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

packs of children played games and where the warriors talked among themselves, was a bluish cloud of dust and smoke.
    Sitting Bull was about forty-five years old, his legs bowed from a boyhood of riding ponies, his left foot maimed by an old bullet wound that caused him to amble lopsidedly as he searched the top of the butte for a place to sit, finally settling on a flat, moss-padded rock. He’d been only twenty-five years old when he suffered the injury to his foot as part of a horse-stealing raid against his people’s hated enemies, the Crows. During a tense standoff, he had the temerity to step forward with his gun in one hand and his buffalo-hide shield in the other and challenge the Crow leader to a one-on-one encounter.
    Across from him, standing proudly in front of a long line of mounted warriors, with his bangs combed up in the pompadour style of the Crows, was the chief. Almost simultaneously, the Crow leader and the impudent young warrior began to run toward each other.
    Sitting Bull was not only a fearless warrior, he was also a singer of uncommon talent. Music played a fundamental part in his people’s daily life. There were songs of war, songs of play, ceremonial songs, story songs, council songs, songs for dances, hunting songs, and dream songs. Sitting Bull had a high, resonant singing voice, and as he charged the Crow chief in 1856, he sang,
Comrades, whoever runs away,
He is a woman, they say;
Therefore, through many trials,
My life is short!
    In this haiku-like song, Sitting Bull expressed the credo of a warrior society that had come to stunning fruition amid a tumultuous century of expansion, adaptation, and almost continual conflict. The French traders and missionaries who first encountered Sitting Bull’s ancestors at the headwaters of the Mississippi River in modern Minnesota called them the Sioux—a corruption of the Chippewa word for snakes or enemies. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Chippewa’s French-supplied guns had forced many of the Sioux west toward the Missouri River, where they came to depend on the buffalo as the mainstay of their way of life. When the French explorer Pierre Radisson met the Sioux in 1662 he described them as “The Nation of the Beef.”
    By the middle of the eighteenth century, a combination of events had set the stage for the rise of the western, or Teton, Sioux. Being a nomadic people, they were less affected by the diseases that began to devastate their more sedentary rivals along the Missouri River. The gradual acquisition of firearms made the Sioux an increasingly formidable foe, but it was the horse, obtained in trade from tribes to the south, that catapulted them into becoming what one scholar has termed “hyper-Indians.”
    By the 1770s, the Teton Sioux had overrun the Arikara, or Ree, on the Missouri River and made it as far west as the Black Hills, where they quickly ousted the Kiowa and the Crows. Over the next hundred years the Sioux continued to expand their territory, eventually forcing the Crows to retreat all the way to the Bighorn River more than two hundred miles to the west, while also carrying on raids to the north and south against the Assiniboine, Shoshone, Pawnee, Gros Ventre, and Omaha. “These lands once belonged to [other tribes],” the Oglala Black Hawk explained, “but we whipped those nations out of them and in this we did what the white men do when they want the lands of Indians.”
    For the Teton Sioux, who called themselves the Lakota, war was an integral part of everyday life. A warrior kept obsessive account of his battle honors, which were best won in hand-to-hand combat. Instead of killing the enemy, a warrior’s highest accolade was achieved by hitting or even just touching an opponent, known as counting coup. Other ways to win honors were to rescue a fallen comrade, suffer a wound, or capture the enemy’s horses. Despite the largely ceremonial nature of plains warfare (which has been called “a gorgeous mounted game of tag”), the life of a Lakota warrior was perilous, and “Hokahe!” —meaning “Come on, let’s go!”—was the traditional cry before battle. On that memorable day in 1856, as Sitting Bull sprinted toward the Crow chief, he celebrated the violence and transience of the Lakota warrior by singing, “Through many trials / My life is short.”
    The Crow was the first to drop to one knee, swing his flintlock muzzle-loader into position, and fire. The bullet punctured the hide of