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

complete surprise. There were about a hundred lodges of northern Cheyenne, Oglala, and Minneconjou, who immediately fled from their tepees and took refuge in the surrounding hills, where they watched the soldiers torch the village and take their horses. While their warriors pursued the retreating soldiers south and eventually retrieved almost all the horses, the old people, mothers, and children returned to the burnt-out ruin of their village and collected what little had not been consumed by fire.
    “We were . . . at peace with the whites so far as we knew,” remembered the Cheyenne warrior Wooden Leg, who was then eighteen. “Why should soldiers come out . . . and fight us?”
    In the days ahead, a thaw turned the snow and ice into slush, and on March 23, after four days of slow and messy travel, Wooden Leg’s people found Crazy Horse’s village of just thirty lodges. The village was not large enough to provide the refugees with the food and clothing they desperately needed, so they decided to move together as a group to Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa village about forty miles to the northeast, where they arrived on April 2.
    The Hunkpapa were almost strangers to Wooden Leg’s people, the northern Cheyenne. As the Cheyenne straggled into the village, Sitting Bull made sure to provide a positive first impression. Two huge lodges were erected in the middle of the village, one for the women and one for the men. Hunkpapa women fired up their cooking pots and were soon distributing armloads of steaming buffalo meat. The herald shouted out in a booming voice, “The Cheyennes are very poor. All who have blankets or robes or tepees to spare should give to them.”
    “Oh, what good hearts they had!” remembered Wooden Leg, who was given a buffalo blanket by a ten-year-old girl. “I never can forget the generosity of Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa Sioux on that day.”
    It was not clear to anyone why the soldiers had attacked. Among the Lakota, young warriors in search of glory often did their best to confound the attempts of their more conservative leaders to rein them in. Crazy Horse theorized that President Grant, whom they called the “grandfather,” had run into similar problems with his army. “These white soldiers would rather shoot than work,” he said. “The grandfather cannot control his young men and you see the result.” The sad truth was that the white soldiers were acting under the explicit, if evasively delivered, orders of the grandfather.
    One thing was clear, however. After years of watching his influence decline, Sitting Bull had finally come into his own. “He had come now into admiration by all Indians,” Wooden Leg remembered, “as a man whose medicine was good—that is, as a man having a kind heart and good judgment as to the best course of conduct.”
    Sitting Bull, it seemed, had been right all along. The only policy that made any sense was to stay as far away as possible from the whites. If the soldiers were willing to attack a solitary village in winter, who knew what they might do to the thousands of Indians on the reservations. As the Cheyenne had learned back in 1864 at the brutal massacre called the Battle of Sand Creek, soldiers in search of a fight were perfectly capable of attacking a village of peaceful Indians, since they were always the easiest Indians to kill.

    —SETTING BULL’S VILLAGE, March 17-June 7, 1876 —

    Sitting Bull determined that the best strategy was strength in numbers. As the village migrated north and west, he sent out runners to the agencies telling the Lakota to meet them on the Rosebud River. “We supposed that the combined camps would frighten off the soldiers,” Wooden Leg remembered. Keeping with the policy of the last few years, this was to be a defensive war. They would fight only if attacked first. To those young warriors, such as Wooden Leg, who longed to revenge themselves on the white soldiers, Sitting Bull and the other chiefs insisted on restraint. “They said that fighting wasted energy that ought to be applied in looking only for food and clothing,” Wooden Leg remembered.
    By the end of April, the new spring grass had begun to appear. The buffalo were abundant, and when in early June they camped forty-five miles up the Rosebud from its junction with the Yellowstone, the village had grown to about 430 lodges, or more than three thousand Lakota and Cheyenne.
    With hundreds, if not thousands, of Indians headed in their direction from the