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

receiving his own allotted portion just like everybody else.
    “Why does he keep trying to humble me?” Sitting Bull later asked in frustration. “Can I be any lower than I am? Once I was a man, but now I am a pitiful wretch. . . . I should have stayed with the Red Coats in the Grandmother’s country.”
    The irony was that Sitting Bull, whom McLaughlin dismissed as “crafty, avaricious, mendacious, and ambitious,” was one of the most famous people in the United States. Twice in the years ahead he would tour the country, once with the legendary Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. McLaughlin’s Native wife, who served as Sitting Bull’s interpreter, enjoyed these trips, and both she and her husband were disappointed when Sitting Bull decided in 1886 that once was enough with Buffalo Bill and that he was going to remain at Standing Rock. “Ever since,” Sitting Bull claimed, “[White Hair] has had it in for me.”
    McLaughlin believed, as did almost all Indian reformers in the late nineteenth century, that Native culture was doomed to extinction. To prepare the Lakota for the future, he must wean them from the past. Many Lakota children were sent away to boarding schools where the watchword was “Kill the Indian, and save the man.”
    Sitting Bull had seen enough of the United States to know that the culture of the washichus had problems of its own. He believed the best path for his people was to combine elements from both societies. “If you see anything good in the white man’s road,” he said, “pick it up and keep it. But if you find something that is not good, or that turns out bad, leave it alone.”
    Inevitably McLaughlin came to view Sitting Bull as the leader of what he called the “non-progressives” at Standing Rock. But there was more to it than that. “Long ago I had two women in my lodge,” Sitting Bull said. “One of them was jealous. White Hair reminds me of that jealous woman.”
    But McLaughlin was not the only jealous one. There were also Sitting Bull’s own people, several of whom hoped to emerge as the new, McLaughlin-endorsed leader of the tribe. During a meeting of the Silent Eaters Society, Sitting Bull compared the dynamics of reservation life to the children’s game of whipping tops, in which a Hunkpapa boy used his top to knock away those of his competitors so that his top would be the first through the gate of a five-foot-square corral.
    “Well, it seems,” Sitting Bull said, “that all the Indians are playing that game now. The corral is the agent’s office. Everybody wants to get inside and become a favorite. But no sooner does he do this than all the rest combine against him, and knock him, and try to drive him out. So a good many have failed in their attempt, though a few have managed to get ahead and are now spinning happily inside. I have no chance whatever of getting into that corral. But so long as I know I am not betraying my people, I shall be content to remain outside.”
    In August of 1890, Sitting Bull left his home to check on his ponies. After walking more than three miles, he climbed to the top of a hill, where he heard a voice. A meadowlark was speaking to him from a nearby knoll. “Lakotas will kill you,” the little bird said.
    In the days ahead, Sitting Bull tried to forget about the prophecy of the meadowlark. But it was no use. From that day forward, his nephew One Bull remembered, Sitting Bull knew “he was to be killed by his own people.”

    O n the morning of July 5, 1876, ten days after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the Far West reached the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers. At nearby Fort Buford, Marsh paused to drop off Sergeant Michael Rigney, who was suffering from tuberculosis, and pick up some ice. The deck of the Far West was soon filled with onlookers begging for news about Custer and the Seventh Cavalry. “Their questions were not half answered,” Hanson wrote, “when they were cleared from the decks and the boat was out in the stream again.”
    Now that they were on the wider and more familiar Missouri, with approximately three hundred miles to go before they reached Bismarck, Marsh was willing to push the Far West even harder than he’d done on the Yellowstone. In order to increase the heat of the furnaces, he instructed his men to throw hunks of spoiled bacon into the fire. The rising boiler pressure caused the “incessant clang and cough” of the Far West ’s machinery to increase in speed as