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

instead of killing him as the others had expected, Sitting Bull decided to let the rider live.
    The rider called himself Frank Grouard, but the Lakota chose to call him the Grabber. His furry coat and big, wide-shouldered physique reminded them of a bear, a creature that used its front paws like hands.
    The Lakota assumed the Grabber was an Indian half-breed. He certainly looked like an Indian with dark skin, jet-black hair, and high cheekbones. The speed with which he learned the Lakota language and the enthusiasm with which he embraced all aspects of the culture also seemed to corroborate the impression that Grouard was at least part Native American. But as Grouard later insisted to anyone who listened, he was something else entirely: a South Sea Islander, commonly referred to by American sailors as a Kanaka.
    Grouard’s father, Benjamin, had been a Mormon missionary who established a church on an island in the South Pacific and married the daughter of the local chief. They had three children, and Frank was born in 1850. In 1852, the Grouards moved to California. Frank’s mother and sister eventually returned to the South Pacific, while Frank was adopted by a Mormon family who relocated to Utah. Frank ran away from home at sixteen and in a few years’ time, after being abducted by Sitting Bull, was living with the Hunkpapa.
    Soon after Grouard’s capture, Sitting Bull decided to adopt him as his brother. Ten years before, he’d successfully done the same thing when he adopted a thirteen-year-old Assiniboine boy who’d been captured in a raid. The boy proved so loyal that two years later, when Sitting Bull’s father was killed by the Crows, the boy was given the old man’s name of Jumping Bull. At some point after 1869, the Grabber became the Lakota leader’s second adopted brother.
    Frank Grouard was not the only non-Indian to embrace Lakota culture. For decades, what was known as the “squaw man” had been a fixture in the West, and many of the children born from these interracial unions served as scouts for the U.S. Army. Custer’s Seventh Cavalry had two brothers, Billy and Bob Jackson, who were part Pikuni Blackfoot. One of Custer’s own officers, Lieutenant Donald McIntosh, was part Iroquois. According to Cheyenne oral tradition, Custer’s relationship with the Cheyenne captive Monahsetah in 1868–69 produced a son named Yellow Hair.
    It was true that Native and white worlds were profoundly different in the 1870s. There were some Lakota and Cheyenne in Sitting Bull’s village on the Rosebud who had not yet even seen a white person. But instead of a hard and fast division, the barrier between cultures was so permeable that men like Frank Grouard could move between the washichus and Lakota as conditions required.
    Sitting Bull undoubtedly liked Frank Grouard, but he had other, largely political reasons for bringing him into the fold. Since Sitting Bull refused to deal directly with the whites, he needed an intermediary, someone he could trust who was capable of understanding and communicating with the washichus, and Grouard quickly became a member of his inner circle. In 1872, a government official described him “as a Sandwich Islander, called Frank, who appears to exercise great control in the Indian councils and who excels the Indians in their bitter hatred of the whites.”
    Grouard came to have a deep respect for Sitting Bull’s skills as a leader. The Hunkpapa warriors Gall and No Neck often opposed him at the tribal councils, but Sitting Bull was, according to Grouard, “a first class politician [and] could hold his own.” Grouard noticed how he worked indefatigably to garner as much backing as possible, whether it was with his male peers in the various warrior societies or—perhaps even more important—with the women, who far outnumbered the men in a typical Lakota village and who, Grouard recounted, “sang his praises to the exclusion of every one else.” Women usually had no voice at the tribal councils, but since grandmothers were the ones who raised the children, Sitting Bull realized they counted for much in molding the attitudes of the tribe.
    Sitting Bull’s strongest source of support, according to Grouard, was among the Lakota youth. For teenagers who had not yet attained their war honors, reservation life, and the cessation of intertribal warfare that went with it, would be a disaster. Their fathers and grandfathers could enjoy the comforts of the reservation without