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

In the spring of 1876, the United States government launched an unprovoked military campaign against the Lakota and Cheyenne of the northern plains. Two years earlier, an expedition led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer had discovered gold in the Black Hills, a mountainous region in modern South Dakota that was sacred to the Lakota and legally theirs by the Treaty of 1868. When the Lakota refused to sell, President Ulysses S. Grant chose war. The resulting conflict produced one of the most devastating military defeats in American history and, for the Lakota and Cheyenne, the beginning of their own destruction. Nathaniel Philbrick traces both sides of this collision, centering his narrative on Custer and the Lakota holy man Sitting Bull, a leader of the Hunkpapa, one of the seven Lakota bands.

Philbrick establishes Custer as a figure of restless ambition. A Civil War prodigy who became a brigadier general at 23, Custer struggled in the postwar years with diminished rank, financial troubles, and a court-martial for abandoning his regiment to visit his wife, Elizabeth "Libbie" Custer. He rebuilt his reputation through the controversial 1868 Battle of the Washita, in which the Seventh Cavalry attacked Black Kettle's Cheyenne village in winter, but the engagement also planted the seeds of a bitter feud with Captain Frederick Benteen, who accused Custer of abandoning Major Joel Elliott, a Seventh Cavalry officer, and his men. In 1876, Custer's congressional testimony implicating Grant's associates so angered the president that Grant nearly blocked Custer from the campaign, relenting only on the condition that Brigadier General Alfred Terry command the expedition. Custer arrived at Fort Lincoln in modern North Dakota desperate for a spectacular victory.

Sitting Bull's rise paralleled the westward expansion of the Lakota. Driven onto the plains by rival tribes, the Lakota adopted the horse, became formidable mounted warriors, and expanded aggressively across the northern plains. Their culture centered on buffalo hunting and intertribal warfare, with a warrior's highest honor being counting coup: touching rather than killing an enemy. By the late 1860s, Sitting Bull had emerged as the leading holy man and political leader of the northern Lakota, a wicasa wakan with a profound connection to Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery central to Lakota spirituality. While other leaders chose reservation life, Sitting Bull insisted on complete autonomy, calling the Black Hills the Lakota's "food pack" and galvanizing resistance.

The campaign involved three converging columns: Custer's Dakota Column from Fort Lincoln, Colonel John Gibbon's Montana Column from the west, and General George Crook's Wyoming Column from the south. Philbrick follows the Dakota Column's grueling march through rain, hail, and mud across the badlands toward the Yellowstone River. When Major Marcus Reno was sent to scout the Rosebud River, he disobeyed Terry's orders, discovered a massive Indian trail, but turned back without attacking, infuriating both Terry and Custer.

Meanwhile, Sitting Bull's village had been growing. After soldiers attacked a village of Cheyenne, Oglala, and Minneconjou, two other Lakota bands, on the Powder River in March, the refugees joined Sitting Bull, and his reputation soared. He sent runners to the reservation agencies calling Lakota to gather on the Rosebud, adopting a defensive strategy of strength in numbers. During the sun dance, the Lakota's most sacred ceremony, Sitting Bull offered 50 pieces of flesh cut from each arm and danced for more than 24 hours, receiving a vision of soldiers falling upside down into a Lakota village "like grasshoppers." The vision promised victory but warned that the Lakota must not take the spoils of war. On June 17, approximately 1,000 warriors drove Crook's column into retreat at the Battle of the Rosebud. Crook withdrew for six weeks without communicating with Terry.

On June 21, Terry unveiled his plan aboard the riverboat Far West: Custer and the Seventh Cavalry would march south up the Rosebud while Terry and Gibbon approached from the north along the Bighorn River. Terry's written orders contained deliberate ambiguity, granting Custer latitude near the enemy while technically restricting his earlier movements. Everyone present expected Custer to attack independently if he found the village. Custer declined Gatling guns and extra cavalry, confident in the Seventh's ability.

Marching up the Rosebud, Custer encountered fresh signs of a massive trail. On the night of June 24, he ordered a night march toward the divide between the Rosebud and Little Bighorn valleys. At dawn on June 25, Crow scouts, Native allies serving with the army, spotted a vast pony herd in the valley, but Custer could not see it through the haze. When reports confirmed the regiment had been detected, Custer decided to attack immediately rather than wait.

He divided the regiment into four parts. Benteen's three companies swept left toward a line of bluffs. Reno's three companies received orders to charge the village. Custer kept five companies and climbed the bluffs east of the Little Bighorn, from which he saw the encampment for the first time: hundreds of tepees stretching nearly two miles. He sent urgent messages for Benteen to come quickly with ammunition.

Reno's charge stalled short of the Hunkpapa camp circle. Crazy Horse, a renowned Lakota war leader, rallied the defenders and broke Reno's line. The retreat across the river became a rout, with 40 men killed. Benteen, who had been moving at a deliberate pace despite hearing gunfire, arrived to find Reno pleading for help. Benteen immediately framed the situation as a repeat of the Washita, convincing Reno that Custer had abandoned them. Neither officer made a serious effort to go to Custer's aid.

Philbrick reconstructs Custer's final battle from Native oral accounts and archaeological evidence uncovered after a 1983 fire swept the battlefield. Evidence suggests that part of Custer's force feinted toward the river to draw warriors from Reno while the remainder waited on the ridgeline for Benteen. When reinforcements never came, Custer pushed north. Warriors infiltrated the hills through hidden ravines, invisible to the soldiers. The Hunkpapa war leader Gall captured the troopers' horses, stripping them of mobility and reserve ammunition. Crazy Horse broke through Battle Ridge, splitting the command. Calhoun Hill and the position held by Captain Myles Keogh, commander of Custer's Right Wing, were quickly overrun. Only about 20 soldiers reached Last Stand Hill, where Custer and roughly 40 men made a final defense behind dead horses. Forensic evidence suggests Custer suffered two gunshot wounds, the second possibly a mercy shot. His brother Tom was so badly mutilated that only his arm tattoos allowed identification. Sitting Bull's vision had come true, but the warriors violated his warning by looting the dead.

On Reno Hill, Benteen emerged as the effective leader during a second day of desperate fighting on June 26, rallying troops, leading charges, and walking upright through gunfire. By late afternoon the warriors withdrew, and the entire village of 8,000 people moved south. Terry's column arrived the morning of June 27.

The Far West, transformed into a hospital ship, departed July 3 and steamed 710 miles to Bismarck at record speed. America learned of the disaster on July 7. At Fort Lincoln, Libbie Custer received the news and insisted on accompanying the delegation that informed 26 other newly widowed wives. She spent the rest of her life guarding Custer's reputation through memoirs and authorized biographies.

The government intensified its campaign, and by autumn 1876 virtually every Lakota and Cheyenne band had surrendered. Sitting Bull fled to Canada, surrendered in 1881, and was confined to the Standing Rock Agency. On December 15, 1890, agency police killed Sitting Bull and his son Crowfoot during an arrest connected to the Ghost Dance, a Native spiritual movement that alarmed reservation authorities. Two weeks later, the Seventh Cavalry massacred Minneconjou men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, an act some officers viewed as revenge for the Little Bighorn.

Philbrick concludes that the Last Stand was not Custer's, since Custer was on the attack almost to the end, but the nation's. With the frontier closed, America turned its imperial ambitions overseas. Sitting Bull's most important legacy, Philbrick argues, was his preference for negotiation over self-destruction, his recognition that survival serves future generations better than a blaze of glory.