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

VIKING
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    Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
    First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
    Copyright © Nathaniel Philbrick, 2010
    All rights reserved
    Map illustrations by Jeffrey L. Ward. Copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2010
    Image credits appear on page 447.

    LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

    Philbrick, Nathaniel.
The last stand : Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn / by Nathaniel Philbrick.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
    eISBN : 978-1-101-19011-1

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To Melissa

Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord, to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space, to the old ineradicable rhythm.

    —WILLIAM FAULKNER, Absalom, Absalom!

PREFACE

    Custer’s Smile
    I t was, he later admitted, a “rashly imprudent” act. He and his regiment were pursuing hostile Indians across the plains of Kansas, a portion of the country about which he knew almost nothing. And yet, when his pack of English greyhounds began to chase some an-telope over a distant hill, he could not resist the temptation to follow. It wasn’t long before he and his big, powerful horse and his dogs had left the regiment far behind.
    Only gradually did he realize that these rolling green hills possessed a secret. It seemed as if the peak up ahead was high enough for him to catch a glimpse of the regiment somewhere back there in the distance. But each time he and his horse reached the top of a rise, he discovered that his view of the horizon was blocked by the surrounding hills. Like a shipwrecked sailor bobbing in the giant swells left by a recent storm, he was enveloped by wind-rippled crests and troughs of grass and was soon completely lost.
    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. In the years to come he would see hundreds of thousands of these creatures, but none, he later claimed, as large as this one. He put his spurs to his horse’s sides and began the chase.
    Both Custer and his horse were veterans of the recent war.