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

Sitting Bull realized that his people’s world was falling apart, and on October 20, he agreed to meet with Colonel Miles.
    By this time the Hunkpapa leader had already captured the imagination of the American people. Without any substantive information to explain how an Indian had defeated the country’s greatest Indian fighter, the rumors abounded. Sitting Bull, a Captain McGarry claimed, could read French, and after studying Napoleon’s military tactics had “modeled his generalship after the little Corsican Corporal.” Others claimed that Sitting Bull was actually a hirsute white man named “Bison” McLean who had graduated from West Point in 1848 and subsequently been court-martialed for dishonorable conduct. “His nature is untamed and licentious,” a correspondent of the Richmond Despatch wrote, “his courage superb and his physical qualities almost herculean.”
    But when Colonel Miles came face-to-face with Sitting Bull in October 1876, he saw not a calculating white man in Indian dress but a proud and increasingly desperate Lakota leader struggling to identify the best course for his people to follow. “I think he feels much depressed,” Miles wrote his wife, “suffering from nervous excitement and loss of power. . . . At times he was almost inclined to accept the situation, but I think partly from fear and partly through the belief that he might do better, he did not accept. I think that many of his people were desirous to make peace.”
    That winter, Sitting Bull decided to seek asylum in Canada. The following fall he granted an interview with a newspaper reporter in which he spoke about the Battle of the Little Bighorn. His warriors, he claimed, had told him about Custer’s final moments: “It was said that up there where the last fight took place, where the last stand was made, the Long Hair stood like a sheaf of corn with all the ears fallen around him.”
    Sitting Bull may simply have been telling the reporter and his readers what they expected to hear. But he also may have found some comfort in this idealized portrait of a leader fighting desperately till the end. For as Sitting Bull no doubt knew, he was headed for his own Last Stand.

    A fter four years in what the Lakota called “the Grandmother’s country,” Sitting Bull finally surrendered to American authorities at Fort Buford in the summer of 1881. That fall, after a brief time at the Standing Rock Agency, he was placed under arrest and transported about four hundred miles down the Missouri to Fort Randall on the Dakota-Nebraska border. A year and a half later, the decision was made to return the Hunkpapa leader to his people at Standing Rock, and in the spring of 1883, Grant Marsh, now the master of the W. J. Behan, arrived at Fort Randall to pick him up.
    Everywhere they stopped during the voyage up the Missouri the boat was mobbed by people wanting to see Sitting Bull. At the towns of Chamberlain and Pierre, the crowds were so large that the detail of fifteen soldiers assigned to guard Sitting Bull and his family had difficulty maintaining order.
    By this point, Sitting Bull had learned to sign his name. He’d also learned that people were willing to pay for his autograph, and by the time the W. J. Behan stopped at the Cheyenne River Agency just downriver from Standing Rock, he’d accumulated a surprising amount of money.
    At Cheyenne River, Marsh was presented with a nicely carved pipe stem. Through an interpreter Sitting Bull asked whether Marsh might be willing to sell him the pipe stem. Marsh declined at first, then jokingly said he’d take the outrageous sum of fifty dollars for it. This time Sitting Bull declined.
    “Well, tell him,” Marsh said to the interpreter, “he has kept me scared for twenty years along the river and he ought to give me something for that.”
    “I did not come on your land to scare you,” Sitting Bull countered. “If you had not come on my land, you would not have been scared, either.”
    Though he ultimately refused to part with the pipe stem, Marsh had to admit that Sitting Bull had a point.

    S oon after his arrival at Standing Rock, Sitting Bull discovered that the reservation’s agent, Major James McLaughlin, refused to recognize him as chief of the Hunkpapa. When Sitting Bull asked to be given the privilege of distributing the government’s annuities to his people, McLaughlin, whom the Lakota called White Hair, summarily denied the request and informed him that he would be