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

“turned his wild man loose.”

    —GENERAL TERRY’S PLAN, June 20, 1876—

    T erry was six feet two inches tall. He had a bushy black beard that concealed a long and thoughtful face. It was impossible not to like General Terry, but behind his air of forthright magnanimity lurked something unexpected: a crafty and calculating intelligence that seems to have caught Custer, who emerged from the meeting on the Far West strangely shaken and depressed, almost completely off guard.
    Terry was that most egotistical of egotists: the humble man. Unlike Custer, who compulsively needed to tell anyone who would listen how great he was, Terry was patient and smart enough to let others do the praising for him. He was modest, but he was also, as he admitted in a letter to his sister, “day-velish sly.”
    Before Custer became the mythic figure we know today, he was a lieutenant colonel desperate to find a way to salvage his reputation after his run-in with President Grant. Custer did not stride through history doing what he wanted; he, like any military man, spent most of his time following orders.
    It is often said that the road to the Little Bighorn began with Custer’s Black Hills Expedition of 1874. But Custer was not the prime mover in his own career. That expedition would not, in all likelihood, have happened without Alfred Terry’s prior approval. Terry had helped draft the Treaty of 1868, and only after he had assured Sheridan that it was legal “to make surveys and explorations” in land that had been granted in perpetuity to the Lakota did Sheridan go through with the expedition. It’s true that Terry subsequently objected to granting land claims to the miners who then flooded into the Black Hills, but by then it was too late—the process that had begun with his legal opinion could no longer be reversed.
    Terry had a lawyer’s talent for crafting documents that appeared to say one thing but were couched in language that could allow for an entirely different interpretation should circumstances require it. The written orders Custer received on the morning of June 22 are a case in point. On their surface they seem to say that Custer has been granted free rein. But lurking beneath the orders’ sometimes fulsome surface are hidden qualifiers.
It is of course impossible to give you any definite instructions in regard to this movement [Terry’s orders read], and, were it not impossible to do so, the Dept. Commander places too much confidence in your zeal, energy and ability to impose on you precise orders which might hamper your action when nearly in contact with the enemy [italics mine].
    As Terry’s aide, Colonel Hughes, later pointed out, whatever latitude Terry had granted Custer applied only, thanks to that final clause, to the moments just prior to the attack. Anything he did before encountering the Indians must conform to the letter of Terry’s orders, which carefully directed him to continue up the Rosebud even if the Indian trail “be found (and it appears to be almost certain that it will be found) to turn toward the Little [Big] Horn.” With these orders, Terry had managed to protect his reputation no matter what the outcome. If Custer bolted for the village and claimed a great victory, it was because Terry had had the wisdom to give him an independent command. If Custer did so and failed, it was because he had disobeyed Terry’s written orders.
    Left unsaid, or at least unrecorded, during the meeting aboard the Far West was the possibility that instead of attacking the Indian village, Custer might do what he had done after the Battle of the Washita and attempt to bring the Indians in peacefully. Given that Terry had taken a leading role in the government’s negotiations with the Lakota, it might be assumed that he would have been inclined to at least discuss the option.
    There is a tantalizing reference in a May 23 letter written by one of the Seventh Cavalry’s medical staff, Dr. James DeWolf. “General Terry, I learn, wishes to try first to bring the Indians into the Reservation & if they won’t come, to fight them. He, I believe, is not in favor of the treatment they have received for some time past.” If Terry did, in fact, express this sentiment, he did not choose to share that view with the press. A week earlier he had told the reporter Mark Kellogg “that there was to be no child’s play as regards the Indians. They must be taught that the Government was not to be trifled with, and