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

writings—not those who were best acquainted with him and knew the peculiarities of his character.”
    But none of these naysayers could match the righteous indignation of Libbie, who dedicated the rest of her long life to making sure her beloved Autie was remembered in the most positive light. In addition to ensuring that the battle’s unofficial historian, Custer’s former lieutenant Edward Godfrey, wrote nothing that might compromise her husband’s reputation, she published her own books about her experiences in the West. The Custer that emerges from the pages of her three reminiscences is boyish, brave, patriotic, and charming. But there was another force contributing to Custer’s rise as an American hero: the myth of the Last Stand.
    In the late nineteenth century, with the help of Buffalo Bill Cody’s tremendously popular Wild West Show, which often ended with an earsplitting reenactment of Custer’s demise, the perpetually thirty-six-year-old general became the symbol of what many Americans wanted their country to be: a pugnacious, upstart global power. Just as Custer had stood fearlessly before overwhelming odds, the United States must stand firm against the likes of Spain, Germany, and Russia. Now that America had completed its bloodstained march across the West, it was time to take on the world.
    As Custer, or at least the mythic incarnation of Custer, remained center stage in the ongoing drama of American history, those who’d managed to survive the Battle of the Little Bighorn were left with the aftermath of the general’s controversial leave-taking. Some, like Edward Godfrey and Peter Thompson, attempted to reconstruct, as best they could, what had happened on June 25, 1876. Others, like Frederick Benteen, insisted that it no longer mattered: “ ’tis a dead, dead issue,” he wrote Goldin, “stale, flat, &c.” But as both of them knew perfectly well, that had not prevented Benteen from writing compulsively about the man he loathed above all others.
    One spring day in Atlanta, Benteen attended a lecture entitled “Reno, Custer, and the Little Big Horn.” “The lecture abounded in compliments to me,” he wrote Goldin, then added, somewhat unconvincingly, “but really . . . I’m out of that whirlpool now.”

    F our years after Custer’s death, Grant Marsh returned to the Little Bighorn with three slabs of granite perched on his riverboat’s bow. The following winter the stones were dragged by sledge across the frozen river, and in the summer of 1881, the summer Sitting Bull surrendered at Fort Buford, the stones were assembled into a monument on Last Stand Hill.

EPILOGUE

    Libbie’s House
    A t the corner of Cass and West Seventh streets in Monroe, Mich-igan, sits the two-story, three-bedroom house in which Libbie Custer was raised. In 1999, the house was bought by Steve and Sandy Alexander. Alexander is known as the country’s foremost Custer reenactor. Bearing an uncanny physical resemblance to the general, he has spent his life researching every conceivable aspect of the Custer biography and has become a fixture at the reenactments staged each year near the battleground. He can quote long passages of the general’s prose; he has studied the many photographs; he has a uniform for each stage in Custer’s multifaceted career. With an endearing humility, he has somehow managed to inhabit the personality of one of America’s most famous egomaniacs. As his Web site proclaims, “Steve Alexander is George Armstrong Custer.”
    On a Saturday in late September 2006, Steve and his wife, Sandy (who plays the role of Libbie Custer with equal passion and commitment), hosted a noted guest: Ernie LaPointe, the great-grandson of Sitting Bull.
    “This is a monumental occasion,” Alexander said to a reporter from the local newspaper, adding that he doubted the Custers could have imagined “that a relative of Sitting Bull would [one day] be sitting here.”
    When the two men shook hands in the living room of the house, Alexander was dressed in a replica of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry uniform. In real life, Alexander has never served in the military. LaPointe, on the other hand, is a wounded veteran of the Vietnam War, in which he served with the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne Division. Once seated in the Alexanders’ living room, LaPointe made it clear that he held no grudges against the man Alexander portrays. “Sitting Bull didn’t dislike Custer,” he said. “He realized he was