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

Bull was about to join a group of Ghost Dancers at a remote area in the Dakota badlands known as the Stronghold. McLaughlin, who’d been looking for an opportunity to get rid of Sitting Bull ever since he’d arrived at Standing Rock seven years before, ordered his arrest. In the early morning hours of December 15, thirty-eight agency policemen, known as the Cheska Maza or “Metal Breasts” for the badges they wore, crossed the frozen Grand River to capture Sitting Bull.
    In the frigid darkness, eight Lakota policemen prepared to storm Sitting Bull’s cabin. They were led by Lieutenant Bull Head. Several years before, Bull Head had gone out of his way to insult Sitting Bull’s friend Catch the Bear. Sitting Bull had responded by refusing to give Bull Head a much-coveted horse. “[Bull Head’s] personal arrogance was hurt,” a Lakota woman remembered, “and he resented it.”
    The policemen pushed through the door, and as they felt their way in the dark, one of them lit a match. Sitting Bull, they saw, was lying in bed with one of his wives and their small child. Before he could reach for a nearby rifle, the policemen grabbed the Hunkpapa leader and blew out the light.
    “I come after you to take you to the agency,” Bull Head announced. “You are under arrest.” Sitting Bull responded that he needed to put on his clothes before he could go with them. As the policemen helped him dress, one of Sitting Bull’s wives burst into a loud cry.
    Even before they’d led Sitting Bull out the door, his followers had begun to gather around the cabin. The darkness made it difficult to see who was who, but they all recognized the voice of Bull Head’s enemy Catch the Bear.
    “Here are the Cheska Maza,” Catch the Bear called out, “just as we had expected all the time. You think you are going to take him. You shall not do it.” Sitting Bull’s adopted brother Jumping Bull urged him to cooperate with the police. But it was the chief’s fourteen-year-old son Crowfoot who carried the day.
    Crowfoot was an unusual boy, more comfortable with his father’s friends than with children his own age. “You always called yourself a brave chief,” Crowfoot said to his father. “Now you are allowing yourself to be taken by the Cheska Maza.”
    Up until this point, the policeman Lone Man maintained, Sitting Bull had seemed willing to go with them. But after the taunt from his son, he changed his mind. “Then I will not go,” he said.
    “Uncle,” Lone Man pleaded, “nobody is going to harm you so please don’t let the others lead you into trouble.”
    But as more and more of the chief’s followers arrived, they became increasingly belligerent. Sitting Bull’s old friend Crawler, whose son Deeds had been one of the first to die at the Little Bighorn, shouted, “Kill the old police first. They have experience and the young will flee.”
    Lieutenant Bull Head was holding Sitting Bull’s right arm; Shave Head was on the left, with the policeman Red Tomahawk behind. As the chief resisted their efforts to lead him toward an awaiting horse, Bull Head repeatedly struck him on the back and shouted: “You have no ears, you wouldn’t listen!” Suddenly, Catch the Bear threw back his blanket, raised his rifle, and fired at Bull Head, who instantly turned and fired a bullet into Sitting Bull’s chest. Another shot hit Shave Head while Red Tomahawk fired into Sitting Bull’s head, and the chief fell lifelessly to the ground.
    The policemen retreated back into the cabin and, after knocking out the mud chinks between the logs, began firing at Sitting Bull’s followers, who quickly dispersed toward the river. As the policemen blazed away, Lone Man saw something moving behind the strips of colored cloth tacked to the cabin’s walls. It proved to be Sitting Bull’s son Crowfoot. “My uncles,” the boy cried, “do not kill me. I do not wish to die.”
    Lone Man asked Bull Head, who’d received a mortal wound to the stomach, what he should do. “Do what you like with him,” he replied. “He is the cause of this trouble.” After hitting him with the butt of his rifle, Lone Man and two others shot the boy and threw his body out the door, where it lay beside the corpses of his father and his father’s brother Jumping Bull.
    Holy Medicine had been one of Sitting Bull’s devoted followers. But when he saw that his brother Broken Arm, a policeman, had been killed, he took up a wagon yoke and began beating his former