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

Barnard cite Godfrey’s account of finding “several headless bodies” in the Indian encampment not far from the river; they also cite Private George Glenn’s claim that one of the severed heads found in the village was that of Sturgis, in Where Custer Fell, p. 112.

On what was found on June 27 on Last Stand Hill and the wounds on Custer’s body, see Hardorff’s The Custer Battle Casualties, pp. 15–31. Yellow Nose’s account of his encounter with the “striking and gallant” officer whom he took to be Custer is in “Yellow Nose Tells of Custer’s Last Stand,” pp. 41–42, and in Hardorff’s Indian Views, pp. 103–5. As Hardorff argues in a footnote, Yellow Nose’s opponent was almost certainly not Custer but his brother Tom; see also George Grinnell’s comments in Hardorff’s Cheyenne Memories, p. 58. On the mutilations to Tom’s body (Sergeant Ryan wrote that Tom’s head “was smashed as flat as the palm of one’s hand”), see Hardorff’s The Custer Battle Casualties, pp. 24–25. White Bull claimed that the Lakota sometimes mutilated the body of an enemy “because [the] man was brave, ” in box 105, notebook 24, WCC.
    Edgerly wrote that Boston Custer and Autie Reed were found “about a hundred yards from the general’s body,” in W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, p. 220. Frost cites the Oct. 28, 1868, letter in which Custer asked Libbie about the possibility of adopting Autie Reed, in General Custer’s Libbie, p. 178. Big Beaver, who was seventeen at the time of the battle, reported that “a soldier got up and mounted his horse and rode as fast as he could towards the east. . . . Two Cheyenne Indians cut him off and killed him,” in Hardorff’s Cheyenne Memories, p. 149; others claimed the soldier committed suicide, while Moses Flying Hawk reported that instead of killing himself, the lone rider “was beating his horse with his revolver” when it went off accidentally, in Ricker’s Voices of the American West, vol. 1, p. 446. Walt Cross argues that forensic analysis of a skull taken from a remote portion of the battlefield indicates that it was Henry Harrington’s, in Custer’s Lost Officer, pp. 199–233.
    Wooden Leg claimed that the warriors’ mad scramble for Last Stand Hill “looked like thousands of dogs . . . mixed together in a fight,” in Marquis, Wooden Leg, p. 237; Wooden Leg also told how the warriors exclaimed, “I got a good gun,” etc., p. 264. Brave Bear spoke of the “fussing and quarreling” over spoils, in Hardorff’s Indian Views, p. 80. Wooden Leg told of how he scalped Cooke’s face of one of its long sideburns and how the women “used sheathknives and hatchets,” in Marquis, Wooden Leg, pp. 240, 263. On Sand Creek, see Jerome Greene’s Washita: The U.S. Army and the Southern Cheyennes, 1876–9, pp. 3–5, and Gregory Michno’s Encyclopedia of Indian Wars, pp. 157–59. Julia Face told of seeing the naked skin of the dead soldiers shining in the sun, in Hardorff’s Lakota Recollections, p. 190. One Bull recounted how Sitting Bull “told Indians not to take spoils or be condemned by God, but Indians took saddles, etc. and Sitting Bull said because of it they will starve at [the] white man’s door, they will be scattered and be crushed by troops,” in box 104, folder 6, WCC; elsewhere White Bull remembered, “After the battle Sitting Bull told the Indians to leave things alone that belong to the soldiers but they did not obey. Sitting Bull said, ‘For failure on your part to obey, henceforth you shall always covet white people’s belongings,’ ” box 110, folder 8, WCC.
    Beaver Heart claimed that Custer bragged, “When we get to the village I’m going to find the Sioux girl with the most elk teeth,” in John Stands in Timber’s Cheyenne Memories, p. 199. Kate Bighead recounted how the two southern Cheyenne women punctured Custer’s eardrums with an awl, in Hutton’s The Custer Reader, p. 376. Hardorff writes, “In an interview with his friend Colonel Charles F. Bates, General Godfrey disclosed that Custer’s genitals had been mutilated by an arrow which had been forced up his penis,” in The Custer Battle Casualties, p. 21; see also Hardorff’s The Custer Battle Casualties, II, pp. 20–21. Sergeant Ryan wrote, “At the foot of [the] knoll, we dug a grave about 18 inches deep, and laid the body of the General in it. We then took the body of Tom, and laid him beside the General. Then we wrapped the two bodies in canvas and