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

taking Black Kettle’s village, Custer planned on attacking the much larger village to the east. Clark’s account of convincing Custer that this “would be little less than suicide” is in Brill’s Conquest of the Southern Plains, pp. 174–79. Custer recounted how he attempted to do what the enemy neither “expects nor desires you to do” in his feint toward the larger village in My Life, p. 249; Godfrey wrote that the band played “Ain’t I Glad to Get Out of the Wilderness” as the regiment marched toward the village, in “Some Reminiscences,” p. 497. Ryan described the use of captives as human shields in Barnard, Ten Years, p. 77. On Clark’s and Custer’s versions of events, see Elmo Watson’s “Sidelights on the Washita Fight,” especially p. 59, in which he speaks of Custer’s “delirium of victory.”
    Godfrey described Elliott’s determination to go “for a brevet or a coffin,” in “Some Reminiscences,” p. 493; Benteen admitted that Elliott had ventured from the regiment on “his own hook” in a Feb. 12, 1896, letter to Goldin, in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, p. 252. Benteen wrote to Barry of his certainty that Custer would one day be “scooped,” in The D. F. Barry Correspondence at the Custer Battlefield, edited by John Carroll, p. 48. According to Walter Camp, “Custer’s tactics for charging an Indian camp Benteen did not approve of,” in Hardorff, On the Little Bighorn with Walter Camp, pp. 232–33; Camp also wrote of how Indians “had to be grabbed,” p. 188. Godfrey wrote of the need for surprise when attacking Indians in “Custer’s Last Battle,” in W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, p. 137. Benteen’s obsession with the Major Elliott affair is made clear in his Oct. 11, 1894, letter to Goldin: “Now, as ever, I want to get at who was to blame for not finding it out then,” in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, p. 229. The description of the “sixteen naked corpses” was in the Jan. 4, 1869, New York Herald, in Hardorff, Washita Memories, p. 259. Benteen’s letter to William DeGresse about the Washita appeared in the Dec. 22, 1868, St. Louis Democrat and the Feb. 14, 1869, New York Times and is reprinted in Hardorff, Washita Memories, p. 176. For a synopsis of the evidence concerning the abuse of the Cheyenne captives, including the adage “Indian women rape easy,” see the note in Hardorff, Washita Memories, p. 231. See also Jerome Greene’s discussion in Washita, p. 169. Benteen makes the claims about Custer and Monahsetah in a Feb. 12, 1896, letter to Goldin, in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, p. 258. Custer employed Monahsetah as a scout from Dec. 7, 1868, to Apr. 17, 1869; sometime in January of 1869 she gave birth to a son. According to Cheyenne oral tradition, she later gave birth to another son who was the product of her relationship with Custer. However, Monahsetah, who was known as Sally Ann among the officers of the Seventh, may also have had relations with Custer’s brother Tom. The son she gave birth to in January was jokingly known as Tom among the officers of the Seventh. For a more sympathetic view of the Custer-Monahsetah relationship, see “My Heritage, My Search” by Gail Kelly-Custer, who claims to be a descendant of Yellow Hair, also known as Josiah Custer, the child of Monahsetah and Custer. According to Kate Bighead, the southern Cheyenne women “talked of [Custer] as a fine-looking man.” Bighead added that Monahsetah (also known as Meotzi) “said that Long Hair was her husband, that he promised to come back to her, and that she would wait for him,” in The Custer Reader, edited by Paul Hutton, p. 364.
    Varnum compared the “peculiar hollow” near the lookout in the Wolf Mountains to the “old Crow Nest at West Point,” in Hammer, Custer in ’76, p. 60. Thomas Heski writes of how the original Crow’s Nest at West Point was named for the lookout on the masthead of a ship in “ ‘Don’t Let Anything Get Away’—The March of the Seventh Cavalry, June 24–25, 1876: The Sundance Site to the Divide,” p. 23. See also Richard Hardorff’s “Custer’s Trail to the Wolf Mountains.” My descriptions of the two Crow’s Nests—one in southern Montana, the other in New York—are based on my own visits to these areas. My thanks to Major Ray Dillman for his directions to Storm King Mountain (the closest peak in the Hudson River valley to the Crow’s Nest, which as part of a former firing range is now