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

itself in the midst of a squalid little war against the embattled Sioux and Cheyenne of the northern plains. In the end, he had been powerless to stop the American push for more. Not that he had tried very hard or refused to let his own administration participate in the pillage, but it must have been sad and infuriating to see America’s celebration of its centennial come down to this: the rude, derisive silence of several thousand people withholding their applause.

    O n May 10, 1876, the same day that President Grant spoke in Philadelphia, Custer and General Terry arrived at Bismarck. From there they took the ferry across the Missouri River to Fort Lincoln: a ramshackle collection of wooden buildings surrounding a muddy parade ground with the wide brown ditch of the river flowing beside it.
    There was room at Fort Lincoln for only a portion of the regiment, so a small city of tents had sprung up beside it. In addition to the twelve companies of the Seventh Cavalry, there were several companies of infantry housed in nearby Fort McKeen. Sixty-five Arikara Indian scouts, who lived with their families at Fort Lincoln in a hamlet of log huts, were also participating in the campaign, along with 114 teamsters and their large canvas-topped wagons, each pulled by six mules and containing between three thousand and five thousand pounds of forage. General Terry, who had gained fame near the close of the Civil War by leading an impeccably organized assault on the supposedly impregnable Confederate stronghold at Fort Fisher, estimated that the column’s sixteen hundred horses and mules required a staggering twelve thousand pounds of grain a day. By his calculations, they might need every one of these wagons before reaching the Yellowstone River, where they would be replenished by the Far West .
    There were hopes, however, that this might be a short campaign. One hundred and fifty miles to the west, approximately halfway between Fort Lincoln and their rendezvous point on the Yellowstone, was the Little Missouri River. According to a recent scouting report, Sitting Bull was encamped somewhere along this river with fifteen hundred lodges and three thousand warriors. A force that size would have outnumbered the Seventh Cavalry’s approximately 750 officers and enlisted men by about four to one. But Custer did not appear concerned. As he’d bragged to a group of businessmen in New York City that spring, the Seventh Cavalry “could whip and defeat all the Indians on the plains.”
    By most accounts, Custer was bubbling with even more than the usual enthusiasm when he arrived at Fort Lincoln with his niece and nephew from Monroe, Michigan, and with two canaries for his wife, Libbie. One soldier described him as “happy as a boy with a new red sled.” General Grant had done his best to ruin him, but thanks to the intercession of what he called “Custer luck,” he was back at Fort Lincoln and on the cusp of yet another one of his spectacular comebacks. The presence of General Terry was certainly a bother, but he had surmounted worse obstacles in the past.

    I n the nine years since Custer chased his first buffalo across the plains of Kansas, his career had zigged and zagged like the Missouri River. His first summer in the West in 1867 had been filled with frustration. The Cheyenne had made a mockery of his attempts to pursue them. When his men began to desert wholesale for the goldfields to the west, Custer overreacted and ordered some of them shot. But it was the long absence from his wife that finally undid him. At least at night, Libbie had spent much of the Civil War by her husband’s side, but this wasn’t possible when chasing Indians across the plains. At one point, Custer abandoned his regiment and dashed to Libbie, covering more than 150 miles on horseback in just sixty hours. From Libbie’s standpoint, it was all wonderfully romantic and resulted in what she later remembered as “one long perfect day,” but it almost ruined Custer’s career. He was court-martialed and sentenced to a year’s unpaid leave.
    Outwardly, Custer remained unrepentant, claiming he’d been made a scapegoat for the failings of his superiors. Still, for a former major general who was now, under the diminished circumstances of the peacetime army, a mere lieutenant colonel (although, for courtesy’s sake, he was still addressed as General Custer), this was a potentially disastrous development. Then, as happened time and again throughout