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

Benteen, especially p. vi. Benteen compared his literary outpourings about Custer to “a goose doing his mess by moonlight” in a Mar. 23, 1896, letter to Goldin, in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, p. 295. Benteen’s comment that “[t]he Lord . . . had at last rounded the scoundrels up” is in a Feb. 17, 1896, letter to Goldin, in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, p. 271. Colonel Samuel Sturgis’s criticisms of Custer appeared in the July 22, 1876, issue of the Army and Navy Journal . On Libbie’s role as guardian of her husband’s reputation, see Louise Barnett’s Touched by Fire, pp. 351–72, and Shirley Leckie’s Elizabeth Bacon Custer, pp. 256–306. On Custer and the myth of the Last Stand, see Richard Slotkin’s The Fatal Environment, especially the chapter “To the Last Man: Assembling the Last Stand Myth, 1876,” pp. 435–76, as well as Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation, especially the chapter “The White City and the Wild West: Buffalo Bill and the Mythic Space of American History, 1880–1917,” pp. 63–87. Benteen told of attending the lecture about the LBH, then insisted, “I’m out of that whirlpool now,” in a May 26, 1896, letter to Goldin, in John Carroll, Benteen-Goldin Letters, p. 302. He died two years later on June 22, 1898.
    In his notes, Camp recorded that the three slabs of stone used to construct the Custer monument weighed five, six, and seven tons and were “hauled one piece at a time to Custer battlefield during winter in a wooden drag or sled pulled by 24 mules, 4 abreast, crossed LBH 3 times on ice. Derrick of ash used to put stones in place. W. B. Jordan says no steamboat pilot wanted to take monument. Finally Grant Marsh took it on F. Y. Batchelor, put it in bow of his boat and took it to Fort Custer,” in box 6, folder 2, #57, Camp Papers, BYU. See also Jerome Greene’s Stricken Field, pp. 30–33.
    Epilogue: Libbie’s House
    My account of the meeting between Steve Alexander and Ernie LaPointe is based on “A Visit of Peace” by Dean Cousino in the Sept. 30, 2006, Monroe News . Alexander’s Web site address is Georgecuster.com . Also see Michael Elliott’s Custerology, pp. 90–101. Elliott’s probing analysis of the meaning of the battle in modern society and culture has deeply influenced my own thinking about the LBH. See also Paul Hutton’s “From Little Bighorn to Little Big Man,” pp. 19–45. Vine Deloria refers to Custer as “the Ugly American” in Custer Died for Your Sins, p. 148. He Dog’s statement that “the cause of that trouble” was in Washington, D.C., is in Hardorff’s Lakota Recollections, p. 78. White Man Runs Him’s claim that Custer said, “I have an enemy back where many white people live that I hate,” was recorded by Edward Curtis, in The Papers of Edward S. Curtis , edited by James Hutchins, p. 41. The passage in which Custer expresses his sympathies for the Indians who “adhered to the free open plains” is in My Life on the Plains, p. 22. Even Custer’s peers recognized that Custer was a cultural chameleon; according to John Wright, one of Custer’s classmates at West Point: “Custer was only meeting the demands of the country when he met his fate, his fault was the fault of his times and people,” Recollections of John M. Wright, LBHBNM Collection, cited in Lisa Adolf’s “Custer: All Things to All Men,” p. 16. In Moby-Dick, Melville writes, “Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease,” p. 82.
    DeMallie links Bull Head’s and Kate Bighead’s uses of the term “no ears,” in “ ‘These Have No Ears,’ ” p. 534. According to Utley in The Lance and the Shield, “Sitting Bull defiantly swore to all that . . . he would rather die like Crazy Horse than leave his new home at Standing Rock,” p. 240. No one at Standing Rock felt, however, that Sitting Bull had a death wish in the last years of his life. According to Stanley Vestal, “As to his wanting to die and wanting to fight, the old men say it is false. They say, ‘If he had wished to die fighting, he . . . had only to take his rifle, ride to Fort Yates, and begin shooting at the soldiers,’ ” in Vestal, New Sources, p. 312. On Sitting Bull’s relationship with Catherine Weldon, see Eileen Pollack’s Woman Walking Ahead . Weldon’s letter to McLaughlin saying that she respects Sitting Bull “as . . . my own father” is in Vestal, New Sources, p. 100. James Carignan’s report to McLaughlin that Sitting