Custer's ill-fated attack on June 25, 1876, has gone down as the American military's most catastrophic defeat. This historic and personal work tells the Native American side, poignant revealing how disastrous the encounter was for the "victors," the last great gathering of Plains Indians under the leadership of Sitting Bull. Telling of the pride and desperation of a people systematically stripped of their treaty rights, hounded from their ancestral hunting grounds, and herded into wretched reservations, reveals how this defining moment in American history was no more a "Last Stand" than a final celebration of waning power and freedom.