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

testimony to one of the foremost chroniclers of the American West, Theodore Roosevelt. In the past, Roosevelt, who also happened to be president of the United States, had been a champion of Curtis’s work; perhaps he would know what to do with these incendiary claims.
    Roosevelt found the Crows’ account “wildly improbable.” This, however, did not necessarily make it untrue. “Of course, human nature is so queer that it is hard to say that anything is impossible . . . ,” Roosevelt wrote in an April 8, 1908, letter to Curtis. “Odd things happen in a battle, and the human heart has strange and gruesome depths and the human brain still stranger shallows; but the facts should be clearly brought out indeed, and the proof overwhelming, before at so late a date a man of high repute deliberately publishes a theory such as the above.”
    It wasn’t the source of the evidence that prompted Roosevelt to doubt the story; it was the passage of time. “I need not say to you,” he wrote, “that writing over thirty years after the event it is necessary to be exceedingly cautious about relying on the memory of any man, Indians or white. Such a space of time is a great breeder of myths.”
    As it turned out, the testimony of the three Crows may have been influenced by a rivalry within the tribe. There had been a fourth Crow scout accompanying Custer’s battalion that afternoon, the nineteen-year-old Curley. Curley claimed to have stuck with Custer long after the other three Crows had fled, and as a consequence he’d gained a national reputation as the sole survivor of the Custer massacre, a status the other scouts inevitably resented.
    According to Goes Ahead, Hairy Moccasin, and White Man Runs Him, Curley was the one who left Custer’s battalion early. Curtis could understand why the three Crows might cast aspersions on Curley. But why depict Custer as, in Roosevelt’s words, “both a traitor and a fool,” unless, of course, Custer—whose anonymous defamation of Reno made plain his feelings for the major—had in fact acted as they had claimed?
    It was a question that became more and more perplexing the more Curtis pondered it, especially since White Man Runs Him insisted that Custer “was always very good to us Crow scouts, and we loved him.” Taking Roosevelt’s advice to heart, Curtis elected not to publish the results of his interviews with the three Crow scouts. “I am beginning to believe,” he wrote, “that nothing is quite so uncertain as facts.”

    C urtis was not the only one at the beginning of the twentieth century wrestling with the mysteries of memory and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. There was also Walter Mason Camp, the editor of a railroad trade journal based in Chicago, Illinois. Over the span of several decades, Camp crisscrossed the country interviewing more than 60 survivors of Reno’s command and more than 150 Lakota and Cheyenne participants in the battle. He also tracked down dozens of firsthand accounts published soon after the battle in newspapers and magazines, as well as the official documents related to the campaign. Camp never published a book about the battle, but the evidence he collected is voluminous.
    Like Roosevelt, Camp was skeptical of the Crow scouts’ claims about Custer’s movements along the ridge. He seems to have had more faith in Curley even though he recognized that the scout’s accounts had shifted over time. (Curley defended himself by insisting, “I have always told the same story but there have been different interpreters.”) Camp also realized, however, that there were others besides White Man Runs Him and his fellow Crow scouts who had questioned Curley’s veracity.
    Custer’s striker, John Burkman, had been relegated to the pack train at the divide. As the train approached the valley of the Little Bighorn, Burkman recognized Curley riding with a group of Arikara scouts as they drove a small herd of Lakota ponies east. If Burkman’s perception was accurate, Curley had, as the other Crow scouts insisted, left Custer’s battalion long before it engaged the enemy. But, like White Man Runs Him and the others, Burkman also had reasons to be jealous of Curley’s status as the last to have seen Custer alive. Burkman had wanted desperately to be with the general at the end, and to think that someone else, and an Indian at that, had been granted that right (and lived to tell about it) must have been difficult for Burkman to bear.
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