The Last Stand

In June 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer leads part of the Seventh Cavalry towards a large Lakota and Cheyenne village beside the Little Bighorn River. Sitting Bull has helped draw families and warriors together after resisting federal demands that they move onto reservations, while Crazy Horse and other war leaders prepare to defend the encampment. Custer divides his regiment, and the resulting battle destroys his immediate command while Major Marcus Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen struggle to survive on nearby ridges.

Philbrick reconstructs the campaign through military records, archaeology, landscape and Indigenous testimony, weighing accounts that were recorded at different times and often shaped by self-defence or legend. He rejects both the heroic Custer martyr and the simplified image of an inevitable Native victory. The book instead presents the battle as a sequence of uncertain decisions within the wider war of dispossession, followed by an American effort to turn defeat into national mythology.