The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (51 page)

On July 8, 2009, at a restaurant in Deadwood, South Dakota, in the Black Hills, Ernie LaPointe spoke of his great-grandfather and the Battle of the Little Bighorn: “Historians are always saying that we are a defeated people, but slaughtering the buffalo, disarming and massacring old men, women, and children like they did at Wounded Knee doesn’t constitute victory. After all these years, after everything that’s happened, we still have the colors we won at the Little Bighorn, and that makes us strong.”

O
n the morning of June 28, 1876, Private Thomas Coleman was part of the burial detail assigned to Last Stand Hill. In his diary he composed a kind of prose poem entitled “Oh What a Slaughter”:

How many homes are made desolate by
The sad disaster, every one of them were scalped
And otherwise mutilated, but the General he
Lay with a smile on his face.

Others said Custer looked much as he did when taking a nap in the midst of a march: quietly relaxed and content, as if all were right with the world. Lieutenant Godfrey described Custer’s smile as a “calm, almost triumphant expression.”

As with so many aspects of this story, no one will ever know with any certainty what Custer was thinking at the time of his death. Did he look around and realize that, like the Spartans at Thermopylae and the Texans at the Alamo, all 210 troopers and civilians under his immediate command were dead or about to be? Did he, like Brutus in Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar,
take consolation in knowing that he would have “glory by this losing day,” and did he smile?

Or perhaps the smile was a simple attempt to reassure the officers and men who were still alive that even if he had fallen, they should carry on and prevail. Or was the smile directed to his brother Tom in grateful thanks for a mercy killing? Or did it signal a more private acknowledgment that Libbie’s father had been right all along, and he was about to die, as Judge Bacon had predicted, as “a soldier”?

Or perhaps Custer’s expression had nothing to do with the circumstances of his death. Perhaps the smile was applied to his lips postmortem as a sardonic commentary on the mutilations inflicted on his body by the Lakota and Cheyenne.

In the end, Custer’s smile remains a mystery, and people will make of it what they will.

I
n 1876 the American public used that smile to construct the myth that has become synonymous with Custer’s name, the myth of the Last Stand. The irony is that if the archaeological evidence and much of the Native oral testimony is to be believed, Custer’s thrust to the north barely gave him time for the kind of epic confrontation commonly associated with a Last Stand. In truth, the Battle of the Little Bighorn was the Last Stand not for Custer, who was on the attack almost to the very end, but for the nation he represented. With this battle and its sordid aftermath, climaxing so tragically in Wounded Knee, America, a nation that had spent the previous hundred years subduing its own interior, had nowhere left to go. With the frontier closed and the Indians on the reservations, America—the land of “Westward Ho!”—began to look overseas to Cuba, the Philippines, and beyond.

The Wild West of memory, however, continued to live on, and Custer remains an icon to this day. But the times have changed since Custer led the Seventh Cavalry to the Little Bighorn. Wars are no longer fought with arrows and single-shot carbines. There are weapons of mass destruction. Instead of several hundred dead and a guarantee of eternal fame, a Last Stand in the future might mean the devastation of a continent.

Sitting Bull is known today for stalwart resistance, for being the last of his tribe to surrender to the U.S. government. But at the Little Bighorn, he did not want to fight. He wanted to talk. This may be his most important legacy. As he recognized when he instructed his nephew to approach Reno’s skirmish line with a shield instead of a rifle, our children are best served not by a self-destructive blaze of glory, but by the hardest path of all: survival.

APPENDIX A

The Seventh Cavalry on the Afternoon of June 25, 1876

P
rior to the battle, Custer organized the twelve companies of his regiment into three units, known as battalions. Custer commanded the largest battalion of five companies, and Major Marcus Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen commanded their own battalions of three companies each. There is evidence that Custer further divided his own battalion into Right and Left wings, consisting of Companies C, I, and L and Companies E and F, respectively. In addition, the 175-mule pack train, escorted by Captain Thomas McDougall’s B Company, operated as a largely independent entity, meaning that Custer’s approximately 670-man regiment was split into four separate components when the battle began.

Below is a listing of the officers and enlisted men mentioned in the text, as well as the guides, scouts, and interpreters who accompanied the Seventh Cavalry on that historic day in 1876.

CUSTER’S BATTALION

(five companies, approximately 215 men)
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Commanding:
Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer

Staff:
First Lieutenant William Cooke, Adjutant

Captain Thomas Custer, Aide-de-Camp
George Lord, Assistant Surgeon
Mitch Boyer, Interpreter
Boston Custer, Guide
Mark Kellogg, Attached Newspaper Correspondent
Autie Reed, Accompanying Civilian

Custer’s Right Wing

(three companies, approximately 115 men)

Commanding:
Captain Myles Keogh

C Company

Commanding:
Second Lieutenant Henry Harrington
First Sergeant L. Edwin Bobo; Sergeants George Finckle,
Jeremiah Finley, Richard Hanley, and Daniel Kanipe;
Corporal Henry French; Privates James Bennett, John Jordan,
John Mahoney, John McGuire Jr., Peter Thompson, James Watson,
and Alfred Whittaker

I Company

Commanding:
Captain Myles Keogh
Second-in-Command:
First Lieutenant James Porter
First Sergeant Frank Varden; Private Gustave Korn

L Company

Commanding:
First Lieutenant James Calhoun
Second-in-Command:
Second Lieutenant John Crittenden
First Sergeant James Butler; Private John Burkman

Custer’s Left Wing

(two companies, approximately 100 men)

Commanding:
Captain George Yates

E Company

Commanding:
First Lieutenant Algernon Smith
Second-in-Command:
Second Lieutenant James Sturgis
First Sergeant Frederick Hohmeyer

F Company

Commanding:
Captain George Yates
Second-in-Command:
Second Lieutenant William Van Reily
First Sergeant Michael Kenney; Privates Edward Davern, Dennis Lynch,
and James Rooney
Crow Scouts:
Curley, Goes Ahead, Hairy Moccasin, and White Man Runs Him

RENO’S BATTALION

(three companies, approximately 131 men)

Commanding:
Major Marcus Reno

Staff:
Lieutenant Benjamin Hodgson, Adjutant

Henry Porter, Acting Assistant Surgeon
James DeWolf, Acting Assistant Surgeon

A Company

Commanding:
Captain Myles Moylan
Second-in-Command:
First Lieutenant Charles DeRudio
First Sergeant William Heyn; Sergeants Ferdinand Culbertson, Henry
Fehler, and Stanislas Roy; Trumpeters William Hardy and David
McVeigh; Privates William Nugent and William Taylor

G Company

Commanding:
First Lieutenant Donald McIntosh
Second-in-Command:
Second Lieutenant George Wallace
Acting First Sergeant Edward Botzer; Privates Theodore Goldin,
Benjamin Johnson, Samuel McCormick, John McVay, Thomas O’Neill,
and Henry Petring

M Company

Commanding:
Captain Thomas French
First Sergeant John Ryan; Sergeants Miles O’Hara and Charles White;
Privates John Donahue, Henry Gordon, George Lorentz, William Meyer,
William Morris, Daniel Newell, Edward Pigford, Roman Rutten, John
Sivertsen, William Slaper, James Tanner, and Henry Voight

Scouts/Guides/Interpreters with Reno’s Battalion

(approximately 35 men)

Commanding:
Second Lieutenant Charles Varnum
Second-in-Command:
Second Lieutenant Luther Hare
Interpreters:
Isaiah Dorman and Frederic Gerard
Scout:
George Herendeen

Guide:
Charley Reynolds

Arikara Guides and Scouts:
Bloody Knife, Bobtail Bull, Bull, Forked Horn, Goose, Left Hand, Little Brave, One Feather, Red Bear, Red Star, Soldier, Stabbed, and Young Hawk

Crow Scouts:
Half Yellow Face and White Swan
Pikuni Scout:
William Jackson
Two Kettle Lakota Scout:
William Cross

BENTEEN’S BATTALION

(three companies, approximately 113 men)

Commanding:
Captain Frederick Benteen

D Company

Commanding:
Captain Thomas Weir
Second-in-Command:
Second Lieutenant Winfield Edgerly
Sergeants James Flanagan and Thomas Harrison; Corporal George
Wylie; Farrier Vincent Charley; Private Patrick Golden

H Company

Commanding:
Captain Frederick Benteen
Second-in-Command:
First Lieutenant Francis Gibson
First Sergeant Joseph McCurry; Blacksmith Henry Mechling; Privates
Jacob Adams, William George, George Glenn, and Charles Windolph

K Company

Commanding:
First Lieutenant Edward Godfrey
First Sergeant Dewitt Winney; Saddler Michael Madden; Privates Charles
Burkhardt and Jacob Horner

PACK TRAIN

(approximately 120 soldiers and 11 citizen packers)

Commanding:
First Lieutenant Edward Mathey
Citizen Packers (mentioned in the text):
Benjamin Churchill, John Frett, and
John Wagoner

Escorted by B Company

Commanding:
Captain Thomas McDougall
First Sergeant James Hill

APPENDIX B

Sitting Bull’s Village on June 25, 1876

T
here were two major tribes represented at the Battle of the Little Bighorn: the Lakota (also known as the Teton Sioux) and the Cheyenne, along with a small number of Arapaho and Santee Sioux. Of the Lakota, there were seven bands: the Blackfeet, Brulé, Hunkpapa, Minneconjou, Oglala, Sans Arcs, and Two Kettles. Below is a listing of the participants mentioned in the text, grouped alphabetically by tribe and band.
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