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

DeWolf’s May 23 letter describing Terry’s sympathies for the Indians, p. 77; the letter is in Luce, “Diary and Letters of Dr. James M. DeWolf,” p. 75. Kellogg wrote of Terry’s insistence “that there was to be no child’s play as regards the Indians” in the May 17, 1876, New York Herald . John Burkman’s account of Custer’s words with Terry and Gibbon in front of his tent are in Wagner, p. 133. Grant Marsh also noticed that “the general seemed in an irritable frame of mind that night,” in Hanson, p. 260. Godfrey described Custer as “unusually emphatic” in his meeting with his officers in “Custer’s Last Battle,” in W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, p. 130. Custer wrote of how the Crows had heard “that I never abandoned a trail” in a June 21, 1876, letter to Libbie in Boots and Saddles, p. 275. Edgerly’s account of his playful interchange with Custer about stepping high is in Merington, p. 309. Richard Thompson reported on Benteen and Custer’s argumentative exchange to Walter Camp in Hammer, Custer in ’76, p. 247. Burkman’s comments about Custer being “worked up over something” are in Wagner, p. 134. Sheridan’s vote of confidence prior to the Battle of the Washita is in Merington, p. 217. Charles DeLand writes that Custer’s fear of happening upon Crook “may well have increased his desire to refrain from marching southward,” in The Sioux Wars, p. 427. Custer’s disparaging words about Reno appeared in the July 11, 1876, New York Herald . Burkman’s description of the drinking that night is in Wagner, p. 135.
    Godfrey writes of how several officers “seemed to have a presentiment of their fate” in “Custer’s Last Battle” in W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, p. 130. Custer described Cooke’s heroics against the Cheyenne in My Life on the Plains , pp. 90–97. Cooke and Gibson’s exchange is in Fougera’s With Custer’s Cavalry, p. 277. Brisbin’s letter describing how “we fixed poor Mark up for his ride to death” appeared in the Nov. 15, 1890, Sturgeon Bay, Wisc., Advocate, cited by Sandy Barnard in I Go with Custer, p. 133. Hanson describes Charley Reynolds’s conversation with Grant Marsh, p. 264, as well as the late-night poker game played in the cabin of the Far West, p. 263; according to Hanson, “Custer’s tent was pitched on the riverbank but a few feet away from the Far West ,” p. 247. On Reno’s actions that night see Willis Carland’s Feb. 2, 1934, letter to William Ghent, in Edward Settle Godfrey Papers, LOC; Carland was the son of Lieutenant John Carland of the Sixth Infantry and wrote, “I remember . . . seeing Reno with his arm about father’s shoulder, both of them singing ‘larboard watch.’ ” John Burkman’s description of standing guard in front of Custer’s tent and finding Custer asleep with the pen in his hand are in Wagner, pp. 137, 138. John Gibbon wrote of Custer’s departure in “Last Summer’s Expedition Against the Sioux and Its Great Catastrophe,” p. 293; he also wrote of the scene in a letter to Terry in Brady’s Indian Fights, p. 223.

Chapter 7: The Approach
    Arthur Brandt, in his introduction to Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail, suggests that Parkman’s illness, known as “mountain fever,” may have been linked to the alkaline in the drinking water, p. xiv. Once in the Black Hills, Parkman felt “a spirit of energy in the mountains,” p. 116; his descriptions of a buffalo hunt, pemmican, and the elders in their “white buffalo-robes” are all in The Oregon Trail, pp. 162–63, 160, 150. Gray tells of how the government’s attempts to buy the Black Hills “had thrown the rationing machinery of the government into chaos”; he also describes the effects of the embargo on selling arms and ammunition to the agency Indians in Centennial Campaign, pp. 33–34; he estimates the size of Sitting Bull’s village by June 18 to have been approximately four thousand people, p. 333.
    Dan Flores in “The Great Contraction” writes that the northern plains were “the scene of the nineteenth-century endgame for both bison and Plains Indians” and that it was “almost inevitable that the country just north of the Little Bighorn . . . should feature the final acts of almost 90 centuries of Indian/bison interactions in western America,” pp. 7–8. The Lakota who hugged the buffalo were Broken Arrow and He Dog; a herd of seventeen bison had been collected in a corral and put on display to local