The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (19 page)

B
urkman had guard duty that night, and with Custer’s dog Tuck beside him, he marched back and forth in front of his commander’s tent. In the distance he could hear the steady beat of drums from the tents of the Arikara and Crow scouts. Many of the officers and soldiers were in the process of getting very drunk, “the liquor tasting good to the innards,” Burkman remembered, “after so much alkali water.” Others were writing letters and making wills; “they seemed to have a presentiment of their fate,” Lieutenant Godfrey wrote.

If the Battle of the Little Bighorn had resulted in victory for Custer, it’s doubtful that these “presentiments” would have been remembered. But as is the way with most great disasters, the survivors later saw the catastrophe as preordained.

Back in 1867, Custer’s regimental adjutant, the tall and elegantly whiskered Lieutenant William Cooke, had survived a terrifying encounter with the Cheyenne during which he and about fifty other men were attacked by an estimated five hundred warriors. They were able to hold off the Indians for three hours until reinforcements arrived and the Cheyenne fled. Nine years later on the Yellowstone, Custer’s adjutant was convinced his luck had run out and asked Lieutenant Gibson to witness his will.

“What, getting cold feet, Cookie,” Gibson taunted, “after all these years with the savages?”

“No,” Cooke responded, “but I have a feeling that the next fight will be my last.”

Onboard the
Far West,
Mark Kellogg sat writing his dispatches for the
New York Herald
. It was after midnight by the time he joined Major Brisbin, who was smoking a cigar on the riverboat’s deck. Kellogg had originally planned to follow Gibbon and Terry but had just decided to go with Custer; otherwise, he feared, “he might miss something if he did not accompany the column.” Brisbin secured the reporter a mule and some canvas saddlebags, along with some provisions from the riverboat’s stores. “We fixed poor Mark up,” Brisbin later remembered, “for his ride to death.”

Also on the fence about going with Custer were his younger brother Boston, to whom Grant Marsh had offered a cabin on the
Far West,
and his nephew Autie Reed. In the end, both went with the Seventh. The scout Charley Reynolds had a serious infection on his hand, and one of the regiment’s surgeons, Dr. Henry Porter, had advised him to remain on the boat, as did Marsh. “Captain,” Reynolds said, “I’ve been waiting and getting ready for this expedition for two years and I would sooner be dead than miss it.”

That night the main cabin of the
Far West
was the scene of a high-stakes poker game that was, according to Marsh, “the stiffest ever played on the river.” At the table were Marsh, Custer’s brother Tom, his brother-in-law James Calhoun, and Captain William Crowell of the Sixth Infantry. By the end of the night, Captain Crowell had won several thousand dollars, leaving Tom Custer and Jim Calhoun not only exhausted and hung over but broke.

As Tom Custer and Calhoun lost at cards, Marcus Reno sang. That afternoon he’d purchased a straw hat from the sutler and at least one half-gallon keg of whiskey. He appears to have spent much of the evening getting drunk, and that night he and several officers stood arm in arm on the deck of the
Far West
singing sentimental songs. Custer’s tent was beside the riverboat, and one can only wonder whether the major’s slurred harmonizing contributed to the anger his abstemious commander directed toward him that night in his anonymous dispatch.

Burkman watched the cabin light on the
Far West
finally go out. “All got still,” he remembered. “Here and there was blotches where men was laying asleep on the ground. You couldn’t hear nothing except horses munching their feed or nickering soft to one another.” At some point Custer’s dog Tuck sat down on his haunches and with his muzzle pointed skyward started to howl. “It sounded like the death howl . . . ,” Burkman remembered. “I tried to shut him up.”

When streaks of light began to appear in the sky, Burkman knew he must awaken his commander. He found Custer “hunched over on the cot, just his coat and boots off, and the pen still in his hand.” As he’d done every night for the last month and a half, Custer had spent the night filling up the darkness with words. The pen was his talisman, his way to whatever future might exist beyond the next few days, and he’d fallen asleep clutching it like a rosary. “I hated to rouse him,” Burkman remembered, “he looked so peaked and tired.”

Once awake, Custer asked, “What’s the day like outside?”

“Clear and shiny,” Burkman said.

T
hey departed at noon on June 22. There was a cold wind blowing out of the north, and as the Seventh Cavalry approached Terry and Gibbon, who waited at the head of the camp along with Brisbin, the regiment’s colorful flags, known as guidons, could be seen, Gibbon wrote, “gaily fluttering in the breeze.” “Together we sat on our horses,” he continued, “and witnessed the approach of the command as it threaded its way through the rank sage brush which covered the valley.” Once the advance had started, Custer rode up to join Terry and the others, where they were accompanied by the regiment’s buglers, who gave as rousing a version of “Garry Owen” as was possible without Vinatieri’s band. “General Custer appeared to be in good spirits,” Gibbon wrote, “chatted freely with us, and was evidently proud of the appearance of his command.” The horses, Gibbon noted, were of unusually high quality for the U.S. cavalry, and Custer claimed that despite the many days of hard marching they’d already seen, “there was not a single sore-backed horse amongst them.”

Once the pack mules had passed, followed by the rear guard, Custer shook hands with the assembled officers and started after his regiment. Gibbon claimed that it was then that he called out, “Now, Custer, don’t be greedy, but wait for us.” Over the course of the last month, Gibbon had passed up two matchless opportunities to attack the Indians. That he now had the audacity to ask Custer to save some of the fighting for him was, to put it politely, disingenuous.

Custer’s response to Gibbon’s plea to not “be greedy, but wait for us” was suitably ambiguous. “No, I will not,” he said.

CHAPTER 7

The Approach

I
n 1846, when Crazy Horse was six years old and Sitting Bull was fifteen, a twenty-three-year-old Bostonian named Francis Parkman spent three weeks with an Oglala village in modern Wyoming. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Parkman decided to write the definitive history of England and France’s battle for the New World. To prepare himself for his life’s work, he must go west and see firsthand a Native people unaffected by extended contact with the European invaders. The book he eventually wrote about his experiences in the West,
The Oregon Trail,
contains some of the best contemporaneous descriptions of Lakota life ever written.

For most of his time with the Oglala, Parkman was desperately sick with a dysentery-like illness that may have been linked to drinking the alkaline water. But this did not prevent him from participating in the exhilarating bedlam of a buffalo hunt. “While we were charging on one side,” Parkman wrote, “our companions attacked the bewildered and panic-stricken herd on the other. The uproar and confusion lasted but a moment. The dust cleared away, and the buffalo could be seen scattering as from a common centre, flying over the plain singly, or in long files and small compact bodies, while behind them followed the Indians riding at furious speed, and yelling as they launched arrow after arrow into their sides.”

Parkman accompanied the village to the southwestern fringe of the Black Hills, where he watched the Oglala women harvest tepee poles from the pine-studded peaks. Just when he feared his illness might be the death of him, he was saved by a restorative handful of pemmican: a nutritious combination of protein and fat made from pounded slices of dried buffalo meat. This allowed him to accompany the village as it made its way across the dusty plains to a new campsite, the old women leading the travois-laden ponies with two or three children clinging to the pack animals’ backs as the elders, “stalking along in their white buffalo-robes,” led the throng beneath the unceasing blue glare of the sky.

Thirty years later, on June 18, 1876, a similar scene was enacted on the banks of the Little Bighorn River as approximately four thousand Lakota and Cheyenne and more than twice that many ponies made their way to a new campsite. Back in 1846, Parkman had believed that traditional Lakota culture was doomed to almost immediate extinction. Already, he noted, whiskey and disease had taken a terrible toll on the Oglala. He would no doubt have been stunned by the size and vibrancy of this village in south-central Montana in 1876.

It was no accident that Sitting Bull and his people had ended up here, beside the Little Bighorn River. This narrow, tree-lined waterway was in the middle of the last buffalo-rich region in the United States. By the end of the nineteenth century, the buffalo had become so rare that when a small herd appeared near the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, several elderly Lakota felt compelled to hug, instead of kill, the animals. In the spring and summer of 1876, however, the buffalo had been remarkably abundant, and as a consequence, Sitting Bull’s people, who ate on average six buffalo per person per year, were flourishing.

In the meantime, conditions at the reservations had never been worse. The previous fall, thousands upon thousands of Lakota had flocked to the agencies to attend councils about the possible sale of the Black Hills. The agencies’ attempts to feed these huge gatherings had completely overwhelmed the already inefficient rationing system, and by the winter there was little food left. In the past, agency Indians had supplemented their meager rations by hunting for game. But on January 18, with war looming, the agents were instructed to stop selling any more ammunition to the Indians.

Rather than starve to death on the reservations and angered by the government’s attempts to purchase the Black Hills, unprecedented numbers of Lakota elected to join Sitting Bull and hunt the buffalo that summer. But before they could set out on the three-hundred-mile journey from the agencies, their ponies must first strengthen themselves on the new spring grass, which did not appear until the end of April. This meant that it wasn’t until mid- to late June that the agency Indians started to reach Sitting Bull’s village in significant numbers.

It began slowly, but by June 18, the day after Crook’s retreat at what became known as the Battle of the Rosebud, the outflow from the reservations was averaging a stunning seven hundred Lakota and Cheyenne per day. In the week ahead, Sitting Bull’s village more than doubled in size to eight thousand men, women, and children, making it one of the largest gatherings of Indians in the history of the northern plains.

The warriors and their leaders had difficulty imagining how anyone could dare attack a village of this immense size. At the center of the camp was the large council lodge painted a distinctive yellow, where the leaders from the many bands met to discuss the issues of the day.

Back in 1846, Parkman had watched the Oglala elders struggle to come to a consensus about when to launch a war party against their enemies, the Snakes. “Characteristic indecision perplexed their councils,” Parkman wrote. “Indians cannot act in large bodies. Though their object be of the highest importance, they cannot combine to attain it by a series of connected efforts.” Three decades later, Parkman was proven wrong. As the challenges to traditional Native culture increased, a leader had emerged whose intelligence, charisma, and connection to the shadowy forces of Wakan Tanka enabled him to unite these disparate bands into a single, albeit loose-jointed, entity.

Not everything had gone Sitting Bull’s way. Despite the council’s decision to wait until Crook’s forces attacked them, the warriors had forced Sitting Bull’s hand. He had accompanied the young men to the Battle of the Rosebud, but this had not deterred him from advocating a policy of restraint in the days ahead. In his vision he had seen soldiers falling into a Lakota camp, and this could happen only if the washichus attacked first. The warriors’ first priority must be the protection of the women and children.

Sitting Bull’s tepee was larger than most and decorated with colorful images of his many accomplishments. Living in his lodge were at least a dozen family members, including his mother, Her Holy Door; his two wives, the sisters Seen by the Nation and Four Blankets Woman; their brother Gray Eagle; Sitting Bull’s two adolescent daughters; and a total of six children, the youngest of whom were twin baby boys born to Four Blankets Woman just two weeks before.

Sitting Bull’s eldest wife, Seen by the Nation, sat to the right of the entryway and was responsible for the family’s food, while her sister was in charge of the cooking utensils. The family’s baggage was carefully lined up against the inner edge of the tepee. When a guest arrived outside, barking dogs inevitably alerted the family that someone wanted to come in. Only after being formally invited could the guest enter the tepee, where he was given the place of honor across from the entryway on the opposite side of the central fire.