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

describing Sitting Bull’s village, I have relied on Wooden Leg, interpreted by Thomas Marquis, who mentions the number of buffalo skins required to make a tepee, p. 77. According to the scout Ben Clark, a “tepee of freshly-skinned buffalo skins was always white as snow. Always made of cow skins tanned as soft as buckskin and very pliable. If bull hide tanned had to split where hump and sew up with sinews,” in James Foley, “Walter Camp and Ben Clark,” p. 26. My thanks to Jeremy Guinn and Rick Delougharie, who conducted a Buffalo Brain Tanning Workshop at Porcupine, North Dakota, while I was visiting the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in June 2007.
    Charles Eastman in Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains wrote that Sitting Bull’s “legs were bowed like the ribs of the ponies that he rode constantly from childhood,” p. 108. Even though Sitting Bull walked with a noticeable limp, he managed to win a running race against a white cowboy at the Standing Rock Agency when he was a relatively old man, proclaiming, “A white man has no business to challenge a deer,” in Vestal’s New Sources of Indian History, p. 345. My description of Sitting Bull’s killing of the Crow chief is based on several accounts at WCC: Circling Hawk, box 105, notebook 13; One Bull, “Information in Sioux and English with Regard to Sitting Bull,” MS box 104, folder 11; Little Soldier, c. 1932, box 104, folder 6; One Bull, MS 127, box 104, One Bull folder, no. 11. The incident is also described by Vestal, Sitting Bull pp. 27–30, and in Robert Utley’s The Lance and the Shield, p. 21.
    Vestal describes Sitting Bull’s high singing voice in Sitting Bull, p. 21, and adds, “[T]here was a theme-song appropriate to every occasion,” p. 22. See also Frances Densmore’s Teton Sioux Music and Culture, p. 458. The song Sitting Bull sang while charging the Crow chief is in “25 Songs by Sitting Bull,” by Robert Higheagle, box 104, folder 18, WCC. On the early history of the plains tribes, see William Swagerty’s “History of the United States Plains Until 1850” in Plains, edited by Raymond DeMallie, vol. 13 of the Handbook of North American Indians, pp. 256–79, and DeMallie’s “Sioux Until 1850,” also in the Handbook, pp. 718–27, in which he decribes Radisson’s impressions of the Sioux. My thanks to Professor DeMallie in pointing out this passage as well as for his guidance in spelling the Lakota words hokahe, tiyoshpaye, and washichus for a general audience. I’ve also relied on George Hyde’s Red Cloud’s Folk: A History of the Oglala Sioux Indians, pp. 5–42, and Michael Clodfelter’s The Dakota War, p. 18. Richard White in “The Winning of the West” writes of the role of disease in devastating the sedentary tribes along the Missouri, p. 325. Dan Flores in The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains mentions the term “hyper-Indians,” p. 56. John Ewers discusses the evolution from the use of dogs to the use of horses in The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture, p. 308. Colin Calloway in “The Intertribal Balance of Power on the Great Plains, 1760–1850” writes, “What the United States did to the Sioux was what the Sioux themselves had been doing to weaker peoples for years,” p. 46. The Oglala Black Hawk’s comparison of the Lakota’s expansion to that of the white man is cited by Richard White in “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West, p. 95. Royal Hassrick in The Sioux: Life and Times of a Warrior Society writes of the Sioux’s “unswerving faith in themselves,” p. 69, and how for a warrior it was “good to die in battle,” p. 92. Jeffrey Ostler in The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee writes of the “universal process by which those moving into a new country come to see themselves as a chosen people,” p. 27. Vestal describes plains warfare as “a gorgeous mounted game of tag,” in Sitting Bull, p. 11. My references to winter counts are based on Candace Greene and Russell Thornton’s The Year the Stars Fell: Lakota Winter Counts at the Smithsonian, pp. 77, 87, 151–52, 230, 249, 254–55. Dan Flores in The Natural West writes of the decline of the buffalo among the Cheyenne to the south, p. 67.
    Sitting Bull spoke of his interest in the world while still in his mother’s womb in an article by Jerome Stillson in the Nov. 16, 1877, New York Herald, cited by Utley in