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

a military guy following orders.”
    LaPointe’s attitude in 2006 could not be more different from that expressed over thirty years earlier by the Lakota intellectual and activist Vine Deloria Jr. in Custer Died for Your Sins. Reflecting the radicalism of the Vietnam War era, Deloria described Custer, the righteous martyr of the first half of the twentieth century, as the quintessential “Ugly American . . . [who] got what was coming to him.” This is the Custer I came to know in 1970 when as a high school freshman I saw the delightfully iconoclastic Western Little Big Man.
    By the start of the twenty-first century, however, attitudes had begun to change once again. After September 11, 2001, and the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003, it was possible to recognize, as LaPointe acknowledged during his meeting with Steve Alexander, that no matter how misguided the conflict, soldiers such as Custer were only doing their duty.
    As it turns out, Custer’s Native opponents had known this all along. In 1919, the Lakota warrior He Dog recounted what he had told an army officer looking for information about the Battle of the Little Bighorn on behalf of Libbie Custer. “[I]f he wanted to know the cause of that trouble,” He Dog told him, “he would have to look in Washington . . . [because] Washington was the place all those troubles started.”

    B ut is this letting Custer too easily off the hook? General Terry, like Sheridan before him, had told Custer to do whatever he thought best once he came in contact with the Indians. At the Washita in 1868, Custer had attacked. As the campaign against the southern Cheyenne progressed the following year, Custer chose a completely different course. Even though Sheridan’s and Custer’s own officers remained skeptical, he chose this time to negotiate. No mere gunslinger in buckskin, Custer was too much of an opportunist to remain committed to any single approach.
    Washington sent Custer to south-central Montana in 1876, but what Custer decided to do at the Little Bighorn was by no means determined by President Grant. In fact, if the Crow scout White Man Runs Him is to be believed, Custer viewed his actions at the battle as a kind of repudiation of his commander in chief. “I have an enemy back where many white people live that I hate,” he reportedly told the scouts. “I am going to take this village whether I am killed or not.”
    Custer represented the government of the United States, but he was also a strong-headed officer known for going his own way. What that way represented was rarely clear to anyone—least of all to Custer himself.
    In My Life on the Plains, published two years before the Battle of the Little Bighorn, he expressed his sympathies for the so-called hostiles such as Sitting Bull: “If I were an Indian,” Custer wrote, “I often think I would greatly prefer to cast my lot among those of my people adhered to the free open plains rather than submit to the confined limits of a reservation, there to be the recipient of the blessed benefits of civilization, with its vices thrown in without stint or measure.” If Custer’s sympathies for the Indians were indeed as deep as this passage suggests, then how do we account for his decision to desecrate the Lakota graves during his march up the Yellowstone toward the Far West ? Several observers believed that Custer and his family members ultimately paid for this outrageous and needless act with their lives.
    Despite his inconsistencies and flaws, there was something about Custer that distinguished him from most other human beings. He possessed an energy, an ambition, and a charisma that few others could match. He could inspire devotion and great love along with more than his share of hatred and disdain, and more than anything else, he wanted to be remembered.
    Some are remembered because they transcended the failings of their age. Custer is remembered because he so perfectly embodied those failings. As Herman Melville wrote of that seagoing monster of a man Captain Ahab, “All mortal greatness is but disease.”

    C uster and Sitting Bull were both great warriors. But Sitting Bull was something more. He was a leader, a prophet, and a politician. He was also convinced that he alone had his people’s welfare in view, a conviction that inevitably exasperated those Lakota attempting to meet the challenges of reservation life in their own way. As Bull Head shouted at Sitting Bull in his final moments, “You have no