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

size come from Thomas O’Neil’s Passing into Legend, pp. 14–15. According to the Custer living-historian Steve Alexander, Custer wore 9½B shoes, not 9C, in Michael Elliott’s Custerology, p. 94. Custer’s Irish tailor was Jeremiah Finley of Tipperary, in Ronald Nichols’s Men with Custer, p. 100. Richard Slotkin writes about how Buffalo Bill Cody and Custer copycatted each other’s clothing styles in The Fatal Environment, p. 407. Varnum’s account of how he and Custer had “the clippers run over their heads” is in Coughlan’s Varnum: The Last of Custer’s Lieutenants, p. 35. John Burkman’s statement that Custer looked “so unnatural” after cutting his hair is in Wagner, p. 117. The reporter John Finerty, who was with Crook’s Wyoming Column, wrote that “after the [Custer] tragedy some of the officers who survived likened the dead hero to Samson. Both were invincible while their locks remained unshorn,” War-Path and Bivouac, p. 208.
    Custer’s ability to leap to a stand from a lying-down position is referred to in Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, p. 47. Custer’s letter to Libbie describing Bloody Knife’s comments about his endurance is in Boots and Saddles, p. 267. Charles Francis Bates wrote about Custer’s napping habit in Custer’s Indian Battles, pp. 12, 34. According to Katherine Gibson Fougera, Custer “had a habit of throwing himself prone on the grass for a few minutes’ rest and resembled a human island, entirely surrounded by crowding, panting dogs,” With Custer’s Cavalry, p. 110. Chorne writes of the seventy-eight unmounted troopers having to march in their high-heeled cavalry boots, p. 40. According to Private William Slaper, Custer was “a hard leader to follow. He always had several good horses whereby he could change mounts every three hours if necessary, carrying nothing but man and saddle, while our poor horses carried man, saddle, blankets, carbine, revolver, haversack, canteen, ” in Troopers with Custer by E. A. Brininstool (subsequently referred to as Brininstool), p. 63. The reporter Mark Kellogg wrote of Custer’s “hell-whooping over the prairie” in the June 14 New York Herald . Don Rickey in Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay wrote about Custer’s nickname of “Hard Ass,” p. 90.
    Kellogg wrote in his diary on May 21, 1876, “General Custer visits scouts; much at home amongst them,” in “Notes, May 17 to June 9, 1876 of the Little Big Horn Expedition” (subsequently referred to as diary), p. 215. Red Star’s account of Custer’s interactions with the scouts is in The Arikara Narrative of Custer’s Campaign and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, edited by Orin Libby (subsequently referred to as Libby), p. 61. Custer’s remarks about becoming “the Great Father” appear in Libby, pp. 62, 82. Emanuel Custer’s Sept. 22, 1864, letter to his son is part of the Bacon-Custer Correspondence, Monroe County Museum Library. For an account of the political scene in 1876, see Roy Morris Jr.’s Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876 . Utley has an excellent discussion of Custer’s presidential ambitions in Cavalier in Buckskin: “That Custer fantasized such an absurdity cannot be disproved, of course, but that presidential aspirations governed his tactical decisions demands more weighty evidence than supplied by the Arikara scout,” p. 164. Utley believes that Custer was actually referring to his hopes of being promoted to brigadier general.
    The anecdote about Custer telling his father “you and me can whip all the Whigs in Ohio” is in Jay Monaghan’s Custer, p. 13; see also Emanuel Custer’s Feb. 3, 1887, letter to Libbie Custer in Tenting on the Plains, p. 182. For the organization of a cavalry regiment, see Jay Smith’s “A Hundred Years Later,” p. 125, and Robert Utley’s Frontier Regulars, in which he states that the company, not the regiment, “commanded loyalties and fostered solidarity,” p. 25. Benteen’s reference to when “war was red hot” is in a Feb. 12, 1896, letter to Goldin in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, p. 248. Perry Jamieson in Crossing the Deadly Ground describes the army’s mission in the West as a “long-running police action . . . broadly understood but never precisely defined,” p. 36. Don Rickey writes of the lack of target practice in the army at the time in Forty Miles, p. 101. In his diary, the surgeon James DeWolf describes when he and