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

Cheyenne captive Monahsetah at the LBH with the son she bore after her relationship with Custer, but he insists that after he saw the action at Reno’s skirmish line he also managed to make it to the river in time to see Custer get shot as he led his soldiers across the ford. Given the testimony of several southern Cheyenne informants, especially that of Kate Bighead (who mentions Custer’s relationship with Monahsetah but does not claim she was at the battle), it seems highly unlikely that Monahsetah and her son were present that day.
    Benteen testified that Custer’s battle “was a panic—rout,” in W. A. Graham, RCI, pp. 145–46. The testimony of the Cheyenne Sylvester Knows Gun appears in Royal Jackson’s An Oral History of the Battle, pp. 67–68. The Cheyenne Ted Rising Sun also learned from his grandparents “that Custer was wounded in the midstream of the LBH. And that some soldiers quickly rode up beside him and propped him up,” p. 67. In an interview, Sitting Bull’s great-grandson Ernie LaPointe also claimed that Custer was killed at the ford at Medicine Tail Coulee and that the battle was over twenty minutes later. In the documentary film The Authorized Biography of Crazy Horse and His Family, Part 3: The Battle of the Little Bighorn, descendants of the Crazy Horse family claim that it was Tom Custer who was wounded at the ford and eventually taken up to Last Stand Hill. In Sandy Barnard’s Ten Years with Custer, John Ryan wrote that Custer had “a Remington Sporting Rifle that used a brass shell” and that “five or six shells . . . were found under General Custer’s body. I picked up those shells and gave them to the captain of my company. They were afterwards sent to Mrs. Custer with a lock of the general’s hair,” p. 303. Richard Fox provides a useful summary of the scenario he developed in Archaeology, History, and Custer’s Last Battle, pp. 333–34. In this chapter I have relied on Fox and others in developing an overall scheme of the battle while using the warriors’ own accounts to drive the narrative.
    Runs the Enemy’s account of first seeing Custer’s battalion and hearing Sitting Bull’s speech about the bird protecting its nest is in Joseph Dixon’s The Vanishing Race , p. 174. Sitting Bull admitted that “[w]e thought we were whipped” in the interview in W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, p. 69. According to Red Horse, “A Sioux man came and said that a different party of soldiers had all the women and children prisoners. Like a whirlwind the word went around, and the Sioux all heard it and left the soldiers on the hill and went quickly to save the women and children,” in W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, p. 61. John Henley recounted hearing the interchange among Yates and the other two officers after the skirmish in the Yellowstone campaign, in Liddic and Harbaugh’s Camp on Custer, p. 50. Curley told Camp about Boyer’s claim that “the other commands had been scared out” in Hammer, Custer in ’76, p. 158. Curley told Russell White Bear that Boyer pointed at Custer and said, “That man will stop at nothing,” in W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, p. 18; White Bear also told how Boyer encouraged Curley to escape before it was too late, p. 19.
    Wooden Leg’s account of the battle is in Marquis, Wooden Leg, pp. 226–70; Kate Bighead’s account, also told to Thomas Marquis and titled She Watched Custer’s Last Battle, is in The Custer Reader, edited by Paul Hutton, pp. 363–77. My description of the terrain is based, in part, on my own experience riding across the battlefield with the Crow tribal member Charlie Real Bird in June 2007. I also found discussions in July 2009 with author and seasonal ranger Michael Donahue of great value; Donahue directed me to Kill Eagle’s account of a buffalo trail that led from the vicinity of Last Stand Hill to the LBH River, in Donahue’s Drawing Battle Lines , pp. 139–43. Hanging Wolf’s description of the soldiers’ approach to the river is in John Stands in Timber’s description of the battle in Cheyenne Memories , pp. 194–210. See also Fox’s account of Custer’s northerly thrust in Archaeology, pp. 173–94. There is a striking similarity between Hanging Wolf’s account of the Left Wing’s approach to the north ford (often referred to as Ford D) and the account of Sylvester Knows Gun’s grandmother (and many others) of the Left Wing’s approach to the ford at Medicine Tail Coulee (Ford B). Both accounts