Caveat and Historical Notes:
A caveat to the serious student: Although the geographical references have been the traditional ones, north (Last Stand), south (Calhoun Hill), east (Keogh's slope) and west (riverside), the Indian geography is different and Indian accounts must be perused carefully to determine which is being used. To the Indian, north is Keogh's slope; south (riverside), east (Calhoun Hill) and west (Last Stand). Once the Custer fight was finished, the Indians surrounded Reno on the evening of June 25. Reno's companies were formed in a rough horseshoe position with the open end upriver. The fire from around 7 p.m. until darkness was heavy and some eleven soldiers were killed on the bluff. A hospital was established in a swale, and the horses and mules positioned at the open side of the swale to protect the wounded.
During the night some entrenchments were dug. Packs, boxes and dead animals were dragged into position to protect the troops, particularly in Company A's area at the end of the horseshoe on the eastern side of the siege area.
On June 26, the battle commenced around 2:30 in the morning. The troops were under constant long range fire, particularly Benteen's Co. H in which there were a large number of wounded. The warriors approached Benteen closely from the river side, but a charge drove them from the surrounding knolls and ravines. This opened the way for water carrier parties to obtain some water from the Little Big Horn which then was distributed to the wounded. Late that afternoon, the troops saw a welcome sight as the entire village withdrew in an upstream direction.
It was not until the morning of June 27 that the reason for the withdrawal was clear. The Montana column led by Terry and Gibbon had camped about two miles above the Indian camp the night before, and reached the valley site the next day. On June 26, on their way to the juncture with the 7th Cavalry, three of Custer's Crow scouts had met Lieutenant James Bradley's detachment of Crow scouts and mounted infantry. The fleeing Crows told a story of disaster to Custer which was met with skepticism by the white officers but which led all of Bradley's Crows to leave immediately.
On the morning of June 27, Bradley reported to Terry and Gibbon who were then on the site of the Indian camp. He stated that he had found 197 bodies on the hills to the east. What the Gibbon men thought were dead buffalo, were the mingled bodies of dead horses and soldiers stripped of their clothing .
The two commands then moved into the river bottom, and the soldiers spent most of the day bringing the wounded down from the bluffs. Some investigation of the field was made that day, principally by Benteen, and the next day the 7th Cavalry turned to the gruesome task of burying its dead. The burials were anything but complete, consisting for the most part, of a little dirt and sagebrush thrown over the corpse.
Although the figures vary somewhat, 208 bodies were found and buried, with identification difficult, if not impossible in many cases. Many bodies had been subjected to extensive mutilation immediately after death, and all had been exposed to the hot Montana sun for three days.
On June 28, an effort was made to move the wounded to the steamer Far West, primarily using hand carried litters. The task proved impossible. The next day was given over to creating mule-borne litters with which all of the wounded were successfully carried to the waiting steamer in an all night march. There the wounded were placed on the boat for transport to Fort Abraham Lincoln. The rest of the expedition awaited reinforcements before continuing the campaign.
Click the Guidon to hear Garry Owen
| "...there were more Sioux than the soldiers had bullets." Kevin M. Sullivan's Shattering the Myth: Signposts on Custer's Road to Disaster. |
You'll have to pardon me if I root for the Indians. I really like that picture, BTW.
JJM - USNR.
Sure you can trust the government. Just ask any Indian.
Excellent read, SW! This has always been one of my favorite, and most fastinating parts of US History.
Thanks for posting it :)
So Crazy Horse died only a year later...Sitting Bull managed a bit longer
Sitting Bull
Tatanka-Iyotanka
(1831-1890)
A Hunkpapa Lakota chief and holy man under whom the Lakota tribes united in their struggle for survival on the northern plains, Sitting Bull remained defiant toward American military power and contemptuous of American promises to the end.
Born around 1831 on the Grand River in present-day South Dakota, at a place the Lakota called "Many Caches" for the number of food storage pits they had dug there, Sitting Bull was given the name Tatanka-Iyotanka, which describes a buffalo bull sitting intractably on its haunches. It was a name he would live up to throughout his life.
As a young man, Sitting Bull became a leader of the Strong Heart warrior society and, later, a distinguished member of the Silent Eaters, a group concerned with tribal welfare. He first went to battle at age 14, in a raid on the Crow, and saw his first encounter with American soldiers in June 1863, when the army mounted a broad campaign in retaliation for the Santee Rebellion in Minnesota, in which Sitting Bull's people played no part. The next year Sitting Bull fought U.S. troops again, at the Battle of Killdeer Mountain, and in 1865 he led a siege against the newly established Fort Rice in present-day North Dakota. Widely respected for his bravery and insight, he became head chief of the Lakota nation about 1868.
Sitting Bull's courage was legendary. Once, in 1872, during a battle with soldiers protecting railroad workers on the Yellowstone River, Sitting Bull led four other warriors out between the lines, sat calmly sharing a pipe with them as bullets buzzed around, carefully reamed the pipe out when they were finished, and then casually walked away.
The stage was set for war between Sitting Bull and the U.S. Army in 1874, when an expedition led by General George Armstrong Custer confirmed that gold had been discovered in the Black Hills of Dakota Territory, an area sacred to many tribes and placed off-limits to white settlement by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. Despite this ban, prospectors began a rush to the Black Hills, provoking the Lakota to defend their land. When government efforts to purchase the Black Hills failed, the Fort Laramie Treaty was set aside and the commissioner of Indian Affairs decreed that all Lakota not settled on reservations by January 31, 1876, would be considered hostile. Sitting Bull and his people held their ground.
In March, as three columns of federal troops under General George Crook, General Alfred Terry and Colonel John Gibbon moved into the area, Sitting Bull summoned the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho to his camp on Rosebud Creek in Montana Territory. There he led them in the sun dance ritual, offering prayers to Wakan Tanka, their Great Spirit, and slashing his arms one hundred times as a sign of sacrifice. During this ceremony, Sitting Bull had a vision in which he saw soldiers falling into the Lakota camp like grasshoppers falling from the sky.
Inspired by this vision, the Oglala Lakota war chief, Crazy Horse, set out for battle with a band of 500 warriors, and on June 17 he surprised Crook's troops and forced them to retreat at the Battle of the Rosebud. To celebrate this victory, the Lakota moved their camp to the valley of the Little Bighorn River, where they were joined by 3,000 more Indians who had left the reservations to follow Sitting Bull. Here they were attacked on June 25 by the Seventh Cavalry under George Armstrong Custer, whose badly outnumbered troops first rushed the encampment, as if in fulfillment of Sitting Bull's vision, and then made a stand on a nearby ridge, where they were destroyed.
Public outrage at this military catastrophe brought thousands more cavalrymen to the area, and over the next year they relentlessly pursued the Lakota, who had split up after the Custer fight, forcing chief after chief to surrender. But Sitting Bull remained defiant. In May 1877 he led his band across the border into Canada, beyond the reach of the U.S. Army, and when General Terry traveled north to offer him a pardon in exchange for settling on a reservation, Sitting Bull angrily sent him away.
Four years later, however, finding it impossible to feed his people in a world where the buffalo was almost extinct, Sitting Bull finally came south to surrender. On July 19, 1881, he had his young son hand his rifle to the commanding officer of Fort Buford in Montana, explaining that in this way he hoped to teach the boy "that he has become a friend of the Americans." Yet at the same time, Sitting Bull said, "I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle." He asked for the right to cross back and forth into Canada whenever he wished, and for a reservation of his own on the Little Missouri River near the Black Hills. Instead he was sent to Standing Rock Reservation, and when his reception there raised fears that he might inspire a fresh uprising, sent further down the Missouri River to Fort Randall, where he and his followers were held for nearly two years as prisoners of war.
Finally, on May 10, 1883, Sitting Bull rejoined his tribe at Standing Rock. The Indian agent in charge of the reservation, James McLaughlin, was determined to deny the great chief any special privileges, even forcing him to work in the fields, hoe in hand. But Sitting Bull still knew his own authority, and when a delegation of U.S. Senators came to discuss opening part of the reservation to white settlers, he spoke forcefully, though futilely, against their plan.
In 1885 Sitting Bull was allowed to leave the reservation to join Buffalo Bill's Wild West, earning $50 a week for riding once around the arena, in addition to whatever he could charge for his autograph and picture. He stayed with the show only four months, unable to tolerate white society any longer, though in that time he did manage to shake hands with President Grover Cleveland, which he took as evidence that he was still regarded as a great chief.
Returning to Standing Rock, Sitting Bull lived in a cabin on the Grand River, near where he had been born. He refused to give up his old ways as the reservation's rules required, still living with two wives and rejecting Christianity, though he sent his children to a nearby Christian school in the belief that the next generation of Lakota would need to be able to read and write.
Soon after his return, Sitting Bull had another mystical vision, like the one that had foretold Custer's defeat. This time he saw a meadowlark alight on a hillock beside him, and heard it say, "Your own people, Lakotas, will kill you." Nearly five years later, this vision also proved true.
In the fall of 1890, a Miniconjou Lakota named Kicking Bear came to Sitting Bull with news of the Ghost Dance, a ceremony that promised to rid the land of white people and restore the Indians' way of life. Lakota had already adopted the ceremony at the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations, and Indian agents there had already called for troops to bring the growing movement under control. At Standing Rock, the authorities feared that Sitting Bull, still revered as a spiritual leader, would join the Ghost Dancers as well, and they sent 43 Lakota policemen to bring him in. Before dawn on December 15, 1890, the policemen burst into Sitting Bull's cabin and dragged him outside, where his followers were gathering to protect him. In the gunfight that followed, one of the Lakota policemen put a bullet through Sitting Bull's head.
Sitting Bull was buried at Fort Yates in North Dakota, and in 1953 his remains were moved to Mobridge, South Dakota, where a granite shaft marks his grave. He was remembered among the Lakota not only as an inspirational leader and fearless warrior but as a loving father, a gifted singer, a man always affable and friendly toward others, whose deep religious faith gave him prophetic insight and lent special power to his prayers.
Hellooooooo!!!! I am finally here.
Sam - I am so impressed with the thread today. You did an awesome job with the articles and the choices of artwork. Thanks so much for all your hard work.
