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

1860s, p. 80; Lass claims that $24 million worth of gold was taken down the Missouri during the Montana gold rush in the 1860s, A History of Steamboating, pp. 67–68. The town of Bismarck was named for the chancellor of Germany in the unrequited hope that he would invest in the Dakota Territory; see Lass, A History of Steamboating, p. 80. According to Lass, the Dakotas in the mid-1870s were “one of the last lucrative steamboat frontiers in the nation,” p. 89. Edward Lazarus in Black Hills White Justice: The Sioux Nation Versus the United States, 1775 to the Present puts the national debt in 1874 at $2 billion, p. 78. My description of Custer’s Black Hills Expedition is based on Sven Froiland’s Natural History of the Black Hills and Badlands and Ernest Grafe and Paul Horsted’s Exploring with Custer . Charles Windolph in I Fought with Custer, edited by Frazier and Robert Hunt, wrote of the incredible profitability of the Homestake Mine in Lead, South Dakota, p. 40. On Custer’s testimony before Congress in the spring of 1876, see Robert Utley’s Cavalier in Buckskin, pp. 152–54. Hanson reported that Marsh and the Far West were paid $360 a day by the U.S. Army, p. 239.
    My account of the Centennial Exhibition is based largely on Dorothy G. Beersin’s “The Centennial City,” pp. 461–68, in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, edited by Russell F. Weigley. The opening ceremony of the exhibition is described in Robert Rydell’s All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916, pp. 14–17. Custer’s troubles with his horse during the Grand Review at the conclusion of the Civil War are described in Jeffrey Wert’s Custer: The Controversial Life of George Armstrong Custer, p. 228; Jay Monaghan’s Custer: The Life of General George Armstrong Custer, pp. 248–51; Frederick Whittaker’s A Life of Major General George A. Custer, pp. 311–14; and Lawrence Frost’s General Custer’s Libbie, p. 47. The New York Herald ’s reference to Grant as the “modern Caesar” is in James Wengert’s The Custer Despatches, p. 5. William Dean Howells referred to the “silent indifference” of the crowd’s response to Grant and added, “Ten years ago earth and sky would have shaken with the thunder of his welcome. What a sublime possession to have thrown away, the confidence and gratitude of a nation!” in William Randel’s Centennial: American Life in 1876, p. 291. Robert Utley in The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890 writes of Grant’s Indian policy, pp. 129–31.
    General Terry described the logistics of the campaign in a May 17, 1876, letter to his sister Polly Jane in The Terry Letters, edited by James Willert, p. 1. Mark Kellogg wrote of the scouting report placing Sitting Bull’s village on the Little Missouri River in the May 18, 1876, Bismarck Tribune; see also Terry’s May 15, 1876, letter to General Sheridan, cited in Gray, Centennial Campaign, p. 89; Gray puts the total size of the column, including both the Seventh Cavalry and the infantry columns at 879, p. 97. Custer’s boast that the Seventh “could whip and defeat all the Indians on the plains” appeared in J. R. Perkins, Trails, Rails and War: The Life of General G. M. Dodge, who added that Custer “went not only to fight the Indians but determined to wipe out the disgrace of his arrest,” p. 193. Frost in General Custer’s Libbie referred to the two canaries for Libbie; the reference to Custer being as “happy as a boy with a new red sled” is in Windolph, I Fought with Custer, p. 50. In Boots and Saddles, Libbie Custer wrote that prior to the departure of the Seventh in May 1876 Custer’s “buoyant spirits made him like a boy,” p. 219.
    Custer’s 150-mile sprint to Libbie in 1867 is described by Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, p. 169. Libbie Custer referred to that “one long perfect day” in Tenting on the Plains, p. 403. When the legendary scout Jim Bridger heard about Sheridan’s plan for a winter campaign against the Cheyenne, he felt compelled to travel to Fort Hays to dissuade the general: “You can’t hunt Indians on the plains in winter,” he said, “for blizzards don’t respect man or beast,” in Carl Rister, Border Command, p. 92. As Perry Jamieson in Crossing the Deadly Ground: United States Army Tactics, 1865–1899 points out, the concept of a winter campaign was nothing new, pp. 37–38. Although Jamieson cites examples as far back as the