[Illustration] [Illustration: _The Red Man’s Last Victory_: The Fight of the Little Big Horn _By Angus Evan Abbott_] The Red man has fought his last great fight. The long and bloody struggle waged between the White man and the Red for the possession of the North American continent has ended, and ended for all time: the weaker has gone to the wall. From the day in 1609 when Samuel de Champlain and his hardy followers burst upon the Iroquois at Ticonderoga, and, armed with sticks that spoke with fire and spat out unseen death he put these hitherto invincible warriors to flight, to the day when the United States were preparing to celebrate with unheard-of splendour the centennial of their independence, a ceaseless state of war existed between the children of the forest and prairie and the pale-faced usurpers. Every year had its tragedy, every mile its white gravestone in history. And as a fit ending to these centuries of conflict and bloodshed came the crimson tragedy of the blotting-out of Custer and his cavalrymen in the Bad Lands of the Yellowstone. Many notable tragedies, dramatic in execution as appalling in effect, marked the long years, but none struck home to the hearts of the American people with such searching directness and force as the finale to the Indian tragedy, in which Sitting Bull, chief of the Sioux, and General Custer, one of America’s most dashing cavalry leaders, played the leading _rôles_.