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

tell me that Custer and his men were over across from the village a considerable time threatening to attack, the soldiers occasionally shooting over into the village, but that the soldiers did not at any time attempt to ford the river and come over. All this time the Sioux were crossing and getting ready to attack Custer,” in Hardorff’s On the Little Bighorn, p. 87.
    Curtis’s account of his visit in 1907 to the LBH Battlefield with the three Crow scouts is in The Papers of Edward S. Curtis Relating to Custer’s Last Battle, edited by James Hutchins, pp. 37–48. According to Joseph Medicine Crow, the name White Man Runs Him is more accurately translated as “Chased by a White Man” and came from a “clan uncle who had once been chased in jest by a white trader, much to the amusement of some Crow men who had witnessed the incident,” in Herman Viola’s Little Bighorn Remembered, p. 105. White Man Runs Him’s account of Custer’s actions on the bluff, in which he tells how he “scolded” Custer for not assisting Reno, is in Hutchins, Papers of Edward S. Curtis, pp. 51–54. Theodore Roosevelt’s Apr. 8, 1908, letter to Curtis is in Hutchins, Papers of Edward S. Curtis, pp. 79–80. In a Feb. 9, 1908, letter to Colonel David Brainard about Curtis’s “Notes,” General Charles Woodruff wrote, “This all lends color to the theory that for three quarters of an hour or more Custer’s column was idle and he watching Reno, but it is an awful theory to contemplate,” in Hutchins, Papers of Edward S. Curtis, p. 76. In an Apr. 22, 1908, letter to Colonel W. H. C. Bowen, Curtis wrote, “I am beginning to believe that nothing is quite so uncertain as facts,” adding that “there certainly is no end of confusion in regard to the Custer affair,” in Hutchins, Papers of Edward S. Curtis, p. 85.
    For an excellent summary of Walter Mason Camp’s association with the Battle of the LBH, see Hardorff’s Camp, Custer, pp. 11–34; according to Hardorff, Camp visited the battlefield a total of ten times, p. 28. Camp made the claim of interviewing 150 Native survivors and sixty soldiers in an Oct. 31, 1917, letter to Libbie Custer, in Hardorff’s On the Little Bighorn, p. 138. Camp’s notes contain an eloquent mission statement: “After having listened to the story of the LBH Expedition from the lips of some of the men who participated therein, the current literature on the subject seemed to present such a tangle of fiction, fancy, fact, and feeling that I formed an ambition to establish the truth. It occurred to me that the essential facts must rest in the minds of many men then living, and that these facts, if collected, would constitute fairly accurate history. This has been my plan: to gather my data from eyewitnesses,” in Hardorff’s On the Little Bighorn, p. 201. Camp dismissed White Man Runs Him’s story about Custer watching Reno’s battle from the bluffs as “entirely preposterous,” in Hammer, Custer in ’76, p. 178. Since the three Crow scouts were, by their own admission, the ones who pointed Benteen in the direction of Reno’s battalion on the top of the bluff, it is difficult to see how they could have been, as they claimed, on Weir Peak watching the Valley Fight with Custer several miles to the north at almost precisely the same time. Still, one can only wonder whether there is an element of truth in their suggestion that Custer demonstrated a less-than-sympathetic attitude toward Reno’s situation in the valley. Curley’s statement about the interpreters being responsible for the different accounts attributed to him is in Hammer, Custer in ’76, p. 170. Burkman, who was with the pack train, claimed that he saw Curley with some Arikara scouts riding away from the battlefield behind a herd of captured Indian ponies, in Wagner, pp. 158–59. Burkman lived out his final days in Billings, Montana, where he repeatedly confronted the Crow scout. “Curley,” he was overheard to shout, “you lie when you tell folks you fought on Custer Hill,” in Wagner, p. 27. Kanipe told Camp of the time he witnessed a similar encounter at a Billings Hotel, in Hardorff’s On the Little Bighorn, pp. 176–77.
    In a Mar. 24, 1914, letter to J. S. Smith, the editor of the Belle Fourche Bee, which was in the midst of publishing a serialized version of Peter Thompson’s manuscript, Camp recounted how he first came upon Thompson: “Some time after I began to study the battle of the LBH, Sergeant Kanipe .