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

compromising their sense of self-worth, but that was not possible for those whose best fighting years were still in the future. For them, the uncompromising traditionalism of Sitting Bull’s stance was irresistible. “All the young warriors worshipped him,” Grouard remembered.
    In the early 1870s, the U.S. government opened the Milk River Agency at Fort Peck on the Missouri River, where rations and clothing were made available to the Lakota in a conscious attempt to undercut hard-liners such as Sitting Bull. In the winter of 1872–73, even some of his strongest supporters, including his uncles Four Horns and Black Moon, succumbed to the lure of the agencies. Only fourteen lodges, composed mostly of the families in his immediate kinship circle, known as a tiyoshpaye, joined him that winter in his obstinate insistence on remaining beyond the reach of the whites. Sitting Bull was in danger of losing his tribe.
    To make matters worse, his adopted brother the Grabber betrayed him. In the spring of 1873, Grouard pretended to go on a horse-stealing raid against the Assiniboine when he really intended to visit Fort Peck. Like many cultural go-betweens before and since, Grouard felt the competing pulls of two different ways of life. It would be several years before he completely turned his back on the Lakota, but for now he decided it was time he at least visited the fort. When Sitting Bull learned the truth soon after Grouard’s return, the Hunkpapa leader was so angry that Grouard feared for his life. Sitting Bull’s mother attempted to patch things up between them, but Grouard finally decided it was better to leave Sitting Bull’s family circle and join the Oglala, where, much as he had once done for Sitting Bull, he became the trusted lieutenant of Crazy Horse.
    Sitting Bull had at least one consolation. After his divorce from Snow on Her and the death of Red Woman, he was now happily married to two sisters, Four Blankets Woman and Seen by the Nation.

    I n the summer of 1873, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry ventured for the first time into Lakota territory as escorts for the surveyors of the Northern Pacific Railway. Having seen what had happened to the Cheyenne to the south, the Lakota knew that the railroads had a devastating effect on the buffalo, and they responded to this invasion of their hunting territory with force.
    The year before, in 1872, the appearance of the soldiers on the Yellowstone had given Sitting Bull an opportunity to reestablish his once unsurpassed reputation for bravery. A bloody confrontation between about a thousand warriors and several companies of soldiers had reached an unsatisfying stalemate. Armed with only a lance, Crazy Horse rode back and forth in front of the soldiers, challenging them to fire at him. It was a magnificent display of courage that appears to have inspired Sitting Bull to perform his own kind of bravery run.
    He laid down his rifle and, with only his pipe in his hand, started to walk toward the enemy line. Once he’d come to within a quarter mile of the soldiers, he sat down and lit his pipe. Since he was well within range and presented such an inviting target, the soldiers immediately began to blast away. With bullets flying all around, Sitting Bull turned to the warriors behind him and called out, “Whoever wishes to smoke with me, come.”
    Only four men joined him: two Cheyenne, a Hunkpapa named Gets the Best Of, and Sitting Bull’s nephew White Bull. Despite the near-constant barrage of bullets, the Lakota chief seemed unperturbed. “Sitting Bull was not afraid,” White Bull marveled, “he just sat and looked around and smoked peacefully,” even as the others, their “hearts beating fast,” puffed away at a furious rate. Once the pipe had been smoked out, Sitting Bull paused to clean the bowl with a stick, and even as bullets continued to chop up the ground around his feet, he “walked home slow.” His performance that day “counted more than counting coup,” remembered White Bull, who called it the “most brave deed possible.” Sitting Bull might not be leading the Hunkpapa into battle anymore, but his courage could no longer be questioned.
    The following year, in 1873, Custer and the Seventh Cavalry had two brief encounters with the Lakota. What impression Custer, whose flowing locks earned him the Lakota name of Pehin Hanska, meaning Long Hair, made on Sitting Bull is unknown. We do know, however, that the