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

most desperate time of their history.

    S itting Bull later claimed that even before he was born, when he was still adrift in amniotic fluid, he’d been scrutinizing the world. “I was still in my mother’s insides,” he told a newspaper reporter in 1877, “when I began to study all about my people. . . . I studied about smallpox, that was killing my people—the great sickness that was killing the women and children. I was so interested that I turned over on my side. The God Almighty must have told me at that time . . . that I would be the man to be the judge of all the other Indians—a big man, to decide for them all their ways.” Sitting Bull was much more than a brave warrior. He was a wicasa wakan: a holy man with an unusual relationship with the Great Mystery that the Lakota called Wakan Tanka.
    He could see into the ungraspable essence of life—the powerful and incomprehensible forces that most people only dimly perceive but to which all humanity must pay homage. Dreams and visions provided glimpses into this enigmatic world of ultimate meaning; so did nature, and in conversations with animals and birds, Sitting Bull found confirmation of his role as leader of his people.
    One of these transformative encounters occurred in the Black Hills beside beautiful Sylvan Lake. He was standing among the huge gray rocks that bound this clear pool of blue water when he heard singing from somewhere up above:
My father has given me this nation;
In protecting them I have a hard time.
    He assumed the song came from a man, but when he climbed to the top of the rocks, he watched as an eagle flew into the sky.
    A vision could occur at any pivotal moment in a Lakota’s life. After days without food and water, alone, often on a mountaintop or butte, he might receive what the Oglala holy man Sword called “a communication from the Wakan-Tanka . . . to one of mankind.” The vision was not hazy or ill-defined. It was real. “It hits you sharp and clear like an electric shock,” the Lakota John Fire recounted. “You are wide awake and, suddenly, there is a person standing next to you who you know can’t be there at all . . . yet you are not dreaming; your eyes are open.”
    When the renowned Oglala warrior Crazy Horse was twenty years old, he received the vision that came to define his life. After fasting for several days, he found himself staggering down a hill toward a small lake. He collapsed in the knee-deep water, and once he’d struggled to his feet and started back to shore he saw a man on horseback rise out of the lake. “He told Crazy Horse,” the interpreter Billy Garnett recalled, “not to wear a war bonnet; not to tie up his horse’s tail.” Traditionally a Lakota warrior tied up his pony’s tail in a knot. The man from the lake insisted that a horse needed his tail for balance when jumping streams and for swatting flies. “So Crazy Horse never tied his horse’s tail,” Garnett continued, “never wore a war bonnet.” The man from the lake also told him not to paint his face like other warriors but to rub himself with dirt from a gopher hole and to knit blades of grass into his hair. He also said that Crazy Horse could not be killed by a bullet. Instead, the man from the lake predicted, “his death would come by being held and stabbed; as it actually was.”
    The vision in the shallows of the lake transformed Crazy Horse into his tribe’s greatest warrior. “[W]hen I came out,” he told his cousin Flying Hawk, “I was born by my mother . ”

    C entral to Lakota identity was the story of the White Buffalo Calf Woman and her gift of the sacred calf pipe. In ancient times, the buffalo had been ferocious creatures at war with the ancestors of the Lakota. With the intercession of the White Buffalo Calf Woman, who’d been sent by the Buffalo People, the Lakota came into symbiotic harmony with their former enemies, who provided them with food and the means to grow as a people.
    The White Buffalo Calf Woman first appeared to two young hunters, who were on a hill searching for game when they saw a young woman dressed in white buckskins with a bundle on her back. She began to approach them, and as she drew near, they saw that she was very beautiful. Her beauty was as unworldly as it was wonderful (what the Lakota described as wakan ), and one of the hunters became consumed with lust. When he told his companion of his desire, his friend chastised him, saying, “[S]urely this is a wakan woman.”