The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (55 page)

In
My Life on the Plains,
Custer unflinchingly lingered on Monahsetah’s considerable physical charms. She was, Custer wrote, “an exceedingly comely squaw, possessing a bright, cheery face, a countenance beaming with intelligence, and a disposition more inclined to be merry than one usually finds among the Indians. She was probably rather under than over twenty years of age. Added to the bright, laughing eyes, a set of pearly teeth, and a rich complexion, her well-shaped head was crowned with a luxuriant growth of the most beautiful silken tresses, rivaling in color the blackness of the raven and extending, when allowed to fall loosely over her shoulders, to below her waist,” p. 282. In 1890, fourteen years after her husband’s death, Libbie published
Following the Guidon,
in which she described her first meeting with Monahsetah at Fort Hays, Kansas, in 1869. “How could I help feeling,” she wrote, “that with a swift movement she would produce a weapon, and by stabbing the wife, hurt the white chief who had captured her, in what she believed would be the most cruel way,” p. 95. In this passage Libbie somehow manages to acknowledge the threat Monahsetah posed to her marriage without betraying the truth of her husband’s infidelity.

Libbie wrote of Custer’s relationship with the actor Lawrence Barrett in
Tenting on the Plains,
p. 220; she also referred to how Barrett typically greeted her husband: “Well, old fellow; hard at work making history, are you?” Libbie wrote of how Custer sat spellbound, performance after performance, watching Barrett perform as Cassius in Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar:
“There were forty nights that these friends sat side by side, until the call boy summoned the actor to the footlights. The General listened every evening with unflagging interest to the acting of his friend,” in
Boots and Saddles,
p. 208. Early in their marriage, Libbie was taken with how thoroughly Custer immersed himself in a play, remarking that he “laughed at the fun and cried at the pathos in the theatres with all the abandon of a boy unconscious of surroundings,” in Frost, p. 94.

My account of Grant Marsh’s encounter with Libbie and the other officers’ wives is based on Hanson, pp. 237–40. John Burkman’s description of Libbie and Custer’s farewell is in Wagner, pp. 123–24. Libbie wrote of her mistaken impression that Custer had “made every plan” to have her join him by steamboat in
Boots and Saddles,
p. 219. John Neihardt’s description of Marsh as a “born commander” is from
The River and I,
p. 250. Libbie wrote of how terrible it was “to be left behind” in
Boots and Saddles,
p. 60. Thomas Marquis in “Pioneer Woman Describes Ft. Abraham Lincoln Scenes When Word Came of the Custer Disaster,”
Billings Gazette,
Nov. 13, 1932, quotes a Mrs. J. C. Chappell (who was eleven years old in 1876) as saying that Libbie told her mother, Mrs. Manley, that “she never had seen her husband depart on active service with so heavy a heart. . . . She was grievously disappointed that Captain Marsh was not willing she should be a passenger in the
Far West
.”

My description of Marsh’s two exploring expeditions up the Yellowstone, in 1873 and 1875, are based on Hanson, pp. 197–225. According to an article in the Sept. 23, 1873,
New York Tribune:
“It seems not a little singular . . . that one of our largest and most beautiful rivers . . . should remain entirely unexplored by large steamers until the year 1873.”

Chapter 2:
The Dream

My description of a butte is largely based on the description by Ellen Meloy in
Home Ground,
edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney, p. 57. My description of Sitting Bull’s actions in this chapter are based on the “Prophecy of Sitting Bull As Told to One Bull,” box 110, folder 8, WCC. Interestingly, Campbell/Vestal chose not to include any mention of this particular vision in his biography of Sitting Bull. As Raymond DeMallie writes in “ ‘These Have No Ears’: Narrative and Ethnohistorical Method,” the vision of two clouds colliding was “redundant in a narrative sense” when paired with Sitting Bull’s more well-known sun dance vision described in chapter 4. “To Campbell,” DeMallie writes, “the second prophecy apparently seemed unnecessary—a kind of afterthought,” p. 523. DeMallie refers to an account interpreted by Robert Higheagle, box 104, WCC, that places this prophecy
after
Sitting Bull’s sun dance vision. I’ve chosen to follow Robert Utley in
The Lance and the Shield,
who places this vision prior to the sun dance, sometime between May 21 and May 24, p. 136. This chronology is corroborated by Ernie LaPointe, the great-grandson of Sitting Bull, in “Thank You Grandfather, We Are Still Alive,” part 2 of his film
The Authorized Biography of Sitting Bull
. Although several details of the vision vary in LaPointe’s account, he also places Sitting Bull’s vision of the collision of what he describes as “two whirl-winds” prior to the sun dance.

In describing Sitting Bull’s village, I have relied on
Wooden Leg,
interpreted by Thomas Marquis, who mentions the number of buffalo skins required to make a tepee, p. 77. According to the scout Ben Clark, a “tepee of freshly-skinned buffalo skins was always white as snow. Always made of cow skins tanned as soft as buckskin and very pliable. If bull hide tanned had to split where hump and sew up with sinews,” in James Foley, “Walter Camp and Ben Clark,” p. 26. My thanks to Jeremy Guinn and Rick Delougharie, who conducted a Buffalo Brain Tanning Workshop at Porcupine, North Dakota, while I was visiting the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in June 2007.

Charles Eastman in
Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains
wrote that Sitting Bull’s “legs were bowed like the ribs of the ponies that he rode constantly from childhood,” p. 108. Even though Sitting Bull walked with a noticeable limp, he managed to win a running race against a white cowboy at the Standing Rock Agency when he was a relatively old man, proclaiming, “A white man has no business to challenge a deer,” in Vestal’s
New Sources of Indian History,
p. 345. My description of Sitting Bull’s killing of the Crow chief is based on several accounts at WCC: Circling Hawk, box 105, notebook 13; One Bull, “Information in Sioux and English with Regard to Sitting Bull,” MS box 104, folder 11; Little Soldier, c. 1932, box 104, folder 6; One Bull, MS 127, box 104, One Bull folder, no. 11. The incident is also described by Vestal,
Sitting Bull
pp. 27–30, and in Robert Utley’s
The Lance and the Shield,
p. 21.

Vestal describes Sitting Bull’s high singing voice in
Sitting Bull,
p. 21, and adds, “[T]here was a theme-song appropriate to every occasion,” p. 22. See also Frances Densmore’s
Teton Sioux Music and Culture,
p. 458. The song Sitting Bull sang while charging the Crow chief is in “25 Songs by Sitting Bull,” by Robert Higheagle, box 104, folder 18, WCC. On the early history of the plains tribes, see William Swagerty’s “History of the United States Plains Until 1850” in
Plains,
edited by Raymond DeMallie, vol. 13 of the
Handbook of North American Indians,
pp. 256–79, and DeMallie’s “Sioux Until 1850,” also in the
Handbook,
pp. 718–27, in which he decribes Radisson’s impressions of the Sioux. My thanks to Professor DeMallie in pointing out this passage as well as for his guidance in spelling the Lakota words
hokahe, tiyoshpaye,
and
washichus
for a general audience. I’ve also relied on George Hyde’s
Red Cloud’s Folk: A History of the Oglala Sioux Indians,
pp. 5–42, and Michael Clodfelter’s
The Dakota War,
p. 18. Richard White in “The Winning of the West” writes of the role of disease in devastating the sedentary tribes along the Missouri, p. 325. Dan Flores in
The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains
mentions the term “hyper-Indians,” p. 56. John Ewers discusses the evolution from the use of dogs to the use of horses in
The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture,
p. 308. Colin Calloway in “The Intertribal Balance of Power on the Great Plains, 1760–1850” writes, “What the United States did to the Sioux was what the Sioux themselves had been doing to weaker peoples for years,” p. 46. The Oglala Black Hawk’s comparison of the Lakota’s expansion to that of the white man is cited by Richard White in
“It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West,
p. 95. Royal Hassrick in
The Sioux: Life and Times of a Warrior Society
writes of the Sioux’s “unswerving faith in themselves,” p. 69, and how for a warrior it was “good to die in battle,” p. 92. Jeffrey Ostler in
The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee
writes of the “universal process by which those moving into a new country come to see themselves as a chosen people,” p. 27. Vestal describes plains warfare as “a gorgeous mounted game of tag,” in
Sitting Bull,
p. 11. My references to winter counts are based on Candace Greene and Russell Thornton’s
The Year the Stars Fell: Lakota Winter Counts at the Smithsonian,
pp. 77, 87, 151–52, 230, 249, 254–55. Dan Flores in
The Natural West
writes of the decline of the buffalo among the Cheyenne to the south, p. 67.

Sitting Bull spoke of his interest in the world while still in his mother’s womb in an article by Jerome Stillson in the Nov. 16, 1877,
New York Herald,
cited by Utley in
The Lance and the Shield,
pp. 27–28. On Native spirituality I have consulted Raymond DeMallie and Douglas Parks’s
Sioux Indian Religion,
pp. 25–43, and Lee Irwin’s
The Dream Seekers: Native American Visionary Traditions on the Great Plains;
according to Irwin, the “most common place for seeking a vision is a hill, butte, or mountain. . . . To be up above the middle realm of normal habitation meant making oneself more visible to all the powers,” p. 106. Sitting Bull’s vision of the eagle at Sylvan Lake is told by One Bull, box 104, folder 6, and ww box 110, folder 8, WCC.

Irwin in
The Dream Seekers
cites the quotes from Sword, p. 122, and John Fire, p. 127. Billy Garnett’s account of Crazy Horse’s vision of the man in the lake is in
The Indian Interviews of Eli S. Ricker,
edited by Richard Jensen, p. 117. Kingsley Bray provides an excellent account of this vision in
Crazy Horse,
pp. 65–66, in which he cites Garnett’s account as well as that of Flying Hawk, p. 66.

My rendering of the myth of the White Buffalo Calf Woman is based largely on Black Elk’s account in
The Sacred Pipe,
edited by Joseph Epes Brown, pp. 3–9. I’ve also consulted James Walker’s
Lakota Belief and Ritual,
especially pp. 109–12 and 148–50, and William Powers’s
Oglala Religion,
pp. 81–83. Raymond DeMallie in “Lakota Belief and Ritual” in
Sioux Indian Religion
writes of the buffalo having once been at war with the ancestors of the Lakota, p. 31. White Bull’s claim that Sitting Bull could “foretell anything” is in ww box 105, notebook 24, WCC. Raymond DeMallie in “ ‘These Have No Ears’ ” writes of “Sitting Bull’s well-documented reputation for prophecy,” p. 527.

Chapter 3:
Hard Ass

Throughout this chapter I have relied on James Willert’s
Little Big Horn Diary
and Laudie Chorne’s
Following the Custer Trail of 1876
(subsequently referred to as Chorne). In a May 29, 1876, letter, the surgeon James DeWolf wrote, “The bridges are just logs & brush put in the bed of the stream . . . and dirt & sods piled on and the banks graded so the teams can drive in & out,” Edward Luce, ed., “The Diary and Letters of Dr. James M. DeWolf,” p. 77. The regiment’s engineer, Lieutenant Edward Maguire, wrote in detail about the difficulties encountered during the march in
General Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn: The Federal View,
edited by John Carroll, pp. 38–39. As Chorne rightly says of the alkaline mud of North Dakota, it “sticks to whatever it comes in contact with,” p. 33. Custer wrote of how “everybody is more or less disgusted except me” in a May 20 letter to Libbie in
Boots and Saddles,
p. 266.

Maguire refers to the wild rose in John Carroll’s
General Custer . . . The Federal View,
p. 38, which as Chorne points out, is now the state flower of North Dakota, p. 63. In a May 19, 1876, letter, DeWolf wrote, “I should like you to see us all after we get in camp, the tents and wagons and animals all lariated out completely cover the ground for about ½ mile square,” in Luce, “Diary and Letters,” p. 73. Chorne refers to the practice of wearing wet boots at night, p. 25. Jacob Horner spoke of raw sowbelly dipped in vinegar, as well as “hardtack fried in fat and covered with sugar” for dessert, in Barry Johnson’s “Jacob Horner of the Seventh Cavalry,” p. 81. A. F. Mulford’s
Fighting Indians in the U.S. 7th Cavalry
is a wonderful source of information about being a trooper in the 1870s; Mulford described how the aroma of the horse “creeps up out of the blanket,” cited by Chorne, p. 43. For a description of a military tent of the time, see Douglas McChristian and John P. Langellier’s
The U.S. Army in the West, 1870–1880: Uniforms, Weapons, and Equipment,
pp. 102–3. Terry’s description of the badlands is in a May 30 letter,
Terry Letters,
p. 9. John Gray in
Centennial Campaign
goes so far as to describe the scout up the Little Missouri as a “diversionary exercise” and a “skit,” p. 100.

According to Charles Francis Bates (a member of the extended Custer family), “Custer mounted was an inspiration,”
Custer’s Indian Battles,
p. 29. James Kidd, who served with Custer during the Civil War, described him “as if ‘to the manor born’ ” in
At Custer’s Side: The Civil War Writings,
p. 79. Frost in
General Custer’s Libbie
quotes a letter in which Custer says his weight had dropped to 143 pounds, p. 187. Custer’s jacket and boot size come from Thomas O’Neil’s
Passing into Legend,
pp. 14–15. According to the Custer living-historian Steve Alexander, Custer wore 9½B shoes, not 9C, in Michael Elliott’s
Custerology,
p. 94. Custer’s Irish tailor was Jeremiah Finley of Tipperary, in Ronald Nichols’s
Men with Custer,
p. 100. Richard Slotkin writes about how Buffalo Bill Cody and Custer copycatted each other’s clothing styles in
The Fatal Environment,
p. 407. Varnum’s account of how he and Custer had “the clippers run over their heads” is in Coughlan’s
Varnum: The Last of Custer’s Lieutenants,
p. 35. John Burkman’s statement that Custer looked “so unnatural” after cutting his hair is in Wagner, p. 117. The reporter John Finerty, who was with Crook’s Wyoming Column, wrote that “after the [Custer] tragedy some of the officers who survived likened the dead hero to Samson. Both were invincible while their locks remained unshorn,”
War-Path and Bivouac,
p. 208.