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

Slotkin’s The Fatal Environment, especially “To the Last Man: Assembling the Last Stand Myth, 1876,” pp. 437–76. Sitting Bull’s words upon his surrender in 1881 were recorded in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 21 and 30, Aug. 3, 1881; cited in Robert Utley’s The Lance and the Shield, p. 232. Michael Elliott discusses Custer’s calculated association with the past in Custerology: “Custer . . . drew upon a model that emphasized theatricality and performance . . . and that derived its cultural status from its conscious evocation of the past. In a sense it was deliberately anachronistic,” p. 98.
    For the demographics of the Seventh Cavalry, see Thomas O’Neil, “Profiles of the 7th by S. Caniglia,” in Custer Chronicles, p. 36. In “Custer’s Last Battle,” Edward Godfrey wrote, “In 1876, there was not a ranch west of Bismarck, Dakota, nor east of Bozeman, Montana,” in W. A. Graham’s The Custer Myth: A Source Book of Custeriana, p. 129. On the inadequacy of the term “frontier” (“an unsubtle concept in a subtle world”), see Patricia Limerick’s groundbreaking study The Legacy of Conquest, p. 25. For a comparison of the Battle of the Little Bighorn and Isandlwana, see James Gump’s The Dust Rose Like Smoke and Paul Williams’s Little Bighorn and Isandlwana: Kindred Fights, Kindred Follies .
    Sitting Bull’s reference to an “island of Indians” appeared in Stanley Vestal’s Sitting Bull, p. 141. Benteen compared serving in the cavalry to shipboard life in a Feb. 22, 1896, letter to Theodore Goldin in The Benteen-Goldin Letters, edited by John Carroll, p. 278.
    In Mayflower I also strove to view the historical participants as idiosyncratic individuals instead of cogs in a “clash of cultures”: “the real-life Indians and English of the seventeenth century were too smart, too generous, too greedy, too brave—in short, too human—to behave so predictably,” p. xvi. In “Clash of Cultures as Euphemism: Avoiding History at the Little Bighorn,” Timothy Braatz writes, “Cultures do not clash; cultures do not even act—people do,” p. 109; see also Elliott, Custerology, pp. 138–39. Edward Godfrey described the “sickening, ghastly horror,” in W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, p. 346. Thomas Coleman’s description of Custer is in I Buried Custer, edited by Bruce Liddic, p. 21.

Chapter 1: At the Flood
    For information on riverboats and the Missouri River, I’ve looked to Louis Hunter’s Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History, pp. 217–30; William Lass, A History of Steamboating on the Upper Missouri River, pp. 1–3; and Arthur C. Benke and Colbert E. Cushing, Rivers of North America, pp. 431–32. Hunter speaks of how deadly a snag could be in Steamboats, p. 236, and lists the average age of a Missouri riverboat as just five years, p. 100; after a trip up the Missouri in 1849, Francis Parkman wrote in The Oregon Trail: “It was frightful to see the dead and broken trees, each set as a military abatis, firmly imbedded in the sand and all pointing downstream, ready to impale any unhappy steamboat,” p. 2.
    Hunter writes of a Missouri riverboat’s “amphibian role, literally crawling along the river bottom,” p. 251; he also writes of how “the western steamboat, like the American ax, the revolver, and barbed wire, was a typical mechanical expression of a fluid and expanding frontier society,” p. 65. Joseph Mills Hanson in The Conquest of the Missouri (subsequently referred to as Hanson) provides the specifications of the Far West, p. 238. Hiram Chittenden in History of Early Steamboat Navigation on the Missouri River notes that the invention of the balanced rudder, with part of the blade forward of the rudder post, allowed for the replacement of two side wheels with a single stern wheel, p. 112. Hunter describes a Missouri riverboat as an “engine on a raft, with $11,000 worth of jig-saw work,” p. 62; he also writes of the “explosive exhaust of the high pressure engine,” p. 141, and of how the lightness of a riverboat’s construction meant that “every distinct motion of the propulsive power was vibrated through the entire frame,” p. 81. My description of “grasshoppering” is based on Hunter, p. 254, and Lass, who compares a riverboat perched on its two forward spars to a “squatting grasshopper,” in A History of Steamboating on the Upper Missouri River, p. 12.
    Hanson writes of Grant Marsh’s experiences in the