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

Bull “has lost all confidence in the whites” is in Vestal, New Sources, p. 10. Ernie LaPointe’s account of his great-grandfather’s death is in Sitting Bull, pp. 102–7. According to LaPointe, the crying child that the agency police claimed was Crowfoot was actually Crowfoot’s twelve-year-old half brother William, p. 104. In Woman Walking Ahead, Eileen Pollack writes about the staged reenactment of Sitting Bull’s death, p. 290, and of “Sitting Bull’s Death Cabin” at the midway in Chicago, p. 295. Custer’s essay “The Red Man” is in E. Lisle Reedstrom’s Bugles, Banners and War Bonnets, p. 311. The 1890 census report read: “At present, the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line,” cited in Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, p. xvii. For an account of how the dams associated with the Pick-Sloan Plan affected the tribes along the Missouri River, especially the Fort Berthold Indians, see Michael Lawson’s Dammed Indians, pp. 59–62. Gerard Baker described the tribal elders mourning beside the artificially created lake at Fort Berthold in Herman Viola’s Little Bighorn Remembered , pp. x–xi. Like his great-grandfather before him, Ernie LaPointe has seen a vision of the future: “I was told through ceremony that what the Americans have done will come back to them four times. This is why I ask the creator to have pity on them. It doesn’t matter what they have done. I do not wish what is coming from the future on anyone” (personal communication to the author).
    Thomas Coleman’s description of how Custer “[l]ay with a smile on his face” is in I Buried Custer, edited by Bruce Liddic, p. 21. Larry Mc Murtry used a phrace from Coleman’s journal as the title of his excellent examination of massacres in the American West, Oh What a Slaughter. The July 25, 1876, Helena (Montana) Herald contained a letter from Lieutenant James Bradley in which he described Custer in death: “Probably never did [a] hero who had fallen upon the field of battle appear so much to have died a natural death. His expression was rather that of a man who had fallen asleep and enjoyed peaceful dreams, than of one who had met his death amid such fearful scenes as that field had witnessed, the features being wholly without ghastliness or any impress of fear, horror, or despair. He had died as he lived—a hero—and excited the remark from those who had known him and saw him there, “ ‘You could almost imagine him standing before you!’ ” Godfrey wrote of Custer’s “almost triumphant expression,” in “Address by General E. S. Godfrey,” Custer Battle Files, Billings [Montana] Public Library, cited by Richard Hardorff in The Custer Battle Casualties, p. 24. In Archaeology, History, and Custer’s Last Battle, Richard Fox argues that the term “Last Stand” cannot be properly applied to the Battle of the Little Bighorn given the rapidity with which Custer’s force collapsed. In an interview recorded in March 23, 2000, on The Paula Gordon Show, Richard Slotkin speaks eloquently about the inadequacy of the myth of the Last Stand in our modern age: http://www.paulagordon.com/shows/slotkin/ .

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