Little Bighorn Battlefield: Greasy Grass

You are driving through the valley the Lakota called the Greasy Grass. On June twenty-fifth, eighteen seventy-six, this ground became the site of the most decisive Native American military victory over the United States Army in the long history of the Plains Indian Wars.

By the late spring of that year, more than ten thousand Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho people had gathered along the Little Bighorn River. The Black Hills of South Dakota had been guaranteed to the Lakota by the Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight. When gold was discovered there in eighteen seventy-four, the federal government reneged, and thousands who refused to surrender the hills left their reservations to join Sitting Bull in Montana. Washington declared them hostile and sent the Army.

Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led the Seventh Cavalry. On the morning of the twenty-fifth, his scouts located the encampment. Believing the warriors would scatter before he could close a trap, Custer split his regiment into three columns. He took five companies, roughly two hundred ten soldiers, to strike the northern end of the village from the ridgeline above. He never reached it.

Crazy Horse led a force up a dry coulee to the north, cutting off Custer's advance. Chief Gall drove from the south after repelling a separate attack on the village by Major Reno. Within an hour, Custer and every man under his direct command were dead, killed on the slope that would be called Last Stand Hill. The Army suffered two hundred sixty-eight killed in total across both engagements.

The Lakota and Cheyenne won the battle completely. They lost the war within five years. Sitting Bull fled to Canada. Crazy Horse was arrested and bayoneted in September eighteen seventy-seven. By eighteen eighty-one, most of the Sioux and Cheyenne were confined to reservations.

The site was set aside as a national cemetery in January eighteen seventy-nine. For over a century it was called Custer Battlefield, and only the cavalry dead received a monument. In December nineteen ninety-one, Congress renamed it Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument and authorized a memorial to the Native combatants as well. That Indian Memorial, the result of a national design competition held by Congress, opened in two thousand three. It stands a hundred yards from Last Stand Hill, on the same ground, finally bearing the names of warriors and soldiers side by side.