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

warriors had departed for the upper portion of the Rosebud to the south. Reluctantly Sitting Bull, his arms still scabbed and swollen, joined them for the night ride across the divide to the soldiers. As was so often the case, the young warriors had no ears.

    G eorge Custer might fancy himself America’s premier Indian fighter, but it was George Crook, the commander of the Wyoming Column, who had achieved the actual results. In many ways he was the anti-Custer. Instead of dressing up like a buckskinned dandy, he affected a grubby anonymity; in fact, he looked so ordinary in his dirty shirt and shapeless black hat that at least one new recruit had mistaken him for an enlisted man—much to Crook’s amusement. But once you studied his face—two piercing eyes above a biblical beard tied into two sloppy braids—you detected a troubling, oddly Zen-like zealotry.
    Crook had spent the last few years in the Southwest hunting the Apache. He’d been so successful that it had been Crook, not Custer, who’d been elevated two grades from lieutenant colonel to brigadier general. (Custer’s Civil War rank of major general had been only a brevet, or honorary, rank.) Crook was the one who’d pioneered the technique of using pack mules instead of wagons to transport his regiment’s supplies, the technique that the Seventh Cavalry was now belatedly learning. Traveling light and fast, he had gained a reputation for relentless pursuit.
    But his real secret was in his use of Indian scouts—not just scouts from rival tribes, but scouts from the very people he was pursuing. “To polish a diamond,” he later told a reporter, “there is nothing like its own dust. It is the same with these fellows. Nothing breaks them up like turning their own people against them. They don’t fear the white soldiers, whom they easily surpass in the peculiar style of warfare which they force upon us, but put upon their trail an enemy of their own blood, an enemy as tireless, as foxy, and as stealthy and familiar with the country as they themselves, and it breaks them all up. It is not merely a question of catching them better with Indians, but of a broader and more enduring aim—their disintegration.”
    Crook was confident that he’d found the key to subduing Indians, and he came to the northern plains with the expectation of doing unto the Lakota and Cheyenne what he’d done to the Apache. In the middle of May he traveled to the Red Cloud Agency with the intention of recruiting at least three hundred Lakota scouts.
    But when he met with Red Cloud, he encountered some unexpected resistance. The Oglala chief lived on a government agency, but this did not mean he approved of the government’s war. His own teenage son Jack was on his way to Sitting Bull’s village. “They are brave and ready to fight for their country,” Red Cloud warned the general and his staff. “They are not afraid of the soldiers nor of their chief. . . . Every lodge will send its young men, and they all will say of the Great Father’s dogs, ‘Let them come!’ ” Crook left the agency without recruiting a single Oglala scout.
    In the weeks ahead, Crook had to settle for some Crows and Shoshone. He also had the services of Frank Grouard, the Kanaka scout who had found the Cheyenne village back in March. By the morning of June 17, when Crook called a halt within a wide, rolling amphitheater of grass, he was still supremely confident that he had the manpower—more than eleven hundred soldiers—required to handle anything the Indians could throw at him. He had no idea where the Dakota and Montana columns commanded by General Terry were at that moment, but all the better. The victory would be his and his alone.
    Crook was so confident, in fact, that he’d dispensed with the pack train that had made his earlier successes possible. The Lakota, he predicted, “would never stand punishment as the Apaches had done.” This was going to be a quick and decisive battle, and there was no need for a pack train. As they waited beside the Rosebud for word from the Crow scouts, Crook and his staff played a hand of cards.
    They began to hear sounds of shooting to the north, but Crook, who was a man of exceedingly few words, appeared unconcerned. Some Crow scouts rode down out of the hills and breathlessly reported that a large number of Lakota were headed their way. Then they heard what Grouard called “the Sioux war-cry.” Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and the seven hundred