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

fell down and rolled,” he told an interpreter, “and he nearly ran into them himself.” Wooden Leg saw a warrior stagger, fall, then woozily rise to a stand. When the cloud of smoke and dust parted slightly, he realized that the warrior’s entire lower jaw had been shot away. Wooden Leg turned and vomited into a nearby clump of sagebrush.
    There was at least one warrior who found the terrible chaos of that day to his liking. White Bull enjoyed a good-natured rivalry with Crazy Horse, and he later claimed that his bravery run had been what had inspired the Oglala warrior to cut the Right Wing in half. Whatever the case may be, White Bull plunged into the resultant pandemonium with a will. He accumulated seven coups that day, but his most memorable encounter occurred on the west side of Battle Ridge soon after his horse was shot out from underneath him. Ahead was a soldier with his carbine raised. Unlike so many troopers that day, this soldier wanted to fight. When White Bull charged at him, the trooper threw aside his weapon and wrestled White Bull to the ground.
    The Lakota warrior soon found himself in the midst of a death struggle. The soldier tried to rip the rifle out of his hands, and when that didn’t work, punched White Bull in the face and shoulders, then grabbing him by his braids, pulled his face toward him, and attempted to bite off his nose. “Hey, hey, come over and help me!” White Bull cried out to the other warriors. But when Crow Boy and Bear Lice began punching and kicking, it was White Bull who received most of the abuse. In desperation, he screamed into the trooper’s face at the top of his lungs. When the trooper’s grip relaxed, White Bull pulled out his revolver and finally managed to pistol whip the soldier to death.
    “It was a glorious battle,” he recalled. “I enjoyed it.”
    As the Right Wing collapsed, the surviving soldiers attempted to make their way north along the narrow ridge toward Custer and the Left Wing. “The men on horses did not stop to fight,” Foolish Elk remembered, “but went ahead as fast as they could go. The men on foot, however, were shooting as they passed along.” Of the approximately 115 troopers of Keogh’s Right Wing, only about 20 made it to Custer and the Left Wing.
    At the northern extreme of Battle Ridge was a flat-topped hill. Here Custer, his staff, and Yates’s F Company welcomed the refugees from the Right Wing. To their north, the soldiers of Smith’s E Company remained deployed in a skirmish line. All around these two groups of soldiers the ever-growing sea of Indians was moving in, “swirling,” Two Moons remembered, “like water round a stone.”

    T wo miles away, on the flats beside the low hills to the west of the river, Sitting Bull watched with the women and children. One Bull remembered that his uncle was dressed in buckskin, with a shirt decorated with green quillwork. Instead of a war bonnet, he wore a single feather and was without war paint.
    During the sun dance on the Rosebud, he had foreseen exactly what was happening now. The soldiers were, as he predicted, falling into their camp. Whereas Custer had frantically divided his regiment—first in an effort to surround a supposedly dispersing village, then in an increasingly desperate attempt to maintain the offensive by securing hostages—Sitting Bull had sought to consolidate his forces from the start. Rather than seek out the enemy (as the young warriors had forced him to do at the Rosebud Fight), his intention all along had been to let the soldiers come to him. In the face of Custer’s hyperactive need to do too much, it had proven a brilliant strategy.
    As a child, Sitting Bull had been known as “Slow” because of his unusually methodical manner. At the Battle of the Little Bighorn, this lifelong habit of carefully studying a situation before he acted had contributed to one of his people’s greatest victories.
    As the battle reached its terrible climax, the fighting moved north to the knoll where just the night before he and One Bull had appealed to Wakan Tanka. The hill was at the edge of a huge cloud of smoke and dust, similar to the one he had seen in his first vision of the soldiers. But instead of lightning, the immense and brooding cloud was filled with flashes from the muzzles of hundreds of blazing guns.

    T wo Moons claimed that as Custer and the Left Wing assembled around what came to be known as Last Stand Hill, “not a shot was fired.” “They