The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Big Horn by Nathaniel Philbrick Read Free Book Online Page B

overlooking the campsite along the Heart River, Burkman and Custer watched her ride back to Fort Lincoln. “She looked so little and so young,” Burkman remembered, “and she was leaning way over with her head bent and we knew she was crying. We watched till she was just a speck way off on the plains.”
    Libbie’s only consolation since her husband’s departure was the hope that Marsh would take both her and her good friend Nettie Smith on the Far West . She soon discovered that the riverboat’s captain had other ideas.
    Grant Marsh was not one to be trifled with. Over the course of his long life, he earned the respect of such luminaries as Mark Twain, General Ulysses S. Grant, and Sitting Bull. Late in life, he picked up a scruffy young writer named John Neihardt, who was working on a book about the Missouri River. When Neihardt, who was destined to write the classic Black Elk Speaks, met Marsh in 1908, the seventy-four-year-old river pilot impressed him as “a born commander.” “It struck me,” Neihardt wrote, “that I should like to have [his face] cast in bronze to look at whenever a vacillating mood might seize me.”
    That afternoon in 1876, Marsh explained that he anticipated the voyage to the Yellowstone to be “both dangerous and uncomfortable,” and then showed Mrs. Custer and Mrs. Smith the crude nature of the Far West ’s accommodations. But Libbie and Nettie still wanted to go.
    Marsh was reduced to what he called “a feeble subterfuge.” Perhaps when the more comfortable steamboat Josephine stopped at Fort Lincoln, her master would take the ladies to their husbands. Until then, they’d have to wait.
    Deeply disappointed, Libbie and Nettie Smith returned to their homes in the garrison. “It is infinitely worse to be left behind,” Libbie wrote, “a prey to all the horrors of imagining what may be happening to the one you love. You slowly eat your heart out with anxiety and to endure such suspense is simply the hardest of all trials that come to the soldier’s wife.”

    B y the next morning, Marsh and the Far West were headed up the Missouri for the Yellowstone, the magnificent east-flowing river that cut directly across the territory occupied by Sitting Bull’s band of Indians. Geographically speaking, the Yellowstone was one of the least known rivers in the United States. Terry and Custer’s map of the region dated back to before the Civil War and was full of inaccuracies. What current information the army possessed had been gathered just a year before by an exploring expedition also transported by Grant Marsh.
    During that expedition in 1875, Marsh took careful note of the Yellowstone’s many north-flowing tributaries, including the Powder, Tongue, Rosebud, and Bighorn rivers. Marsh even ventured twelve miles up the Bighorn, where the channel became so clogged with mud that it was generally assumed he could go no farther. But as Marsh would prove almost exactly a month after leaving Fort Lincoln to rendezvous with Custer, it was in fact possible, given proper motivation, to take a steamboat another thirty miles to the Bighorn’s confluence with a river called the Little Bighorn.

CHAPTER 2

    The Dream
    I n late May of 1876, as Grant Marsh navigated the Far West from his lofty pilothouse of wood, iron, and glass, Sitting Bull, hundreds of miles to the west, mounted a tower of his own. Near the Rosebud River, just south of the Yellowstone, there is a butte. By defini-tion taller than it is wide, a butte is formed when a surface layer of unyielding rock protects the underlying sedimentary layers from erosion. The result can be weirdly dramatic, creating what appears to be a vigorous upwelling of stone that is really something altogether different: a freestanding core sample of what the wind, rain, and frost have whittled from the surrounding plain.
    Not far from this eroded projection of rock-capped earth was a village of more than four hundred tepees spread out for almost a mile along