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

from Monroe, it is doubtful whether Custer could have conceived of a future in which a fourth-generation descendant of Sitting Bull’s drank coffee in the living room of Libbie’s childhood home. The Indians, even their most fervent white supporters in the late nineteenth century believed, were about to disappear.
    As a cadet at West Point, Custer expressed the conventional wisdom of his day in a paper entitled “The Red Man”: “We behold him now on the verge of extinction,” he wrote, “standing in his last foothold, clutching his bloodstained rifle, resolved to die amidst the horror of slaughter, and soon he will be talked of as a noble race who once existed but have now passed away.”
    It was not the Indian who was on the way out in 1876; it was the Indian fighter. In 1890, the year of Sitting Bull’s death, the U.S. Census Bureau declared the frontier officially closed. The Wild West of Custer’s greatest renown was defunct, but the Indians remained.

    I n 1944, the Army Corp of Engineers decided to turn the Missouri River into a series of lakes. It’s been called “the single most destructive act perpetrated against an Indian tribe in the twentieth century.” With the building of five dams in North and South Dakota, the U.S. government flooded 550 square miles of tribal land.
    Since the waters of the Missouri were what sustained the Native peoples in this region, the dams eliminated their most fertile and sacred lands. Hundreds of Lakota families along the Missouri were displaced. But it was those peoples whose ancestors had assisted Custer’s Seventh Cavalry—the Mandan; the Hidatsa; and Bloody Knife’s people, the Arikara—who suffered the most. With the building of the Garrison Dam in North Dakota, these three tribes lost the very heart of their reservation at Fort Berthold, forcing approximately 95 percent of the agency’s residents to relocate.
    Gerard Baker is a member of the Three Affiliated Tribes, and for six years he served as superintendent of the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. As a child growing up on the Fort Berthold Reservation, he often fished on the artificially created Sacagawea Lake. “[O]ld people would come to the bluffs around the lake to cry and wail,” he remembered. “They would look out over the water and cry for the loss of the graves of their ancestors and for their lost homeland, lost way of life and community.”

    F or legions of self-described Custer buffs, the Battle of the Little Bighorn is much like an unsolvable crossword puzzle: a conundrum that can sustain a lifetime of scrutiny and debate. Instead of the personalities of the participants, the buffs tend to focus on military strategy and tactics, the topography of the battlefield, and the material culture of the two opposing forces. Some, like Steve Alexander, participate in reenactments of the battle; others research and write articles and attend annual gatherings of fellow battle enthusiasts. In the tradition of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, the battle is, for this group, a fascinating diversion.
    For the Lakota and Cheyenne, the battle is something else altogether. Instead of providing a refuge from the troubling complexities of the here and now, the battle and especially its aftermath are an inescapable part of that present.
    In the almost century and a half since the Little Bighorn, the Native population of the United States has been steadily increasing. The reservations continue to be plagued by a host of serious social issues, including unemployment, alcoholism, drug addiction, and a frighteningly high suicide rate. But there are also some positive signs. Traditional practices such as the sun dance and the use of the Lakota and Cheyenne languages are making a comeback. Some tribes have begun buying back land the government took from them in the nineteenth century. Instead of settling for a multimillion-dollar government buyout of the Black Hills at the end of the twentieth century, tribal leaders continue to hold out hope of one day reclaiming this vast territory as theirs. Contrary to the expectations of their nineteenth-century conquerors, the Lakota and Cheyenne have endured.
    On July 8, 2009, at a restaurant in Deadwood, South Dakota, in the Black Hills, Ernie LaPointe spoke of his great-grandfather and the Battle of the Little Bighorn: “Historians are always saying that we are a defeated people, but slaughtering the buffalo, disarming and massacring old men, women,