GALL’S LAST STAND

After the Great Sioux War of 1876–77 Sitting Bull and other Lakota leaders, including his trusted lieutenant Gall, sought sanctuary with their followers in Canada. Life up north was indeed better. Spared the wrath of the U.S. Army, the Sioux instead dealt peacefully with the sympathetic Major James Morrow Walsh, an inspector for the North-West Mounted Police. The buffalo hunting was better, too, for a while. But their Canadian exile was never intended to be permanent, and in 1880 Walsh’s replacement put more pressure on the Sioux refugees to recross the border to their homeland. Gall was the first to return south to Montana Territory. That fall he led his Hunkpapas into camp across the Missouri River from the Poplar River Agency. Soon joining them was Spotted Eagle’s Sans Arc band, which swelled the Indian camp to more than 70 lodges. Mindful of earlier Lakota resistance, the Army sent in reinforcements, and in January 1881 the parties faced off in a little-remembered encounter known as the Battle of Poplar River.

Known to American soldiers as the “Fighting Cock of the Sioux,” Gall lost two wives and three children when the 7th U.S. Cavalry under Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer attacked the large Indian village at the Little Bighorn River on June 25, 1876. Enraged, he sought vengeance. “It made my heart bad,” he later remarked. “After that I killed all my enemies with the hatchet.” He showed steady leadership in the subsequent battle (though how much leadership is still debated), played a role in stampeding the horses troopers were holding in reserve and helped wipe out Custer’s immediate command.

The fight was far from over for Major Marcus Reno and the remnants of his command, who forted up atop a hill through the following