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

Washington, D.C., he’d run into one of the most powerful newspapermen in the country, Lawrence Gobright, cofounder of the Associated Press. During the Civil War Gobright had worked directly with the Lincoln administration in controlling the flow of war news to the American people. This was just the kind of man any ambitious military officer needed to have on his side.
    Much to Custer’s surprise, Gobright had proven to be “wonderfully interested” in Frederick Benteen. It turned out that the two were cousins. “Yes,” Benteen replied, “we’ve been very dear friends always.” Suddenly Benteen understood the reason behind his elevation to wing commander. “Custer perhaps feared,” he wrote, “that I might possibly bring influence to bear at some time.” After almost a decade, Custer, who enjoyed being the perennial darling of the press, now had a reason to cultivate the friendship of his nemesis.
    Benteen had blue eyes, a round cherubic face, and a thatch of boyishly cropped hair that had, over the course of his tenure with the Seventh Cavalry, turned almost preternaturally white. Unlike Custer, who spoke with such nervous rapidity that it was sometimes hard to understand what he was saying, Benteen had an easy, southern volubility about him. Lurking beneath his chubby-cheeked cordiality was a brooding, utterly cynical intelligence. His icy blue eyes saw at a glance a person’s darkest insecurities and inevitably found him or her wanting. Custer was, by no means, the only commander he had belittled and despised. Virtually every officer he served under in the years ahead—from Colonel Samuel Sturgis to General Crook—was judged unworthy by Benteen. “I’ve always known that I had the happy facility of making enemies of any one I ever knew,” he admitted late in life, “but what then? . . . I couldn’t go otherwise—’twould be against the grain of myself.”
    Even before this conversation about Lawrence Gobright, Custer had made overtures to Benteen. “I always surmised . . . ,” Benteen wrote, “that he wanted me badly as a friend.” Benteen dismissed these gestures as part of a calculated attempt by Custer to elevate his own standing, both within the regiment and, ultimately, with the American public, and he would have none of it. Custer’s co-conspirator in this constant quest for acclaim was Libbie, whom Benteen regarded as “about as cold-blooded a woman as I ever knew, in which respect the pair were admirably mated.”
    Benteen relished the fact that Custer and Libbie had been put on notice that there were “wheels within wheels,” and that he, the reviled white-haired underling, was the ultimate insider when it came to the workings of the press. He had used the papers once before to set Custer straight, and as was now clearer than ever, he could do it again.

    O n May 16, 1876, with the regiment due to leave Fort Lincoln the next day, Custer requested that General Terry meet him at the two-story house he shared with Libbie and their servants. Of all the rooms in this newly built Victorian home, Custer’s favorite was his study. During the winters he often spent almost the entire day holed up in the little room, poring over Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy or a biography of Napoleon. To make sure he remained undisturbed, he placed a printed card on the door that read, “THIS IS MY BUSY DAY.”
    During the Yellowstone campaign, Custer had learned the art of taxidermy, and the walls of his study contained the heads of a buffalo, an antelope, a black-tailed deer, and the grizzly bear he’d bagged in the Black Hills. At dusk Custer and Libbie, who had long since resigned themselves to their childlessness, liked to lounge within this crowded self-made world, with only the glowing embers of the fire to illuminate the unblinking glass eyes of the animals Custer had killed and stuffed. Libbie later admitted that the study was a somewhat bizarre place for a husband and wife to linger lovingly in each other’s presence. “I used to think that a man on the brink of mania, thrust suddenly into such a place in the dim flickering light, would be hurried to his doom by fright,” she wrote. “We loved the place dearly.”
    On the opposite side of the hall was the much larger living room, with a piano and harp. On Tuesday, May 16, Custer called out for Libbie, and asked her to come into the living room, where she found her husband and General Terry.
    Once Libbie had taken her seat,