Fort Custer: After the Little Bighorn

Fort Custer was established in eighteen seventy-seven, one year after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, at the confluence of the Bighorn and Little Bighorn rivers. The Army placed it here deliberately: the site commanded the very valley where Custer's Seventh Cavalry had been destroyed, and the fort was meant to assert control over the Crow and Lakota homelands. Named for the fallen general, it served as the operational base for campaigns across southeastern Montana through the eighteen eighties.

When the Northern Pacific Railroad reached the region and settler pressure changed the strategic picture, the Army abandoned the fort in eighteen ninety-eight. Only a marker and scattered cellars and ground depressions remain today near the town of Hardin.