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

agencies to the east and south, hopes were high that this already sizable village might soon become one of the largest gatherings of Indians ever known on the northern plains. However, not all of those present were there under their own free will.
    Kill Eagle was the fifty-six-year-old chief of the Blackfeet band of the Lakota. He lived at the Standing Rock Agency on the Missouri River, but that spring, the government failed to provide his people with the promised rations. He decided that he had no alternative but to leave the agency to hunt buffalo; otherwise his people would starve. He knew that the soldiers were planning a campaign against Sitting Bull, but he hoped to return to the agency before trouble started.
    In May, he and twenty-six lodges were camped near the Tongue River when they were approached by warriors from Sitting Bull’s village. The warriors told him that he should “make haste” to Sitting Bull’s camp, where “they would make my heart glad.” Soon after his arrival at the village, he was presented with a roan horse and some buffalo robes. But when Kill Eagle decided it was time to leave, he and his followers soon discovered that they’d been lured into a trap. Almost instantly they were surrounded by Hunkpapa police, known as the akicita , who escorted them to the next campsite up the Rosebud River. Like it or not, the Blackfeet were about to attend Sitting Bull’s sun dance.

    T he sacred tree, with two hide cutouts of a man and a buffalo attached to the top, stood at the center of the sun dance lodge. Buffalo robes had been spread out around the tree, and Sitting Bull sat down with his back resting against the pole, his legs sticking straight out and his arms hanging down.
    He’d vowed to give Wakan Tanka a “scarlet blanket”—fifty pieces of flesh from each arm. His adopted brother Jumping Bull was at his side, and using a razor-sharp awl, Jumping Bull began cutting Sitting Bull’s left arm, starting just above the wrist and working his way up toward the shoulder. Fifty times, he inserted the awl, pulled up the skin, and cut off a piece of flesh the size of a match head. Soon Sitting Bull’s arm was flowing with bright red blood as he cried to Wakan Tanka about how his people “wanted to be at peace with all, wanted plenty of food, wanted to live undisturbed in their own country.”
    A few years before, Frank Grouard had endured a similar ordeal. “The pain became so intense,” he remembered, “it seemed to dart in streaks from the point where the small particles of flesh were cut off to every portion of my body, until at last a stream of untold agony was pouring back and forth from my arms to my heart.” Sitting Bull, however, betrayed no sign of physical discomfort; what consumed him was a tearful and urgent appeal for the welfare of his people.
    Jumping Bull moved on to the right arm, and a half hour later, both of Sitting Bull’s punctured arms, as well as his hands and his fingers were covered in blood. He rose to his feet, and beneath a bright and punishing sun, his head encircled by a wreath of sage, he began to dance. For a day and a night, Sitting Bull danced, the blood coagulating into blackened scabs as the white plume of the eagle-bone whistle continued to bob up and down with each weary breath.
    Around noon on the second day, after more than twenty-four hours without food and water, he began to stagger. Black Moon, Jumping Bull, and several others rushed to his side and carefully laid him down on the ground and sprinkled water on his face. He revived and whispered to Black Moon. Sitting Bull, it was announced, had seen a vision. Just below the searing disk of the sun, he had seen a large number of soldiers and horses, along with some Indians, falling upside down into a village “like grasshoppers.” He also heard a voice say, “These soldiers do not possess ears,” a traditional Lakota expression meaning that the soldiers refused to listen.
    That day on the Rosebud, the Lakota and Cheyenne were joyful when they heard of Sitting Bull’s vision. They now knew they were to win a great victory against the white soldiers, who, as Sitting Bull had earlier predicted, were coming from the east.
    On the other side of the Rosebud, on a rise of land about a mile to the west, were the Deer Medicine Rocks, also known as the Rock Writing Bluff. This collection of tall, flat-sided rocks was covered with petroglyphs that were reputed to change over time and foretell