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

rivaling in color the blackness of the raven and extending, when allowed to fall loosely over her shoulders, to below her waist,” p. 282. In 1890, fourteen years after her husband’s death, Libbie published Following the Guidon, in which she described her first meeting with Monahsetah at Fort Hays, Kansas, in 1869. “How could I help feeling,” she wrote, “that with a swift movement she would produce a weapon, and by stabbing the wife, hurt the white chief who had captured her, in what she believed would be the most cruel way,” p. 95. In this passage Libbie somehow manages to acknowledge the threat Monahsetah posed to her marriage without betraying the truth of her husband’s infidelity.
    Libbie wrote of Custer’s relationship with the actor Lawrence Barrett in Tenting on the Plains, p. 220; she also referred to how Barrett typically greeted her husband: “Well, old fellow; hard at work making history, are you?” Libbie wrote of how Custer sat spellbound, performance after performance, watching Barrett perform as Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “There were forty nights that these friends sat side by side, until the call boy summoned the actor to the footlights. The General listened every evening with unflagging interest to the acting of his friend,” in Boots and Saddles, p. 208. Early in their marriage, Libbie was taken with how thoroughly Custer immersed himself in a play, remarking that he “laughed at the fun and cried at the pathos in the theatres with all the abandon of a boy unconscious of surroundings,” in Frost, p. 94.
    My account of Grant Marsh’s encounter with Libbie and the other officers’ wives is based on Hanson, pp. 237–40. John Burkman’s description of Libbie and Custer’s farewell is in Wagner, pp. 123–24. Libbie wrote of her mistaken impression that Custer had “made every plan” to have her join him by steamboat in Boots and Saddles, p. 219. John Neihardt’s description of Marsh as a “born commander” is from The River and I, p. 250. Libbie wrote of how terrible it was “to be left behind” in Boots and Saddles, p. 60. Thomas Marquis in “Pioneer Woman Describes Ft. Abraham Lincoln Scenes When Word Came of the Custer Disaster,” Billings Gazette, Nov. 13, 1932, quotes a Mrs. J. C. Chappell (who was eleven years old in 1876) as saying that Libbie told her mother, Mrs. Manley, that “she never had seen her husband depart on active service with so heavy a heart. . . . She was grievously disappointed that Captain Marsh was not willing she should be a passenger in the Far West .”
    My description of Marsh’s two exploring expeditions up the Yellowstone, in 1873 and 1875, are based on Hanson, pp. 197–225. According to an article in the Sept. 23, 1873, New York Tribune: “It seems not a little singular . . . that one of our largest and most beautiful rivers . . . should remain entirely unexplored by large steamers until the year 1873.”

Chapter 2: The Dream
    My description of a butte is largely based on the description by Ellen Meloy in Home Ground, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney, p. 57. My description of Sitting Bull’s actions in this chapter are based on the “Prophecy of Sitting Bull As Told to One Bull,” box 110, folder 8, WCC. Interestingly, Campbell/Vestal chose not to include any mention of this particular vision in his biography of Sitting Bull. As Raymond DeMallie writes in “ ‘These Have No Ears’: Narrative and Ethnohistorical Method,” the vision of two clouds colliding was “redundant in a narrative sense” when paired with Sitting Bull’s more well-known sun dance vision described in chapter 4. “To Campbell,” DeMallie writes, “the second prophecy apparently seemed unnecessary—a kind of afterthought,” p. 523. DeMallie refers to an account interpreted by Robert Higheagle, box 104, WCC, that places this prophecy after Sitting Bull’s sun dance vision. I’ve chosen to follow Robert Utley in The Lance and the Shield, who places this vision prior to the sun dance, sometime between May 21 and May 24, p. 136. This chronology is corroborated by Ernie LaPointe, the great-grandson of Sitting Bull, in “Thank You Grandfather, We Are Still Alive,” part 2 of his film The Authorized Biography of Sitting Bull . Although several details of the vision vary in LaPointe’s account, he also places Sitting Bull’s vision of the collision of what he describes as “two whirl-winds” prior to the sun dance.
    In