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

furnaces,” p. 54. Magnussen, in his edition of Thompson’s Account, writes in a note, “[T]his must have been sides of bacon which spoiled in the hot weather and would produce great heat for the boilers,” p. 290. Thompson described the mysterious leave-taking of the Indian scout in his Account, pp. 54–55, in which he also told of Bennett’s death. My account of Sitting Bull’s death draws from the testimony in Vestal, New Sources, pp. 1–117; in John Carroll’s The Arrest and Killing of Sitting Bull: A Documentary, pp. 68–97; and in William Coleman’s Voices of Wounded Knee, pp. 176–224. See also Jeffrey Ostler’s The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism, pp. 313–37. In “ ‘These Have No Ears,’ ” Raymond DeMallie cites One Bull’s and his wife’s accounts of how Bull Head struck Sitting Bull on the back three times, saying, “You have no ears,” p. 534. “[T]here had been no trouble between Sitting Bull and Bull Head before settling at the agency,” DeMallie writes; “adherence to different strategies to reach the same result—accommodation with the white people—led to an irrevocable breach between them.” Louise Cheney tells the story of how C. A. Lounsberry and others transmitted the story of the battle to the East Coast in “The Lounsberry Scoop,” pp. 91–95. As Sandy Barnard points out in I Go with Custer, the telegraph operator John Carnahan later claimed that Lounsberry greatly exaggerated his role in the scoop, pp. 157–59.
    Jeffrey Ostler’s The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism contains a provocative account of the Ghost Dance and the massacre at Wounded Knee, pp. 338–60. Joseph Horn Cloud told an interpreter that “Capt. Wallace sent Joseph to tell the women to saddle up,” in Ricker, Voices of the American West, vol. 1, pp. 200–201. Dewey Beard’s memory of how the officers of the Seventh “tortured us by gun point” is in William Coleman’s Voices of Wounded Knee, p. 275, as is Beard’s account of seeing his “friends sinking about me,” p. 303. Philip Wells claimed Wallace was killed by a bullet to the forehead; other accounts said he’d been smashed with a war club; both may have been true; see William Coleman, Voices , p. 304; Will Cressey’s account of the smoke-shrouded Indian camp looking like a “sunken Vesuvius” is also in Voices , p. 305. Godfrey’s testimony about hunting down the Lakota women and children is in his Tragedy at White Horse Creek: Edward S. Godfrey’s Unpublished Account of an Incident Near Wounded Knee, pp. 3–6, cited in William Coleman, Voices, pp. 330–33. Elizabeth Lawrence chronicles Comanche’s last days in His Very Silence Speaks, pp. 108–9.
    Libbie Custer touched briefly on how she received word of the disaster in Boots and Saddles, pp. 221–22. Gurley’s account of delivering the news to Libbie and her sister-in-law is in Hanson, pp. 312–14, as is Marsh’s account of turning down Libbie’s invitation to visit her and the other widows. See also Dennis Farioli and Ron Nichols’s “Fort A. Lincoln, July 1876,” pp. 11–16. In an Oct. 3, 1876, letter to his wife, Lawrence Barrett said that an officer who saw Libbie on her way from Fort Lincoln to Monroe, Michigan, “says that he believes she will become insane—that her nervous energy will support her for a time, but when the strain has weakened her strength, her brain will give way,” in Sandy Barnard’s “The Widow Custer: Consolation Comes from Custer’s Best Friend,” p. 4. Barrett’s description of his visit with Libbie is in an Oct. 25, 1876, letter to his wife, p. 3.
    DeRudio told Camp that at the RCI “there was a private understanding between a number of officers that they would do all they could to save Reno,” in Hardorff’s On the Little Bighorn, p. 241. In 1904, a story in the Northwestern Christian Advocate claimed that Reno had admitted to a former editor of the Advocate that “his strange actions” both during and after the Battle of the Little Bighorn were “due to drink,” in W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, pp. 338–39. Thomas French, one of the other heavy drinkers in the regiment, died of alcoholism on Mar. 27, 1882. For the linkage between the article that appeared in the Jan. 3, 1887, Kansas City Times and Benteen’s ultimate court-martial, as well as the parallels between that article and the one Benteen penned about Custer and the Battle of the Washita, see John Carroll’s The Court Martial of Frederick W.