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

increasing presence, there was a need for a single, all-powerful leader to coordinate the actions of the tribe.
    Sitting Bull’s nephew One Bull remembered how in the late 1860s the warriors Gall and Running Antelope presided over a ceremony attended by four thousand Lakota, in which Sitting Bull was named “the leader of the entire Sioux nation.” Instead of being the “head chief,” Sitting Bull’s new authority appears to have applied only to the issue of war. One Bull claimed that Gall was named his “2nd in command as War chief,” while Crazy Horse was named “war chief of the Oglala, Cheyenne, and Arapaho.” “When you tell us to fight,” they told Sitting Bull, “we shall fight. When you tell us to make peace, we shall make peace.”
    The concept of having a supreme leader did not come naturally to the Lakota, for whom individuality and independence had always been paramount. Even in the midst of battle, a warrior was not bound by the orders of a commander; he fought for his own personal glory. Decisions were reached in Lakota society by consensus, and if two individuals or groups disagreed, they were free to go their separate ways and find another village to attach themselves to. From the start, Sitting Bull had to strive mightily to balance his own views with those of the majority of the tribe.
    There were three possible paths for the Lakota to follow. They could do as Red Cloud and Spotted Tail eventually opted to do and move permanently to a reservation. For both leaders, this was not an act of submissive resignation. Red Cloud had recently led a number of raids (which came to be known as Red Cloud’s War) that had forced the American government to shut down a series of forts along the Bozeman Trail, running from eastern Wyoming all the way to western Montana. Spotted Tail had spent several months as a prisoner of the U.S. government and knew more about the realities of white society than any other Lakota leader. Both chiefs decided that given the inevitability of white expansion into their territory, the time was right to start working with, rather than against, the U.S. government.
    A second and more attractive option for many Lakota was to have it both ways: spend the winter months at the agencies, where there was meat, bread, tobacco, and even ammunition for firearms, and depart for the hunting grounds in the summer. Then there was Sitting Bull’s position: complete autonomy, as far as that was possible, from the washichus. It was true that the horse and the gun had come to them from the whites, but all the rest of it—their diseases, their food, their whiskey, their insane love of gold—all of this had a hateful effect on the Lakota.
    As the Cheyenne and Lakota to the south had come to recognize, self-imposed isolation from the whites was impossible once the buffalo disappeared. But for now, with the herds to the north still flourishing, Sitting Bull resolved to do everything he could to keep the washichus at bay.
    In the late 1860s, Sitting Bull launched his own version of Red Cloud’s War against the growing number of army forts along the upper Missouri River. In 1867, at Fort Union, near the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers, he took time out from what proved to be a four-year campaign against the washichus to scold some Indians who had made a habit of scrounging food at the outpost. “You are fools to make yourself slaves to a piece of fat bacon, some hard tack and a little sugar and coffee . . . ,” he said. “[The] whites may get me at last . . . , but I will have good times till then.”
    By 1870, however, Sitting Bull had been forced to soften his stance toward the washichus. “Be a little against fighting,” advised his mentor Four Horns, “but when anyone shoots be ready to fight him.” Even Crazy Horse, the foremost warrior of the Oglala, endorsed the policy advocated by Four Horns. “If any soldiers come . . . and don’t start firing, we won’t bother them,” he was heard to say to Sitting Bull. “But if they come firing we will go after them.”
    There were other factors contributing to the tempering of Sitting Bull’s warrior spirit. By the late 1860s, he had been seriously injured a total of three times. Being an only son with two sisters, he was responsible for a large extended family. Now that he was approaching forty years old, it was time, his mother insisted, that he become more mindful of his own safety. “You must hang back in