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

husband’s name. “I learned to estimate the true strength of Mrs. Custer,” Barrett wrote. “And to see what a wife she had been to him, sinking her own personality to push him forward.” Libbie insisted that she had no regrets—“that her life with him had been one of intense happiness—which could not last, she knew—that she would live upon the memory of it.”
    But on the morning of July 7, the day the nation first learned of her husband’s death, Libbie was still in the throes of inconsolable despair. Marsh decided that he “could not bear the thought of witnessing [her] grief,” and declined the invitation.

    L ibbie spent the rest of her life playing out her grief and widowhood before a national audience. The Lakota and Cheyenne widows (some of whom had also lost sisters, brothers, children, and parents in the battle) were afforded no such stage or audience. In the years to come those who were not gunned down or otherwise mistreated during the incidents up to and including Wounded Knee lived out the rest of their lives on the reservations, where malnutrition, disease, and poverty replaced the variety and endless challenges of life on the plains.

    W hittaker’s biography of Custer appeared in the fall of 1876. As Libbie had hoped, the book depicted Reno as both a coward and a traitor. To clear his name, Reno requested a court of inquiry into his conduct during the battle. In the winter of 1879, a military court convened at the Palmer House in Chicago, Illinois.
    Over the course of almost a month, dozens of witnesses testified before the court. Their statements provided a wealth of information about the battle. But the statements also skirted the issue of blame. The rancor many of the officers had expressed about Reno’s actions during the battle had begun to cool—especially when General Sheridan made it clear that he wanted no disclosures during the proceedings that might reflect poorly on the U.S. Army. By January 1879, the officers of the Seventh had closed ranks. In the end, the judges refused to condemn Reno, but they also refused to exonerate him.
    By that time, Reno had lost himself to drink. In addition to the court of inquiry, he endured two humiliating courts-martial, one for making illicit advances toward the wife of a fellow officer, another for peeping through the bedroom window of Colonel Sturgis’s teenage daughter. He was dismissed from the service, and in 1889 he died of complications after surgery for throat cancer.
    Frederick Benteen also fell victim to a career-ending court-martial. With Custer gone, it was General Crook’s turn to become the object of Benteen’s scorn. After the two clashed, Benteen did as he’d done after the Washita and fed an unflattering story to the press. Unlike Custer, who had let it pass, Crook was unwilling to tolerate such blatant insubordination, and Benteen had no choice but to retire.
    He returned to his home in Atlanta, where he spent much of the next decade trading letters with a variety of correspondents, most of whom wanted to know more about Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Benteen obliged with a series of gossipy and vituperative letters (the writing of which he once compared to “a goose doing his mess by moonlight”) where he made plain the tortured depths of his obsession with Custer. To Theodore Goldin, another veteran of the battle, he admitted that he had felt no sorrow upon viewing the dead bodies of Custer and his circle of relatives and friends. “The Lord, in His own good time had at last rounded the scoundrels up,” he wrote, “taking, however, many good and innocent men with them!”
    Benteen despised Custer, but he was powerless to prevent the general’s reemergence as a Great American Hero. The rapid ascent of Custer’s posthumous reputation was not without some initial resistance. Terry’s supposedly private letter to Sheridan blaming Custer for the disaster was published in the summer of 1876 when the document accidentally fell into the hands of a newspaper reporter. Later that year, President Grant publicly claimed that Custer had unnecessarily sacrificed his battalion. One of Custer’s most vociferous critics was the Seventh Cavalry’s own commander, Colonel Samuel Sturgis, who’d lost his son in the battle. “[T]hat he was overreached by Indian tactics, and hundreds of valuable lives sacrificed thereby,” Sturgis said of Custer, “will astonish those alone who may have read his