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

numerous references in WCC.
    One Bull describes how Sitting Bull “pierced the heart” on the Little Missouri in One Bull Interview, box 105, notebook 19, WCC. White Bull spoke about the pain of being pierced to Walter Campbell: “[T]here was a strong pain for the first jerks then the nerves seem to be killed and no pain thereafter. Even jerking out. Some bleeding but put stuff on that stopped it,” box 105, notebook 8, WCC.
    For two quirky, sometimes winningly irascible accounts of Red Cloud and Spotted Tail, see the two books by George Hyde: Red Cloud’s Folk: A History of the Oglala Sioux Indians and Spotted Tail’s Folk: A History of the Brulé Sioux . On Sitting Bull’s selection as the leader who has “authority over all decisions of war and peace,” see Utley, Lance and Shield, pp. 85–87. According to Robert Higheagle, Sitting Bull sang the following song after being “coronated by Running Antelope and Gall”: “Ye Tribes behold me / The chiefs [of old] are no more [are gone] / Myself [as substitute or successor] shall take courage [pledge],” in “25 Songs by Sitting Bull,” box 104, folder 18, WCC. One Bull’s description of the ceremony with which Sitting Bull became war chief is in box 104, folder 11, WCC. My account of Sitting Bull’s role as leader owes much to Jeffrey Ostler’s The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism, especially pp. 52–53.
    Sitting Bull’s famous words about being “fools to make yourself slaves to a piece of fat bacon” are in Charles Larpenteur’s Forty Years a Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri, 1833–1872, p. 360. White Bull told of Four Horns’ advice about being “a little against fighting,” as well as Crazy Horse’s statements about attacking the soldiers only if they attack first, in ww box 105, notebook 8, WCC. White Bull also spoke of the cautionary words of Sitting Bull’s mother, ww box 105, notebook 24, WCC. Utley writes of the state of relative peace after 1870 in Lance and Shield, p. 90. Kingsley Bray in Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life writes of the iwashtela movement among the Lakota, p. 132; according to Bray, “in October 1870, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse agreed to a policy that for the present complemented iwestela . . . a gradual transition to reservation life. Sitting Bull even declared an end to his own band’s four-year war against the military posts on the upper Missouri,” p. 154. John Gray in Centennial Campaign estimates that the total population of the Lakota and Cheyenne tribes that had participants in the Battle of the Little Bighorn was 21,870, and that only 8,000, or 37 percent of that population, were not at the agencies during the battle and could have possibly taken part in it, pp. 318–20. My account of Sitting Bull and Crow King’s encounter with a group of agency Indians on the Yellowstone River in 1870 is from Stanley Vestal’s New Sources of Indian History, pp. 329–32. Sitting Bull’s statement that Red Cloud “saw too much” comes from William Quintin’s report of a conference with the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre at Fort Shaw in which it was said that Sitting Bull had broken with Red Cloud; cited by James Olson in Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem, p. 131. Vestal writes of Sitting Bull’s difficulty sleeping with his two jealous wives in Sitting Bull, pp. 39–40.
    According to John Gray in “Frank Grouard: Kanaka Scout or Mulatto Renegade?” Grouard’s mother was from the Tuamotu Islands; according to Richard Hardorff in “The Frank Grouard Genealogy,” she was from an island off Tahiti. White Bull speaks of Sitting Bull’s relationship with Grouard in ww box 105, notebook 8, WCC. On “Yellow Hair,” the supposed child of Custer and Monahsetah, see “My Heritage, My Search” by Gail Kelly-Custer (who claims to be descended from Yellow Hair, also known as Josiah Custer) in Custer and His Times, book 5, edited by John Hart, pp. 268–81. On the phenomenon of the “squaw man,” see Stanley Vestal’s New Sources, pp. 312–13, as well as Walter Boyes’s “White Renegades Living with the Hostiles Go Up Against Custer,” pp. 11–19, 31.
    The 1872 description of a “Sandwich Islander, called Frank” is cited by John Gray in “Frank Grouard,” p. 64. Grouard’s comments about Sitting Bull are in Joe DeBarthe’s Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard (subsequently referred to as DeBarthe), pp. 159, 387, 386. On Sitting Bull’s use of warrior societies to create “channels of influence both to the