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

way up the watery tendrils of both the Rosebud and Bighorn rivers. In addition to the soldiers of the Dakota and Montana columns, there was the steamboat Far West, which after ferrying Gibbon’s troops across the Yellowstone was now pushing against the current toward the mouth of the Little Bighorn.
    These armies and what the Indians called the “fireboat” represented an unprecedented threat, but times had changed since the Battle of Killdeer Mountain. Like the soldiers, the Lakota and Cheyenne were armed with pistols and rifles, including repeaters made by Henry and Winchester that gave them an advantage over the soldiers’ single-shot Springfields when the fighting was at close quarters. The Indians were also armed with a renewed sense of outrage over the seizure of the Black Hills. They had already repelled Crook’s army when the camp had been half this size. What these warriors, who had their women and children to defend, would do if attacked once again was frightening to contemplate. As decades of intertribal warfare had taught, too complete a victory was never, in the long run, good for the victor. Nothing inspired the enemy like revenge.
    That evening on the hill overlooking the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull brought his pipe, some buckskin-wrapped tobacco tied to sticks of cherry, along with a buffalo robe. He presented the offerings to Wakan Tanka and, standing, began to chant. “Great Spirit,” he said, “pity me. In the name of the tribe I offer this pipe. Wherever the sun, the moon, the earth, the four points of the winds, there you are always. Father, save the tribe, I beg you. Pity me, we wish to live. Guard us against all misfortunes or calamities. Pity me.”
    Meanwhile, in the valley below, the Cheyenne Wooden Leg was having what he later remembered as the time of his life. Unlike the week before, he had no interest in sneaking out of the village in search of soldiers. He had other priorities on the night of June 24. “My mind was occupied mostly by such thoughts as are regularly uppermost in the minds of young men,” he remembered. “I was eighteen years old, and I liked girls.”
    He soon found himself beside a bonfire, where young people danced around a pole standing in the center of the Cheyenne circle. “It seemed that peace and happiness was prevailing all over the world,” he remembered, “that nowhere was any man planning to lift his hand against his fellow man.”

CHAPTER 8

    The Crow’s Nest
    I t was already beginning to get dark when Frederick Benteen arrived at the night’s campsite on the Rosebud. Captain Myles Keogh, who was a thirty-six-year-old Irishman and the leader of I Company, was there to greet him. “Come here, old man,” he called out. “I’ve kept the nicest spot in the whole camp next to me for your troop.” “Bully for you, Keogh!” Benteen responded. “I’m your man.”
    Keogh had been born to a well-to-do Catholic family in county Carlow and at twenty left for Italy to join the army of Pope Pius IX in its battle against Garibaldi’s Italian revolutionaries. He was recognized for his bravery, and after the eventual defeat of the papal forces, he headed for America to fight in the Civil War. Once again, Keogh distinguished himself as a gallant and trustworthy officer. Like Custer (whom he first met while serving on General McClellan’s staff), he looked good on a horse, and like Custer, he knew it. Remembered one officer, “His uniform was spotless and fitted him like the skin on a sausage.”
    But Myles Keogh was no Custer. “A certain lack of sensitiveness is necessary to be successful,” he reflected in a letter to one of his many siblings back in Ireland. “This lack of sensitiveness I unfortunately [did] not inherit.” He’d fallen in love with a young widow at the end of the Civil War, and when she died in June of 1866, he was heartbroken. Whether or not it was because of this loss, Keogh drank more than was good for him. He was so often “hopelessly boozy,” remembered Libbie Custer, that he’d been forced to hand over the management of his financial affairs to his orderly.
    Keogh, ever the dandy, wore buckskins like the Custers, but he was by no means a member of the Custer clique. Custer had no patience with Keogh’s sentimentality and fits of depression; his frequent requests for leave meant that he’d missed every major engagement in the regiment’s nearly decade-long history. Just this last winter, Keogh had once again