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

the middle of an immense territory of defiant and potentially dangerous Indians, with only the Far West to provide them with food, ammunition, and, if the worst should happen, a way out.
    By 3 p.m., the Far West had reached the mouth of the Powder, and Terry was on his way back up the river for a showdown with Custer. At some point during that all-night ride through a driving rain, he decided to send an unmistakable message to his subordinate. He knew that Custer, having led the most recent march across the badlands and before that the scout up the Little Missouri, fully expected to lead the upcoming scout. He also knew that Custer was itching to break free of him and engage the Indians. But now, Terry was convinced, was not the time. He first needed to get Gibbon in proper position on the Yellowstone, where he could block any Indians attempting to flee north.
    He decided that in good conscience he couldn’t give the scouting mission to Custer—at least not yet. Major Reno had been hoping to lead the regiment all spring. Well, now was his chance for an independent command. The likelihood of Reno actually coming across any Indians was slim to none, but so much the better. Once they’d all regrouped at the mouth of the Tongue River after Reno’s scout west, they would proceed against the Indians—but on his terms, not Custer’s.

CHAPTER 4

    The Dance
    B y early June, Sitting Bull’s village had traveled about thirty miles up the Rosebud River. On a flat section of grass on the east bank, they prepared for the Lakota’s most sacred of ceremonies, the sun dance. A tree was selected from a cottonwood grove and carried to a hoof-flattened plain. Shorn of branches except for one sprig of green leaves at the top, and painted red, the tree was dropped into a carefully dug hole, where it became the center of the arborlike sun dance lodge.
    Eleven years earlier, during a sun dance on the Little Missouri River, Sitting Bull had “pierced the heart.” Two sharp sticks had been thrust through the flesh and muscle wall of his chest. Ropes were attached to the sticks, and with an eagle-bone whistle in his lips, he had hung suspended from the top of the sacred pole at the center of the lodge. There was a downy white feather at the end of the whistle that danced pulselike with each breath. Even though his lifelong training as a warrior helped him endure the searing pain, he did his best to lay bare all his pitiful human frailties before Wakan Tanka and, weeping, prayed “for his people to be healthy and have plenty of food.”
    His nephew One Bull had been fifteen years old during that sun dance on the Little Missouri, and he later remembered that as his uncle was “hanging there and crying,” Sitting Bull heard a voice say “God will give you what you ask for.” Eventually, the wooden sticks had torn through Sitting Bull’s flesh, and now, more than a decade later, as he entered the circular lodge beside the Rosebud River, his naked torso bore the scars of that and other sun dances.
    For Sitting Bull, this sun dance beside the Rosebud River, with which the northern Lakota appealed to Wakan Tanka to support them in the year to come, marked the culmination of an almost decade-long struggle. Only now, after years of contention and hardship, had the way become clear. Much, however, remained to be revealed.

    W ith the signing of the Treaty of 1868, the U.S. government granted the Lakota most of the modern state of South Dakota, along with hunting rights to more than twenty-two million acres of prime buffalo territory to the west and north in modern North Dakota and Montana. The following year, Red Cloud and Spotted Tail, the leaders of two of the largest bands of the Lakota, the Oglala and the Brulé, respectively, decided that it was in their people’s best interests to move to government-created reservations in northern Nebraska.
    Around this time, Sitting Bull emerged as leader of the Lakota to the north. In addition to the Oglala and the Brulé, the Lakota, whose name means “alliance of friends,” included five other bands: the Minneconjou, Sans Arcs, Two Kettles, Blackfeet, and Sitting Bull’s people, the Hunkpapa. In the 1860s, the northern Lakota had not yet felt the full brunt of the coming collision with the whites, whom they referred to as the washichus . But as several tribal leaders, including Sitting Bull’s powerful uncle Four Horns, recognized, change was coming. With the washichus becoming an