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

Like stationary fireflies, the lodges intermittently flared with fat-fueled flame, glowing softly through the tepees’ translucent buffalo hides.
    Some have claimed that nomads are the happiest people on earth. To be always on the move, to be forever free of the boundaries, schedules, and material goods that circumscribe a sedentary existence, more than offset the dangers and discomforts of rootlessness. Late in life, the Cheyenne Wooden Leg admitted that living on the reservation had its compensations. “It is pleasant to be situated where I can sleep soundly every night, without fear that my horses may be stolen or that myself or my friends may be crept upon and killed.” And yet, when he looked back on his life as a young warrior, “when every man had to be brave,” he knew when he had been the most contented and fulfilled. “I wish I could live again through some of the past days,” he said, “when it was the first thought of every prospering Indian to send out the call: ‘Hoh-ohoh-oh, friends: Come. Come. Come. I have plenty of buffalo meat. I have coffee. I have sugar. I have tobacco. Come, friends, feast and smoke with me.’”

    A round sunset on June 22, Custer sat on the cot in his A-frame field tent, waiting for his officers to arrive. Gradually they assembled about him, some squatting, some standing, some chatting in hushed tones in the deepening twilight.
    Since leaving the Far West close to noon, they had marched just twelve miles before camping beneath a steep bluff beside the Rosebud River. Given Custer’s earlier warnings about ruthless pursuit of the Indians, it had been an unexpectedly easy day, and now as he spoke to them about the march ahead, there was, Lieutenant Godfrey remembered, an “indefinable something that was not Custer.”
    His officers expected him to be, Lieutenant Gibson wrote, “dominant and self reliant.” But on the evening of June 22, with his officers gathered around him, Custer seemed in the grip of what Gibson called “a queer sort of depression”—a depression that dated back just twenty-four hours to his discussions with General Terry aboard the Far West.
    At some point during those talks, Terry had halfheartedly floated the possibility that they change the plan. Instead of Custer leading the Seventh up the Rosebud, maybe it would be better if he (Terry) led a column that contained both the Seventh and a battalion of the Second Cavalry. When Custer strenuously objected, Terry quickly backed down. But the damage had been done. In his hesitant and evasive way, Terry had unintentionally planted the seeds of doubt and paranoia in a psyche that not even the president of the United States had been able to crack.
    As his striker, John Burkman, could attest, Custer had a tendency to overreact. “That’s the way he always was,” Burkman remembered, “flying off the handle suddenly, maybe sometimes without occasion.” In this instance, Custer leapt to the conclusion that Terry’s eleventh-hour failure of confidence had been instigated by comments made by the hated Marcus Reno. In actuality Major Brisbin of the Second Cavalry had been the one whispering in Terry’s ear, but Custer would never know that. The thought that one of his own officers had been scheming against him seems to have become a major distraction to Custer, and at officer’s call on the evening of June 22 he was not his usual cocksure self.
    In the past, Custer had followed the model of Napoleon, telling his subordinates as little as possible about his intentions. That night it seemed as if he needed to justify his every decision. He’d opted against the Gatling guns, he explained, so as not to “hamper our movements.” He’d decided against the offer of an extra battalion from the Second Cavalry because he felt the Seventh “could whip any force” of Indians it was likely to meet. He claimed that he’d done some research that spring at the Indian Bureau in Washington, D.C., and he was confident that even with infusions from the agencies, there were no more than fifteen hundred warriors under Sitting Bull. And besides, if in the unlikely event they should encounter an overwhelming force of Indians, the extra troopers from the Second Cavalry, which would inevitably create “jealousy and friction” between the two regiments, would not, in all probability, be enough to “save us from defeat.” The most important consideration, he insisted, was that there be “sure harmony” within