The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Big Horn by Nathaniel Philbrick Page A

shunning the whites, these Lakota felt it was time to begin a conscious effort at accommodation. Increasing numbers of Lakota opted for the reservations (by 1875 more than half of the total Lakota population of approximately eighteen thousand had moved to the agencies), and Sitting Bull’s staunch insistence on isolationism was beginning to seem willfully anachronistic.

    I n the spring of 1870, Sitting Bull and his followers were encamped on the north side of the Yellowstone River. His warriors had just returned from a raid against the Crows when some Hunkpapa appeared on the south bank of the Yellowstone. The Indians in this group had made the controversial decision to enroll at the newly formed Grand River (eventually known as Standing Rock) Agency to the east. Whether they viewed themselves as possible emissaries or simply wanted to visit with their relatives, they had traveled several hundred miles to find Sitting Bull, a leader whose scorn for reservation life was well known.
    The agency Indians constructed bullboats, tiny circular craft made of willow branches and male buffalo skins, and paddled across the Yellowstone. Once they’d arrived on the north bank, they were met by the warrior Crow King. Crow King was unfailingly loyal to Sitting Bull; he was also known for his temper, and he was already angry by the time the agency Hunkpapa approached the encampment. They were armed, and it wasn’t proper etiquette to come into your own people’s camp bristling with hatchets, guns, and bows. Clutching his own weapons, Crow King paced menacingly back and forth and shouted, “What do you pack those guns for? You ought to do everything in a peaceful way.”
    One of the agency Indians tried to calm Crow King. “We came over here to bring Sitting Bull an invitation to our camp,” he insisted. He also admitted that they were a “little bit afraid” of their Hunkpapa brethren, who had obviously just returned from the warpath. “We thought you were on the warpath still. That is why we packed our guns along. We meant nothing by that. We came to help ferry you across.”
    Still seething with indignation, Crow King stormed into Sitting Bull’s lodge. Eventually, the tepee flap was pulled aside and both Crow King and Sitting Bull emerged. “Friends,” the Hunkpapa leader said, “Crow King means no harm. But the way you came over excited him. . . . That’s why he is getting crazy mad. But your suggestion is welcome to me. I accept your invitation. And so we are going to move across the river to your camp.” In this instance, Sitting Bull had chosen to accept the agency Indians’ overtures, and the visit proceeded peacefully. He would not always prove so amenable.
    That same year the Oglala agency chief Red Cloud returned from his first visit to Washington, D.C., with stories of the immensity of the white population and the daunting power of its military arsenal. Sitting Bull was dismissive of the claims. “Red Cloud saw too much,” he was reported to say. “[T]he white people must have put bad medicine over Red Cloud’s eyes to make him see everything and anything that they pleased.”
    Making matters even worse for the embattled Hunkpapa leader was his domestic situation. His two wives, Red Woman and Snow on Her, did not get along. The simmering tension between the two was bad enough during the day, but at night it became intolerable as Sitting Bull lay sleepless on his back, bracketed by two wives who refused to allow him to turn on his side and face the other. It was during this difficult, divisive time in his life that Sitting Bull reached out for help in a most unlikely direction.

    O n a cold, snow-swept afternoon in 1869, somewhere to the west of the Missouri River, Sitting Bull and a small war party lay in ambush, waiting for the rider on the local mail line to enter a narrow gulch. The warriors soon captured the rider—a big nineteen-year-old dressed in a shaggy buffalo coat—and instead of killing him as