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

Sioux was still living he would not believe me”; see W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, p. 44, and Hammer, Custer in ’76, pp. 188–89. The researcher Fred Dustin had his doubts about Thompson’s Account but grudgingly admitted that the account could not be completely dismissed: “In sifting the wheat from the chaff, it is necessary to exercise patience, discrimination and toleration. A story as a whole may be unreliable, but it may furnish a few corroborative facts that might not otherwise be obtained. Thompson’s alleged story is an instance in the matter of his horse giving out between where Custer’s battalion left Reno’s [i.e., Sun Dance] Creek and Reno’s Hill. Even that incident might have been discredited had not the Rees seen such an event,” in a Feb. 26, 1934, letter to Theodore Goldin, in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, p. 116. Goldin, who claimed to have delivered a message from Custer to Reno, was an LBH veteran who ran into many of the same problems as Thompson when it came to being believed by others. Unlike Thompson, Goldin proved to be quite good at adjusting his story to meet the expectations of his audience (see W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, pp. 267–78); Goldin’s chief contribution to the history of the LBH was to draw Frederick Benteen into the series of very frank and opinionated letters in John Carroll, The Benteen-Goldin Letters.
    At least one war veteran, and a Medal of Honor winner at that, Frank Anders, found Thompson’s Account to be entirely convincing in its sometimes perplexed but always graphic rendering of war. In a Nov. 4, 1940, letter to William Falconer, Anders wrote, “I have carefully read through Peter Thompson’s story twice to see what I could see about it. I see nothing about it that is more strange than any [other accounts]. Peter Thompson went into great detail as to what happened and that seldom or ever sets well with most people as they are generally incapable of visualizing such situations. . . . The experiences of some ten of us inside the Philippine lines from May 4th to May 10th 1899 is very comparable to those of Peter Thompson.” Later in the letter, Anders wrote, “I am supporting Peter Thompson’s story because 1) There is nothing improbable about it if my own experience is any thing to be relied upon. 2) Peter Thompson’s whole life as far as I can find out was one of honesty and integrity if the stories of those who knew him intimately [are] to be taken as a criterion. 3) If Peter Thompson had limited his story to one or two pages instead of what he did, little question about [it] would have prevailed. 4) The stories of men of greater rank who should have been in a position to correctly observe what was going on have been discredited,” in Anders Collection, North Dakota State Archives. My thanks to Rocky Boyd for bringing this letter to my attention.
    Thompson’s Account was first published serially in the Belle Fourche Bee in the spring of 1914; in 1924, A. M. Willard and J. Brown published (without Thompson’s approval) the entire Account in The Black Hills Trails, edited by John Milek. In 1974 Daniel O. Magnussen published a heavily annotated edition of the Thompson Account that did much to obfuscate the importance of Thompson’s contribution to the history of the battle. Walt Cross has provided a more sympathetic reading in his 2007 edition of the Account, quite rightly pointing out that Magnussen “spent more energy disapproving much of Thompson’s writing, when he should have . . . dedicated his study to finding what was pertinent and historically viable in the narrative.” In their 2004 article, Wyman and Boyd found corroboration for several incidents in Thompson’s Account that others (Magnussen in particular) had found difficult to believe. In their view, Thompson was “a brave, sober, honest and successful man, who found that writing history and dealing with fame were difficult tasks. Repeated publication and distribution of his flawed account of the battle, in combination with the tenor of his times, resulted in his being discredited on a national scale. . . . Thompson’s story should be regarded as an honest eyewitness account,” in “Coming to an Understanding of Peter Thompson,” p. 48. When not otherwise indicated, all quotations in this chapter are from Wyman and Boyd’s 2004 edition of the Account, pp. 17–25.
    Susan Taylor related her father’s description of how his fingers shook with fright as he