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

Have No Ears’: Narrative and Ethnohistorical Method,” p. 525. Throughout the book I remain a curious outsider doing my best to make sense of it all.
    It is also my firm belief that the spiritual and visionary aspects of experience are essential to understanding not only Sitting Bull but also Custer and his wife, Libbie, who, after all, saw a troubling vision of her husband’s fate as the Seventh marched through the mist at Fort Lincoln. According to Lee Irwin in Visionary Worlds: The Making and Unmaking of Reality: “No . . . history can capture the inner reality of outward change based only on physical or biological evidence. There must be an awakening to the psychic and spiritual dimensions which also motivate outward change and developments and which, for the sensitive and aware, are primary sources of motivation and conception,” p. 19.
    When it comes to our understanding of Sitting Bull, there is the underappreciated problem of evidence. During the painful transition to reservation life in the 1880s, there was a tendency—encouraged by the agency head James McLZughlin at the Standing Rock Reservation (Sitting Bull’s home during the final years of his life)—to view the Lakota chief as both a coward and a bully and to deny his role in effecting the victory at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In the 1930s, the writer Walter Campbell, who wrote under the pen name of Stanley Vestal, set out to write a revisionist biography of the Lakota leader, relying primarily on Sitting Bull’s two nephews, One Bull and White Bull. Not surprisingly, the two relatives had nothing but positive things to say about their uncle, and Vestal’s portrait is of an infallible, always fair-minded leader. Robert Utley’s more recent biography, which applies a higher degree of historical rigor to the notes left by Walter Campbell (who as the writer Stanley Vestal sometimes took considerable artistic license), is a more balanced portrait on the whole. However, since it also relies, for the most part, on the information provided by White Bull and One Bull, his opinion of Sitting Bull is in basic agreement with Vestal’s.
    Although Sitting Bull lived and died at the Standing Rock Agency, almost all his family members (with the notable exception of his nephew One Bull) relocated to the Pine Ridge Agency about two hundred miles to the south. While Campbell’s investigations remained based at Standing Rock, the noted Little Bighorn researcher Walter Mason Camp interviewed several Sitting Bull descendants at Pine Ridge. Recently a new Native voice has emerged in regards to Sitting Bull: that of his great-grandson Ernie LaPointe, who grew up at Pine Ridge. In two film documentaries and the book Sitting Bull: His Life and Legacy (2009), LaPointe relates the oral traditions passed down to him from his grandmother Standing Holy (Sitting Bull’s daughter) to his mother, Angelique.
    I cite the many sources I’ve depended on below, but there are a handful of titles that were of particular importance in shaping my overall view of the battle and its participants. Evan Connell’s Son of the Morning Star is the book that introduced me to the fascinating nooks and crannies of this story and stands in a class by itself as a lyrical exploration of the evidence. Robert Utley’s Cavalier in Buckskin: George Armstrong Custer and the Western Military Frontier is a model of crisp, accessible, and economical writing combined with impeccable scholarship. Richard Slotkin’s The Fatal Environment is another fundamental work that examines the intersection between history and myth, while Michael Elliott’s Custerology traces how that intersection has manifested itself in modern-day responses to the battle. Louise Barnett’s Touched by Fire is a provocative examination not only of the Custer marriage but of Libbie Custer’s subsequent role as spin doctor to her husband’s posthumous reputation. Other works that I found indispensable were Richard Fox’s Archaeology, History, and Custer’s Last Battle, John Gray’s Centennial Campaign and Custer’s Last Campaign, James Willert’s Little Big Horn Diary, Edgar Stewart’s Custer’s Luck, Roger Darling’s A Sad and Terrible Blunder, Larry Sklenar’s To Hell with Honor, and James Donovan’s A Terrible Glory . When it comes to the Native side of the battle, I have looked to Joseph Marshall’s The Day the World Ended at Little Bighorn, James Welch’s Killing Custer, and Gregory Michno’s Lakota