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

fellow Natives—“Palini” to the Lakota—the Arikara were special targets, and they knew it. “I made up my mind I would die this day,” Young Hawk remembered.
    In addition to Bloody Knife, two other Arikara, Little Brave and their leader Bobtail Bull, were killed that afternoon. Young Hawk’s friend Goose had just been injured in the hand. Young Hawk helped him off his horse and leaned him against a tree. He also helped the Crow scout Half Yellow Face with his wounded compatriot White Swan.
    “Seized with rage,” Young Hawk stripped to the waist and prepared for the end. In anticipation of being killed and scalped, he unbraided his hair and tied it with eagle feathers. But first he must say good-bye to his horse. Wrapping his arms around the pony’s neck, he said, “I love you.”
    On the other side of the brush was a group of Lakota warriors. Once he’d finished bidding his horse farewell, Young Hawk burst out of the timber, his pistol blazing, then took refuge behind a pile of driftwood, where he found his grandfather Forked Horn.
    “It is no way to act,” Forked Horn admonished.
    Miraculously, Young Hawk had not been injured. Instead of throwing away his life, he decided to take his grandfather’s advice. Like the soldiers and scouts on the other side of the Little Bighorn, he would wait.

    B y approximately 4:10 p.m., 80 or so survivors of Reno’s 130-man battalion had gotten out of the timber and made it to the top of the bluff, leaving in their wake dozens of dead, wounded, and missing men. Now that all resistance from the soldiers had ceased, Lakota women, old men, and children joined the warriors along the river and began killing the wounded soldiers and stripping and mutilating the dead. “The Indians were mad and it was hard to check them,” Black Elk remembered; “they were plumb crazy.” They had reason to be outraged. The troopers had attacked their village without provocation and killed six women, four children, and ten warriors.
    Black Elk and his friends were riding their ponies near the river when they came upon what he described as a “kicking soldier.” “Boy,” a warrior commanded him, “get off and scalp him.” Black Elk obediently took out his knife and started to hack away at the soldier’s head. “Probably it hurt him,” he remembered, “because he began to grind his teeth. After I did this I took my pistol out and shot him in the forehead.”
    One of the wounded was the African American interpreter Isaiah Dorman. Since he was married to a Hunkpapa woman at the Standing Rock Agency, he was well known to many of the Indians gathered there that day, one of whom was Moving Robe Woman. Still mourning the death of her ten-year-old brother, Deeds, she approached the wounded interpreter on her black horse, with her hair braided, her face painted red, and a six-shooter in her hand.
    “Do not kill me,” Dorman said, “because I will be dead in a short while anyway.”
    “If you did not want to be killed,” Moving Robe Woman said, “why did you not stay home where you belong and not come to attack us?”
    She raised her pistol and pulled the trigger, but the cartridge did not fire. The second cartridge worked, however, and Moving Robe Woman killed Isaiah Dorman.
    Dorman’s body was later found beside his coffee kettle and cup, both filled with his own blood. His penis had been cut off and stuffed in his mouth and his testicles staked to the ground with a picket pin.
    Not far from Dorman lay Lieutenant McIntosh, who had taken a leading role in the desecration of the dead at the Lakota burial ground on the Tongue River. What apparently drew the attention of McIntosh’s enemies on the afternoon of June 25 was the lieutenant’s clearly discernible Iroquois ancestry. Given that he was last seen by Private Rutten surrounded by more than twenty warriors, it’s likely that his death was both slow and excruciatingly painful. Only a distinctive button given to him by his wife and later recognized by his brother-in-law, Lieutenant Gibson, made the identification of his remains possible.

    L ooking down on this horrifying scene from the hilltop to the east was the men’s commander, Major Marcus Reno. The Lakota had set fire to the grass and trees, and billows of smoke rose up from the valley. In the river, the pale bodies of the soldiers floated like dead fish. But as their moans and cries for help indicated, many of the soldiers scattered across the hillside and valley