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

leader’s already mutilated face until it was, Shoots Walking remembered, “a shapeless mass.”
    When Lone Man returned home that night, he bathed himself in a sweat lodge and burned his clothes “that I [might] cleanse myself for participating in a bloody fight with my fellow men.”
    So ended what the Lakota at Standing Rock came to call “the Battle in the Dark.”

    A round 11 p.m. on July 5, 1876, Grant Marsh sounded the boat’s whistle to announce the arrival of the Far West at the Bismarck landing. Windows throughout the town blossomed with light as the inhabitants hastily put on their clothes and came out onto the street to learn the much-anticipated news. Even before the Far West was secured to the dock, C. A. Lounsberry, the editor of the Bismarck Tribune, had arrived in his buggy to greet his good friend Dr. Porter along with General Terry’s staff member Captain Smith.
    Lounsberry soon learned not only of the death of Custer and his officers and men but of the passing of his own correspondent, Mark Kellogg. Retiring to the telegraph office with Smith’s bulging suitcase full of dispatches, the men awoke the telegrapher John Carnahan. Over the course of the next twenty-four hours, Carnahan passed along more than forty thousand words of copy to the editors of the New York Herald, who enjoyed one of the biggest scoops in newspaper history.
    As the words flowed across the wires to the East, Grant Marsh backed the Far West from the landing and headed down the Missouri in the early morning darkness to Fort Lincoln.

    T wo weeks after the death of Sitting Bull, on the morning of December 29, 1890, about two hundred miles to the south of the Standing Rock Agency, the Seventh Cavalry lay encamped at a place called Wounded Knee. There was much excitement among the troopers. Their commander, Colonel James Forsyth, had accepted the unconditional surrender of a band of Ghost Dancers under the leadership of the Minneconjou chief Big Foot. Many of Big Foot’s men, it was rumored, had fought at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

    —THE RIVER OF NIGHTMARES, June 28, 1876-December 29, 1890 —

    That night, several of the officers and men of the Seventh Cavalry got drunk. What they wanted to know, more than anything else, was who among the Minneconjou had been there back in 1876. “They wouldn’t let us get any sleep,” Dewey Beard remembered. “All night they tortured us [with questions] by gun point. They asked us who was in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the battle with Custer. . . . We told them we didn’t know.”
    The next morning, Colonel Forsyth positioned his troopers around Big Foot’s people. He announced that before they were escorted to the Pine Ridge Agency, about fifteen miles away, the Indians must turn over their weapons.
    Captain George Wallace feared there might be trouble. He could tell the Indians were having difficulty understanding his commander’s orders and urged Joseph Horn Cloud to “tell the women to hitch up and get out of camp.” Three days before the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Wallace had predicted that Custer was fated to die. Fourteen years later, Wallace’s premonition once again proved true.
    Wallace was attempting to take a rifle from a deaf Minneconjou man who didn’t fully comprehend why he must surrender his weapon. As the two struggled, the gun fired in the air.
    “Look out! Look out!” a soldier shouted.
    “Fire! Fire on them!” another cried.
    Will Cressey was watching from a nearby hill. “In a moment,” he wrote, “the whole front was a sheet of fire, above which the smoke rolled. . . . [T]he draw in which the Indian camp was set looked like a sunken Vesuvius.”
    Dewey Beard was caught in the deadly crossfire. “I saw my friends sinking about me, and heard the whine of many bullets. I was not expecting this. It was like when a wagon breaks in the road.” In just a few minutes, eighty-three Minneconjou men lay dead. Since Forsyth had positioned his soldiers around the camp, they were firing not only on the Indians but on one another, and one of the casualties was Captain Wallace, who was later found, according to one account, with a bullet through his forehead.
    Women, children, and the handful of men still left alive attempted to escape into the surrounding bluffs and canyons. Captain Edward Godfrey, another veteran of the Little Bighorn, led a detail of between fifteen and twenty soldiers in pursuit. Several miles from the battleground at a