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

pp. 2–8, and L. J. Chorne’s Following the Custer Trail, pp. 10–27. Several research trips to North Dakota during the wet spring months have given me a firsthand knowledge of what Don Rickey in Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay describes as “a semi-liquid gumbo quagmire,” p. 259. The account of the “weird something” felt by Lieutenant Gibson’s wife is recounted in Katherine Gibson Fougera’s With Custer’s Cavalry, p. 252. Annie Yates’s account of Custer’s statement that he “cannot die before my time comes” is in A Summer on the Plains with Custer’s 7th Cavalry, edited by Brian Pohanka, p. 154. John Burkman’s description of Libbie telling Custer “I wish Grant hadn’t let you go” is in Glendolin Damon Wagner’s Old Neutriment (subsequently referred to as Wagner), p. 119. Libbie wrote of the regiment’s tearful departure in Boots and Saddles, pp. 217–18. My discussion of the phenomenon of the superior image is based in part on W. J. Humphreys’s Physics of the Air, pp. 470–71.
    Libbie’s description of Custer’s first extended kiss is in Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, p. 80. In a letter written early in their marriage, Libbie wrote, “He brushes his teeth after every meal . I always laugh at him for it, also for washing hands so frequently,” Merington, p. 109. She wrote of Custer’s sensitive stomach in Boots and Saddles, p. 76. Another one of Custer’s idiosyncratic traits was his love of raw onions, which he bit into like apples. In Boots and Saddles, Libbie wrote, “[O]nions were permitted at our table, but after indulging in them, [Custer and Tom] found themselves severely let alone, and that they did not enjoy,” p. 267. Concerning Custer’s silences, Annie Yates wrote that “like all unusual and original men, he had moods of silence when he seemed too full of earnest serious thoughts for words,” Pohanka, A Summer on the Plains, p. 154. Rebecca Richmond also wrote of Custer’s silences in Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, p. 233. John Burkman told of Custer’s gambling, in Wagner, p. 93. At one point Custer wrote Libbie: “Am I not right darling to tell of my faults and tell you I have discarded them forever,” Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, p. 85. Benteen made repeated references to Custer’s relationship with the Cheyenne captive Monahsetah and his African American cook in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, pp. 30, 258, 262, 271, 276; see also Jeffrey Wert’s Custer, p. 291. In an 1868 letter to Vinnie Ream, Custer wrote, “Please have your servant examine the floor of your studio to see if my wallet (not my pistol) was not [left] there last night,” in the Vinnie Ream Hoxie Collection, LOC. See Edward Cooper’s Vinnie Ream on her affair with Sherman, pp. 178–80.
    The letter fragment in which Custer refers to his “erratic, wild, or unseemly” conduct is at the Beinecke Library at Yale; see Barnett’s Touched by Fire, pp. 198–200, for an excellent discussion of this letter. Libbie’s possible relationship with Thomas Weir in 1867 is discussed by Robert Utley in Cavalier in Buckskin, pp. 106–8; by Shirley Leckie in Elizabeth Bacon Custer and the Making of a Myth, pp. 102–3; and by Louise Barnett in Touched by Fire, p. 139. Frost discusses Libbie’s potential interest in Myles Keogh, General Custer’s Libbie, p. 192. In his fascinating biography of Custer, Glory-Hunter, Frederic Van de Water quotes extensively from Custer’s letter about his ambition “not to be wealthy, not to be learned, but to be great.” As Van de Water quite rightly comments, “This is not a march-worn husband writing to his wife. This is adolescence engaged in autobiography,” p. 161. Libbie’s comments about “making history” are recorded in Katherine Fougera’s With Custer’s Cavalry, p. 137. Frost cites the letters from Libbie about her ambitions for Custer in General Custer’s Libbie, p. 205.
    In My Life on the Plains, Custer unflinchingly lingered on Monahsetah’s considerable physical charms. She was, Custer wrote, “an exceedingly comely squaw, possessing a bright, cheery face, a countenance beaming with intelligence, and a disposition more inclined to be merry than one usually finds among the Indians. She was probably rather under than over twenty years of age. Added to the bright, laughing eyes, a set of pearly teeth, and a rich complexion, her well-shaped head was crowned with a luxuriant growth of the most beautiful silken tresses,