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

the boat’s timbers shook with the added strain.
    By this point, Peter Thompson had become suspicious of one of the Far West ’s passengers. During the march from Fort Lincoln, Thompson had given a knife to a soldier in C Company who was later killed in the battle. That afternoon, as he sat with his badly wounded friend James Bennett (“who seemed glad to have me beside him”), Thompson noticed that an Indian with a bandage wrapped around one of his arms was leaning against the wheelhouse. Tucked into the scabbard attached to the Indian’s belt was a knife with a distinctive chip in the handle. Thompson immediately recognized it as the knife he’d given to the trooper. “To say I was astonished,” he wrote, “was putting it mildly.” He began to wonder whether instead of being an Arikara scout, this Indian (who had two rifles in his hands) was, in fact, a hostile who’d pilfered the knife from the body of his dead comrade.
    Before Thompson could inquire as to the true identity of this mysterious Indian, the Far West began to edge dangerously close to shore. Up ahead he saw a Native woman washing some clothes beside the river. As the boat rushed past her, Thompson watched as two rifles, followed by the wounded Indian, landed on the shore. “[I] saw the Indian scramble up the bank,” Thompson wrote, “take his guns and go away.”
    Several decades later, he was still mystified by this odd and troubling scene. “Was he hostile or was he friendly?” Thompson wrote. “How did he get the knife, and why did he leap from the boat when it was going full speed? These are questions I cannot answer.” Just as when he had watched the man he took to be General Custer gallop along the banks of the Little Bighorn River, Thompson was once again the baffled and awestruck witness to an event he did not wholly understand but nonetheless remembered with an eerie, almost clinical exactitude.
    If Thompson had made some inquiries that afternoon, he would have learned that what he had just seen was not the clandestine escape of a Lakota warrior but the return of the Arikara scout Goose to his home at Fort Berthold. But Thompson’s attention was quickly diverted to other, more important matters on the afternoon of July 5. At three o’clock, James Bennett, the soldier whose pleas for water had first inspired Thompson to venture from Reno Hill to the Little Bighorn and back, finally succumbed to his wounds. “Poor Bennett died . . . with my hand clasping his,” Thompson wrote. “So died a man who always gave me good advice.”
    That evening, Marsh prepared the Far West for her projected arrival before midnight. In accordance with Terry’s orders, he draped the boat in black and lowered the flag to half-mast. Once again, all lights were extinguished as the riverboat steamed south in the deepening twilight toward Bismarck.

    O n the night of December 15, 1890, Sitting Bull lay asleep in one of the two cabins he’d built beside the Grand River about forty miles to the south of the agency headquarters at Standing Rock. Over the last few years, his relationship with the agent James McLaughlin, never good to begin with, had deteriorated dramatically. Two summers before, Sitting Bull had opposed the government’s plan to sell off large portions of Lakota land, a plan McLaughlin endorsed. More recently, Sitting Bull had shown interest in a new religious movement called the Ghost Dance.
    By 1890, several years of drought had made it almost impossible for the Indians to support themselves by farming. A terrible series of diseases had swept across the reservations, killing many of their children, including a child of Sitting Bull’s. Making conditions even worse, the government had recently reduced their already meager allotment of rations. Sick and starving, with no hope for the future, many Lakota reached out in desperation to the promise provided by the Paiute medicine man Wovoka.
    Wovoka predicted that a giant wave of earth was about to sweep across the world, burying the whites and bringing back the buffalo along with the Indians’ cherished ancestors. Until the coming of this new Native utopia, true believers must commune with the dead by means of the Ghost Dance. Despite Wovoka’s insistence on pacifism, authorities throughout the West viewed the movement with alarm, and large numbers of soldiers, including the Seventh Cavalry, had been dispatched to the reservations south of Standing Rock.
    Rumor had it that Sitting