no means determined by President Grant. In fact, if the Crow scout White Man Runs Him is to be believed, Custer viewed his actions at the battle as a kind of repudiation of his commander in chief. “I have an enemy back where many white people live that I hate,” he reportedly told the scouts. “I am going to take this village whether I am killed or not.”

In fact, if the Crow scout White Man Runs Him is to be believed, Custer viewed his actions at the battle as a kind of repudiation of his commander in chief. “I have an enemy back where many white people live that I hate,” he reportedly told the scouts. “I am going to take this village whether I am killed or not.”

“If I were an Indian,” Custer wrote, “I often think I would greatly prefer to cast my lot among those of my people adhered to the free open plains rather than submit to the confined limits of a reservation, there to be the recipient of the blessed benefits of civilization, with its vices thrown in without stint or measure.”

If Custer’s sympathies for the Indians were indeed as deep as this passage suggests, then how do we account for his decision to desecrate the Lakota graves during his march up the Yellowstone toward the Far West? Several observers believed that Custer and his family members ultimately paid for this outrageous and needless act with their lives.

Some are remembered because they transcended the failings of their age. Custer is remembered because he so perfectly embodied those failings. As Herman Melville wrote of that seagoing monster of a man Captain Ahab, “All mortal greatness is but disease.”

As Bull Head shouted at Sitting Bull in his final moments, “You have no ears, you wouldn’t listen!” This, according to Kate Bighead, was the same sentiment the two southern Cheyenne women expressed on Last Stand Hill when they pierced Custer’s eardrums with an awl.

Weldon was what Libbie and Monahsetah had been for Custer—part promoter, part cultural intermediary—and she and her son lived with Sitting Bull and his extended family along the banks of the Grand River.

More than anything else, he was tired. “He said he would be glad if the soldiers would kill him,” Weldon wrote, “so his heart would find rest.”

When Weldon and her son left in November, what little hope Sitting Bull had for the future seems to have faded. On November 27, the teacher John Carignan reported to McLaughlin, “Sitting Bull has lost all confidence in the whites since Mrs. Weldon left him.”