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

descendants of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull have participated in documentaries that reveal never-before-disclosed information about their famous ancestors. The Lakota author Joseph M. Marshall has also written several books about the battle that make excellent use of Native oral tradition.
    Just as important as the oral testimony left by Native participants is the visual evidence. Pictographs by Red Horse, Amos Bad-Heart Bull, One Bull, Standing Bear, Wooden Leg, and many others are much more than pretty pictures; they are highly detailed and painstakingly crafted renderings of what happened along the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876. A warrior remembered in obsessive detail each one of his battle honors or coups, which like “kills” in twentieth-century aerial combat, were corroborated and confirmed by other warriors. With these drawings, the warrior recorded essential and extraordinarily precise information, and they are an immense help to anyone attempting to understand the battle. A good place to start in this regard is Sandra L. Brizée-Bowen’s For All to See: The Little Bighorn Battle in Plains Indian Art. However, as Castle McLaughlin cautions in a review of Brizée-Bowen’s book, Native pictographs are by no means a purely documentary source: “Rather than simply creating ‘literal’ visual records, Plains artists often used rhetorical gestures to convey aspects such as tense, perspective, distance, quantity, and the identity of subjects,” p. 60.
    In addition to studying the Native testimony, I have looked to the relatively recent appearance of a new source of archaeological evidence. In 1983, fire swept across the battlefield, providing a team of archaeologists and volunteers with the chance to comb the site with metal detectors and analyze what they found. This happenstance has provided a most exciting and late-breaking avenue of research, but there are also problems associated with this form of evidence. The battlefield was by no means a virgin archaeological site in 1983. Soldiers had been buried, exhumed, and reburied; beginning with the victorious warriors, artifact hunters had been picking over the site for more than a century. In 1993, Richard Fox, one of the archaeologists on the team that examined the battlefield after the fire, wrote Archaeology, History, and Custer’s Last Battle. Combining the evidence found in the ground with Native testimony, Fox argued that Custer’s battalion pushed much farther north than had generally been believed. Although I find Fox’s insistence that there was no concerted “last stand” more a matter of semantics than a proven fact, I feel that his account does an excellent job of explaining the eventual fate of Custer’s battalion, and I have followed it closely in this chapter. In 1994 Douglas Scott and Peter Bleed conducted an archaeological examination of portions of the battlefield adjacent to the Little Bighorn National Monument (described in A Good Walk Around the Boundary ) that corroborated the fact that Custer’s battalion pushed well north of Last Stand Hill and that the firing around the mouth of Medicine Tail Coulee was quite light. (What Scott and Bleed did find in the vicinity of Medicine Tail Coulee was archaeological evidence associated with the movie Little Big Man , which was filmed in this portion of the battlefield, p. 38.)
    Another recent publication that I have found indispensable is Where Custer Fell: Photographs of the Little Bighorn Battlefield Then and Now by James Brust, Brian Pohanka, and Sandy Barnard. Combining historic photographs with the written evidence (much of it from the papers of Walter Camp), Brust et al. have done much to clarify the topographic subtleties of the battlefield. Yet another essential book in this vein is Michael Donahue’s Drawing Battle Lines: The Map Testimony of Custer’s Last Fight. Combining recorded oral and written testimony with the maps drawn by either the battle participant or the interviewer, Donahue’s book is especially helpful in trying to understand what happened during Custer’s thrust to the north.
    One source that may seem noticeably absent from my account is David Miller’s Custer’s Fall. Although it is useful in providing a readable Native-based narrative of the battle, some of Miller’s informants, especially the Oglala White Cow Bull, seem too good to be true when it comes to witnessing certain key events. Not only does White Cow Bull claim that he saw Custer’s