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

The Lance and the Shield, pp. 27–28. On Native spirituality I have consulted Raymond DeMallie and Douglas Parks’s Sioux Indian Religion, pp. 25–43, and Lee Irwin’s The Dream Seekers: Native American Visionary Traditions on the Great Plains; according to Irwin, the “most common place for seeking a vision is a hill, butte, or mountain. . . . To be up above the middle realm of normal habitation meant making oneself more visible to all the powers,” p. 106. Sitting Bull’s vision of the eagle at Sylvan Lake is told by One Bull, box 104, folder 6, and ww box 110, folder 8, WCC.
    Irwin in The Dream Seekers cites the quotes from Sword, p. 122, and John Fire, p. 127. Billy Garnett’s account of Crazy Horse’s vision of the man in the lake is in The Indian Interviews of Eli S. Ricker, edited by Richard Jensen, p. 117. Kingsley Bray provides an excellent account of this vision in Crazy Horse, pp. 65–66, in which he cites Garnett’s account as well as that of Flying Hawk, p. 66.
    My rendering of the myth of the White Buffalo Calf Woman is based largely on Black Elk’s account in The Sacred Pipe, edited by Joseph Epes Brown, pp. 3–9. I’ve also consulted James Walker’s Lakota Belief and Ritual, especially pp. 109–12 and 148–50, and William Powers’s Oglala Religion, pp. 81–83. Raymond DeMallie in “Lakota Belief and Ritual” in Sioux Indian Religion writes of the buffalo having once been at war with the ancestors of the Lakota, p. 31. White Bull’s claim that Sitting Bull could “foretell anything” is in ww box 105, notebook 24, WCC. Raymond DeMallie in “ ‘These Have No Ears’ ” writes of “Sitting Bull’s well-documented reputation for prophecy,” p. 527.

Chapter 3: Hard Ass
    Throughout this chapter I have relied on James Willert’s Little Big Horn Diary and Laudie Chorne’s Following the Custer Trail of 1876 (subsequently referred to as Chorne). In a May 29, 1876, letter, the surgeon James DeWolf wrote, “The bridges are just logs & brush put in the bed of the stream . . . and dirt & sods piled on and the banks graded so the teams can drive in & out,” Edward Luce, ed., “The Diary and Letters of Dr. James M. DeWolf,” p. 77. The regiment’s engineer, Lieutenant Edward Maguire, wrote in detail about the difficulties encountered during the march in General Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn: The Federal View, edited by John Carroll, pp. 38–39. As Chorne rightly says of the alkaline mud of North Dakota, it “sticks to whatever it comes in contact with,” p. 33. Custer wrote of how “everybody is more or less disgusted except me” in a May 20 letter to Libbie in Boots and Saddles, p. 266.
    Maguire refers to the wild rose in John Carroll’s General Custer . . . The Federal View, p. 38, which as Chorne points out, is now the state flower of North Dakota, p. 63. In a May 19, 1876, letter, DeWolf wrote, “I should like you to see us all after we get in camp, the tents and wagons and animals all lariated out completely cover the ground for about ½ mile square,” in Luce, “Diary and Letters,” p. 73. Chorne refers to the practice of wearing wet boots at night, p. 25. Jacob Horner spoke of raw sowbelly dipped in vinegar, as well as “hardtack fried in fat and covered with sugar” for dessert, in Barry Johnson’s “Jacob Horner of the Seventh Cavalry,” p. 81. A. F. Mulford’s Fighting Indians in the U.S. 7th Cavalry is a wonderful source of information about being a trooper in the 1870s; Mulford described how the aroma of the horse “creeps up out of the blanket,” cited by Chorne, p. 43. For a description of a military tent of the time, see Douglas McChristian and John P. Langellier’s The U.S. Army in the West, 1870–1880: Uniforms, Weapons, and Equipment, pp. 102–3. Terry’s description of the badlands is in a May 30 letter, Terry Letters, p. 9. John Gray in Centennial Campaign goes so far as to describe the scout up the Little Missouri as a “diversionary exercise” and a “skit,” p. 100.
    According to Charles Francis Bates (a member of the extended Custer family), “Custer mounted was an inspiration,” Custer’s Indian Battles, p. 29. James Kidd, who served with Custer during the Civil War, described him “as if ‘to the manor born’ ” in At Custer’s Side: The Civil War Writings, p. 79. Frost in General Custer’s Libbie quotes a letter in which Custer says his weight had dropped to 143 pounds, p. 187. Custer’s jacket and boot