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

be no artificial light of any kind aboard the vessel. Smoking was forbidden, since even the faintest glimmer from a cigarette or pipe transformed the windows of the pilothouse into mirrors. Blinds were placed across the boat’s skylights, and huge tarpaulins curtained the glow from the furnaces on the lower deck to create what Mark Twain remembered as “that solid world of darkness.”

    A s Marsh strained to see the river ahead aboard a vessel divested of light, the soldiers he’d left behind on the banks of the Yellowstone struggled with a different kind of darkness. Of the Seventh Cavalry’s approximately 750 officers and enlisted men, 268 had been killed and 62 wounded. They’d lost not only their leader, but almost half their officers and men in the most devastating military loss in the history of the American West. If they were to resume the fight against Sitting Bull, they needed more mules, more horses, and more men. So they languished on the sun-broiled riverbank, waiting for reinforcements and getting hopelessly drunk.
    Surviving records indicate that Reno bought an astonishing eleven gallons of whiskey over a twenty-two-day period. French got by on only a gallon and a half of brandy, but he was also taking heroic quantities of opium. Benteen and Weir raged drunkenly at each other. As he usually did in such situations, Benteen challenged Weir to a duel. Weir was smart enough to decline the offer.
    Back on June 25 Weir had grown so frustrated with Reno’s and Benteen’s refusal to march to Custer that he’d headed out on his own. At the top of the peak that is now named for him, he stood staring toward the distant cloud of dust and smoke. Three days later, when the Seventh set out to perform the grim task of burying the naked and mutilated bodies of the dead, Weir turned to Lieutenant Godfrey and said, “Oh, how white they look! How white!” Five months later, after drinking himself to insensibility for much of the summer and fall, Weir was assigned to recruitment duty in New York City, where on December 9, 1876, he was found dead in his hotel room at the age of thirty-eight.

    O n the night of July 3, 1876, as the Far West sped down the Yellowstone River in the dark, a quarter of a million celebrants gathered in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. At the stroke of midnight, the Liberty Bell rang thirteen times as the band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” All across the United States, pandemonium reigned as the nation celebrated the centennial of its birth. After weathering the cataclysm of the Civil War, Americans were confident that the country was about to fulfill its destiny as a nation that extended without interruption from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Little did they suspect that in just three days they would learn that the command of General George Custer, the greatest Indian fighter of them all, had been annihilated by the Lakota and Cheyenne.
    At four in the morning on July 4, on the lower deck of the Far West, Private William George of Benteen’s H Troop died of a bullet wound he’d received through the left side. They were approaching the supply depot at the Powder River, where a company of the Sixth Infantry under Major Orlando Moore was stationed, and Marsh decided to drop off George’s body for burial. The soldiers at the encampment had assembled a large amount of driftwood in anticipation of a Fourth of July bonfire. “But when they heard the news,” remembered James Sipes, who served as the Far West ’s barber, “they gave up the idea.”

    I n the aftermath of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the U.S. government stepped up its efforts against Sitting Bull and his people. By the end of July, the new Custer, Colonel Nelson Miles, had arrived on the Yellowstone and begun his ceaseless pursuit of the Lakota and Cheyenne. At the agencies, all Indians, even those who had remained loyal throughout the summer, were forced to surrender their ponies and guns. Plans were in the works to build new forts on the Yellowstone and the Bighorn, and at the Standing Rock Agency on the Missouri.
    Of more immediate concern to Sitting Bull, buffalo were proving almost impossible to find. With the collapse of the buffalo herd came the collapse of the Lakota. In the months to come, after a series of small but bloody skirmishes, virtually every band of Lakota and Cheyenne, even the Oglala under Crazy Horse, found that they had no choice but to surrender. By the autumn of 1876