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

ears, you wouldn’t listen!” This, according to Kate Bighead, was the same sentiment the two southern Cheyenne women expressed on Last Stand Hill when they pierced Custer’s eardrums with an awl.
    For a former warrior such as Sitting Bull, the glorious finality of a violent death had been a sore temptation all his life. When he was told only a few weeks after his arrival at Standing Rock in 1881 that he was going to be placed under arrest and shipped off to Fort Randall, he almost decided to end it then and there. Back in 1877, soon after surrendering to the authorities, Crazy Horse had been stabbed to death while resisting arrest. Sitting Bull initially vowed to go the way of his Oglala friend but eventually changed his mind. His Last Stand would have to wait.
    During the final year of Sitting Bull’s life, his household was joined by two most unusual guests: a fifty-two-year-old Swiss-born widow named Catherine Weldon and her twelve-year-old son, Christie. The previous year Weldon, a member of an Indian rights group, had helped the Hunkpapa leader in his attempts to fight the U.S. government’s proposal to reduce the size of the Standing Rock Agency. In the summer of 1890, she decided to move to the reservation and devote her life to assisting the man she admired above all others. “I honor and respect S. Bull as if he was my own father,” she wrote to the agent James McLaughlin, who must have taken her letter as a kind of challenge, “and nothing can ever shake my faith in his good qualities and what I can do to make him famous I will certainly do and I will succeed, but I regret he is so universally misjudged.”
    Weldon was what Libbie and Monahsetah had been for Custer—part promoter, part cultural intermediary—and she and her son lived with Sitting Bull and his extended family along the banks of the Grand River. It was a most unconventional partnership, and McLaughlin appears to have encouraged the rumors that the two shared a physical relationship, something Weldon, whom Sitting Bull called Woman Walking Ahead, indignantly denied.
    By the fall of 1890, as the tensions surrounding the Ghost Dance came to a head, the two had a falling-out. Weldon believed that if Sitting Bull continued to support the movement, McLaughlin and the military would use it as a pretext to destroy him. By this point, the Hunkpapa chief appears to have grown increasingly despondent. His efforts to oppose McLaughlin’s totalitarian rule at Standing Rock had so far failed. Many of his own people were aligned against him. More than anything else, he was tired. “He said he would be glad if the soldiers would kill him,” Weldon wrote, “so his heart would find rest.”
    When Weldon and her son left in November, what little hope Sitting Bull had for the future seems to have faded. On November 27, the teacher John Carignan reported to McLaughlin, “Sitting Bull has lost all confidence in the whites since Mrs. Weldon left him.”

    T hat was the opinion of a white schoolteacher. Sitting Bull’s immediate family inevitably had a different view of the Hunkpapa leader’s last days. According to Ernie LaPointe, the agency police did not storm into his great-grandfather’s cabin. They knocked on the door and waited for him to get dressed. Sitting Bull’s son Crowfoot was not, as the agency police claimed, a fourteen-year-old boy. He was actually a seventeen-year-old young man. When his father started for the door, Crowfoot took up a gun and said, “I will protect you.” Sitting Bull paused, turned to his family, which included LaPointe’s grandmother Standing Holy, and sang one last song: “I am a man and wherever I lie is my own.”
    With his son at his back, Sitting Bull opened the door and stepped into the night.

    N ot long after Sitting Bull’s death, a photographer from nearby Fort Yates staged a reenactment of the Hunkpapa chief’s Last Stand. Agency policemen who had survived the incident were placed around the cabin and photographed with their rifles at the ready. During the winter of 1891, some citizens from the town of Mandan, North Dakota, proposed that Sitting Bull’s cabin be purchased from his heirs and transported to Chicago for the upcoming world’s fair. Billed as “Sitting Bull’s Death Cabin,” the structure was reassembled on the midway of the fairgrounds and manned by nine Oglala who showed visitors where bullets had riddled the cabin’s sides.

    A s Steve Alexander remarked to the reporter