The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Big Horn

buildings, including the two largest structures in the world: the twenty-one-acre Main Building, housing exhibits related to mining, metallurgy, manufacturing, and science, and Machinery Hall, containing the exhibition’s centerpiece, the giant Corliss Steam Engine. Products displayed for the first time at the exhibition included Hires root beer, Heinz ketchup, the Remington typographic machine (later dubbed the typewriter), and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone.

    By 11:45 a.m., when it came time for President Grant to make his remarks in front of Memorial Hall, there were approximately four thousand notables assembled on the grandstands behind him. Included in that illustrious group were the generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip Sheridan. Over the course of the last couple of days, Grant had been badgering these two old friends about George Armstrong Custer.
    Eleven years before, at the conclusion of the Civil War, it had been Custer who had spoiled what should have been Grant’s finest hour. Thousands upon thousands of soldiers and spectators had gathered on a beautiful spring day for the Grand Review of the Army of the Potomac in Washington, D.C. The cavalry led the procession through the city, and as the troopers marched down Pennsylvania Avenue toward Grant and the other dignitaries gathered in front of the White House, Custer’s horse suddenly bolted from the ranks. It was later said that a bouquet of flowers thrown to Custer from an admiring young lady had startled his horse, but Grant must have had his doubts as he watched Custer gallop to the head of the parade. The only cadet at West Point to match his own record in riding and jumping a horse had been Custer, and there he was, alone in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, ostentatiously struggling to subdue his bucking steed. Whether intentionally or not, Custer had managed to make himself the center of attention.
    Now, more than a decade later, in the final year of his second term as president, Grant watched in baffled rage as his administration collapsed around him amid charges of corruption and incompetence. At this dark and dismal hour, it was annoying in the extreme to have one of his own—an army officer (and Custer at that!)—contribute to the onslaught. Testifying against the secretary of war was bad enough, but to pull his brother Orville into the morass was unforgivable, and Grant had resolved to make the blond-haired prima donna pay.
    He’d ordered Sheridan to detain Custer, then on his way back to Fort Lincoln, in Chicago. When word of Custer’s arrest became public, the press had erupted in outrage, branding Grant the “modern Caesar.” “Are officers . . . to be dragged from railroad trains and ignominiously ordered to stand aside,” the New York Herald howled, “until the whims of the Chief magistrate . . . are satisfied?” Grant had relented, but not without putting Custer under the command of Terry, who was as modest and serene as Custer was pompous and frenetic. Indeed, Terry, a courtly former lawyer from New Haven, Connecticut, and the only non–West Point general in the post–Civil War army, was so excruciatingly nice that it would more than likely drive Custer to distraction. At least that was the hope.
    At almost precisely noon on May 10, 1876, at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, Grant stepped up to the podium in front of Memorial Hall and began to read from several legal-sized sheets of paper. The acoustics outside this modern-day coliseum were atrocious, and no one beyond the second row could hear a word he said. When he finished his ten-minute speech, the few isolated cheers only underscored what the writer William Dean Howells later described in the pages of the Atlantic as “the silent indifference” of the crowd’s reception.
    It was astonishing how far Grant had plummeted. After winning the war for Lincoln, he seemed on the brink of even greater accomplishments as president of the United States. With input from the Quakers, he’d adopted what he described as “an Indian policy founded on peace and Christianity rather than force of arms.” He even appointed his friend Ely Parker, a full-blooded Seneca, as commissioner of Indian affairs. But as it turned out, Parker lasted only a few years before a toxic mixture of greed and politics poisoned every one of Grant’s best intentions.
    It was more than a little ironic. Despite all he’d hoped to do for the Indians, his administration now found