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

describe a trooper in the lead getting wounded, if not killed, as he came to the river. Given the difficulty of pinpointing the exact location of an event during a battle, the possibility exists that these might be descriptions of the same event. Kellogg’s remains were identified by the distinctive shape of his boot heels. Also found with the body were thirty-seven narrow sheets of paper folded to fit neatly into Kellogg’s pocket. The reporter’s diary entries, it was later discovered, went only as far as June 9. See Sandy Barnard’s I Go with Custer, pp. 142–47. John Stands in Timber provides a surprisingly detailed account of how the Left Wing paused for twenty minutes at what is known today as Cemetery Ridge, then deployed in the vicinity of Last Stand Hill, in Cheyenne Memories, pp. 199–200. Runs the Enemy corroborated Wooden Leg’s and Kate Bighead’s claims that there was no firing as the warriors infiltrated the hills: “[W ]hile Custer was all surrounded there had been no firing from either side,” in Joseph Dixon’s The Vanishing Race, p. 175.
    On the demise of C Company and the warriors’ attack on Calhoun Hill, see Fox, Archaeology, History, and Custer’s Last Battle, pp. 143–61. I have also found Brust, Pohanka, and Barnard’s Where Custer Fell extremely helpful in describing these episodes; they claim that Keogh’s Right Wing “probably enjoyed half an hour to forty-five minutes of relative tactical stability, and the deployment of Company C must have been a controlled and seemingly logicalI reaction to the situation as [Keogh] saw it. Most likely the move was intended to check the growing number of Indians gathering on Greasy Grass Ridge,” p. 91. Sitting Bull told of how the dismounted soldiers “swayed to and fro . . . like the limbs of cypresses in a great wind,” in W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, p. 71. Yellow Nose described how the Indians “seemed really to be springing from the ground” in “Yellow Nose Tells of Custer’s Last Stand,” p. 40. On Lame White Man’s role in the battle, see the accounts of John Stands in Timber in Cheyenne Memories, pp. 197, 205; Hardorff’s Cheyenne Memories, pp. 170–71; and Wooden Leg in Marquis, Wooden Leg, p. 231, who quotes Lame White Man as calling out, “Come. We can kill all of them.” John Two Moons told of how the warriors finally followed Yellow Nose on his fourth attempt to lead them in a charge, in Hardorff’s Cheyenne Memories, p. 66. White Shield told how Yellow Nose used the captured guidon to count coup, in Hardorff’s Cheyenne Memories, p. 53, which also contains a footnote with extensive biographical information about Yellow Nose. See also Yellow Nose’s own account in Hardorff’s Indian Views, pp. 99–105. White Shield, Little Hawk, Young Two Moons, Long Forehead, and John Stands in Timber all commented on Yellow Nose and the guidon, in Hardorff’s Cheyenne Memories. Gregory Michno in Lakota Noon claims that Yellow Nose took the guidon much earlier in the battle, during his encounter with Yates’s Left Wing as it first made its way toward the river in the vicinity of Medicine Tail Coulee, pp. 127–28, 139. Hardorff, on the other hand, places the event later in the fight, during the warriors’ assault on Calhoun Hill, in Indian Views, p. 102. Since Yellow Nose’s description of how a group of troopers suddenly found itself surrounded corresponds so closely to Wooden Leg’s and Kate Bighead’s descriptions of what happened to C Company in the vicinity of Greasy Grass Ridge, I have placed the guidon taking during the initial attack on C Company prior to the charge on Calhoun Hill, as do Brust, Pohanka, and Barnard in Where Custer Fell, p. 92. Runs the Enemy’s description of how “a great roll of smoke seemed to go down the ravine” is in Joseph Dixon’s The Vanishing Race, p. 176; Fox also cites this account in his description of C Company’s collapse, Archaeology, p. 154. Red Horse’s description of “the bravest man they had ever seen” is in W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, pp. 57, 60. Two Moons mentioned a heroic trooper in buckskin with “long black hair and a mustache,” in Hardorff’s Cheyenne Memories, p. 102. Walt Cross in Custer’s Lost Officer argues that this “bravest man” was Harrington, pp. 140–55.
    On the archaeology conducted at the battlefield, see Douglas Scott and Richard Fox’s Archaeological Insights into the Custer Battle; Scott, Fox, Melissa A. Connor, and Dick