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

original MS, he had a lot of trouble with the sequences and guessed at the dates,” Susan Taylor MS, p. iii. When working on what would become the published version of his Account in the summer of 1913, Thompson frequently discussed the manuscript’s contents with his wife. Susan Taylor, who was seven years old at the time, was “a fascinated listener”: “When Father discussed points in the MS, or proposed changes, Mother acted as a ‘devil’s advocate.’ She would ask him just how it really went and just what he had actually seen. He would tell her. She especially urged him not to put down the statements of things he had not personally witnessed. . . . She insisted that he could not differentiate among facts, rumors and plain lies if he had not personally seen these things and that he should protect himself from being called a ‘liar’ in spots. But, he did not listen to her. He said, ‘That was the way it was and nobody can fault me for that.’ Too bad, as Mother was so right. . . . [T]here is too much hearsay in the MS without stating that it is hearsay,” in Susan Taylor MS, pp. iv–v; elsewhere she adds, “Thompson had the bad fault of making positive statements without proof,” p. 327.
    Thompson’s habit of incorporating the unsubstantiated anecdotes of others into his own personal story was essentially that of many of the Lakota and Cheyenne warriors, whose accounts are, in the words of Michael Donahue, “a blend of native oral history and personal observation,” in Drawing Battle Lines, p. 193. Thompson’s tendency to remember specific scenes, often without any chronological context, is typical of many battle veterans. In the preface to his incomparable memoir of World War II, Quartered Safe Out Here, George MacDonald Fraser writes, “Looking back over sixty-odd years, life is like a piece of string with knots in it, knots being those moments that live in the mind forever, and the intervals being hazy, half-recalled times when I have a fair idea of what was happening, in a general way, but cannot be sure of dates or places or even the exact order in which events took place. I suspect it is the same with most folk.”
    The novelistic style of Thompson’s Account has caused some scholars, such as Fred Dustin, to speculate that the manuscript “may have fallen into the hands of a novelist.” “Not so,” Susan Taylor claims. “Thompson was too independent and stubborn and proud to allow anyone to touch the wording of his MS except for the corrected spelling and grammar. Thompson wrote in the flowery manner in vogue in the late 1800’s,” in Susan Taylor MS, p. vi. Several LBH veterans, including William Slaper (who almost got into a fistfight with Thompson during the 1926 reunion) and Theodore Goldin, dismissed Thompson’s Account because James Watson, the soldier who supposedly accompanied Thompson during his adventures beside the river, never mentioned the incident. But as Camp discovered, Watson (who was dead by the early decades of the twentieth century) had, in fact, spoken about the incident to Private Frank Sniffen, in Liddic and Harbaugh’s Camp on Custer , p. 88. John McGuire of C Company told Camp the reason Thompson’s and Watson’s stories weren’t mentioned much at the time was that “the company filled up with new men in the fall who would not understand such discussions, and the old men never said much about questions of this kind,” in Hardorff’s On the Little Bighorn, p. 125. Several of the officers Camp spoke with, especially Godfrey, also discounted Thompson’s story because they had heard nothing about it at the time. But as several of the enlisted men Camp interviewed pointed out, this was not particularly surprising: “[A]fter the battle the officers never encouraged discussion of the details of the fighting. . . . [T]he habitual reserve between officers and enlisted men operated both ways,” in Hardorff’s On the Little Bighorn, p. 33. Susan Taylor remembered that Thompson “wished so many times that he could find Watson” so that he could confirm the truth of his Account, footnote in Susan Taylor MS, p. 314.
    Walter Camp found corroboration of Thompson’s story from the Arikara scout Soldier, who spoke of coming upon two soldiers whose horses had given out and how a group of five Sioux “were circling them.” Camp informed Thompson: “When I told this Ree [Arikara] that at least one of the two soldiers whom he had seen surrounded by the five