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

“anything important that will happen that year.” That day on the Rosebud, a new picture appeared on one of the stones depicting “a bunch of soldiers with their heads hanging down.”
    The people were jubilant, but Sitting Bull’s vision contained a troubling coda. For the last decade, the Hunkpapa leader had urged his people to resist the temptation of reservation life. The promise of easy food and clothing was, he insisted, too good to be true. That day on the Rosebud, the voice in Sitting Bull’s sun dance vision said that even though the Indians would win a great victory, they must not take any of the normal spoils of war.
    The defeat of the soldiers had been guaranteed by Wakan Tanka. But the battle was also, it turned out, a test. If the Lakota and Cheyenne were to see Sitting Bull’s sun dance vision to its proper conclusion, they must deny their desires for the material goods of the washichus.

CHAPTER 5

    The Scout
    O n his deathbed in 1866, Libbie Custer’s father, Judge Daniel Bacon, made a most unsettling observation. “Armstrong was born a soldier,” he told his daughter, “and it is better even if you sorrow your life long that he die as he would wish, a soldier.” It was not a sentiment Libbie shared. “Oh Autie,” she wrote her husband during the Civil War, “we must die together. Better the hum-blest life together than the loftiest, divided.”
    On the year of Judge Bacon’s deathbed exhortation, Custer visited a psychic in New York City who told him everything Libbie wanted to hear: He would have four children and live to “seventy or more.” The psychic also told him he was considering “changing businesses,” to either the railroads or mining, which happened to be exactly what Custer was contemplating at the time. Best of all, the fortune-teller confirmed the metaphysics of Custer luck: “I was always fortunate since the hour of my birth and always would be. My guardian angel has clung to my side since the day I left the cradle.”
    Over the course of the intervening decade, almost none of the psychic’s predictions had come true. Libbie and Custer remained childless. It was just as well, Custer insisted. “How troublesome and embarrassing babies would be to us . . . ,” he wrote in 1868. “Our married life to me has been one unbroken sea of pleasure.”
    Custer’s flirtation with business also did not pan out. By the winter of 1876, a poorly timed investment in a silver mine combined with a series of risky railroad stock speculations had brought him to the brink of financial disaster. That January, while he and Libbie were in New York City soaking up Julius Caesar, he pleaded with Generals Sheridan and Terry to extend his leave until April so that he could attend to his affairs; otherwise, he grimly claimed in a telegram, he stood to lose ten thousand dollars and would “be thrown into bankruptcy.” The extension was not forthcoming, and he and Libbie (who would not know the full extent of her husband’s financial woes until after his death) returned to Fort Lincoln.
    In the end, he was neither the father of a growing brood of babies nor a budding millionaire; he was merely, as Judge Bacon had known all along, a soldier. But even that had been threatened during his run-in with President Grant. Quivering on the brink of professional and financial ruin, he was now headed, he fervently hoped, for a reunion with his guardian angel. If Terry would only give him the opportunity to find and catch the Indians, all would once again be well.
    In the meantime, as he waited with his regiment beside the Powder River for Terry’s return from his meeting with Gibbon and the Montana Column on the Yellowstone, Custer spent every spare moment writing his next article for the Galaxy magazine. As Libbie had assured him, writing was his true destiny, and even though he was supposed to be directing preparations for the scout to the Tongue River, Custer sat in his tent composing an account of his early days in the Civil War. “It is now nearly midnight,” he wrote Libbie after a long day of writing capped by a simple dinner of bread drenched in syrup, “and I must go to bed, for reveille comes at three.”
    At 9:50 p.m. on Friday, June 9, General Terry arrived back at the Powder River encampment in a driving rain. The next morning he met with the officers of the Seventh. He had big news. Major Marcus Reno—not, as had generally been assumed, Custer—would be leading the scout to the