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

eighteenth century, there are even earlier precedents. During the winter of 1675, New England colonial forces launched a winter campaign against the Narragansett Indians; see my Mayflower, pp. 265–80. Benteen described his confrontation with Custer concerning his article about the Washita in a Feb. 22, 1896, letter to Goldin in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, p. 280.
    In a March 24, 1869, letter to Libbie, Custer wrote of his deliberate plan to answer the critics of his Washita campaign with diplomacy: “[M]y command, from highest to lowest, desired bloodshed. . . . I paid no heed but followed the dictates of my own judgment upon which my beloved commander [General Sheridan] said he relied for the attainment of the best results. . . . And now my most bitter enemies cannot say that I am either blood-thirsty or possessed of an unworthy ambition,” in Elizabeth Custer’s Following the Guidon, pp. 56–57. Utley in Cavalier in Buckskin quotes Custer’s letter to Libbie concerning “Custer luck,” pp. 104–5. Libbie wrote of the “aimlessness” of Custer’s time in Kentucky in Boots and Saddles, p. 123; she also wrote of how smashing chairs was typical of how he “celebrated every order to move with wild demonstrations of joy,” p. 5. The officer’s reference to how Custer was “making himself utterly detested” during the march up the Missouri in 1873 is cited in Roger Darling’s Custer’s Seventh Cavalry Comes to Dakota: New Discoveries Reveal Custer’s Tribulations Enroute to the Yellowstone Expedition, p. 177.
    Benteen’s account of his conversation with Custer concerning his cousin Lawrence Gobright is in his Feb. 22, 1896, letter to Goldin in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, pp. 281–82. The surgeon James DeWolf wrote of Benteen in his diary, edited by Edward Luce: “He has silver gray hair and is very easy spoken,” “Diary and Letters of Dr. James M. DeWolf,” p. 67. In a Mar. 10, 1897, letter to the photographer D. F. Barry, Benteen wrote, “Mrs. Custer knows that I am one of the few men who thoroughly understood her husband,” D. F. Barry Correspondence, edited by John Carroll, p. 44. Benteen wrote of his “happy facility of making enemies” in a Mar. 23, 1896, letter to Goldin in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, p. 293. In a Nov. 17, 1891, letter Benteen wrote, “I’ve been a loser in a way, all my life by rubbing a bit against the angles—or hair—of folks, instead of going with their whims; but I couldn’t go otherwise—’twould be against the grain of myself,” in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, p. 206. In a Nov. 10, 1891, letter to Goldin, he wrote of how Custer “wanted me badly as a friend,” in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, p. 199; he wrote of Libbie as “cold-blooded” in a Feb. 17, 1896, letter, p. 262; the reference to “wheels within wheels” is from Benteen’s Feb. 22, 1896, letter to Goldin, p. 282.
    Marguerite Merington in her collection of correspondence titled The Custer Story (subsequently referred to as Merington) wrote of Custer reading The Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 204; Libbie described Custer as a “self-appointed hermit” in Boots and Saddles, p. 118. Glenwood Swanson’s G. A. Custer has a picture of Custer’s “THIS IS MY BUSY DAY” card, p. 59. Libbie described Custer’s study in Boots and Saddles, p. 149. Libbie recounted Custer’s words during his meeting with Terry on May 16, 1876, in a letter to Custer’s friend Jacob Greene; quoted by Greene in a Sept. 1, 1904, Greene letter reprinted in Cyrus Townsend Brady’s Indian Fights and Fighters, p. 393. Custer’s Mar. 29, 1876, testimony before Congress on the “Sale of Post Traderships” is in House of Representatives, 44th Cong., 1st Sess., Report 799. For an account of these hearings that is sympathetic to Custer, see John Hart’s “Custer’s First Stand: The Washington Fight.” But as even Hart admits, Custer did recant the only substantive part of his testimony.
    In the article “Campaign Against the Sioux in 1876,” General Terry’s aide and brother-in-law Robert Hughes claimed that Terry told him how Custer “with tears in his eyes, begged my aid. How could I resist it?” p. 12; Hughes also wrote of Custer’s encounter with Terry’s good friend William Ludlow and his intention to “swing clear of Terry.”
    In describing the regiment’s departure from Fort Lincoln on May 17, I’ve looked to James Willert’s Little Big Horn Diary,