The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (12 page)

In the early 1870s, the U.S. government opened the Milk River Agency at Fort Peck on the Missouri River, where rations and clothing were made available to the Lakota in a conscious attempt to undercut hard-liners such as Sitting Bull. In the winter of 1872–73, even some of his strongest supporters, including his uncles Four Horns and Black Moon, succumbed to the lure of the agencies. Only fourteen lodges, composed mostly of the families in his immediate kinship circle, known as a
tiyoshpaye,
joined him that winter in his obstinate insistence on remaining beyond the reach of the whites. Sitting Bull was in danger of losing his tribe.

To make matters worse, his adopted brother the Grabber betrayed him. In the spring of 1873, Grouard pretended to go on a horse-stealing raid against the Assiniboine when he really intended to visit Fort Peck. Like many cultural go-betweens before and since, Grouard felt the competing pulls of two different ways of life. It would be several years before he completely turned his back on the Lakota, but for now he decided it was time he at least visited the fort. When Sitting Bull learned the truth soon after Grouard’s return, the Hunkpapa leader was so angry that Grouard feared for his life. Sitting Bull’s mother attempted to patch things up between them, but Grouard finally decided it was better to leave Sitting Bull’s family circle and join the Oglala, where, much as he had once done for Sitting Bull, he became the trusted lieutenant of Crazy Horse.

Sitting Bull had at least one consolation. After his divorce from Snow on Her and the death of Red Woman, he was now happily married to two sisters, Four Blankets Woman and Seen by the Nation.

I
n the summer of 1873, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry ventured for the first time into Lakota territory as escorts for the surveyors of the Northern Pacific Railway. Having seen what had happened to the Cheyenne to the south, the Lakota knew that the railroads had a devastating effect on the buffalo, and they responded to this invasion of their hunting territory with force.

The year before, in 1872, the appearance of the soldiers on the Yellowstone had given Sitting Bull an opportunity to reestablish his once unsurpassed reputation for bravery. A bloody confrontation between about a thousand warriors and several companies of soldiers had reached an unsatisfying stalemate. Armed with only a lance, Crazy Horse rode back and forth in front of the soldiers, challenging them to fire at him. It was a magnificent display of courage that appears to have inspired Sitting Bull to perform his own kind of bravery run.

He laid down his rifle and, with only his pipe in his hand, started to walk toward the enemy line. Once he’d come to within a quarter mile of the soldiers, he sat down and lit his pipe. Since he was well within range and presented such an inviting target, the soldiers immediately began to blast away. With bullets flying all around, Sitting Bull turned to the warriors behind him and called out, “Whoever wishes to smoke with me, come.”

Only four men joined him: two Cheyenne, a Hunkpapa named Gets the Best Of, and Sitting Bull’s nephew White Bull. Despite the near-constant barrage of bullets, the Lakota chief seemed unperturbed. “Sitting Bull was not afraid,” White Bull marveled, “he just sat and looked around and smoked peacefully,” even as the others, their “hearts beating fast,” puffed away at a furious rate. Once the pipe had been smoked out, Sitting Bull paused to clean the bowl with a stick, and even as bullets continued to chop up the ground around his feet, he “walked home slow.” His performance that day “counted more than counting coup,” remembered White Bull, who called it the “most brave deed possible.” Sitting Bull might not be leading the Hunkpapa into battle anymore, but his courage could no longer be questioned.

The following year, in 1873, Custer and the Seventh Cavalry had two brief encounters with the Lakota. What impression Custer, whose flowing locks earned him the Lakota name of Pehin Hanska, meaning Long Hair, made on Sitting Bull is unknown. We do know, however, that the Hunkpapa heard Custer’s brass band. Prior to launching a decisive charge, Custer ordered the band to strike up “Garry Owen.” “The familiar notes of that stirring Irish air acted like magic,” wrote Samuel June Barrows, a reporter traveling with the regiment that summer. “If the commander had had a galvanic battery connecting with the solar plexus of every man on the field, he could hardly have electrified them more thoroughly. What matter if the cornet played a faltering note, and the alto-horn was a little husky? There was no mistaking the tune and its meaning.”

Given Sitting Bull’s renown as a composer and singer of songs, it is tempting to speculate on his reaction to the boisterous strains of Felix Vinatieri’s band. Having once sung of his own bravery and daring as he sprinted toward the Crow chief, he would have known exactly what Custer was attempting to accomplish as the notes of “Garry Owen” echoed up and down the valley of the Yellowstone.

T
hat fall, America was gripped by the Panic of 1873, and the following summer Custer led his expedition into the Black Hills, known as Paha Sapa to the Lakota. Both the Lakota and the Cheyenne revered the Black Hills as a source of game, tepee poles, and immense spiritual power. It had been here, within this oasislike region of stone, pine, and clear lakes, that Sitting Bull had heard the eagle sing to him about his destiny as his people’s leader.

The Black Hills were certainly sacred to the Lakota, but from a practical standpoint the people spent relatively little time in this mountainous and forbidding land. In the summer of 1875, by which time Custer’s discovery of gold had flooded the region with prospectors, government officials were hopeful that the promise of a lucrative financial offer might persuade the Lakota to sell the hills.

For the last few years, Sitting Bull had been plagued by the catchy sloganeering associated with the policy of iwashtela. He now developed a powerful slogan of his own. All Lakota were familiar with the food pack: a container of dried meat, vegetables, and berries that enabled them to get through the lean months of winter. The Black Hills were, Sitting Bull insisted, the food pack of the Lakota. It was an image that quickly began to resonate with many of his followers. “At that time I just wondered about what he had said,” the young Minneconjou warrior Standing Bear later remembered, “and I knew what he meant after thinking it over because I knew the Black Hills were full of fish, animals, and lots of water, and I just felt that we Indians should stick to it.”

After years of losing more and more of his people to the netherworld of reservation life, Sitting Bull now had an issue that finally put into focus where they all stood. Without a food pack, a Lakota would starve in the winter. Without the Black Hills, the Lakota had no future as an independent people. It was as simple as that.

By the spring of 1875, Frank Grouard had left Crazy Horse and moved to the Red Cloud Agency, where he offered his services to government officials seeking to win Lakota support for the sale of the Black Hills. Grouard had found the transition back to white society surprisingly difficult. Several years on an all-meat diet had made it almost impossible for him to digest bread. He also had trouble with the language. “It was two or three months before I could talk English without getting the Indian mixed up with it,” he remembered.

That summer Grouard accompanied a delegation to the camp of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The officials hoped to convince the two leaders to attend negotiations at the Red Cloud Agency. Crazy Horse seemed surprisingly receptive, telling Grouard he would abide by “whatever the headmen of the tribe concluded to do after hearing our plan.” Sitting Bull, on the other hand, responded to both the message and the messenger with unbridled scorn. “He told me to go out and tell the white men at Red Cloud that he declared open war,” Grouard remembered, “and would fight them wherever he met them from that time on. His entire harangue was an open declaration of war.”

Although neither Sitting Bull nor Crazy Horse participated in the negotiations that September, a leading Oglala warrior named Little Big Man did his best to convince the government’s commissioners that the Black Hills were not for sale. On September 23, 1875, there were an estimated seven thousand warriors gathered around the commissioners, who were huddled inside a canvas tent set up on a dusty plain between the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies. Tensions were already high when Little Big Man, resplendent in war paint, with a Winchester rifle in one hand and cartridges in the other, pushed his way through the crowd and rode up to the commissioners. He had come, he announced, “to kill the white men who were trying to take his land.” The day’s negotiations were quickly called to a halt as the commissioners, fearing an outbreak of violence, were packed into wagons and rushed to safety. That fall, they returned to Washington with an unsigned agreement.

A
little over a month later, on November 3, 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant met in the White House with Secretary of the Interior Zachariah Chandler, Assistant Secretary Benjamin Cowen, and Generals Philip Sheridan and George Crook. Grant had called them together to discuss the Black Hills, where there were now an estimated fifteen thousand miners despite Crook’s halfhearted attempts over the summer to keep them out. Unless the army was willing to take up arms against U.S. citizens, such attempts were doomed to failure. But the Lakota refused to sell. Grant chose what he felt was the lesser of two evils. He decided to wage war on the Indians instead of on the miners.

Less than a week later, newly appointed Indian inspector Erwin C. Watkins, a former Republican Party hack from Michigan who had served under both Sheridan and Crook during the Civil War, filed a report that gave Grant the excuse he needed to take up arms against the Lakota. Sitting Bull and his followers, Watkins claimed, were raising havoc—not only killing innocent American citizens but also terrorizing rival, peace-loving tribes. Without mentioning the Black Hills once, Watkins spelled out a blueprint for action that might as well have been (and perhaps was) written by Sheridan himself.

The true policy in my judgment, is to send troops against them in the winter, the sooner the better, and
whip
them into subjection. . . . The Government owes it . . . to the frontier settlers who have, with their families, braved the dangers and hardships incident to frontier life. It owes it to civilization and the common cause of humanity.

On December 6, Indian Commissioner E. P. Smith instructed his agents at the various Lakota agencies to deliver an ultimatum to the camps of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and all the other nonreservation Indians. They must surrender themselves to the agencies by January 31, 1876, or be brought in by force.

Up until this point, the Lakota had, despite enormous provocation from the miners in the Black Hills, remained remarkably peaceful. Watkins’s report was false. To expect the Lakota to journey to the reservations in January, when blizzards often made travel impossible, was absurd. Sheridan privately admitted that the order would most likely “be regarded as a good joke by the Indians.”

But on March 17, 1876, on the upper reaches of the Powder River, a village of Cheyenne, Oglala, and Minneconjou learned that the government’s ultimatum was no laughing matter.

T
he army might have never found that village in March of 1876 without the help of Frank Grouard, who had signed on as a scout with General Crook. After weeks of pointless searching through the heaping snowdrifts of a frigid Montana winter, just when it looked as if Crook’s force might have to return south for provisions, Grouard—the scout no one trusted since he’d been on such intimate terms with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse—finally convinced Crook that the Indians were not, as previously reported, on the Tongue River but on the Powder.

Grouard’s years with the Lakota had given him an instinctual familiarity with the land. “I went over the ground so many times,” he remembered, “that I fairly carried a map of the country in my mind, and could close my eyes and travel along and never miss a cut-off or a trail.” By adopting the Grabber as his brother and not, as he had threatened, killing him after his first betrayal, Sitting Bull had unwittingly provided the army with the only person capable of not only finding the village but, just as important, eluding the scouts who were guarding it. As he and several companies of Crook’s regiment approached the village in an icy fog, Grouard even recognized several of the Indians’ horses as belonging to some of his former Oglala friends.

They caught the village by complete surprise. There were about a hundred lodges of northern Cheyenne, Oglala, and Minneconjou, who immediately fled from their tepees and took refuge in the surrounding hills, where they watched the soldiers torch the village and take their horses. While their warriors pursued the retreating soldiers south and eventually retrieved almost all the horses, the old people, mothers, and children returned to the burnt-out ruin of their village and collected what little had not been consumed by fire.

“We were . . . at peace with the whites so far as we knew,” remembered the Cheyenne warrior Wooden Leg, who was then eighteen. “Why should soldiers come out . . . and fight us?”

In the days ahead, a thaw turned the snow and ice into slush, and on March 23, after four days of slow and messy travel, Wooden Leg’s people found Crazy Horse’s village of just thirty lodges. The village was not large enough to provide the refugees with the food and clothing they desperately needed, so they decided to move together as a group to Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa village about forty miles to the northeast, where they arrived on April 2.

The Hunkpapa were almost strangers to Wooden Leg’s people, the northern Cheyenne. As the Cheyenne straggled into the village, Sitting Bull made sure to provide a positive first impression. Two huge lodges were erected in the middle of the village, one for the women and one for the men. Hunkpapa women fired up their cooking pots and were soon distributing armloads of steaming buffalo meat. The herald shouted out in a booming voice, “The Cheyennes are very poor. All who have blankets or robes or tepees to spare should give to them.”