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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  In his notes, Camp recorded that the three slabs of stone used to construct the Custer monument weighed five, six, and seven tons and were “hauled one piece at a time to Custer battlefield during winter in a wooden drag or sled pulled by 24 mules, 4 abreast, crossed LBH 3 times on ice. Derrick of ash used to put stones in place. W. B. Jordan says no steamboat pilot wanted to take monument. Finally Grant Marsh took it on F. Y. Batchelor, put it in bow of his boat and took it to Fort Custer,” in box 6, folder 2, #57, Camp Papers, BYU. See also Jerome Greene’s Stricken Field, pp. 30–33.

  Epilogue: Libbie’s House

  My account of the meeting between Steve Alexander and Ernie LaPointe is based on “A Visit of Peace” by Dean Cousino in the Sept. 30, 2006, Monroe News. Alexander’s Web site address is Georgecuster.com. Also see Michael Elliott’s Custerology, pp. 90–101. Elliott’s probing analysis of the meaning of the battle in modern society and culture has deeply influenced my own thinking about the LBH. See also Paul Hutton’s “From Little Bighorn to Little Big Man,” pp. 19–45. Vine Deloria refers to Custer as “the Ugly American” in Custer Died for Your Sins, p. 148. He Dog’s statement that “the cause of that trouble” was in Washington, D.C., is in Hardorff’s Lakota Recollections, p. 78. White Man Runs Him’s claim that Custer said, “I have an enemy back where many white people live that I hate,” was recorded by Edward Curtis, in The Papers of Edward S. Curtis, edited by James Hutchins, p. 41. The passage in which Custer expresses his sympathies for the Indians who “adhered to the free open plains” is in My Life on the Plains, p. 22. Even Custer’s peers recognized that Custer was a cultural chameleon; according to John Wright, one of Custer’s classmates at West Point: “Custer was only meeting the demands of the country when he met his fate, his fault was the fault of his times and people,” Recollections of John M. Wright, LBHBNM Collection, cited in Lisa Adolf’s “Custer: All Things to All Men,” p. 16. In Moby-Dick, Melville writes, “Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease,” p. 82.

  DeMallie links Bull Head’s and Kate Bighead’s uses of the term “no ears,” in “ ‘These Have No Ears,’ ” p. 534. According to Utley in The Lance and the Shield, “Sitting Bull defiantly swore to all that . . . he would rather die like Crazy Horse than leave his new home at Standing Rock,” p. 240. No one at Standing Rock felt, however, that Sitting Bull had a death wish in the last years of his life. According to Stanley Vestal, “As to his wanting to die and wanting to fight, the old men say it is false. They say, ‘If he had wished to die fighting, he . . . had only to take his rifle, ride to Fort Yates, and begin shooting at the soldiers,’ ” in Vestal, New Sources, p. 312. On Sitting Bull’s relationship with Catherine Weldon, see Eileen Pollack’s Woman Walking Ahead. Weldon’s letter to McLaughlin saying that she respects Sitting Bull “as . . . my own father” is in Vestal, New Sources, p. 100. James Carignan’s report to McLaughlin that Sitting Bull “has lost all confidence in the whites” is in Vestal, New Sources, p. 10. Ernie LaPointe’s account of his great-grandfather’s death is in Sitting Bull, pp. 102–7. According to LaPointe, the crying child that the agency police claimed was Crowfoot was actually Crowfoot’s twelve-year-old half brother William, p. 104. In Woman Walking Ahead, Eileen Pollack writes about the staged reenactment of Sitting Bull’s death, p. 290, and of “Sitting Bull’s Death Cabin” at the midway in Chicago, p. 295. Custer’s essay “The Red Man” is in E. Lisle Reedstrom’s Bugles, Banners and War Bonnets, p. 311. The 1890 census report read: “At present, the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line,” cited in Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, p. xvii. For an account of how the dams associated with the Pick-Sloan Plan affected the tribes along the Missouri River, especially the Fort Berthold Indians, see Michael Lawson’s Dammed Indians, pp. 59–62. Gerard Baker described the tribal elders mourning beside the artificially created lake at Fort Berthold in Herman Viola’s Little Bighorn Remembered, pp. x–xi. Like his great-grandfather before him, Ernie LaPointe has seen a vision of the future: “I was told through ceremony that what the Americans have done will come back to them four times. This is why I ask the creator to have pity on them. It doesn’t matter what they have done. I do not wish what is coming from the future on anyone” (personal communication to the author).

  Thomas Coleman’s description of how Custer “[l]ay with a smile on his face” is in I Buried Custer, edited by Bruce Liddic, p. 21. Larry Mc Murtry used a phrace from Coleman’s journal as the title of his excellent examination of massacres in the American West, Oh What a Slaughter. The July 25, 1876, Helena (Montana) Herald contained a letter from Lieutenant James Bradley in which he described Custer in death: “Probably never did [a] hero who had fallen upon the field of battle appear so much to have died a natural death. His expression was rather that of a man who had fallen asleep and enjoyed peaceful dreams, than of one who had met his death amid such fearful scenes as that field had witnessed, the features being wholly without ghastliness or any impress of fear, horror, or despair. He had died as he lived—a hero—and excited the remark from those who had known him and saw him there, “ ‘You could almost imagine him standing before you!’ ” Godfrey wrote of Custer’s “almost triumphant expression,” in “Address by General E. S. Godfrey,” Custer Battle Files, Billings [Montana] Public Library, cited by Richard Hardorff in The Custer Battle Casualties, p. 24. In Archaeology, History, and Custer’s Last Battle, Richard Fox argues that the term “Last Stand” cannot be properly applied to the Battle of the Little Bighorn given the rapidity with which Custer’s force collapsed. In an interview recorded in March 23, 2000, on The Paula Gordon Show, Richard Slotkin speaks eloquently about the inadequacy of the myth of the Last Stand in our modern age: http://www.paulagordon.com/shows/slotkin/.

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