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

1876—

    They made camp at what may be one of the most hauntingly beautiful valleys in the world. On the east side of the river is a ridge of rolling hills, a miniature mountain range of grass and sagebrush that follows the river for about eight miles. To the south, the hills stand up against the river in precipitous bluffs that loom as high as three hundred feet. Moving downstream to the north, the hills back away from the river and soften into undulating grasslands that look bland enough from a distance but are cut and enfolded in deceptively complex ways. The Lakota called this river the Greasy Grass. Some said this referred to the muddy, alkaline slickness of the surrounding grass after a heavy rain; others said it was because of the milky foam created by the ponies when they chewed a kind of seed pod unique to the grass near the river’s headwaters.
    All spring and summer, Wooden Leg’s people, the Cheyenne, had been leading the Lakota to each new campsite, and they were the first to set up their tepees on the west bank of the Little Bighorn, across the river from the northern portion of the ridge. Behind them to the west spread a wide plain where the huge pony herd could graze on the fertile grass while remaining within easy access of the village and the river.
    Just upriver from the Cheyenne were the Sans Arcs, followed by the Minneconjou, who made camp directly across from a V-shaped fold in the hillside to the east. This portion of the Little Bighorn, where a beaver dam caused the river to swell into a deep placid pool, came to be known as Minneconjou Ford. The next tribal circle was taken by Crazy Horse’s people, the Oglala, who were located well back from the river, to the south and west of the Minneconjou. Finally, at the southernmost point of the village, were Sitting Bull’s people, the Hunkpapa, whose circle, the largest of the village, was adjacent to a thick stand of timber on the river’s western bank.
    Diagonally across the river from the Cheyenne circle, at the northernmost point of a narrow hogback ridge that paralleled the meandering Little Bighorn, was a high, flat-topped hill. That evening, as the sun began to set, Sitting Bull and his nephew One Bull climbed to this tabular peak. Below them, they could see the entire village spread out for almost two miles. Twelve years before, when Sitting Bull was thirty-three years old, he’d witnessed a similar scene from Killdeer Mountain in North Dakota. A huge village, much like this one, had assembled, and on July 28, 1864, it was attacked by an army of twenty-two hundred soldiers.
    For Sitting Bull and the Hunkpapa, what became known as the Battle of Killdeer Mountain was their introduction to the washichus’ way of war. When the soldiers began the attack, the Lakota’s confidence was so high that they left their tepees standing as the women, children, and old men climbed into the surrounding hills to watch the fighting.
    It soon became clear, however, that the soldiers’ modern weaponry made it impossible for the warriors, who were equipped with bows and arrows and a handful of old muskets, to resist the army’s onslaught. By the end of the day the entire village was in flames, and the Lakota were on the run.
    About a week after the Battle of Killdeer Mountain, in the badlands along the Little Missouri River, the Hunkpapa found themselves in another skirmish with the soldiers. During a lull in the fighting, Sitting Bull shouted out an exasperated question to the soldiers’ Indian scouts on the other side of an echoing gorge. “The Indians here have no fight with the whites,” he said. “Why is it the whites come to fight with the Indians?”
    Twelve years later, Sitting Bull was still waiting for an answer.

    T he Lakota believed that the first white man had come from the sea, which they called mniwoncha, meaning “water all over.” The sea was also home to another predator, the shark. The Lakota had a word of warning, “Wamunitu!” that had come to them, the intrepreter Billy Garnett claimed, from the Indians who lived near the Atlantic Ocean, where sharks sometimes threatened their swimming children. There were no sharks in the rivers and lakes of the northern plains, but when it came time for their children to get out of the water, the Lakota nonetheless cried “Wamunitu!”—an admonition that, like the washichus, had worked its inevitable way west.
    Now, if the scouts were to be believed, the washichus were working their