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

Sitting Bull’s shield and slammed into the sole of his left foot, entering at the toe and exiting at the heel. It was now Sitting Bull’s turn to aim his rifle and fire. Amid a cloud of black powder smoke, the Crow chief tumbled to the ground, and taking up his knife, Sitting Bull hobbled toward his fallen opponent and stabbed him in the heart. With the death of their leader, the Crows quickly fled, and Sitting Bull—having not just shot but stabbed the man who’d injured him (and a chief, at that)—was now a Lakota warrior without peer.

    T he history of the Lakota is found in their winter counts, chronological records in which a pictograph, often accompanied by some commentary, tells of the single event by which a year is remembered. With the help of the winter counts, several of which go back as far as 1700, it is possible to chronicle the gradual creep of Western culture into Lakota life.
    It begins indirectly, with the acquisition of significant numbers of guns and iron kettles in 1707–8; references to horses also start to appear about this time, and in 1779–80, smallpox makes its first but by no means last appearance. In 1791–92, the Lakota, who have already seen their first white man, record seeing their first white woman, soon followed by the arrival of French fur traders, and in 1805–6 by the Lewis and Clark expedition. There are references to the first time the Lakota see wagons (1830–31) and to the Laramie Treaty of 1851 (“First issue of goods winter,” the count reads). But what dominates the winter counts in the second half of the nineteenth century are not the increasing number of white incursions into Lakota territory, but the ebb and flow of intertribal warfare. Even in 1864–65, when an uprising of the Santee Sioux in Minnesota triggered American soldiers to attack the Lakota (who were guilty, government officials claimed, of harboring the uprising’s leader, Inkpaduta), most of the winter counts make no mention of these assaults. With one exception, which records “First fight with white men,” the rest of the more than half dozen winter counts at the Smithsonian Institution refer to 1864–65 as the year “Four Crows caught stealing horses and were killed.”
    The winter counts eloquently illustrate how completely the day-today world engages a society—particularly a thriving society that has followed success after success in its triumphant surge into a new and fruitful land. Hunting buffalo and fighting tribal enemies was an all-absorbing way of life around which the Lakota had created a beautifully intricate and self-contained culture. But it was a culture with an Achilles’ heel. The buffalo, Sitting Bull’s namesake, was essential to their existence. Their food, their lodges, their clothing, their weapons, even their fuel source (dried buffalo dung) came from the North American bison, and if what had already occurred among their allies to the south, the Cheyenne, was any indication, the buffalo might not be around much longer.
    With the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1869, the once limitless buffalo population to the south had collapsed, and the Cheyenne had been forced to turn to government reservations, where they received annual allotments of food and clothing. The experiences of the Cheyenne were certainly sobering, but as late as the 1870s, the buffalo herds to the north around the Yellowstone River were still sizable. Besides, even in the best of times, the buffalo supply had varied dramatically from year to year. One or even two bad years did not necessarily mean that disaster was imminent, especially since the Lakota’s religious beliefs told them that the true source of the buffalo was not of this world, but beneath it, inside the earth.
    From this distance in time, it seems obvious: After more than a century of dramatic, seemingly preordained expansion, the Lakota were about to face inescapable catastrophe when their food source, the buffalo, disappeared. Not so obvious, especially today, is what a society about to confront such changes is supposed to do about it.
    The future is never more important than to a people on the verge of a cataclysm. As the officers and men of the Seventh Cavalry—not to mention their families—could attest, fear of the future can imbue even the most trivial event with overwhelming significance. It was no accident that Sitting Bull, renowned for the gift of prophecy, emerged as his people’s leader in the darkest,