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

residents at Pine Ridge, many of whom had never even seen a buffalo; in the Apr. 26, 1891, New York World, cited by Robert Utley in The Indian Frontier, p. 227. Dan Flores calculates that the average Lakota ate about six buffalo per year in “Bison Ecology,” p. 64.
    John Gray describes how the size of Sitting Bull’s village doubled in just a week in Centennial Campaign , pp. 336–37. Kill Eagle noted that the camp’s large council lodge was yellow in W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, p. 55. Parkman wrote of the Lakota’s “characteristic indecision” in The Oregon Trail, p. 107. White Bull described the interior of Sitting Bull’s tepee and told of how a guest was typically welcomed in box 104, folder 22, WCC; according to White Bull, “Sitting Bull could take a joke on himself. I have been in Sitting Bull’s lodge many times and listened to the people cracking jokes. . . . It is true of Indians there are some who cannot take a joke.” Richard Hardorff reprints another White Bull account (box 105, notebook 24, WCC) in Indian Views of the Custer Fight, p. 150. Parkman described a typical evening in a Lakota lodge in The Oregon Trail, p. 145; he compared the light-filled tepee to a “gigantic lantern,” p. 169, “glowing through the half-transparent covering of raw hides,” p. 101. John Keegan writes of nomadism in Fields of Battle: “The nomad regards himself as a superior being, because he enjoys the greatest of all human endowments, personal freedom and detachment from material borders. Nomadism, anthropologists have concluded, is the happiest of human ways of life; and because of the happiness it brings, those who enjoy it react with ruthless violence against outsiders who seek to limit or redirect it,” pp. 277–78. Wooden Leg talked of the pleasures of “when every man had to be brave” in Marquis, Wooden Leg, pp. 383–84.
    Godfrey wrote of officer’s call on June 22, 1876, in “Custer’s Last Battle,” in W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, p. 135. Gibson’s letter describing Custer’s “queer sort of depression” is in Fougera, With Custer’s Cavalry, pp. 266–67. Edgerly also wrote about the scene in his letter to Libbie in Merington, p. 310. In a July 2, 1876, letter to Sheridan, Terry wrote, “I . . . at one time suggested [to Custer] that perhaps it would be well for me to take Gibbon’s cavalry and go with him. To this suggestion he replied that he would . . . prefer his own regiment alone . . . that he had all the force that he could need, and I shared his confidence,” in The Little Big Horn 1876: The Official Communications, Documents, and Reports, edited by Lloyd Overfield, pp. 36–37. According to James Willert, “The apparent undermining of his person before Terry angered him in no small degree,” Little Big Horn Diary, p. 219. Burkman spoke of Custer’s tendency to overreact in Wagner, p. 143. Benteen described his pointed interchange with Custer in his “Little Big Horn Narrative” in John Carroll’s Benteen-Goldin Letters, p. 162. Godfrey wrote of Wallace’s prediction that Custer would be killed in his Field Diary, edited by Stewart, p. 9.
    On the Seventh Cavalry’s difficulties with the pack train, see John Gray’s “The Pack Train on General George A. Custer’s Last Campaign,” pp. 53–68, and Richard Hardorff’s “Packs, Packers, and Pack Details: Logistics and Custer’s Pack Train,” pp. 225–48. According to Hardorff, “this new mode of transportation was totally ineffective. . . . [T]he implementation of this system could not have come at a more inopportune time,” p. 237. John McGuire told Walter Camp that it was “a great misfortune Gatling guns weren’t taken . . . as the ground was not nearly so rough as had been on Reno’s scout,” folder 73, Camp Papers, BYU. Vern Smalley discusses the pluses and minuses of buckskin clothing in More Little Bighorn Mysteries, section 18, pp. 1–3. Kill Eagle attested to the fact that Sitting Bull wore cloth clothing, testifying that “the last time I saw him he was wearing a very dirty cotton shirt,” in W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, p. 55. Charley Reynolds’s description of Custer as “George of the quill and leather breeches” is in a letter from George Bird Grinnell to Walter Camp, reel 1, Camp Papers, BYU. Richard Hardorff in a note in Lakota Recollections claims that in addition to the three Custer brothers and brother-in-law James Calhoun, five other officers wore buckskin, p.