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

commissioners, who were huddled inside a canvas tent set up on a dusty plain between the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies. Tensions were already high when Little Big Man, resplendent in war paint, with a Winchester rifle in one hand and cartridges in the other, pushed his way through the crowd and rode up to the commissioners. He had come, he announced, “to kill the white men who were trying to take his land.” The day’s negotiations were quickly called to a halt as the commissioners, fearing an outbreak of violence, were packed into wagons and rushed to safety. That fall, they returned to Washington with an unsigned agreement.

    A little over a month later, on November 3, 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant met in the White House with Secretary of the Interior Zachariah Chandler, Assistant Secretary Benjamin Cowen, and Generals Philip Sheridan and George Crook. Grant had called them together to discuss the Black Hills, where there were now an estimated fifteen thousand miners despite Crook’s halfhearted attempts over the summer to keep them out. Unless the army was willing to take up arms against U.S. citizens, such attempts were doomed to failure. But the Lakota refused to sell. Grant chose what he felt was the lesser of two evils. He decided to wage war on the Indians instead of on the miners.
    Less than a week later, newly appointed Indian inspector Erwin C. Watkins, a former Republican Party hack from Michigan who had served under both Sheridan and Crook during the Civil War, filed a report that gave Grant the excuse he needed to take up arms against the Lakota. Sitting Bull and his followers, Watkins claimed, were raising havoc—not only killing innocent American citizens but also terrorizing rival, peace-loving tribes. Without mentioning the Black Hills once, Watkins spelled out a blueprint for action that might as well have been (and perhaps was) written by Sheridan himself.
The true policy in my judgment, is to send troops against them in the winter, the sooner the better, and whip them into subjection. . . . The Government owes it . . . to the frontier settlers who have, with their families, braved the dangers and hardships incident to frontier life. It owes it to civilization and the common cause of humanity.
    On December 6, Indian Commissioner E. P. Smith instructed his agents at the various Lakota agencies to deliver an ultimatum to the camps of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and all the other nonreservation Indians. They must surrender themselves to the agencies by January 31, 1876, or be brought in by force.
    Up until this point, the Lakota had, despite enormous provocation from the miners in the Black Hills, remained remarkably peaceful. Watkins’s report was false. To expect the Lakota to journey to the reservations in January, when blizzards often made travel impossible, was absurd. Sheridan privately admitted that the order would most likely “be regarded as a good joke by the Indians.”
    But on March 17, 1876, on the upper reaches of the Powder River, a village of Cheyenne, Oglala, and Minneconjou learned that the government’s ultimatum was no laughing matter.

    T he army might have never found that village in March of 1876 without the help of Frank Grouard, who had signed on as a scout with General Crook. After weeks of pointless searching through the heaping snowdrifts of a frigid Montana winter, just when it looked as if Crook’s force might have to return south for provisions, Grouard—the scout no one trusted since he’d been on such intimate terms with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse—finally convinced Crook that the Indians were not, as previously reported, on the Tongue River but on the Powder.
    Grouard’s years with the Lakota had given him an instinctual familiarity with the land. “I went over the ground so many times,” he remembered, “that I fairly carried a map of the country in my mind, and could close my eyes and travel along and never miss a cut-off or a trail.” By adopting the Grabber as his brother and not, as he had threatened, killing him after his first betrayal, Sitting Bull had unwittingly provided the army with the only person capable of not only finding the village but, just as important, eluding the scouts who were guarding it. As he and several companies of Crook’s regiment approached the village in an icy fog, Grouard even recognized several of the Indians’ horses as belonging to some of his former Oglala friends.
    They caught the village by