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

his career, came the intervention of the miraculous bolt from the blue called Custer luck. On September 24, 1868, while killing time back home in Monroe, Michigan, Custer received a telegram from his old mentor, General Philip Sheridan.
    Sheridan wanted to try a new strategy against the Cheyenne. Instead of chasing them around the plains in summer, why not strike them in winter, when they were confined to their tepees? Even after the legendary scout Jim Bridger attempted to convince him that it was madness to send a regiment of cavalry into temperatures of forty below zero and howling snow, Sheridan remained convinced it would work—especially if the operation was led by Custer, one of the most indefatigable and courageous officers he’d ever known. “Generals Sherman, Sully, and myself, and nearly all the officers of your regiment, have asked for you . . . ,” Sheridan’s telegram read. “Can you come at once?”
    On November 27, 1868, after battling bitter cold and blinding, snow-reflected sun, Custer and the Seventh Cavalry decimated an Indian village beside the Washita River. They then came close to being wiped out by a much larger village farther down the river, which they hadn’t detected prior to the attack, but Custer succeeded in extracting most of his men and fifty or so Cheyenne hostages before scurrying back to safety.
    Both Custer and Sheridan heralded the Battle of the Washita as a great victory, claiming that Custer had killed more than a hundred warriors and almost eight hundred ponies, and destroyed large quantities of food and clothing. But as a local Indian agent pointed out, the leader of the village had been Black Kettle, a noted “peace chief” who had moved his people away from the larger village so as not to be associated with the depredations of the village’s warriors. Instead of striking a blow against the hostiles, Custer had unwittingly killed one of the few Cheyenne leaders who were for peace.
    Custer dismissed such charges by claiming that it had been the hostile warriors’ trail that had led him to Black Kettle’s village. In addition, his officers had found plenty of evidence while burning the tepees that Black Kettle’s warriors had participated in the recent attacks on the Kansas frontier. More troubling, as far as Custer was concerned, was the publication of an anonymous letter in a St. Louis newspaper that accused him of abandoning one of the regiment’s most popular officers, Major Joel Elliott, to an unspeakable death at the hands of the Cheyenne. It was true that the naked and brutally mutilated bodies of Elliott and his men were found several weeks later, but Custer maintained that he had no way of knowing in the midst of the battle what had happened to the missing men.
    When Custer learned of the letter’s publication, he immediately called a meeting of his officers. Slapping his boot tops with his rawhide riding whip, he threatened to “cowhide” whoever had written the letter. At that point, one of his senior commanders, Frederick Benteen, made a great show of inspecting his pistol and then, after returning the weapon to its holster, stepped forward and admitted to being the author. Up until then, Benteen had proven to be a capable and reliable officer, and Custer appeared to be caught completely by surprise. He stammered out, “Colonel Benteen, I’ll see you again, sir!” and dismissed the meeting. Thus began one of the most fascinating, diabolically twisted antagonisms ever to haunt the hate-torn West.
    Custer responded to his detractors, both within and without the regiment, by turning himself into a peacemaker. Instead of torching Indian villages, he pursued a nervy, verging on suicidal, policy of diplomacy. With several of his Cheyenne hostages providing interpretive help (including the beautiful Cheyenne woman Monahsetah), he managed to find the supposedly unfindable hostile leaders, meet with them, and eventually convince them to come into the agencies. There were several times when tensions rose to the point that his own officers pleaded with him to attack instead of negotiate, but Custer was intent on proving that he wasn’t the heartless Indian killer that some had made him out to be. Custer’s efforts were crowned by the dramatic release of two white women hostages, both of whom had suffered, in the parlance of the plains, “a fate worse than death” during their captivity. By the end of the year, peace had come to the plains of Kansas,