Elizabeth Bacon Custer led the Seventh Cavalry in pursuit of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne who refused to be confined to the reservation system. After her husband's column was wiped out at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in June 1876, many in the press, Army, and government criticized Custer for blundering into a massacre. President Ulysses S. Grant publicly blamed Custer for the disaster. Fearing that her husband was to be made a scapegoat by history, Libbie launched a one-woman campaign to rehabilitate her husband's image. Her assistance to the author of the first Custer biography,
Rewi's Last Stand Rewi's Last Stand Rewi's Last Stand is the title of two feature films directed by pioneering New Zealand filmmaker Rudall Hayward: a 1925 silent movie, and 1940 remake with sound. They are historical dramas, based on the last stand of Rewi Maniapoto at the Battle of Ōrākau. Hayward believed that New Zealand's history offered material as dramatic as any Hollywood western. He set out to make films involving conflicts between Maori and pakeha "while there were still people alive" who remembered the period accurately. In 1940 Rudall Hayward remade his second feature on a more ambitious scale, this time with