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

you this to cast any reflection upon Custer. For whatever errors he may have committed he has paid the penalty and you cannot regret his loss more than I do, but I feel that our plan must have been successful had it been carried out, and I desire you to know the facts,” in The Little Big Horn 1876: The Official Communications, edited by Lloyd Overfield, p. 37. M. E. Terry wrote of how the Far West bounced off the riverbanks, “throwing the men to the deck like tenpins,” in an article that appeared in the Pioneer Press in 1878 and was reprinted in Hiram Chittenden’s History of Early Steamboat Navigation on the Missouri River , pp. 388–90. Mark Twain described “that solid world of darkness” aboard a riverboat at night in Life on the Mississippi, p. 70; he also told of how “on very dark nights, pilots do not smoke; they allow no fire in the pilothouse stove if there is a crack which can allow the least ray to escape; they order the furnaces to be curtained with huge tarpaulins and the skylights to be closely blinded. Then no light whatever issues from the boat,” p. 65. On Reno’s purchase of whiskey during the summer of 1876, see Evan Connell’s Son of the Morning Star, p. 51, and James Donovan’s A Terrible Glory, pp. 328–29, in which Donovan also cites evidence of French’s opium use. Benteen wrote of how he challenged Weir to a duel in a Mar. 19, 1892, letter to Goldin, in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, p. 219. Lieutenant E. A. Garlington was assigned to the Seventh soon after the battle and described Weir’s sad and drunken behavior as the regiment waited on the Yellowstone, in The Lieutenant E. A. Garlington Narrative, Part I, edited by John Carroll, p. 15. Godfrey recounted Weir’s reaction to seeing the naked bodies of the dead, “Oh, how white they look!” in W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, p. 346. On the circumstances of Weir’s death, see Nichols, Men with Custer, p. 350. According to an article in the December 16, 1876, Army and Navy Journal, Weir died “of congestion of the brain.”
    My account of the Fourth of July celebration in Philadelphia is based on William Randel’s Centennial: American Life in 1876, p. 300. Sipes told Camp how the soldiers at the Powder River “gave up the idea” of a Fourth of July celebration when they heard about Custer’s defeat, in Hammer, Custer in ’76, p. 241. John Gray described the measures taken against the Lakota on the reservations in the wake of the battle in Centennial Campaign, pp. 255–69. The rumor that Sitting Bull was a student of Napoleon’s military tactics appeared in the July 29, 1876, Army and Navy Journal; the claim that he was really a West Point graduate named “Bison” McLean appeared in the Sept. 2, 1876, Army and Navy Journal . My description of Sitting Bull’s meeting with Nelson Miles is based on Utley’s Lance and Shield, which cites Miles’s Oct. 25, 1876, letter to his wife, pp. 171–73. Sitting Bull’s comparison of Custer to “a sheaf of corn with all the ears fallen around him” is in W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, p. 73. Grant Marsh’s passage up the Missouri with Sitting Bull is described by Hanson, pp. 415–17. Sitting Bull’s frustration over his treatment by McLaughlin (“Why does he keep trying to humble me?”) is in Vestal’s New Sources of Indian History, p. 310. McLaughlin described Sitting Bull as “crafty, avaricious, mendacious, and ambitious,” in My Friend, the Indian, p. 180. Sitting Bull claimed McLaughlin “had it in for me” after he refused to rejoin Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, in Vestal, New Sources, p. 310. On the movement to “Kill the Indian, and save the man,” see Jeffrey Ostler’s The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism, pp. 149–68. Sitting Bull’s views on the potential uses of white culture are in Vestal, New Sources, pp. 273–74, as are his comparison of McLaughlin to a “jealous woman,” p. 310, and his comparison of reservation life to a game of whipping tops, p. 280. One Bull’s account of what the meadowlark told Sitting Bull is in box 104, folder 21, WCC. One Bull said the incident occurred soon after Sitting Bull’s return from Fort Randall; according to Ernie LaPointe it was in August of 1890, in Sitting Bull, p. 93.
    In Centennial Campaign, John Gray described the Far West ’s stop at Fort Buford, p. 54, where Peter Thompson claimed Marsh picked up some ice; Thompson also related how “wood and bacon were fed to the hungry