Fort Custer: The Army's Response

Just south of present-day Hardin, on the high bluff between the Big Horn and Little Big Horn Rivers, the United States Army built what it called the finest cavalry post in the American West. Fort Custer was its name, chosen within a year of Custer's death a few miles upstream.

The Army moved fast after the summer of eighteen seventy-six. Congress appropriated roughly one million dollars to establish a permanent military presence in the valley. In the spring of eighteen seventy-seven, Lieutenant Colonel G. P. Buell led four companies of the Eleventh Infantry and a large force of civilian mechanics and laborers to the blufftop. They worked through the summer and fall, raising barracks, stables, officers' quarters, and a hospital on what would become a garrison of five hundred to seven hundred men.

Fort Custer's mission was explicit: to prevent another Little Bighorn. It served as the staging ground for patrols into Crow and Sioux country, enforced the boundaries of the newly imposed reservation system, and supplied troops for campaigns well beyond Montana. Soldiers from the fort rode south during the Bannock War of eighteen seventy-eight, when Bannock and Paiute people in Idaho rose against encroachment on their camas root grounds. In eighteen eighty-seven, the fort dispatched troops to the Crow Agency itself when Crow leaders resisted government efforts to reduce their land base and ban the Sun Dance.

For two decades the post stood as the anchor of federal authority across a two-hundred-mile arc of the northern plains. Then the major campaigns ended, and the Army had less use for it. Fort Custer was formally abandoned in April eighteen ninety-eight. Within a generation, the buildings were dismantled or collapsed. Today a historical marker stands near the blufftop site, with the rivers still visible below, the same confluence the Army chose because it commanded everything for miles in every direction.