Little Bighorn: Custer's Last Stand and What Came After

On June twenty-fifth, eighteen seventy-six, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led the Seventh Cavalry into the valley of the Little Bighorn River and directly into the largest gathering of free Plains Indians ever assembled. He had expected perhaps eight hundred warriors. He found something closer to two thousand.

The Lakota and Northern Cheyenne had gathered here under the spiritual leadership of Sitting Bull, who had conducted a Sun Dance days earlier and reported a vision of soldiers falling from the sky like grasshoppers. The village stretched for three miles along the river. When Custer divided his regiment and sent his own battalion of roughly two hundred men around the northern end to strike the village from above, Crazy Horse and Gall led warriors who swept around both flanks simultaneously.

The battle that followed on what the Lakota call Greasy Grass lasted less than an hour on the northern end. Custer and every man with him were killed. Total Army losses across all three engagements that afternoon reached two hundred sixty-eight dead. It was the worst defeat the United States had suffered in the Plains Wars, a catastrophe that stunned the nation and dominated newspaper front pages for weeks.

The irony is that the warriors who won here could not hold the victory. Within a year, the Army had flooded the region with reinforcements. The great village dispersed. Sitting Bull fled to Canada. Crazy Horse was killed in custody in eighteen seventy-seven. The Black Hills, seized illegally from the Lakota and never lawfully relinquished, were stripped of the gold that had triggered the whole sequence of events.

For more than a century this site was called Custer Battlefield. In nineteen ninety-one President George H. W. Bush signed legislation renaming it Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument and authorizing an Indian Memorial to honor the warriors who fought here. That memorial was dedicated in two thousand three. Red granite markers now stand beside the white Army headstones, each one marking the spot where a warrior fell. The landscape holds both stories now, and resists the comfort of a simple verdict.