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

Soon the White Buffalo Calf Woman was very near them. She laid down her bundle and invited the hunter with the lustful thoughts to approach. A cloud suddenly enveloped the two of them, and when it lifted, the only thing left of the young hunter was a pile of whitened bones.
    “Behold what you see!” admonished the woman. “I am coming to your people and wish to talk with your chief.” She told the hunter how she wanted the villagers to prepare for her arrival. They were to create a large council lodge, where all the people were to assemble. There she would tell them something of “great importance.”
    The chief and his people did as she instructed and were waiting when she was seen approaching in the distance. Her movements were strange and magical, and suddenly she was inside the lodge and standing before the chief. She took the bundle from her back and held it in both hands. “Within this bundle there is a sacred pipe,” she said. “With this you will, during the winters to come, send your voices to Wakan Tanka. All the things of the universe are joined to you who smoke the pipe—all send their voices to Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit. When you pray with this pipe, you pray for and with everything.”
    The pipe had a bowl made of red stone and a wooden stem. The White Buffalo Calf Woman turned to leave, then stopped to say, “Always remember how sacred this pipe is, for it will take you to the end. I am leaving now, but I shall look back upon your people in every age, and at the end I shall return.”
    She stepped out of the lodge, but after walking just a short distance, she looked back toward the chief and his people and sat down. When she next stood again, she had turned into a red and brown buffalo calf. The calf walked a little ways, lay down, and with her eyes on the villagers, rolled on the ground. When she stood up once again, she was a white buffalo. She walked a little farther, rolled on her back, and this time she was a black buffalo. After bowing four times (the Lakota’s sacred number), she walked over the hill and was gone.
    Sitting Bull’s nephew White Bull remembered how important the pipe was to his uncle, how he filled the pipe with tobacco, lit it, and, holding the bowl with his right hand, pointed the stem into the sky as he pleaded with Wakan Tanka to assist his people. After pointing the pipe in the four sacred directions, he peered into the future and spoke. “He could foretell anything,” White Bull remembered.

    O n that spring day in 1876, when Sitting Bull climbed the butte near the Rosebud River, he knew that there were soldiers on the north bank of the Yellowstone River. His scouts had also reported that soldiers to the south were preparing to march in their direction. But from where would they attack first? Once perched on a mossy rock, Sitting Bull began to pray until he fell asleep and dreamed.
    In his dream he saw a huge puffy white cloud drifting so sedately overhead that it seemed almost motionless. The cloud, he noticed, was shaped like a Lakota village nestled under snow-topped mountains. On the horizon to the east, he saw the faint brown smudge of an approaching dust storm. Faster and faster the storm approached until he realized that at the center of the swirling cloud of dust was a regiment of horse-mounted soldiers.
    The dust-shrouded troopers continued to pick up speed until they collided with the big white cloud in a crash of lightning and a burst of rain. In an instant, the dust—and the soldiers—had been washed away, and all was quiet and peaceful as the huge cloud continued to drift toward the horizon and finally disappeared.
    He now knew from where the attack was going to come—not from the north or from the south, but from the east.

CHAPTER 3

    Hard Ass
    S itting Bull had dreamed of an army washed away by a burst of rain. By the end of the first week of the Seventh Cavalry’s slow slog west from Fort Lincoln, the prediction was about to come true.
    Soon after leaving their first campsite on the Heart River, the column was hit by a furious thunderstorm. At noon on the next day, hail the size of hickory nuts clattered out of the sky, beating on the heads and shoulders of the men and nearly stampeding the mules. The next morning they awoke to a bitterly cold rain that continued all day. And so it went.
    Rivers that were barely discernible trickles for most of the year were transformed into brown, rain-pelted torrents. The engineers built crude bridges